2006-10-31
Wikizine - number: 48
- [Reminder Spam] - Users who have an easy username, like "Walter", frequently get a password reminder. Probably from someone trying to make an account with that name. But there are also weirdos who are using this function to spam users with reminders. There are users who receive hundreds of that type of emails a day.
To stop this type of abuse the password reminder function now has limits. There is a limit of one password reminder per user per 24-hour period, and 5 password reminders per IP per hour. - [Accesskeys change] - the function of the accesskeys and tooltips will be moved soon out of the Monobook.js and and implement them
server-side. This may affect personal scripts that implement custom accesskeys. - [wikipedia.be] - has been offline form Friday until Sunday evening. This domain is only used for redirecting traffic to a country-portal and limited services. Indications suggest that the bill for this domain was not paid. This domain was also offline some time in 2004 for the same reason when the fee for two years was not paid.
- [Wikizine] requests more feedback form the readers about news from there home-wikis, especially the non-English language communities.
- [Wikimania2007] - Request for cooperation from the technical people for setting up the Wikimania 2007 Hacking Days
- [WMF-board change] - The board decided to change the positions of the board members. For now on and for one year at most is this the configuration of the board; Anthere (Florence Devouard), chair of the board of trustees. Tim Shell (who announced to step down from the board) is Vice-chair, Eloquence (Erik Möller) Executive secretary, Michael Davis is the Treasurer. Jimbo remains board member and has the title of Founder and "Chairman Emeritus". Despite his new title it is not expected that Jimbo will retire.
In an interview on "Wikipedia Weekly" Jimbo said that it seems likely that the board will decide in November to expand the board and this to probably 9 members. That means 5 new members.
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Report_from_Frankfurt_-_October_2006
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11402/focus=11402 - comments on Foundation-l
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11451/focus=11451
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11446/focus=11446
- [Mosaic] - the people on Commons are working on a Wikimedia logo made from many different pictures on commons, a mosaic. The to commemorate the one millionth uploaded file at Wikimedia Commons. The are now around 60,000 files away from that. The fun thing is that the mosaic is live. You can click on the tiny images to so them in large.
- [Success] - "Wikipedia Weekly", the new project for providing Wikipedia-related news in the form of an audio recording, has taken a good start. In less then 2 weeks are already 3 editions published. Wikipedia Weekly includes interviews with Wikimedia celebrities like Notafish (episode 2) and Jimbo (episode 3). According to w:en:user:Tawker episode II and III has been downloaded arround 120 times each until now.
- [Summary] - From this weekend the mailing list summary of foundation-l that was started at the beginning of this month will be expanded to cover the wikipedia-l list too.
- [Radio] - Interview of Jimbo on the National Public Radio of the USA program "Talk of the Nation", serious radio program, about Jimbo's idea about buying copyrighted works and set it free.
- [Not found] - A piece by an student who discovers you can not find everything in Wikipedia
- [Telegraph.co.uk] - Very long article in the "The Daily Telegraph", a very popular British newspaper. This article also appeared in the printed edition on several pages and illustrations.
- [W$k$ped$a dot com] - Very recently Google, Inc. bought the very popular video website " YouTube.com". Google paid 1.65 thousand million US dollars for this website. YouTube has a lower traffic ranking than Wikipedia and has very high operatioals costs because of the video storage and needed bandwidth. That can make you think what Wikipedia would be worth if it was commercial. Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, President and Founder of Mojo Supreme and knowledgeable of the online advertisement business has made an post on his blog about that. Going from non-profit to for profit would hurt the page ranking and traffic of Wikipedia and the number of editors but, according Mr. Karbasfrooshan assumptions, still be a very profitable move.
Nevertheless Mr. Karbasfrooshan writes in a follow-up post that ads for now on Wikipedia are not a good idea. He concludes with the words; "Right now, methinks that Wikipedia is doing fine, and it has a business model: its fundraising efforts."- http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=626 - Part I
- http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=637 - Part II
- http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/10/larrying_wikipe.php - related other blog posting
... that there is an easy way to get on IRC from anywhere?
The chat network of Freenode is used by mostly all projects and wikis for talking and running different tools like for anti-vandalism. To make use of this system you need an IRC-client. There are many clients available. Two free clients, from the many that exist, that can be used are Gaim and ChatZilla. But you need to install these on your computer. If you can not do that for what ever reason, your are someone else his computer or your work/school has blocked IRC-access then the IRC-service of Wikizine can be useful. chat.wikizine.org provides webbased access to selected Wikimedia related channels. On request more channels can be added.
"Anything worth doing is worth doing for money." Rule 13
"Faith moves mountains... of inventory." - Rule 104
"Let others keep their reputation. You keep their latinum." - Rule 189
Editor: Walter, Xyrael - Corrector(s): Gary Kirk
2006-10-24
Wikizine - number: 47
- [Block Opera users] - It appears that some bot is posting the question on wikis and forums that the can not see images when using the browser Opera.
- [Portal] - Wikimédia France has installed a portal at www.wikitheque.fr. This portal provides task-oriented directions for finding images and text content on Commons and Wikisource, with the help of Wikipedia.
- [LSS] - the project started by meta:user:Improv of creating summaries of the postings to the mailing list Foundation-l is still alive. It is even growing. The list summaries are also a year disposal in Frensh and Spanish.
- [Report] from the Portuguese Wikipedia
- [Schools] - it is suggested that the visitor traffic to the English language Wikipedia is connected with students in the USA. At least one editor of a high school newspaper is very enthusiastic about Wikipedia
[Conlang] - The total number of articles in planned language (or "conlang") Wikipedias and net encyclopedias has passed 80,000. There are at present 7 active Wikipedias on the main list: Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Novial, Volapük, Lojban and Interlingue]], with 79,665 articles. In addition, the Meta page notes the Wiki lexicon of Lingua Franca Nova with 573 articles, and the two former Wikipedias of Toki Pona and Klingon, with 301 articles. This gives a total of 80,539, slightly below 1.5% of all Wikipedia articles. The 7 active Wikipedias have 3,445 registered users.
The largest is the Esperanto language Wikipedia; the have reached 60,000 articles.
http://eo.wikipedia.org
- [Wikipedia 0101] - Librarian John Hubbard has created an extended Flash presentation about what Wikipedia is, or at least the English language Wikipedia, how it works and topics. Very nicely done. You need Flash 8 or above to make it work. For Linux there is a link to Flash 9 Beta, very easy to install. Read the read-me.
IMHO: In My Humble/Honest Opinion
IMO: In My Opinion
IMNSHO: In My Not So Humble Opinion.
IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer
<by> Is there anyway I can tell the world I'm an idiot?
<Seven7> Of course, just type your name, where you live and your confession
<by> Kk
<by> I am Mark Duval of Belgium, and I am an idiot
<by> ?
<by> Now what?
<Seven7> Don't worry. It's done
2006-10-18
Wikizine - number: 46
- [AntiSpoof] - there is a new check when creating a new account live to prevent the creation of new accounts who look like existing users. For example if there is a user named "Ellen" the creation of the account "E11en" is not allowed.
- [Math skills are needed] to make a new account on some of the smaller projects. To protected wikis from bots making accounts or inserting spam a captcha system is active on the smaller wikis. To save a page of make an account you need to answer a problem like 48-10=? . This is because there are problems in loading the images displaying the letters of the classic captcha-system. The math version is only temporally until the problem with the loading of the images is fixt.
- [Default block settings] - the default option when a sysop blocks a user to block logged in user by default seems to make a good change to be changed to not blocking logged in users by default when blocking an ipadress. To override the default options see Wikizine number 34
- [Logo] - the last fase for the selection of new logos for Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiversity has started. Votes are open until 31 October.
[unblock Wikipedia] - Since rencently internet users of mainland China have again access to the English language after one year of blocking. The Chinese language version of Wikipedia is still blocked for many Chinese users.
- [Dreams:If...] - Jimbo posted a message to call for the community to enter ideas about how $100 million (hypothetical money) could be used by the WMF for paying to free copyrighted works. So that there is confusion about it; there is no $100 million. This is only a "what if...".
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-16/Copyright
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Copyright_wishlist- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Copyright_wishlist (inspiration of the community about how to send $100 million)
- [$] - The PayPal-donation system used by the WMF can now also accepted donations in a lot more different currencies. The new are; Czech korunas, Danish krone, Hong Kong dollars, Hungarian florints, New Zealand dollars, Norwegian krone, Polish zloty, Singapore dollars, Swedish krone and Swiss francs. Please update the fundraising page of you languages projects if needed.
- [Wikimania2007] - A new Wikimania, a new wiki. Not (yet) very interesting .
- [Wikisource]
- the WMF project for source texts - is doing good. Or at least the German language version. The German Wikimedia chapter has found some money to pay the digitization of some very old books and documents. The scans are from a very good quality and presented in such a way that the are very accessible. The digital version of a 16th-century handwritten mathematical schoolbook is uploaded to Commons as a DjVu-file. Commons is able to present those files in such a way that is very user friendly and fast to browse inside the book. DE Wikisource is also working on transcribing the scans to writing that is readable for the public. - http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/010048.html
http://tinyurl.com/vc6no - Example of scan of book- http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Drei_Register_Arithmetischer_ahnfeng_zur_Practic:101
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
- [New Internal Media] - The internal news reporting community is growing. We have the Wikipedia Signpost; Wikipedia news in a more or less newspaper style, we have Wikizine; (very) sort items and url's for more reading. And now there is also the newbie; the "WikipediaWeekly" is bringing news about Wikipedia in an audio-recoding form.
w:en:User:Fuzheado and w:en:User:Tawker are the hosts of the pilot edition. The bring the news and background information about news and events related to Wikipedia in a very relaxed style. More like a radio talk show then a classic news bulletin. WikipediaWeekly will attempt to bring on a weekly basis a new audio-recording. The recoding is currently now available as Ogg Vorbis and Mp3, it is listed on iTunes and there is a webbased player on there website.
#wikipediaweekly and see how you can help out.
- http://www.wikipediaweekly.com - there website with overview of the topics of the edition
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_WikipediaWeekly - for feedback and ideas for new editions
Media
- [Larry] - the new project, Citizendium, of Larry Sanger to write an encyclopedia of better quality then Wikipedia is now hitting the news websites. And not only in USA-media.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium
- http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger_announces_Wikipedia_fork
- http://news.google.com/news?hl=&q=Citizendium&btnG=Search+News
- [CBC News:The hour]
- Item about Wikipedia and the Chinese block of wp starring Jimbo on the Canadian television. - http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/videos/20061013_wiki.wmv
-- direct link to the video (windows media, 11,8Mb)
- [Enquiry]
- In the Netherlands the company Multiscope has done an enquiry about what websites the people most value. The results from the enquiry to over 14,000 Dutch internet users are that Wikipedia (Dutch edition) is on the 3th place of the most valued websites.
- [Service notice] - the url of website of Wikizine has changed to en.wikizine.org This is to make it more easy to launch posible other languages versions of Wikizine in the futhere. Currently has Wikizine barely the resources to support one language version so other versions must not be exspected soon.
... you can move around the tab pages of some programs?
Programs that let you open windows in the same frame but in different tabs are popular. Mostly know is FireFox but also programs like the instant messaging program Gaim is using that. Try it. Click on the tab, keep it selected and try to move it.
Quote
"We congratulate those in charge of Wikipedia, especially Jimmy Wales, who could have chosen to censor their own site to get official blessing. Instead they stuck to their principles and spurned self-censorship. Their determination has paid off inasmuch as Beijing has partially reversed its decision. It is an example that other Internet giants could follow." -- Reporters Without Borders
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15374
Editor(s): Walter
2006-10-08
Wikizine - number: 45
- [username@foobar.com] - New accounts on the WMF-wikis can not longer be created if the username contains the @-symbol. Existing users who have that symbol in there username can still login but only temporary. All these users need to request for a username change. Contact a local bureaucrat to do that or ask a steward if your wiki does not have a bureaucrat.
- [CategoryTree] - On the category-pages there is now a function added that lets users browse through the lower category levels from the higher category. There is an option to "expand" the category. This makes it much more easy to navigate and find the category you are looking for without the need to actually request the different layers of the category. This function works only if javascript is enabled. If not, the "+" symbol appears but does not work. Those users can still use the categories the traditional way.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CategoryTree
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:History - example of a categoryusing this function
- [Going-up] - According to comScor is the traffic to Wikipedia in Europe in August strongly increased and has Wikipedia now the 6th place of the most popular websites (in Europe).
Editor(s): Walter
2006-10-04
Wikizine - number: 44
- [Portal] - Wikibooks has now also its own real portal. It used to point to a page on the wiki to act as portal. The portal is in Wikipedia-style.
- [vanity/vandalism] - Our CEO posted a strong statement about corporate vanity/vandalism-articles. Corporates created non-encyclopedic articles and when the are removed that call the office of the WMF to complain about it. That advice of Brad is to be firm and remove that type of articles and block the users.
- [Logo] - the process for selection a new logo for Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiversity is continuing. No new proposals can be submitted now anymore. The vote for these logos is not yet open but is closing in.
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/logo
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary/logo
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/logoFoundation
- [Promotion] - A new committee for promotion is created. It is a subcommittee of the Communications committee. Users are invited to help out and work and submit promotion material. See the posting of Elian.
- [RFC] - On meta is there a page where users can write there comments about the organisation of the recent board election
- [$] - In September the WMF received $36,311 on donations form PayPal. That is less then in August but in general the donations are still increasing.
- [Report] - This week it is time for the Danish Wikipedia to write there pice
- [Summary-l] - the WMF mailing lists receive many postings. Reading everything is not always possible because it takes a lot of time. User:Improv started a service to provide a summary of the threads posted on Foundation-l so you can get quickly get the general idea of the postings. Providing this service is a lot work. User:Improv seeks volunteers to help and to expand this service to other lists.
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Improv/LSS/foundation-l-current
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Improv
- [Jimbo] - the ongoing mission of Jimbo to travel the world and meet Wikipedians in far away places has brought him recently to India. Where was a "unconference" with the local Wikipedians.
- [Copyvio] - The french news agency "Agence France Presse" has used text from the article about the Amish from the DE Wikipedia in a news report. So far no problem. What is a problem is that the have not given any attribution to Wikipedia like is required by the GFDL-licence. When contacted by Wikipedian Mathias Schindler the AFP office confirmed that the text was from Wikipedia and stated that this was against "AFP policy" because "wikipedia is not a citable source". They refuse to retract or amend the story with proper attribution for Wikipedia and the license. AFP sued Google News in 2005 because in AFP's point of view, Google was violating their copyright with there "google news" service.
- [en.wikt] - The English wiktionary has reached 200'000 entries
- [en.wp] - The Bengali Wikipedia Reaches 10, 000 articles. It is the 50th language to do so, and the 2nd language from South Asia to do so.
- [+20] - A new batch of 20 new Wikipedias has been created.
Wu (wuu:), Mazandarani (mzn:),Newar / Nepal Bhasa (new:), Lak (lbe:), Emilian-Romagnol / Sammarinese (eml:), Buryat (Russia) (bxr:), Upper Sorbian (hsb:),Novial (nov:),Pangasinan (pag:),Bavarian (bar:), Bishnupriya Manipuri (bpy:), Zazaki (diq:), Zealandic (zea:), Tarantino (roa-tara:), Zamboanga Chavacano (cbk-zam:), Classical Chinese (zh-classical:), Old Church Slavonic (cu:), Siberian/Nort Russian (ru-sib:), Gilaki (glk:), Min Dong (cdo:
POV: Point of View, the way how things are according the person who writes it
NPOV: Neutral point of view, core value of the WMF-projects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little
consequence. The only consequence is what we do. - John Ruskin http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ruskin
Editor(s): Walter Contains text from: Mathias Schindler
2006-09-27
Wikizine - number: 43
- [CommonsDelinker] - one of the most annoying things of Commons is that if you use its content and host your files there that you did not knew of the where deleting the file you are using until it was done and you noticed it. Improvements has been made to solve that. There is a check of the usage of files on the wikis and there is the "CommonsTicker" to inform local wikis about changes to files that are in use on there wiki. Now there is also the "CommonsDelinker". That is bot to remove the dead links to files deleted on commons. It is a maintenance service, to remove the trash from the hundreds of wikis after a deletion on commons. There is currently an "Requests for permissions" to request to get an exemption from local bot policies to run this bot. Currently there is universal support for it. Wikis who do not want to receive the service the CommonsDelinker can request to be excluded.
- [Move] - the Japanese, Korean, Malay, and Thai Wikipedias will be moved from the Korean server cluster (yaseo) back to the main servers in Florida (pmtpa) later this week.
- [Wikizine] - Currently Wikizine is basically a one person project. This is not a good model to provide weekly a timely and good edition of a consistent quality.
- Wanted: core staff member(s). You look for news and find it. You constructed Wikizine. Eventually you can write an edition on you own if needed. And this week after week, even when you have better things to do. You can be counted on to do the work.
- Wanted: freelance staff member(s). You look for news when you like to do it. You write sometimes an item for an edition of Wikizine.
- [Board] - Erik Möller/Eloquence has won the board election. He will continue the term of Angela. Kathleen (Kat) Walsh/Mindspillage is second and Oscar van Dillen third.
- [Wikimania2007] - It is now known where the next Wikimania will be; Taipei,Taiwan.
- [Wikimania2008 & 2009] - Unofficial bids are open for locations to host Wikimania 2008 and 2009
- [Sep11] - the "project" September 11 In Memoriam is closed. This is the first project ever that is closed. Sep11 was a very non-typical WMF-project. It was created in the early days when there where only a few wikis. This in 2001 in responds the 9/11 event. The wiki is now read-only.
- [InterWiki-report] - this week we have the Hungarian language Wikipedia and also the Simple English Wikipedia who present there project to you.
- [fi.wp] - The Finnish Wikipedia has reached 80,000 articles.
- [pl.wp] - The Polish Wikipedia has reached 300,000 articles. And this on the day that there wiki is five years old.
- [Larry Sanger] - who played an important role in the early history of Wikipedia and was the editor-in-chief of the late Nupedia, announced a fork of the English Wikipedia. This fork will have a different editorial structure.
SUL: Single User Login. You can use one login for all wikis.Quote
Kudos: to praise someone for doing something.
FYI: for your info - information provided as a service to someone only to inform them about it. No need to responds to it, do with it what you wish.
There is an old Vulcan proverb — "Only Nixon could go to China." -- Mr. Spock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_in_China_(phrase)
Editor(s): Walter, Thanks to: pfctdayelise, helix84
2006-09-10
Wikizine - number: 42
- [!steward] - it is now more easy to get the attention of a steward if it is urgent. In the IRC-channel #wikimedia-stewards is there now a bot guarding the channel provided by w:nl:user:webboy. If you enter the command !steward it calls for the stewards. To test it use !steward-test
- [clarification] - For the current vote for the position for the board of the WMF only users who are indefinitely banned or blocked are not allowed to vote on any project. Users blocked for a specific time period are not allowed to vote on the wiki where the are blocked during the time of there block. If that user can vote on a other wiki the are allowed to do so. See also;
- [New hire] - the WMF has hired Mark Bergsma to serve as Networking Coordinator for the Foundation.
- [InterWiki-report] - this week the Italian language Wikipedia is writing his bit.
- [De-sysop] - On the En wikpedia is a user de-sysoped. That would not be news on most wikis, but on EN it is.
- [Guardian] Wikipedia defies China's censors
- [Law.com] - interview with Brad - Wikimedia's First GC Prepares to Tread 'Legal Minefield'
- The Volapük Wikipedia has reached 500 articles. This is a language with +/- 30 speakers. So 500 is very impressive.
- [Wikizine Closed] - There will be no Wikizine for week 38. The next edition is expected for around the 27th September in week 39. Requests send to Wikizine will not be answered during this period.
... that you can setup local language portals?
The main domain name of the projects is a .org domain. And because most people do not know anything else besides .com domains like www.wiktionary.com also point to that project.
But the first domain people will try is name of the project with the TLD from there country. Check If the domain with the name of your project for your county top level domain is still free. If it is try to obtain it. Keep it private. Do not start discussions about it on your wiki or it will be squatted. Best is that the WMF would buy the domain. Contact Brad Patrick, the WMF interim executive director & lawyer <bpatrick AT wikimedia.org> to ask to buy the domain. If it is already taken try to figure out who it owns and of there intentions are honorable. Possibly it it registered by a friend of your project to prevent it been registered by someone who would exploit it by pointing it to a sexssite or something like that. Maybe the are willing to transfer the domain to the WMF. Do only reconnaissance and contact the [[meta:Trademarks committee]] when you have the basic information.
List the domain and the information you have on;
When you have the domain then you can make a local portal. Consider doing this also even when there is one clear dominant language and other languages are of very little importance in the country. A listing on such a portal can give a project in such a small language the exposure it needs to become successful. Also makes clear that a project organized by language, not by country. Some national domains are already active and are used for portals. Others are only redirecting to the Wikipedia in the dominant language.
Examples of national domains who point to a portal;
- http://www.wikipedia.be/ - Belgium
- http://www.wikipedia.ch/ - Switzerland
Examples of national domains who redirect to the dominant language;User Quote
- http://www.wikipedia.at - Austria ; redirect to the German Wikipedia. Excluding the Slovene, Croatian and Hungarian language project.
- http://www.wikipedia.de - Germany; redirect to the German Wikipedia. Excluding the Danish, Frisian, Low German, Sorbian and Romany languages projects
If you have a dirty mind then most things look sexual. When I first saw the Wikimedia logo it looked to me like someone ripping open their shirt, therby revealing their naked torso underneath. --Dangherous 23:35, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
Editor(s): Walter
2006-09-05
Wikizine - number: 41
- [WikipediaToolbar] - For some time there is a FireFox extension to add a toolbar to you browser especially designed for use on Wikipedia and for MediaWiki wikis in general. This toolbar is made by w:de:user:Bananeweizen. The current toolbar will not work with the new upcoming 2.0 version of FireFox. User:Bananeweizen does not have time anymore to work on this and is looking for someone to take the "Wikipedia Toolbar" over from him. If you are intrested contact Bananeweizen on the irc channel #mediawiki on Freenode.
- [New Logos] for Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikiversity can now be submitted now. Voting is scheduled to start on September 7 for these logos.
- [Wikimania2007] - The first round for the selection for the city to host Wikimania 2007 will close on September 10th. No city will be accepted after that date. Candidates may work on their bid until the 15th.
- [Election] - The vote for the new boardmember is now open. Users can vote on one wiki only using the [[Special:Boardvote]]-page. Users who had 400 edits on a wiki on August 1, 2006 and are not blocked have voting rights. A user with a block on any wiki is not allowed to vote during that time, also not on other wikis. The Board has appointed James Forrester and Jon Harald Søby as additional Assistant Election Officials.
- [$] - The Wikimedia Foundation received in August 1769 donations for a total amount of $37,601.58 by PayPal
- [InterWiki-report] - it is now time for the Spanish language Wikipedia to tell the whole wide Wikimedia-world about their wiki.
- [FAQ] - the new project Wikiversity presents a FAQ to try to explain what is exactly is.
- [WMC 2006] - last Saturday the Dutch Wikimedia chapter held, with extensive support of Kennisnet.nl, its first own conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands. This was a one day event with several presentations like on Wikimania. There where 46 attendees; most from the Netherlands, but also from Switzerland, Germany, Thailand and Flanders. Some pictures and audio recordings are available. One of them is in English "Kurt Jansson: Wikimedia Chapters - Some insights from Wikimedia Germany". This event was announced with an interview on a Dutch national television broadcaster.
- [RE from Jimbo] on /. The announced new functionality of MediaWiki to support stable versions has give inspirations to several media to report that Wikipedia is reducing the freedom of editing to all. A responds from Jimbo about that and the readers of /. on that responds.
- [Brittanica] - Wikipedia is now also included in the Encyclopædia Britannica. You can read the first 75 of 737 words about Wikipedia on the Brittanica for free.
- [Free press] - A politician has found a way to get his name in the press by saying that he is considering to sue Wikipedia.
- [Whois] - a new type of stats. A listing with info about from where the people editing on a wikipedia are coming from. And also on what wikipedia are people of different wikipedias working on. These numbers can give a general idea but take in to account that there is a large possibly of errors.
- [en.wp] has now 1000 sysops. The wiki with the most sysops after the English language Wikipedia is the German with 225 sysops.
... that there is a easy way for adding inter-wikilinks to the articles?
The webbased Interwiki-Link-Checker is a tool for semi-automatic insertion of Interlanguage-links in all latin-encoded Wikipedias larger then 10.000 articles. Input from wikipedians fluent in at least two languages is needed to decide wether articles named the same in two different languages should be interlinked by the bot.
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~flacus/IWLC/start.php - The tool
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Flacus/Wikipedia_Interwiki-Link-Checker/en - FAQ
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
"Small print leads to large risk." - Rule 8
"Trust is the biggest liability of all." - Rule 99
"Not even dishonesty can tarnish the shine of profit." - Rule 181
Editor(s): Walter - Special thanks to: Sasa Stefanovic
2006-08-29
Wikizine - number: 40
- [The Return Of The Stats] - On a wikipedia long ago, before MediaWiki and the WMF, there where webalizer visitor stats. You could see which pages where the most popular of Wikipedia. Now, many years later, this information can be again available for your wiki. [[w:de:User:LeonWeber]] has created a tool to count the requests. See the page on Meta for the information how to get it. But I can be a good idea to discuss this in your community first to avoid problems.
- [Time] - Tim Starling has written a new parser function for time and date formatting, called #time and it is live now on the projects. It gives many options for displaying the time and date. One of the possibility's is that it can give the current time +X-hours (or minus) or the same with dates.
- [Linksearch] - There is special page named [[Special:Linksearch]]. By entering there a domain name or part of a domain name you can see on wish page those external links are placed. Can be useful to clean up linkspam vandalism.
- [Candidates] - There is still for to do in translating that statements of the candidates for the board.
- [Election] - The registration of candidates for the board election is closed. There are about 20 candidates now, some have presented thyself near the end, some have withdrawn thyself. And some will probably be excluded because the have not confirmed there candidacy like requested. The actual voting is supposed to start on September first and will close on the 21th September. Wikizine has done an attempt to present to you the candidates with the extra editions. Also the Signpost has done a special effort. A sort of written interviews with the candidates who responded to there questions. If you are interested in this elections this is a must read.
- [New committee] - The WMF board approved the creation of the "fundraising committee". The function of this committee is not defined in the resolution.
- [CFO resigns] - Daniel Mayer resigns as Chief Financial Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. Daniel Mayer remains involved with the WMF finances as member of the newly created "fundraising committee". The WMF has hired a professional experienced bookkeeper who will work to start with on a part-time basis.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/9689/focus=9689 - Daniel resigns as CFO
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/9728/focus=9728 - New bookkeeper hired
- [SP-com] - The WMF Special projects committee is holding a public meeting on IRC. This on September 2 or 3 arround 20u UTC. See the meta-page for more information.
- [Beta] - The announced Beta Wikiversity is now live. This wiki is an incubator for Wikiversities in various new languages. And also a global platform aiming at coordinating Wikiversity projects in several languages. This coordination should deal with Wikiversity's mission and general guidelines of the project's scope. For example, about original research.
- [Logo] - A new project (Wikiversity) so there is need for a new logo. The start is given for that process by collecting possible logos for Wikiversity.
- [Verifiability] is a policy on the English Wikipedia. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth." That means that what is written must be proven by sources, the fact that it is true is not enough. Not all Wikipedias have the same policies. Local wikis are looking for policy inspiration on other projects and sometimes the adopt policies form other wikis. Currently the Russian Wikipedia is holding a vote regarding the question to adopt also the policy of verifiability for there wikipedia. Verifiability has currently on the ru.wp with 53 votes more support then "no" with 32 votes.
- [Signpost Radio] - w:en:user:Omaryak provides now audio versions of the English language Wikipedia Signpost
- [userboxes] - On userpages are sometimes loaded with boxes to inform about the most unexpeted topics. Those boxes can give controversy about them. One way of dealing with userboxes that some wikis are using is the "German solution". The Spanish comunity has decided to implement the German solution for the userboxes,
- [Swedish Wikipedia] shows everything the are proud of from there community in the interwiki report of the Signpost
- [China] - News about Wikipedia/media in the Chinese press; "Wikipedia chief says no to censorship"
- [Africa] - "African Languages Grow as a Wikipedia Presence" article about the african languages Wikis and the lack of africans working on them. Publised several newsparers including the NY Times, Herald Tribune and Slashdot.
- [ku.wp] - The Kurdish Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles. This is the work of the 15 active users and mostly of only 5 very active users.
- [tg.wp] - The Tajik Wikipedia has reached 500 articles. And that is mostly the work of only 3 very active users of a total of 9 active users.
- [Wikizine] has now 500 subscribers by email.
Editorial remark: Thank you. Walter
Did you know ...
... how to enter directly a search query to the wiki?
You enter [alt]+F The result is that the cursor is blinking in the search box. Type what you look and press enter. But it can even more easy. If you add some code to you [[Special:Mypage/monobook.js]] then the cursor will always be waiting by default in the search box for your request.
Include;
// Park the the cursor allways in the search box - by [[w:en:User:Splarka]]IRC Quote
addOnloadHook(function() {document.getElementById('searchform').elements[0].focus(); return false;;});
<Toazt> "Too few women on the internet?
<Toazt> There are lots of women on the internet,
<Toazt> only most of them are naked and in JPG-format."
Editor(s): Walter
2006-08-28
Wikizine - number: 40 Extra
Very soon you will have the opportunity to elect a new board member for the WMF. To help you to make an informed choice Wikizine presents to you a personal statement of several candidates. All candidates where invited to send there statement in. This offer has expired.
This publication is not an endorsement of Wikizine for these candidates.
Charles Matthews
I'm a candidate with experience and skills useful for the Wikimedia Board. I'm not a technical person, and have not been active on Wikimedia issues, preferring to focus on the English Wikipedia. (On en-WP I'm best known for writing about mathematics and poetry, and as as admin and Arbitrator. See User:Charles Matthews there for more.)
I come without any specific template for the WMF. For manifesto, I would say that we still have to match up some things. Implementing the best distance learning experiences, when we know that factual content is a Long Tail phenomenon (to speak modishly), means we have to be both collectively smart and better in the humanities. The aim is to become comprehensive, but also comprehensible and comprehending on a global scale. These are ambitious slogans.
Background: I had 10 post-doctoral years in academia (1978-1989), at the University of Cambridge, with years in France and the USA. After that I have been a voluntary worker in a number of contexts, including publicity work and raising sponsorship. I have written two books (one conventional, one with a Korean friend published online), and many articles. I have travelled, in East Asia, and recently in Uganda, where in June I gave a well-attended lecture on Wikipedia. I speak reasonable French, and some Russian. I'm a married parent.
The role of the Board: what other online extended community gets to hire its own support staff? The Board has stewardship of the most important piece of hypertext ever. Some intangibles, such as 'wiki culture' and 'motivational working atmosphere', matter as much as money. The scale of Wikimedia projects now means that straight management sometimes applies; but the biggest challenge remains the harnessing of those writing on the wikis to projects in the larger scheme. This means not losing sight of the old-school way of thinking.
In short, I have outside experience, communication skills, and a traditionalist wiki approach.
Discuss matters with me at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews/WMF_Board_Election_2006
Another version of this statement is on the formal candidacy page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/Charles_Matthews/En
Oscar van Dillen
Please read my candidate's statement at;
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/En#Oscar from this i take an excerpt:
"whether we are constructing an ark of noah for human knowledge, or "just" boldly working at the gradual completion of the tower of babel still remains to be seen, but i strongly believe that such is in our own hands for a larger part than could "reasonably be expected". please let it be clear that it is for this very reason that i most emphatically believe in the importance of the wmf's mission, and have been devoting most of my free time for 2,5 years now to the consolidation and further development of its projects and communities. i will continue to do so, no matter the outcome of these elections."
for any further questions, my meta talk page;
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Oscar is available, thank you :-) --[[User:Oscar]] 12:34, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
The Other Candidates
There are also other candidates besides them ones who have presented themselves here to you with a personal statement. These candidates listed here did not responded to the offer to publish there statement.
Aaron Swartz
Daniel Arnold (Arnomane)
Carlos Rivera (Cerejota)
Bruce Andersen (Evrik)
Hadraj Said
Pat Gunn (Improv)
Kelly Martin
Alex Schenck (Linuxbeak)
Kathleen (Kat) Walsh (Mindspillage)
Nicholas Turnbull
Juan David Ruiz (Zuirdj)
2006-08-24
Wikizine - number: 39 Extra BIS
Very soon you will have the opportunity to elect a new board member for the WMF. To help you to make an informed choice Wikizine presents to you a personal statement of several candidates. All candidates where invited to send there statement in. This offer expires on 2006-08-28, 21:00UTC.
This publication is not an endorsement of Wikizine for these candidates.
Arno Lagrange
I am running as a candidate for the board of trustees in order to defend linguistic equal rights. We must try to find a way that any person from any project, speaking any language, can participate in discussions and decisions. Unfortunately, important discussions/decisions all happen in American English, making those who are not good speakers of that language unable to take part. True multilingualism and perspective, provided by an international neutral auxillary language (it could be Esperanto) is absolutely necessary.
It might seem trivial that in my statement I treat only the language question and none other. But as long as this important problem is not solved correctly, it seems impossible for me to look further into any other subject. How does someone enter a debate on some important subject if, because of a language barrier, I, like a great many users, cannot understand well what it is about? There is certainly an effort to develop some amount of multilingualism on meta (such as, for example, this election) but obviously the majority of the debates on the pages of meta, by IRC or mailing lists (e.g. Foundation-l) proceed only in English.
I tried to become interested in certain questions but I am constantly overwhelmed by long English messages; they lack conciseness, a summary and even a summary in other languages. One can note that those used to the English language (whether native speakers or non-native English-speakers accustomed to using English every day) are totally unaware that they leave behind all those who do not use the language as well as themselves. They do not make any effort of conciseness, stuff important messages with unimportant chatter, slang or jargon, abbreviations (which one finds neither in the dictionary nor elsewhere). Consequently even with a pretty good level of English it is impossible to enter the debates when you do not have unlimited time.
Read more;
meta:Election_candidates_2006/ArnoLagrange/statement/En
Ross Hedvicek
I'm a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. My platform is not to change anything drastically, but to improve the current situation. For example - I am aware of cases of blatant abuse of power on several language branches of Wikipedia in eastern Europe. I made the board aware of these cases. However, no action was taken by the board. This was not because they weren't aware of the problems but because of the language barrier preventing them from making reasonable decisions and possibly due to lack of familiarity with the history, realities and facts of life in that part of the world. I am more than qualified to rectify this situation.
My election slogan is: The crap has to stop - vote for me - it is your chance for change. I have a reputation to uphold!
[[User:Ross.Hedvicek]] 18:49, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
Steve Dunlop (UninvitedCompany)
I'm a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. I believe that the board of directors should set up a decisionmaking structure rather than make individual decisions itself, and to that end I've advocated creating additional volunteer and paid positions within the Foundation with specific responsibilities.
I think that would be one means to allow interested people to become active in their particular areas of interest at the Foundation level. Another of my proposals is the designation of two Foundation contacts for each project. Especially for smaller projects, that would be a means to be sure that each project both has a voice and remains accountable to the overall goals of openness and NPOV.
I also support long-term independence for various languages as they become large enough to be self-sustaining. I've been involved at ENWP since March 2003, where I am a former member of the arbitration committee. I've participated at meta since before the inception of the Foundation, and am presently involved in the meta:OTRS mail handling system.
For more information about my candidacy, you can view my candidate statement
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/En#UninvitedCompany
or the discussion page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:UninvitedCompany
where I have been replying to questions about my candidacy.
[[User:UninvitedCompany]] 17:21, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
2006-08-21
Wikizine - number: 39
- [ExpandTemplates] - There is a new special page called "ExpandTemplates". With this you are able to copy a page from a Wiki without having to copy all the templates. In the first field you define the page you took the input from. So if you took it from the page named "Sesame Street" you fill that in and without {{}} arround it.
You can put the input of a template, or of a series of templates, or even the whole page, in the second field. If you wish to enter a whole page you can paste the source text or do it like this; {{:Sesame Street}}
The Special:ExpandTemplates will write the result you get in ordinary Wikitext as it looked like on that specific page, and you will be able to copy and paste that to whatever wiki you want. The only thing you have to do now, is uploading the images. If you move a page this way you loose off course the benefit of the templates that by changing the template you change all the pages where the template is used.
- [Operations report] - Overview about what the status is of hardware and software
- [Wiki down] - It has been a wile since the last total system down. And this time the servers where running perfectly. But there ip-addresses where temporary invalid due to external reasons. The wikis where down for less then three hours. See the article of EN Wikinews for more information.
Remark: when the WMF-systems are down the Wikizine.org website and email is still functional. Feel free to submit news about the situation or see of Wikizine has news about it. Due to the limited core staff of Wikizine this service can not be guaranteed.
Community
- [ES.wikipedia] has decided in two polls to disallow the upload of files to the Spanish wiki and to do it exclusively in Commons.
- [ES.wp BIS] - The fifth Wikiconcurso (Wikicontest) has just finished. This edition was about translating featured articles from en.wiki, de.wiki, fr.wiki, it.wiki, pt.wiki, pl.wiki, nl.wiki, sv.wiki and ja.wiki. The Spanish language Wikipedia translated about 88 articles. 17 of those will be proposed as "Articulo destacado" (outstanding articles) on the Spanish Wikipedia.
- [ZH.wp news] The Signpost brings a report about how the the Chinese language Wikipedia is doing
- [Italia] - On September 2nd, Italian Wikipedians are going to meet in Valentano, near Viterbo, and in the afternoon they will attend to the second Annual Meeting for Wikimedia Italia, the Italian Chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. The assembly is going to elect a new Board and the meeting is going also to approve the budgets and to to describe the strategies for achieving a better promotion to Wikimedia Projects in Italy.
- [Netherlands] - Also on September 2nd, there will be a local one day Wikimedia conference in Utrecht.
- [it.wikipedia] -On Monday, August 14th, at 7:34 local time in the morning, one Wikipedian found himself on air on RAI1, the national TV station of Italy. The producers had also invited for the interview Enrico Cogno, a professor at the University of Perugia, and Federica Lanzellotto, a student from Rome. The subject of the interview was "Wikipedia: il sapere per tutti", with the aim of understanding how Wikipedia is getting more and more present in every day's life. It was only for 9 minutes and extremely early in the morning. But nevertheless it was National television and the Italian Community is very happy with it. The links to the video can you find on the page linked below.
- [Anthere's Blog] A mission: providing free knowledge. Free as in ?
- [Wikizine] made its first appearance in an news article (and made the visitor stats explode)
- [fr.wikt] - The French language Wiktionary has now already 200,000 definitions in its database.
- [ERRATUM] - The webhoster and sponser of Wikizine is Memebot.com and not "memobot.com"
- [WikiBritanica] - The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is now online in a wiki-form. Because the conversions form print to digital text is done by computer mistakes are made. On that wiki you can fix them. And also include some more recent information on a separate page. This is not a WMF-project.
A murderer of a 10 year old murder is arrested. A minister-president says something in a interview about a very sensitive local topic. An ethnic group of people continuous to be exterminated while the world does not care.Did you know ...
What is considered important depends highly about your personal point of view shaped by who and where you are. In the virtual city of Wikimedia the important topic is the board election. Why is it important? It is only for one place on the board. And because of this is only to replace Angela's spot, it is only for the remaining term of Angela's original term of 2 years. And that means it will not even be for one year.
This election is important because the board is not so big. One voice can make a difference. And it is likely that this new board will have to make decisions about significant reforms of the organisation of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Now the candidates present there candidacy to the community. This election is not like a real election where you only can choice between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", like expressed so colorful in South Park. This are all people from our community. There are very good people between them who I know personally and are deeply committed to do good for the projects. You can not know everybody. Consider also the ones you do not know. This is not a "vote for your friends" contest and also not "vote for the candidate form you local wiki". Raise above that. Read there statements. Check there behavior in the history. Ask them questions. Know for who you are voting. This is not a sysop election.
I have send an offer to all candidates to write a few words to present themselves to the readers of Wikizine. This to lower the step for the candidates to reach the community. The first two candidates will say there piece in an extra Wikizine send out soon after this one. Readers of the website will find it below this edition. Depending on the number of candidates who requested inclusion in Wikizine a second extra edition can be send out this week.
Thanks for reading this,
Greetings,
Walter Vermeir
... how to verify of a user who is contacting you off-wiki is really the user he claims to be?
You write (email, Jabber, IRC, etc.) or say (Skype, etc) to the user to write a specific phrase on the wiki like on his talk page.
You can also contact him or ask that user to send you an email by means of the "E-mail this user" function of the wiki. Look at the headers, the source of the message. It must contain "X-Mailer: MediaWiki mailer" and the name in the "From:" field is the username of that user on that wiki. This way can be falsified. Asking to edit is the most secure way.
IRC Quote
<frank> can you help me install GTA3?
<knightmare> first, shut down all programs you aren't using
frank has quit IRC. (Quit)
<knightmare> ...
Editor(s): Walter, Effeietsanders - Special thanks to: M7, Peter B.,Ecelan
Thanks for promoting Wikizine to the; Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Italian Wikipedia
Wikizine - number:39 Extra
Erik Möller
The Wikimedia Foundation must meet many critical challenges in the coming years, including, but not limited to:
- getting as many people as possible involved in important organizational tasks and making the Foundation transparent, open and accountable- accelerating technological innovation to make projects such as Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wikinews, and Wiktionary succeed in the same way Wikipedia has
- finding new ways to systematically improve and label the quality of Wikipedia content, without destroying the principles that have enabled our fantastic growth and that make Wikipedia fun
- developing a large network of partnerships with organizations and individuals who can help us in our ambitious goals, particularly with regard to building sustainable free knowledge communities in developing nations
- responsibly and thoughtfully dealing with legal risks and conceiving a sound legal strategy that covers all projects, all chapters, and all languages.
After 5 years of contributions to Wikimedia on almost all levels, I believe I am ready to help to guide the organization to meet these challenges. I would like to gain your trust and your support in this coming election.
Please review my candidate presentation at
and tell me what you think on the associated discussion page.
Sincerely,
Erik Möller
Cimon Avaro
Hi. I have been editing wikipedia and the related projects for three years now. My focus has been always finding where I can do most good, even if it has meant sacrificing my own ego in the process. Attempting to find solutions in a forward thinking way; such as conceiving the cleanup process out of thin air, and making an honest go of steering the nascent mediation committee away from a bureaucratic model. (Cleanup turned out to be a phenomenal success, although it quickly surpassed all my planning through the miracle that is collaborative wikiway, the mediation committee less so, but that is how it goes).
My last real life job was about "herding cats" in a heavily geek-oriented environment (16-19 age group), as a librarian at a Sciences oriented "magnet" high-school. My modus operandi there was to meet the students at their own level, as far to being one of them as possible. Having established early on that I could not be provoked into over-reacting to their lively antics, I only had to raise my voice once (when a student juggled a switchblade in a dangerous fashion) and it was immediately effective, largely in part to not establishing myself as an authority figure to start with. Over here in Finland this model is called leading from the midst of the troops, rather than from the front, or the rear.
As you can read from my [[w:en:User:Cimon Avaro]] userpage, I have had a decades long interest in encyclopaedias and systematizing the worlds knowledge in general, and have witnessed the whole history of The Net, far from being a pure spectator; for instance participating in the founding of the first commercial ISP in Finland.
Although you can read much more about me on my candidacy page, I would like to end this short introduction by recapping what you will get, if you vote me in as trustee of the board of the WMF:
- Someone who listens before he talks, talks before he acts and thinks before he either talks or acts.
- Someone not beholden to authority, or intimidated by it, but realizing that the potential of collaboration can acheive developments that individual planning might not ever be able to conceive.
- Someone who firmly believes that people will do what people will do, and the role of people in positions of responsibility in an organization such as ours is to apply the "art of the possible" rather than impose superficially ideal seeming constructs. Evolution, not "intelligent design" for WMF. Our part as trustees should be to fend off harm, not believe we can deliver some great boon. The great and wonderful things we acheive are in large part due to communities brewing "stone soup", each bringing to the pot what they can, and spicing up the broth.
Thank you. -- User:Cimon Avaro 02:07, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
P.S. Vote for who you like, but do vote. Read http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/En
and make your own mind up.
2006-08-18
Wiki down!
This post will be updated with news when there is news. Walter Friday 18 August 2006 - 17:53 UTC
- router problem - some parts of the world can see it, some can't. Estimated uptime: Don't ask - update 17:58 UTC
- Hosting company fucked up - 18:00 UTC
- (20:25:52) twincest: uh, it looks like this problem might be quite serious, so don't expect an ETA any time soon 18:30UTC
- (20:27:16) brion Cogent ate our IP space in Florida, heads to roll
- Kyle is manhandling the hosting company right now. The hosting company is manhandling Cogent. - 18:43 UTC
- Cogent cogent deleted ip block of wikimedia. They received an apparently improper DMCA takedown notice and deleted the ipblock of wikimedia. No ipadress = no website - 18:56UTC The ip-addresses Wikimedia was using where owned by Cogent. The where leased to the ISP of Wikimedia.
- 18:50 brion: we've been assigned new ip space, people are trying to figure out how to attach stuff to it
- 19:47 brion: new ips are being worked on now...
- All wikis seems to be up again - in read only mode!
- 19:59UTC - Wiki up. Service restored, write access enabled
Posting from Brion about this on Wikitech-l;
Article from EN Wikinews;
2006-08-15
Wikizine - number: 38
Memebot.com, a small webhoster, supports Wikizine by granting a free account upgrade to match it bandwidth needs. The WMF provides Wikizine with a free mailing list.
Thank You.
Technical news
- [CORRECTION] - in the previous edition of Wikizine about the single-user login it was reported that the email address needed to be confirmed. This is not correct. The fact of an email address is confirmed or not will make no difference regarding the migration to the single-user login. If you have different passwords for the same username on different wikis makes also no difference. If you have a different password and also a different email address you will need to login to confirm ownership.
- [White list] - Our Wikis can be abused with spam-hyperlinks. One way of preventing the insertion of spam-hyperlinks is the meta:Spam blacklist. On that list are all the domains who have been used in spam-attacks or are not welcome for some reason on the projects listed. You can not save the page on the projects if one of these domains listed on that on that page are present. Now there is a local override for this global spam blacklist. You can find it on [[Mediawiki:Spam-whitelist]] on your local wiki. See how it is done on the English language Wikipedia for the correct formatting;
- [Special:Imagelist] has changed. You see now more information and it is shown in a table.
- [Meta] - the wiki that is supposed to be the neutral public wiki for all projects and languages has now email notification on. This means that you can specify in your account preferences to receive an email when you talk page or a page on you watchlist is changed.
- [Userbox] - some useful new userboxes on Meta; to indicate that you can translate from language X to language Y. If you put this on your userpage on Meta and something needs to be translated you can be found if needed.
- [djvu] - Support for rendering inline thumbnail JPEGs from DjVu images is added.
- [Bylaws] - Anthere has asked community attention for and feedback about a draft version of new bylaws for the WMF. This a very serious thing. Speak now or remain silent later.
- [The Wikistudy] project on EN Wikibooks is looking for college students who have completed Advanced Placement courses and exams to help out in writing textbooks that are directed towards specific AP syllabi and academic exams.
- [Wikizine] is looking for typical wikimedia slang, abbreviations, special words and so for a new section to explain these words. ( report to Wikizine)
- [Wikiversity] - more information about Wikiversity is announced;
- Wikiversity is now an offical WMF-project with "Beta-status"
- On the website "beta.wikiversity" people can start working on the translations of the guidelines and look for support the start a Wikiversity in a specific language. After 6 months there will be a review of this new project. A German and English language version already exist.
- [Foundation-l] A posting of Anthere about the current candidates for the board and an appeal to the community for serious people from the non-English language projects to stand as candidate has evolved into discussions about, besides the board candidates, reimbursement of childcare expenses, payment in general for expenses, holding speeches for the wikimedia foundation and who must arrange this and so more is that discussion keeps growing to a very long length more or less like this sentence actually.
- [Board Election] - A clarification is posted by the Election Officers regarding the numbers of seats vacant to the board in the current election. This election is only to replace Angela. One spot is free. Further expansion of the board is a possibility. But if and how the will be appointed is not yet know. That can be by a new second election of by direct appointment.
- [Wikimania 2007] - First round for the selection of the host city is open!
- [Board] - Tim Shell, WMF board member, will step down from the board by the end of the year. So as is announced on Wikimania. The current election has no relation with this.
- [Staff] - The very recently hired person to help in the WMF office has quit. She will now be the very first ex-WMF employee. A person to replace here is already found and active.
- [FR.wp news] - The Signpost brings a report about how the the Frensh language Wikipedia is doing
- [Again a Wikimania report] - This time from Elain for the Kurier of the DE.wp.
- http://tinyurl.com/re8yh - machine translation
- http://tinyurl.com/kxsul - original version
- [Time] magazine announced its list of the "50 Coolest Websites 2006" and Wikipedia is on it. From those 50 another list was made named "25 Sites We Can't Live Without" which also includes Wikipedia.
- [Wikimania press] - I you like to read about Wikimedia/Wikimania then check out the page with links to all the press coverage of Wikimania. On Wikimania it self there where about 50 journalist present. About 78 unique news articles where created, about 1500 news sources ran articles about Wikimania. And there where short spots on 5 TV stations, including 2 on FOX news which is a very important TV-station in the USA.
- [Fashion&Style] - when articles are been written about people about nothing besides some trivial facts about that person and not about what the person actually is doing then the have reached a new level of famous hood. It seems that Jimbo has received this dubious honer now. Or was the author only looking for an excuse to praise a specific type of flashlight?
- [Alexa] - since the early days of Wikipedia there was interest of how popular Wikipedia was. Early August 2003 Daniel Mayer created the page "Wikipedia.org is more popular than...". And writes "We are also neck and neck with sex.com! Soon Wikipedia will be more popular than sex!". Now, 3 years later Wikipedia is not only more popular than sex, but more popular than almost everything. Almost. Wikipedia has raised through the rankings month after month, year after year, going higher and higher. Now Wikipedia is (according to Alexa) the 17th most popular website of the internet. But the steep climb has stopped. Wikipedia now stays stable on its spot in the rankings. Possibly, even probably, shall Wikipedia raise some more. But the flight is over. We are the top. And at the top you can not go higher anymore.
- [yi.wp] - The Yiddish Wikipedia is proud to announce that they hit the 2000 articles mark.
- [nl.wikibooks] - The Dutch Wikibooks has reached 1,000 Wikibook modules. The Dutch Wikibooks recently won the Wikimania Award for best wikibook with their manual for MediaWiki
- [Wikizine.org], the website, exists now for some weeks. From the end of June until now there where 1286 unique visitors. The total weekly average is 322 visitors. Most visitors come from the Italian Wikipedia, followed by the English and Dutch Wikipedia. 49% of the visitors is using Firefox and 17% Linux, 4% MacOS, 73% some version of MS Windows.
- [Apple] has now also has found the wiki-way. In there new MacOS Leopard Server software. With a w:en:WYSIWYG way of editing the pages. Like is expected to come to MediaWiki also relative soon.
- [Mywikibiz.com] - Part 2: This is a company that is selling the service to write an article for other company's and get those in the English language Wikipedia. Jimbo has blocked access to en.wp for mywikibiz. New articles for there clients will be written on the website of mywikibiz under GNU/FDL-licence. From there can people if the wish that copy them to Wikipedia.
- [Must hear] - many people have given their very best to make Wikimania a success. There where many interesting presentations. Go to the archive page, download them and listen to them on you mp3/Ogg-player. If you do not know where to start, start with these tree;
Andre Engels: "I think the reactions [to the Nature study] are interesting - Britannica takes three months to criticize you, and Wikipedia takes one week to fix all the errors"
Paul Kobasa: (One librarian describing Wikipedia to another librarian) "... And he had a wonderful phrase to describe people like him and me - he said we're like the scriptorium monks who are meeting [Johann] Gutenberg for the first time"
Paul Kobasa: "Someone asked me why, as an employee of Worldbook, I was going to Wikimania. And I said that we were jealous of all the press that Encyclopedia Britannica is getting"
A random radio journalist: "So this is like woodstock?"
Editor(s): Walter - Corrector(s): NielsF
2006-08-09
Wikizine - number: 37
- [Stable version] - the German language Wikipedia will soon (how soon is not known yet) enable a new function on there wiki to support "stable versions" as an experiment. This should increase the quality of the articles. And also make the wiki more open to edit because the visitor will see the version with the stable-status. So vandalism on the unstable version will not be a problem from the point of view of the visitor.
- [MediaWiki] will also be developed by full-time employees of the private organizations Wikia.com (the company of Jimbo) and Socialtext.com. This should increase strongly the development of MediaWiki. A new component to MediaWiki is expected to make "wysiwyg"-editing possible. This means that you will have an editbox that looks like the compose window of Hotmail or Gmail with options the edit a page without to see all the sourcetext with all the code. There is hope that this will lower the barrier for new people to work on the projects.
- http://wikiwyg.net/ - with a picture how it will (possibly) look like
- http://www.socialtext.com/node/90
- http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/wysiwyg_and_wik.html
- [Update] about single-user login. The one login for all projects is coming soon. But will probably be delayed until after the board election. When there are several users with the the same username on different wikis the user with the most edits will keep his username, the others will need to pick a new one. To identify witch accounts belong to the same user there well looked of the have same *confirmed* email address. Read the excellent Signpost article for more information.
- [The Signpost] is bringing to its readers a weekly report about a Wikipedia in a "foreign language" written by users from that wiki. Wikizine includes those reports also one week later. The Signpost is looking for users from several wikipedias to present there project to the English Wikipedia audience. This is a great opportunity to show a large part of the Wikipedia-world, EN Wikipedia, how great to non-English versions also are. Contact users Kpjas or Carmelapple for this.
- [done] - Wikimania 2006 is over. Over 400 attendees on each day where registered. No incidents are reported. This Wikimania is considered to be a success. Recordings of some of the presentations are available. Mostly audio. Expansion of the available media soon, especially video, is expected. The overview of the recordings;
- http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Archives
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wikimania2006/ - picture collection of Wikimania visitors
- http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Blog - Wikimania blog
- [Wikiversity] - Jimbo announced on Wikimania the start of a new Wikimedia project; Wikiversity. A center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. It will launch in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
- [Board election] - Candidates for the open board seat can present themselves until the end of August. The voting will start on September 1st, 2006. On Wikimania the function of the board and the election was also discussed. A compilation of those discussions are available to listen to. Interesting for board candidates or possible candidates.
- meta:Elections_for_the_Board_of_Trustees_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation/En
- meta:Election_candidates_2006/En
- File:compilation_board_candidates_advice.ogg - Ogg Vorbis 11,9Mb 32min
- Play file:compilation_board_candidates_advice.ogg - Webbased Player playing the same file
- [New board] - The WMF will create an advisory board by the end of the year. There function will be to help with partnerships, public relations, financing, technology, administration, international affairs, ... The people who will be on the advisory board, if the can be found, will be more academic people who are also like the wiki-style and the open contend movement.
- [$100 laptop] - Jimbo announced on Wikimania that the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) association has chosen to load a snapshot of select Wikipedia articles onto the laptops it is developing. The idea is to make relative cheap laptop computers for schoolchildren for countrys where there are few computers available for children. These laptops are not yet in production. Use of Wikipedia in this way is a perfect fit whit the goal of the WMF to give every single person free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Because these laptops well able to connect to a network Jimbo hopes that by spreading those computers projects in new languages will be started or live will come in near dead wiki's.
- [$] - Brad Patrick stated the there is no need for a fund drive soon. The Wikimedia Foundation has a financial reserve of about $500,000. There is a stable income of donations of about $30,000 every month. The WMF will make a special effort to attract money from grants.
- [PL.wp news] The Signpost brings a report about how the the Polish language Wikipedia is doing
- [Censor] - A Chinese project similar to Wikipedia has shutdown after pressure of the Chinese censor.
- [MyWikiBiz.com] is small company who has found a way to make a living of writing articles on Wikipedia.
- [The Hive] - "How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge" by Marshall Poe
- [Good News] - According to US television the number of elephants in Africa has tripled in the past 10 years.
- [GFW] - The Great firewall of China has upgraded its block level for Wikipedia. The upgrade was noticed and reported as early as August 7, 2006 9:30 UTC. It seems that official Wikimedia proxies are blocked and that zh.wikipedia.org" has become a URL-level keyword for the great firewall of China. This upgrade coincided with a Beijing News (新京報) report on Wikipedia.
The English Wikipedia has reached 1,300,000 articles.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
http://mr.wikipedia.org/
The Min Nan Wiktionary has reached 2,000 articles.
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/
The Sundanese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
http://su.wikipedia.org/
The Lombard Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
http://lmo.wikipedia.org/
Quote from Hacking Day
Ward Cunningham: "The Wiki[pedia] community has grown Wiki[pedia] and has done everything almost perfectly"
Ivan Krstic: "I want a Brion Vibber action figure - when you squeeze it, it says 'it's totally broken'"
Brion Vibber: (Extolling the virtues of downtime) "If you are up all the time, then you forget simple things like how to reboot the servers"
Brion Vibber: "And we have a lot of testers on Wikipedia, so [Mediawiki] bugs get identified pretty quick"
Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao - Special thanks to: User dg on #cgiirc
Thanks for promoting Wikizine to the wikis; HU,RO and KO wikiquote,EN wikibooks
2006-08-06
Wikimania 2006 Online
Wikimedia2006 is over. What left is are recordings who will probaly been added for several days to come. See on the archive page on the Wikimania wiki for these.
Updated: 2006-08-09 09:15 UTC-0
Wikimania program schedule - The Wikimaina2006-blog - Wikimania Signpost Series - IRC channels
See day 1 recordings - Day 2 recordings
Selection of must see (= hear) presentations from Wikimania;
- Jimbo Wales - opening session
Audio MP3 - webbased player - (backup; Internet Archive MP3)
Transcripts and notes; Andy Carvin's notes
Ross Mayfield's Weblog - Jimmy Wales Kicks off Wikimania
Jimbo's remarks on biography quality - Florence Devouard: Wikimedia Foundation: building in diversity
Audio Ogg Vorbis
Image:Wikimania2006 20060806 Florence Devouard.ogg (16,2mb) - Play with webbased player
Transscript; Session 7 - Ames - Wikimedia Foundation Board Panel
Transcript thanks to metasj Wikimedia Foundation Board Panel (partly)
Audio Ogg Vorbis Image:Wikimania2006 20060806 Wikimedia Foundation Board Panel.ogg - Play with webbased player
2006-08-02
Wikizine - number: 36 Extra
It is now almost so far. The main Wikimedia event of the year; Wikimania 2006.
(View countdown until Wikimania )
From this Friday until Sunday in Cambrige, Massachusetts, USA Wikimedians from
all around the world will meet. And listen and give speeches or visit
workshops.
Many Wikimadians will be there. But for all the the other people who are not
there but interested in what is going on extended online information will be
available.
The main presentations will be broadcast online by audio and/or video
live-streams, live transcriptions of the talks and even live translations for
some languages.
Every presentation has its own page on the Wikimania-wiki with information about
it and links to all media when available. (pfd's, silde shows, audio/video,
transcripts)
These pages can you find on the general schedule page.
There will also an item especially for the online participants;
You can still enter nominations for the Wikimania Awards
Wikizine special
Wikizine will attempt to provide its own overview of Wikimania on the website
with the post;
This post will be frequently updated and expanded.
The idea is to provide on one page easy access to the audio, video and other
media that are needed for attending Wikimania online. And tools for making it
more easy to use like a clock with UTC/Wikimania local time, webbased Ogg
Vorbis-player, javachat ... So that you have everything you need to follow
Wikimania online with only one page to watch.
Editor(s): Walter
2006-07-31
Wikizine - number: 36
- [More] servers are coming. The WMF board approved the purchase of 20 new servers with a value of $61440.00. There are now already 167 servers in service.
- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Hardware_Purchase_Jul-06
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikimedia_server.jpg - View of the distribution of the server around the world
- ["Free"] - There is a project for creating a clear definition about what a free content licence needs to be to be called "free". Main forces behind this are Erik Möller/meta:User:Eloquence and w:en:Benjamin Mako Hill. Input is requested to work on the definition and move it to version 1.0
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/7076/focus=7090 - First announcement 2006-05-01
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/8935/focus=8935 - Update 2006-07-30
- http://freecontentdefinition.org/Definition/Unstable
- [Job] Wiki expert in Nigeria needed
- [Wikicat] a project to create an open, bibliographical catalog.
- [Ombudsman] - A special ombudsman commission is founded to take care of complaints regarding possible privacy violations. This includes complaints about the use of the checkuser function.
- [Logo] - The name for the incubator-wiki is confirmed. It stays "Incubator". The project also now has its own logo now and is live. And even the test-wiki has now a logo.
- [Move] - The WiktionaryZ test site will be hosted by the WMF. This does not mean that WiktionaryZ has become an official Wikimedia project.
- [DE.wp news] The Signpost brings a report about how the the German language Wikipedia is doing
- [Front page] - In Japan Wikipedia made it to the front page of one of the leading newspapers with a long and positive article
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tangotango/Asahi - Translation of the article
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27775/focus=27775 - more info
- [Onion] - They say parody is the greatest praise ...
- The Simple English Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles
- The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 80,000 articles.
- The English Wikibooks has reached 20,000 book modules.
- [Censor] Saudi Arabia blocks Wikipedia
- [Private Wikipedia] - Wolf Mountain Group now offers servers for sale with Wikipedia installed (or any other project/language) on a configuration with updating software and support for this. With this setup companies and organisations can offer access to Wikipedia content yet exercise control because it allows them to remove topics they find less suitable for their audiences.
A very special function is machine translation of the project installed to many native American languages like Cherokee and Comanche. Support for Spanish, German and Latin are expected. These translations are also available on the website Wikigadugi.
- [Wikizine] - In an attempt to get more people from different project and languages exposed to Wikizine nearly all wikis will be visited with a request to support Wikizine in the coming weeks or months. Thanks to wikis who agreed to help recently will be included in the footer weekly.
... that you can add functionality to MediaWiki yourself?
MediaWiki has the option that you as a user can override the default settings and change the behavior, add functionality and the look of the wiki by editing your [[Special:Mypage/monobook.js]] and[[Special:Mypage/monobook.css]].
There is a useful javascript extension called "popups". It has many functions. Highlights are; preview of the page where a hyperlink leads to. So you can check an edit done by an anonymous without the need to open that page. A "roll back" option like the sysops have to revert easy edits.
See;
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:POPFAQ
"Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity." - Rule 6
"Enough... is never enough." - Rule 97
"Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit." - Rule 162
Editor(s): Walter Corrector(s): oscar
Thanks for promoting Wikizine to the wikis;
Wikispecies,en.wikipedia,ja.wikiquote,pt.wikiquote
2006-07-24
Wikizine - number: 35
- [Z] -WikitionaryZ, the pre-alpha ultimate Wiktionary, has new functionality; new "Expressions" and "DefinedMeanings" can be added. This means that a new concept can now be translated in many languages. For more details, read the text about the DefinedMeaning on WiktionaryZ and ask on IRC ( #wiktionary) for more information if needed.
- [Ogg Vorbis] - The fact that the Wikimedia projects are using Ogg Vorbis for audio can be a problem for some users. There is a web based Ogg Player that can be used to make it more easy fore the visitors to listen to the audio. EN Wikinews is using this already. You only need to put the path to the audio file after that of the player.
- [Translators] are requested to help with the translation work for the board election. Currently there is not yet anything to translate. People who are willing to help can put there name on the list with volunteers
- [Election] - The election for a new member of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation will start on the first of September. Essjay and Datrio have been appointed as inspectors of the election. Aphaia will assist them as an alternate election official.
- [WMF Nederland] - The Dutch chapter is organizing a one-day conference in Utrecht, Netherlands. And this on 2 September 2006. The working language will be Dutch. Registration fee will be around 15 euro. Registration is now open.
- [WMF 中文維基年會] - The Chinese Wikimedia Conference will be held on August 26th and 27th in Hong Kong. The working language will be Chinese. Registration is now open. Registration for it is now open.
- [Wikimania2006] is from 4 until 6 August in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Subscription is still possible.
- [Archival] - Library of Congress, Holocaust Museum negotiate with Wikimedia regarding the issue of access to archival materials
- [No Consensus] was reached about the deletion nomination of the article about Angela.
- [Wikinews.ogg] - Announcing something is one thing, doing it and especially keep doing it that is something else. The English language edition of Wikinews has made already over 150 audio "news briefs". The also provide a feed of the recordings.
- [Persian WP] - The Persian Wikipedia has decided to restrict page creation to logged in users like on the English language Wikipedia. The reason is that the have a lot of problems with anonymous users who insert copyright violations. Most of those users are from Iran. And because Iran has not signed international copyright agreement those users have problems with the concept of copyright.
- [Wikimania Awards] - For once Wikimedia is not receiving awards but giving them away. "The Wikimania Awards are a free content writing and media contest that takes place at Wikimania. The contest is for the best video, audio, image, and textual content created for use on Wikimedia projects over the past year." People are welcome do donate prices, join the jury and nominate articles or media. First price is a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet with the greetings form Nokia.
- [High profile] - The New Yorker and the LA Times has published two articles about Wikimedia worth of reading. The article of the New Yorker also mentions the existence of the projects Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikiquote. It is not common for these projects to get attentions in high profile media.
- [Print] - If would like to have a decent printed version of a part of the English Wikipedia then that is now possible. Pediapress offers a very easy way to make a selection from the contends of EN Wikipedia and turn it in to a real physical book. That book is not free but the price looks fair. From the earnings of the "Featured Books" the donate 10% to the WMF.
... that you can add some more buttons to the edit toolbar?
w:en:UserMarkS has written some javascript code that extends the default toolbar with many more buttons. If find some buttons not useful you can easily remove them from the javascript code.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MarkS/Extra_edit_buttons
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MarkS/extraeditbuttons.js
"When I visited the offices in March, the walls were bare, the furniture battered. With the addition of a dead plant, the suite could pass for a graduate-student lounge." -- impression of the WMF world headquarters by Stacy Schiff, journalist.
Editor(s): Walter Thanks to: Krog
2006-07-17
Wikizine - number: 34
- [550] The new blocking policy has now been implemented by Tim Starling, resolving bug 550. You can control the type of block by means of two tick boxes. The default settings result in the same behavior as before the change. These default settings are;
[ ] Block anonymous users only
[X] Prevent account creation
(To localize these options, edit [[MediaWiki:Ipbanononly]] and [[MediaWiki:Ipbcreateaccount]])
So if you do not change those setting registered users will still have no access from the school or from their ISP proxy, not have the option to make an account. The default settings give the most total block possible.
Thanks to user [[w:en:User:Lupin]] there is a small Javascript that you can include in your monobook.js so that the default settings are for the "softest" block: only blocking anonymous users, account creation allowed. Or if there is local community approval for it you can include it in the [[MediaWiki:Monobook.js]]-page so it is active for all users.Request for help
- [Update] - The translations of the "Board of Trustees" page need to be updated
- [Awareness Project] This is a WikiProject that aims to spread awareness of Wikipedia and the ability to edit it freely around real-life communities in order to try and attract more contributors from a variety of ages. We hope to gather and catalogue promotional material for members to make use of, and to provide a central point for meetings of this type. The are looking for people to help.
- [Wikiversity] A new push to launch a separate wikiversity project is underway. See the discussion at
- [rm Angela Beesly] - The wp-article of board member Angela is listed for deletion on here request. The article in some other languages is already deleted. And also the the article of Anthere, the well known french wikipedian is removed from the french language Wikipedia. Jimbo's article is still there.
- [Sitenotice] It was brought to the attention of the Wikimedia Foundation on Foundation-l that the Urdu language Wikipedia was using the site notice function to display a verse from the Koran above every page to each visitor. This is considered a breach of the NPOV principle of Wikipedia and an incorrect use of the Sitenotice function. The Koran verse is reluctantly removed by the local community.
- Tread on Foundation-l
- http://tinyurl.com/qkuj6 - Discussion about the sitenotice on the Urdu Wikipedia
- The POV of the Urdu Wikipedia about Israël
- [Wikimania Awards] Media and Writing awards will be handed out at Wikimania in August; nominations for great writing and media are requested on the conference site.
- [Essay] "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" by professor of history and new Media Roy Rosenzweig. This article was originally published in the Journal of American History (Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46), and was reprinted on the web at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. This is a long but very interesting article. It also includes a comparison of historical articles from the English language Wikipedia with other encyclopedias.
- [ERRATUM] The report of last week that Wiktionary has reached the 1,000,000 definitions milestone is not confirmed. It is likely that Wiktionary is close to the one million mark but not yet there.
- [fur.wiki] The Friulian Wikipedia have reached 1000 articles. Friulian is a language spoken by about 600.000 people mainly in North-East Italy
- [ja.wikinews] now exist for one year. Aphaia made an overview of one year ja.wikinews
- [Wikia] has taken over the Uncyclopedia domain name and trademark. Uncyclopedia is a parody of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikia has been hosting Uncyclopedia since May 2005. Now the Wikimedia projects and the parody Uncyclopedia fall under the wings of Jimbo and Angela. Wikia/Uncyclopedia and Wikipedia/Wikimedia are legally totally separate. The news of the transfer is not well received by some of the Uncyclopedia community.
- Announcement: Wikia & Uncyclopedia
- UnNews:Uncyclopedia bought by Wikia for 2 Wooden Nickels - This source is not very trustworthy
- [Torrent] a CD-ROM containing a selection of articles from the English language is available for download via bittorrent.
... that you can use a telephone for calling people?
VoIP, Skype, OpenWengo, GoogleTalk, etc. With all those systems you can call from PC to PC for free. And most have also the option to call to fixt phones or mobile phones, normally not for free. But you still need to mess arround with software, a microphone, a headset, audio settings, allocate bandwidth. And the audio quality is not always very good and also you need to buy credit in advance. An alternative is the service of JaJah.com The make only use of the traditional phones for the connection. No special software needed, no VOIP, no need to buy credit in advance; you pay later. Prices can be similar or even cheaper than SkypeOut. For many western country's it possible to call totally free of charge (possibly only temporary now). You can test there service for free without registration for a free call of 5 minutes from anyware to anyware.
So if you are working on an article and you like to consult with someone who lives in a far away place, maybe it is not even so expensive to give him a call.
http://www.jajah.com/
Quote
"By contrast, when journalists make blunders, and we’ve been provided many an example in recent years, it requires a day or two to make the correction. And, unlike a wiki, the article itself can never be corrected, because it’s printed and on its way to the birdcage." - Larry Sanger
From http://www.dufoundation.org/blog/?p=68
Editor(s): Walter, 18.85.46.138, Gary Kirk - Corrector(s): Gary Kirk, Hector Corerro - Thanks to: Klenje
2006-07-10
Wikizine - number: 33
- [<poem>] On the Wikisource project a new tag is now live especially for poems
- [Bug550] will be fixed soon, block options will change
- [localization] - BetaWiki is a project to centralize the translations and updates for the MediaWiki system messages. This way all MediaWiki installations can have a recent and nearly complete translation. When implementing the new translation care must be taken not to insult projects that are using their own translation version by overwriting those with the new version without consulting them first about it. Like was done on the Dutch language Wikipedia.
- http://nike.users.idler.fi/betawiki/Etusivu - BetaWiki
- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27664- explanation by GerardM about BetaWiki
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27644/focus=27644 - Protest
- [PLURAL] there is a magic word "plural" that can be used to change the spelling of the user interface depending of the number of items involved. For some languages there are multiple conjugations depending on the number, PLURAL allows for that
One example of the syntax for English is:
{{PLURAL:$1one articleare $1 articles}}
This can be used on MediaWiki-pages the contain text used on dynamic changing pages.
Example:
[[MediaWiki:Categoryarticlecount]] contains the text used on category-pages to say how many items there are in that category. But a category can contain one item and then the correct description would be that there is "one article". If there are more then the phrase should use "articles", the plural form.
You can see this in practice on the Afrikaanse Wikipedia;
And the results on a category with only one item reads "een artikel", what is the singular form.There you see how the magic word it used;
Here you see a category with more than one article and it reads "artikelen", the plural form.
This construction can be used on those MediaWiki messages where the software is aware of the potential of a plural form; the English message should have the PLURAL construct as well.
More about this at;Foundation
- [Wikibooks] project is 3 years old now on the 10th of July 2006. Congratulations! This page gives an overview of the "State of the Project";
- [Staff] The Wikimedia Foundation has hired a new full-time staff member. She will be working in the function of administrative assistant in the Florida office. This person will be answering the phones for the WMF office and emails send to Wikimedia and the English language Wikipedia queue. The WMF has now 5 people in service and 1 contractor.
- [Angela] posted an explanation about her resignation from the Board. The Board accepts her resignation and confirms that there will be a election for a new Board member starting on 1 September 2006. Until that time Angela stays on the Board.
- [Incubator] A vote is proceeding about a logo for the "incubator". This is a wiki where new projects can start and maybe move later to their own wiki if they succeed. There is now a vote about a logo for this wiki and about maybe a new name for it.
- [interview] with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko about "How and Why Wikipedia Works"
- [No News] - When someone dies it is always a rush to change their article as fast as possible on Wikipedia. So also with the article about[[w:en:Kenneth Lay]]. Reuters has published an article about the short time from when the article was changed from alive to dead, and about the initial confusion about the cause of death in some versions in the first hour after the announcement of the death of Kenneth Lay. Funny is that Reuters has slightly changed their own article about the Wikipedia article because that had made a mistake. Because it came from Reuters many others have covered it like CNN.
- [Wiktionary], the dictionary project of the WMF has reached the 1,000,000 definitions milestone. Wiktionary, started on 12 December 2002, is the oldest WMF project after Wikipedia. The number of people actively working on the Wiktionaries is, compared with Wikipedia, very few. This means that one person can make a difference - a big difference. [[User:GerardM]] has managed to make an astonishing 13,000 pronunciation audio recordings for Wiktionary, with his bot 200,000 edits on the English Wiktionary and 600,000 on all Wiktionaries.
- [Edits] - the total number of edits in all Wikimedia projects surpassed 150 million.
- [ko.wiki] The Korean Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
- [Campaigns] - On Wikia a new Wiki is created: "Campaigns". It launched on the American Independence Day the 4th of July. It is a new non-Wikimedia project strongly supported by Jimbo. It is a project about increasing the intelligence of politics in the USA. This new project has received a lot of attention by the media.
... that Skype can be useful for your Wikimedia-work?
On our projects many people work together. And there are many ways of communication to makes the work. But talking to someone can makes things a lot easier in some situations. You can use Skype for this. It is free to use between PC to PC. It exists for Windows. And also for Mac OS X and Linux. Those are crappy versions compared to the Windows versions but the work good enough to be useful.
You can also talk with up to 5 people in a conference call. And if like to host a virtual Wikimeet or a open meeting for you chapter maybe the Skypecast-function can be useful. With you can talk to up to 100 people.
- http://www.skype.com/
- http://skypecasts.skype.com
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Instant_Messaging_Wikipedians
Quote
"People talk a lot as if the most important thing in life is to always see things for what they really are. But everything we do, every plan we make, is kind of a lie. We're closing our eyes and pretending that the day won't ever come when we won't need to make any more plans. Hope is the biggest lie there is, and it is the best. We have to keep going as if it all mattered, or else we wouldn't keep going at all." -- Character Allie Keys / science fiction miniserie "Taken"
Editor(s): Walter - Corrector(s): Gary Kirk, Oscar - Special thanks to: Alias, Ruben Slock
Update: 2006-07-12 09:00 utc - fixt broken links
Wikizine - nr.:33 - Tech flash
!!!-***Bug 550 is going to be fixed soon***-!!!
Tim Starling announced on the mailing list that very soon, probably within 24
hours, the way the block function works will change.
Most important changes;
- Allow blocks on anonymous users only (bug 550) ; this means that registered users who are using that ip address still can edit, like users who on the network of a school or need to use the proxy of there ISP
- Allow or disallow account creation from blocked IP addresses on a per-block basis
Here you can see a screenshot form the new interface;
For more information read the posting by Tim Starling;
And even more reading;
Lets rejoice ourselves, spread the news to all sysops on all +600 Wikis and celebrated this wonderful day!
Editor(s): Walter
2006-07-01
Wikizine - number: 32
- [Board] member of the Wikimedia Foundation and vice-president of Wikia, Angela Beesley, has resigned from the Board of the WMF. Angela emphasizes that her reason for resignation is not another board member's fault. She is only leaving the Board, and will continue to stay involved with Wikipedia and with the Australian Chapter and Wikia. An election to replace the position of Angela on the board is expected.
- [Newsletter] - The Promotion & Translation Subcommittee of the Communications Committee has sent the first issue of their new newsletter out. This newsletter is about the translations effort. What still needs to be translated, what is done and news translation related.
- [$] The WMF received in the month of June 2006 $32,969 in donations by means of PayPal. This is a similar amount as in May and April.
- [Export/Import] Improvements have been made on the import and export functionality of MediaWiki. All wikis can already now export pages with [[Special:Export]]. The import function is off but can be enabled on request by Brion. (make a BugZilla ticket for it). This function can be used to move pages cleanly with full history between wikis. Like for transwikiïng an article from Wikipedia to Wikibooks.
- [WikiSource-l] , the mailing list for the Wikisource-project is now also accessible through gmane.org, meaning you can now read and post to this list like as if it were a usenet newsgroup or use the web-based interface.
- [?..Announce-l] seems to be also on gmane.org since February. Announce-l is the mailing list used by Wikizine. It would have been polite to inform Wikizine about this stranger, ignoring that only the listadmin is supposed to be able to add a list to gmane.
- [£$€] Daniel Mayer, aka Mav, the Chief Financial Officer, is looking for people with professional fundraising experience to help with the Fundraising Committee.
- [Idea] An idea to require a confirmed email address in order to upload images gets support. But it causes also a lengthy discussion about freedom on Wikipida.
- [Fußball] It seems that the World championship football is more interesting then Wikipedia, at least to some.
- http://tinyurl.com/ot4wg (machine translation)
- [???] "Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia that now contains nearly 40 million articles" - at least that's what British newspaper ''The Indepent'' writes.
- [Interwiki] A page is made that provides an overview of the pages from the English Wikipedia from where there are the most interwiki-links, and the number of links. And also a list of the largest Wikipedia that has no link to use articles. See explanation by Andre Engels for the details.
- [UR.wiki] The Urdu Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. There are 104 million speakers, so there is a lot of potential for growth.
- [Trolls-Everywhere] Not only the large Wikipedias have their trolls. However, trolls can also have a positive effect. Sabine Cretella explains ...
... that there is an easy way for removing many pages from you watch list?
When you like to remove many pages from your "Watchlist" ([[Special:Watchlist/edit]]) it can be that you need to check hundreds of tick boxes. That is no fun. Select the first box and then select that last box while holding <shift> pressed. All that boxes between those to are now selected.
Quote
"On average, Wikipedia will get it more right than the publishers will."
-- Scott McNealy , chairman of Sun Microsystems Inc.
Editor(s): Walter, Gary Kirk, Oscar
2006-06-26
Wikizine - number: 31
- [SpecialPage] again a new one; "[[Special:Uncategorizedimages]] - to translate edit [[MediaWiki:Uncategorizedimages]] and[[MediaWiki:Uncategorizedimages-summary]]
- [Magic word] {{NUMBEROFADMINS}} and __NOGALLERY__ added.
- "[OpenID] will likely be supported later this year. - Brion" OpenID is a system to be used for identification for website who are supporting the system. The benefit is that you only need one account that can be used to log on to all participating websites.
- [Translation] request for the new privacy policy.
- [Simple Spanish] "Would it be an idea to start a "simple Spanish" wiki:sencillo.wikipedia.org?" - There is some support but like it looks now not enough.
- [Privacy policy] the Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy has been updated. The most current version is the version "June 2006". The changes between the versions are modest.
- http://tinyurl.com/re9vx - current version
- http://tinyurl.com/pkjyg - the changes between the versions
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/8241/focus=8241
- [NewLogos] Discussions are ongoing with logo proposals on Meta regarding the redesign of logos on Wiktionary and Wikibooks, as well as on a logo for Wikimedia Incubator. Currently the incubator logo proposals look the most original.
Politics
- [Board expansion?] Jimbo considers to expand the board with a famous person. There is support for the idea but not to add them to the board but to a "advisory board".
- [Wikimedia Italia] was present at the "FestAmbiente 2006", held in Vicenza, Italy, from June 22nd to 25th. This is an event that attracts the general public and has many visitors. Many pictures and some details are available.
- [NYT wave] the effect of the article published last week in the New York Times keeps spreading across the globe. Articles about this none-event have appeared in newspapers in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and India. In Belgium on the Flemish television there was even a small item about this in a general news bulletin.
- http://blog.jimmywales.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/19/ - new postingfrom Jimbo regarding this
- [:-(] "The Six Sins of the Wikipedia" - Not everbody loves Wikipedia
- [TorontoStar] article about Wikipedia and the Britannica with no obvious errors
- [Spotlight] - Now that Brad Patrick is the new Interim Executive Director and legal counsel of the WMF the press has found him. Jimbo seems to get competition.
- [GoogleStats] Wikipedia is extremely popular. That is no news. But how do get people end up at Wikipedia? For a very large part by google. And google is putting statistics online of the evolution of the search requests of the those words. So you can see the rise of Wikipedia by Google (TM)
- http://www.google.com/trends?q=Wikipedia&ctab=2&geo;=all&date=all - Wikipedia
- http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikimedia&ctab=1&geo;=all&date=all -Wikimedia
- http://www.google.com/trends?q=wiktionary&ctab=1&geo;=all&date=all -Wiktionary
- http://www.google.com/trends?q=Wikiquote&ctab=1&geo;=all&date=all - Wikiquote
- [100] There are now 100 Wikipedias with 1000 articles or more. In total there are 229 Wikipedias. There are estimated 7300 languages.
- [PT.wiki] The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles with Çondilleri.
... that Delphine is not a fish?
notafish : inv. n. from English "not a fish" .
From Delphine, pronounced Delfin [de], or delfín [es] = dolphin, which, as everybody knows, is not a fish but a mammal
NB : notafish does not take a capital "n". Never. Ever.
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Notafish - Chapter co-ordinator,board member of Wikimédia France
IRC Quote
<i8b4uUnderground> d-_-b
<BonyNoMore> how u make that inverted b?
<BonyNoMore> wait
<BonyNoMore> never mind
<Beeth> Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are
already taken.
<honx> well, you can stil get one from a strange country :-P
Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao
Special thanks to: Paginazero
Wikizine - number: 31 Special edition
With pleasure can Wikizine present to you our new website at Wikizine.org.
You can there find Wikizine in "blog-style". You can browse easy in the older editions and use the search function find what you know have read some time ago in Wikizine but can not find it anymore. Also is it now even more easy to give feedback by means of the "comments" function of the blog.
Included in the package is of course a feed of Wikizine;
Wikizine is a "zine". So the plain-text email edition stays the primary distribution channel. The blog is only an online version the email edition. Wikizine hopes so to lower the barrier by means of the blog and reach more members of the community this way. For the email readers nothing will change.
Wikizine will make this week some advertisements about itself on the mailing lists. In the more then six months that Wikizine exists many new people have joined the projects and many will not know that Wikizine exist. The purpose is not to get especially many more readers but to get people subscribed from projects and languages who are not yet reading Wikizine. And so increase the flow of information.
How you can help Wikizine
If you are from a smaller project there is a good change that you community is more isolated form the larger Wikimedia-community because to the language barrier. Please act as a bridge and inform your local community about the news that you read in Wizine.
You can make a complete translation; make a page on you wiki and translate Wikizine every week. That would be great but also a lot of work. And possibly for very few readers. Probably you can suffice by only translate certain fragments that seem to you the most relevant and put those on you local announcement page. Any way of information flow to the non-English speaking wikis is very useful to hold the community across the languages together.
You are part of the Wikimedia-community and so are the people writing Wikizine. You know things that other people may not know. That is the foundation of the Wikimedia-projects; people sharing there knowledge. So is it is also for Wikizine. You will notice the news in Wikizine frequently about Wikipedia and especially about the English language version. The reason is that it is easy find out what is going on there.
If there is interesting news to tell about some smaller project, and most of the Wikimedia projects are small, then it is not likely that Wikizine will find out about if nobody comes to tell about it.
So again, please please please if you have news about your home Wiki share it with Wikizine. You will get credit for it :-)
The existing of Wikizine is still not known by many. So you can also help to expand the reader base by telling about it or putting a banner on your userpage. Or even see of your community has not problem to include a banner on a project page like your local village pump.
If you have questions or like to help someway please contact Wikzine.
Thanks for reading this special edition and, hopefully with your co-operation, you can help Wikizine to accomplish its objective to bring the news of *all* the projects for the members of the community.
This ends this service announcement. The normal edition follows.
Editor(s): Walter
2006-06-19
Wikizine - number: 30
- [undelete] Uploaded files which are deleted can now be undeleted. Admins can also view the deleted files without actually undeleting them. This works only with newly deleted files.
- [Translation] There are several texts waiting for translation. Some like "Travel scholarships for Wikimania" are urgent.
- [Wikizine] is looking for a reliable free form-post service to send emails.
- Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
- [GlobalNotice] The first global notice pushed to all Wikis will be placed very soon. This is to get attention for the Wikimania 2006 event, in the hope that many users will register for it. It is requested to keep the notice online for one week.
- [Scholarship] There is a possibility to reduce your expenses if you like to come to Wikimania. You can apply for a scholarship. Requests must be entered before June 28th.
- [Model] Anthere makes a comparison between the organisation of the Apache Software Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation. And how Wikimedia can learn from that. Responses follow.
- [Ombuds-wo-man] for CheckUser. On suggestion of Anthere; volunteers are welcome. The idea if to have a specific person to complain to about possible checkuser abuse.
- [Medical] A proposal for a project with medical information. For once this proposal has received responses on Foundation-l. There is an older mailing list for people who are interested in this and related projects; Wikimedical-l.
- [Unused accounts] On the English Wikipedia is a proposal to delete user accounts who are never used. Around 70% of all existing accounts on the EN Wikipedia have no edits. Currently about 1,6 million accounts exist on the EN Wikipedia.
- [New York Times] The New York Times discovers semi-protection after six months. And interprets it that; Wikipedia is changing its "everybody can edits policy". Wikipedia has pages with limited access for years. Andnow with semi-protection Wikipedia is even more open then before.
- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html - you need a login
- http://www.bugmenot.com/ - here you can get a login
- http://blog.jimmywales.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/17/ - comments of Jimbo about the NYT-article on his blog
- http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/06/18/0042209.shtml - And /. has something to say about this
- http://liberation.fr/page.php?Article=391273 - also the French media has picked it up
- [WikiCoke] "Coke gets slammed on Wikipedia" - negative publicity
- [Local News] The "Sint Petersburg Times interviewed local celebrity Jimmy Wales.
- [Age/edits] Some graphs are made about the relation of the time a useris active on the English Wikipedia and the number of edits the have done.
- [UploadStats] Ever wondered how big the database of Wikimedia is with all those pictures?
- [MailStats] The great Erik Zachte, the king of statistics, has made some interesting stats about the posting behavior on the mailing lists. What mailing lists are used? And how is the frequency of the number of postsevolving true the years? And who are the top-posters?
- [WikiSymposium] An International Symposium on Wikis will be held onAugust 21-23, 2006 in Odense, Denmark. "Participants will present, discuss, and move forward the latest advances in wiki contents, sociology, and technology." This is a non-Wikimedia event. If you register today, June 19, you pay 470 EUR/594 USD. After the 19th it is 537 EUR/679 USD. Full-time students get a very large discount. Some food is included.
- [SoftwareWiki] LiteratePrograms is a unique wiki where every article is simultaneously a document and a piece of code that you can view, download, compile, and run by simply using the "download code" tab at the top of every article
- [WikizineBlog] beta-version is now online. Same contents as Wikizine by email but webbased and with talk-back option. Feedback is highly welcome.
Did you know ...
... that the wikis support an easy for linking to RFC's?
To use it is very simple. Let say you would like to link to RFC 1855, the netiquette-RFC. Just write RFC 1855 on the wiki. No brackets, only RFC one space and the number.
To know what an "RFC" is, see;
To specify where the automatically created URL points to, modify [[MediaWiki_talk:Rfcurl]];
User quotes
It's better to learn some 'disgusting' things from wikipedia, rather
than from some porn site. --213.184.225.28 12:01, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
"To change time settings, do as Timwi instructed. To change _time_, on
the other hand, is a great deal more complex, and I don't think anybody
on this mailinglist wants to explain it." -- Mark Williamson
Editor(s): Walter, Sj
2006-06-13
Wikizine - number: 29
Technical news
- [X_FORWARD] An old problem : users who have done nothing wrong are blocked
because the IP they are using is used by others who share the same ISP. This
has been known as the "bug 550" problem. In some cases a solution is now
possible : when the ISP provides an "X-Forwarded-For" [XFF] header. Users of
those ISPs have their real local IP address included when contacting a
webserver. The configuration of the wiki can be changed so that the IP address
provided in the XFF header is used for the identification on the wikis and
blocks, at least when provided from specific IP addresses. Users from these
ISPs can then edit even when other users on the same network have been
blocked.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6161
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/XFF_project#Trusted_XFF_list - [Hide language] On Meta and some other projects, there are very multilingual
pages. So multilingual, that it can be annoying to look for content between all
the different languages. There is now a work-in-progress solution to show only
specific languages. A Java-script version is live on Meta now.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Language_select - [FireFox&GoogleToolbar;] A bug has been discovered for people using FireFox and
the GoogleToolbar and edit MediaWiki. When editing a large page, if one goes to
another tab -> loads a page there -> goes back to the tab where originally
editing, text from the edit window will have been cut. After deinstalling
Google Toolbar, this bug disappears.
Requests for help
- [Wikimania] Wikimania media and writing contest : Nominations and curators are
needed for a free content competition and artshow -- to cover video, sound,
images, and text of many varieties from all Wikimedia projects.
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_awards - [Survey] about "Wikis in Enterprises". w:de:User:Avatar is doing his diploma
thesis about this. So if you work at - or even only know a company which uses
wikis as collaboration tools, find some spare minutes and do the survey. You
are helping a fellow Wikimedian with his thesis and are helping with scientific
research about wikis. There are more useless things to do with your time then
that.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-June/044471.html
http://wikipedistik.de/survey/
New project proposals
- [WikiScope] A project to make it easier for users to discover information on a
topic across the many Wikimedia-projects.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiscope
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiscope/Ancient_Egypt_-_Example
Policy
- [New Logo?] initial discussions have started about a new logo for Wiktionary and
for the new Incubator-wiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_logo_for_Wiktionary
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_for_Incubator
Foundation
- [Appointment] The WMF board has announced the appointment of Brad Patrick as the
Foundation's new full-time Legal Counsel and Interim Executive Director.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-June/007673.html
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation - gmane now down
Press release:Wikimedia Foundation Announces Interim_Executive Director - [Foundation-l] On the mailing list is a elaborate discussion about how the
Wikimedia Foundation works now and how it should work. And also about the
appointment of Brad Patrick and the creations of those functions. Involved in
the discussions are many of the WMF key-people.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-June/thread.html
Community
- [en.wikipedia] now has over 1000 articles with "Featured Article" status. Those
articles should be the best articles of the English Wikipedia.
http://tinyurl.com/psc9k
Events
- [Wikimania] Registration opens for Wikimania Hacking Days, which will have
discussions about the present and future of MediaWiki design, and Wikimedia
tools and hardware. Requires registration for Wikimania itself.
http://wm06reg.wikimedia.org/hacker/register
http://wm06reg.wikimedia.org/ - [Wikipedia Academy] A "Wikipedia Academy" gathering and conference is to be held
June 16 and 17 in Göttingen, Germany, supported by Wikimedia Deutschland. The
program will include workshops and presentations, and a talk by Jimbo.
http://wikipedia-academy.de/index.php
Media
- [Bias] The real bias in Wikipedia by Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief
of Encyclopædia Britanica.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp
Stats
- [ko.wiki] The Korean Wikipedia has reached 400,000 page edits.
http://ko.wikipedia.org/
Did you know ...
... that according to Alexa, the 3 month Traffic Rank
for wikipedia.org: 16
for wikimedia.org: 666 (*)
for wiktionary.org: 3,701
for wikibooks.org: 4,108
for wikiquote.org: 4,316
for wikinews.org: 10,605
for wikisource.org: 11,563
for wikizine.org: not in top 100,000... yet.
and the Avg. Review for wikinews.org is 5 stars?
(*) Wikispecies and Wikimedia Commons are using the wikimedia.org domain and are
included in the rank of wikimedia.org
Mac bashing Quotes
"The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small
children."
- Linus Torvalds.
[ robT] Name ONE thing that your windows comp can do that my MAC cant
[ bawss] Right click.
Editor(s): Walter, Sj
Thanks to: Vipuser, Spacebirdy
2006-06-08
Wikizine - number: 28
- [oversight] A new revision-hiding user class, "oversight", was createdrecently. Users with the function can permanently delete pagerevisions containing personal information, copyright violations, orlibelous content. This is function is only active on the Englishlanguage Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-06-05/Oversight - [NewWikisource] 19 new language version-wikis of Wikisource are created
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_log#June_2 - {{#language:}} magic word added. For example, {{#language:es}} produces Español.
Policy
- [Test] Wikipedia pages on meta are being moved to a separate wiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-wphttp://incubator.wikimedia.org/
Politics
- [Sitenotice-to-all] The Communications Committee is working on a wayto set the sitenotice for all wikis. Probably a bot with sysop-statuswill be used for this.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27317
Foundation
- [CEO] The WMF has decided to hire a lawyer for legal matters and whowill also work as "Interim Executive Director".
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_CEO - [New committee] The WMF has the decided to establish a Fundraising committee.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_Fundraising_committee - [Foundation-l] this week there are very active treats about the roleof the board and jobs.
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation
Community
- [CH Wikimedia] on the 17th June the first Swiss Wikipedia-day will proceed.
http://www.wikimedia.ch/wikipedia-day
Stats
- [EO] The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 100,000 total pages.
- [$] In the month May the WMF received 1504 donations for a total of$33,210 by means of PayPal
Did you know ...
... that according to Alexa, the Russian Wiktionary is the secondmost-visited Wiktionary, with half as much traffic as the Englishproject?
Quote
Fun will now commence
-- Seven Of Nine, "Ashes to Ashes", stardate 53679.4
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
2006-05-30
Wikizine- number: 27
Technical news
- [Magic words] New magic word: {{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}}http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words#Time
- [Tiny bits] A lot of small changes to the Wikis. See B.R.I.O.N. of theSignpost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-05-29/Technology_report
Request for help
- [Activism Wiki] is a non-wikimedia project. But the hope to become itone day. The request help for making there content less POV. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/7464 http://activism.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://activism.wikia.com/wiki/User:Nabarry
New project proposals
- [WikiPoll] "a wiki whose goal is to propose polls to everyone". The havea testwiki with a nice MediaWiki extension to support polls. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiPoll http://wikipoll.free.fr/mediawiki-1.6.5/index.php?title=Society
- [WikiBrain] - see meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiBrain
Foundation
- [New employee] The Foundation decided to hire a full time employee toanswer phone calls and handle emails send to Wikimedia (OTRS). http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_OTRS
- [RedHat] Jimbo is invited by Red Hat, the company behind Red Had andFedora Linux distribution, to come and speak at a conference in Delhi,India. Red Hat will be paying for the air plain tickets for Jimbo anddonate $3000 for the Chinese Wikimedia Conference 2006. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/7424
Community
- [CA.wikinews] There is now a Catalan edition of Wikinews. http://ca.wikinews.org
- [logo] It seems there is a new logo for wikisource. Or is it not new? http://wikisource.org/wiki/Image:Wiki.png http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium#Logo_update
Media
- Wikipedia second as the best "Global Web Site" in Byte Level ResearchStudy. http://cio.tekrati.com/research/news.asp?id=7122
Editor(s): Walter
2006-05-23
Wikizine - number: 26
- [NewTool] CommonsTicker is a tool written by [[w:de:User:Duesentrieb]] for collecting critical events regarding images on Commons and posting them tothe wikis using the respective image. So with this tool you see what is going on with the images that your wiki is using from commons.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/7246
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Duesentrieb/CommonsTicker - [nofollow] On the English Wikipedia is the rel="nofollow" attribute now inuse on external links outside the main article namespace. By addingrel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination ofthat hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking byuser agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. searchengines).
http://tinyurl.com/ng3cw - [Magic words] New magic words {{BASEPAGENAME}}, {{BASEPAGENAMEE}},{{NUMBEROFPAGES}} and {{CURRENTVERSION}} were introduced.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-05-15/Technology_report
New project proposals
- [Wiki Activism] WikiActivism is a project for past and present socialmovements such as the Civil Rights movement, Animal Rights movement, andthe blooming Immigrant Rights movement.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Proposals_for_new_projects#Wiki_Activism
Foundation
- [Chapters news] Delphine (notafish) is back from Europe where she visitedvarious Wikimedia chapters. Read the interesting report of Delphine aboutWikimedia Polska, Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Italia and WikimediaSerbia and Montenegro.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/7300 - [de.wikimedia] Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. has decided to open a office inthe real world. The WMDE is currently searching for office space in theFrankfurt area. The hope that the office will be open from October.Initially there will be one employee for that office, a "Geschäftsführer"(director, chief clerk, manager). There where 65 candidates for thatfunction. Arne Klempert [[w:de:Akl]], member of the board of WMDE, isselected for this function.
Community
- [About Wikimania] The Wikipedia Signpost has a interesting series aboutWikimania
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-04-10/Wikimania_report
Stats
- [Stats update] Project statistics updated, except for Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-05-22/Statistics http://stats.wikimedia.org/ - [wo] The Wolof Wikipedia passes the 100 article mark with the addition ofFrench Southern Territories (French Southern Territories), part of aseries of unencyclopedic "articles" started by Ji-Elle.
http://wo.wikipedia.org/ - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolof_language
Did you know ...
... there is a Wikipedia-game?
http://common-lisp.net/project/lifp/rouge.htm
IRC quote
[mage] what should I give sister for unzipping?
[Kevyn] Um. Ten bucks?
[mage] no I mean like, WinZip?
[erno] hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, itworks completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
2006-05-14
Wikizine - number: 25
- [Bad Image] - there is now the page [[MediaWiki:Bad image list]]. Imageslisted there can not be displayed in that Wiki.Example; If you put on that page [[:Image:George-W-Bush.jpeg]] then theimage will be changed to a link to that pictures description page.Why; some users where vandalizing articles by including to them images.Especially images from a very explicit sexual nature are popular forthis. Even when the only remain on it for a couple of minutes it cangive a very bad impression. Also on the article where the image issupposed to be used the image is not displayed, only a link to thedescription page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Bad_image_list - [Magic word] New magic word __NEWSECTIONLINK__ was introduced, whichallows users to add a "new section" link (shown as a tab in Monobook) topages which aren't talk pages.
- [New tools] Especially useful is "Commonshelper", which semi-automatesmoving images to Commons with a correct history summary.
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commonshelper.php
Request for help
- [Web design] Wikimania is looking for a web designer.
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteering
Foundation
- [Tron] Some time ago there where legal problems for the German Wikipediaabout the article of the deceased hacker Tron. His parents did not likedit that the article contains the real name of Tron, Boris Floricic. Andthe sued Wikimedia about this. The lost but appealed that discussion.Now the have also lost the appeal. Further appeal is not possible. It isallowed to include the full name of Tron in the article.
http://www.wikimedia.de/2006/05/landgericht-berlin-weist-berufung-in-sachen-tron-zuruck/ - [New chapter] The Swiss Wikimedia chapter has been officiallyestablished on 14th of May 2006.
http://www.wikimedia.ch/ - [pl.wikimedia] Polish Wikimedia Meeting 2006 took place on 29 April-1May in w:en:Wrocław. There was 42 participants including 5 from abroad.10 lectures were delivered and many discussions took place amongparticipants.During the meeting General Member Assembly 2006 I was organized. 17Association's members and several guests accepted Realization of Boardplans for 2006 and Interim Budget. There was discussion aboutWikicontest and several other issues.
- [Jimbo Time100] Like reported before Jimbo made the Time Magazine top100 of the most influential people of 2006. And there is also a partyfor those 100. Amanda Congdon of rocketboom.com made a video reportabout this.
http://www.time.com/time/2006/time100/
http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/archives/2006/05/rb_06_may_09.html -Jimbowatching (and some other people)
Community
- [*!*Soviet Alert*!*] The licence template PD-Soviet in its current formwill very probably be deprecated on Commons, and replaced by somethingthat is more accurate. The reason, as put forth by[[commons:user:Lupo]], is that images published in the Soviet before1973 are, simply put, not necessarily public domain as the templatecurrently claims.Images with the template will not necessarily be deleted, but manyprobably will. So do not be surprised if some images disappear.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:PD-Soviet - [$] Money offers for an Admin-account... Maybe a new way to get fundingfor Wikimedia?
http://tinyurl.com/mlt4e
Awards
- [Ja.wikipedia] Japanese Wikipedia won `AllAboutスーパーおすすめサイト大賞ビジネス・キャリアチャネル賞'. Some sort of Award. No more informationis available.
http://allabout.co.jp/super/2006/page_win_career.htm
Media
- [Baidu Baike], the "free" encyclopedia, Chinese style. The Chinesesearch website Baidu launched an encyclopedia inspired by Wikipedia. Youneed to register, all edits must be approved by anonymous back-officeeditors, state censorship is applied, searching for inappropriatesubjects like "democracy" get you blocked. Also the seem to violate theCC and GFDL licence besides the human rights.
http://jonathan.rawle.org/2006/04/26/chinese-censorship-in-action/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_mainland_China
Stats
- [Poll] The Dutch newspaper [[w:en:NRC Handelsblad]] had this poll onthere website for one day;"Websites like wikipedia, where everybody can edit the contents, areunreliable."agree 24.27 %, disagree 46.6 %, neutral 29.13 %; Total votes: 206Remark; all visitors to there website could vote on this poll withoutregistration.
- [nrm.wikipedia] The Norman Wikipedia has reached 500 articles. Thenumber of speakers is unknown, but it is a very small language so 500 isvery nice.
http://nrm.wikipedia.orghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_language
Other news
- [Sickipedia] Like all things created by men it can be used for good andalso for very questionable purposes. So also for MediaWiki. There is anew (non-wikimedia) project to collect sick jokes. Racism, Paedophile,Old people, Dead babies ... if there is a topic where it is highlyinappropriate to joke about you can find jokes about it there. This is aproject of an author who has made a book full of sick jokes.Editorial remark: very few of those "jokes" are actually funny.
http://www.sickipedia.orghttp://www.robertmanuel.com/category/sick-joke-book/ - [Commercial] Being listed in Wikipedia is important for companies. "Howto Place a Company in the Wikipedia?"
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003782.html
Did you know ...
... you can use the gmail-spell function without gmail?
Put this url on your user page; http://orangoo.com/spell/
And when you are working on your wiki when you are not at home you canuse that easy to use spellchecker that is actually using the spellcheckfunction of gmail.
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition
"Once you have their money, you never give it back." - Rule 1
"Ask not what your
profits can do for you, but what you can do for yourprofits." - Rule
89"
There's
nothing wrong with charity... as long as it winds up in
yourpocket." - Rule
144
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
2006-05-08
Wikizine - number: 24
[Update Renameuser] The contributions limit for [[Special:Renameuser]]
is increased to 200,000. This means a bureacrat now can rename an user
account for so far the have not done more then 200,000 edits. According
to the available information the bot [[w:en:User:Rambot]] has made the
most edits of all users on the English Wikipedia with 131,511 edits so
it is not likely users will have limit problems.
[Bug 5284] Resolved: [[Special:Mypage]], and [[Special:Mytalk]] can now
take arguments in their URLs
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5284
[Bug 3309] Resolved: When undeleting a page a reason can now be given.
Including a reason is not obligatory
=== Request for help ===
[Mediawiki-i18n] A new mailing list dedicated to centralising discussion
regarding MediaWiki internationalisation. Maintainers for each language
for helping to keep their specific language up to date is requested.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/23486
=== Foundation ===
[Wikimania] Registration for attendance and housing opens for Wikimania
2006. Community members are encouraged to register early while housing
is available.
http://wm06reg.wikimedia.org/
[InstantCommons] The WMF special projects committee recommends the
implementation of the InstantCommons project.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InstantCommons
=== Community ===
[No reference] The English Wikisource decides to exclude all reference
material.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:News/2006-05-02/Recent_vote_ends_excluding_reference_material
Example of information that is not welcome anymore
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hello_world
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mercury
[Polish Wikimeet] A meeting of Wikimedia Poland was held in Wroclaw
April 29 - May 1
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Polish_Wikimedia_Meeting_2006
http://zlot.wikimedia.pl/
=== Awards ===
[Planetizen] The [[w:en:Portal:Architecture]] and [[w:en:Category:Urban
studies and planning]] of the English language Wikipedia have jointly
won an award, being rated one of the top ten best planning, design, and
development websites. Now, this isn't an award which can be won
annually; it is only given to new or dramatically improved web sites.
One thing to notice is this is a trade magazine. That is, the people who
are reading this magazine are professional designers, particularly
community engineers and architectural designers. This indicates
Wikipedia is being used professionally by the people who work in this field.
http://www.planetizen.com/websites/2006#10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Architecture
=== Stats ===
[4 million] Wikipedia reached 4 million articles in its various
languages on Sunday. Of the 4 million articles, over 25% (~1.1 million)
were in English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-05-01/News_and_notes
[131 million] comScore World Metrix, a new global internet tracking
system has placed what it calls "Wikipedia Sites" seventh on its list of
"Online Properties Worldwide", with an estimated 131 million unique
visitors aged 15+ in March 2006, or 19% of all internet users aged 15+,
based on comscores estimate that there were 694 million of them that
month. (see also the "quote" section)
http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20060504/CGTH06704052006-1.html
=== Other news ===
[CFP 2006] Three Wikipedians presented Wikipedia at the Computers,
Freedom, and Privacy conference in Washington, DC. Author Vernor Vinge
gave the conference's closing address, discussing Wikipedia as an
example of a fantasy 'that might have been proposed at CFP 5 or 10 years
ago' as a result of giving everyone networked computers.
http://www.cfp.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
=== Did you know ... ===
... that you can falsify the history of an article?
At least if you are a sysop. First delete the article, then go to the
restore page of that article. There you see history of the page. Every
edit has a tick box. Select all of them. (select the first box and the
last one while pressing
want to disappear, and restore the page.
=== Quote ===
"While the 'big three' properties remain consistent among worldwide and
U.S. audiences, Wikipedia has emerged as a site that continues to
increase in popularity, both globally and in the U.S. Wikipedia's
popularity demonstrates the global power of the Web to unite and provide
information across countries and languages, but the full extent of its
global appeal is only measurable through this new worldwide
measurement," -- Mr. Daboll, comScore Networks
Editor(s): Walter, Amgine
2006-05-01
Wikizine - number: 23
[Local botpower] The bureaucrats have now a new responsibility. The will
find in the "Special pages" section the special page
[[Special:Makebot]]. With this page the can give and revoke the bot flag
of a user account. The stewards and the request page on meta is still
the place to be for botrequest for wikis without a bureaucrat.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_bot_status
[Date of Caching] Bug 4327 is resolved. "Add a timestamp to special
pages containing cached data". So now when look up a page like
[[Special:Ancientpages]] you know how ancient that page is. To localize
the message edit [[MediaWiki:Perfcachedts]]
[New Special pages]
- with the page [[Special:Unusedtemplates]] you can find unused
templates. To localize the message on that page edit
[[MediaWiki:Unusedtemplatestext]] and [[MediaWiki:Unusedtemplateswlh]]
- with the page [[Special:Randomredirect]] you get a random redirect.
You can find it by the "special pages". To translate it edit
[[MediaWiki:Randomredirect]]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randomredirect
[Small stuff]
- page protection/unprotection is now included in the revision history
- Watchlists now have a namespace selector.
- when a non-sysop attempts to edit a page in the MediaWiki-namespace
the used to get the default "protected page warning". But this is not
correct. That are not protected pages but pages with restricted access.
There is now a special warning for MediaWiki pages. See
[[MediaWiki:Protectedinterface]] to translate the message.
- Bug 93 resolved: Nowiki tags and tilde signatures in templates
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93
=== Request for help ===
[Wikimania] A new page is up for interested Wikimania volunteers.
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteering
[Mirrors and Forks] Maintainers of mirrors and forks lists have been
looking for help.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-compliant_site_coordination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Mirrors_and_forks
=== New project proposals ===
[Proposal] A timeline database with history facts for global history,
people, corporations, products, etc., a global database of timelines
that could be used to show graphic interactive timelines specified by
the user.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTimeLine
=== Community ===
[Wikisource-l] A mailing list for Wikisource created. Like there is
Wikipedia-l for all language Wikipedias this one is for all Wikisource
related matters.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l
=== Media ===
[The Time 100] The issue of May 8, 2006 of Time Magazine is about "The
People Who Shape Our World", the top 100. And Jimbo is one of them.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187286,00.html
[Jimbo] - on TV - again. But this time on "Geek Entertainment TV". It
does not even has (yet) an article on EN Wikipedia so it must be very geeky.
http://www.geekentertainment.tv/2006/03/24/sxsw2006-jimmy-wales-uber-wikipedian/
[EFF] Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/
[CNN] Campaign manager resigns amid Wikipedia flap
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/26/cox.wikipedia/
=== Stats ===
[en.wikipedia] The English Wikipedia reaches 1.1 million articles on the
27th of April, adding an extra 100,000 articles only two months after
reaching the one million milestone. This is only a twelfth of the time
taken to create Wikipedia's first 100,000 articles.
=== Editorial ===
Did you noticed there was no Wikizine last week? Until now there was
every week a new edition of Wikizine. The concept of Wikzine is to bring
you every week to most important news about the Wikimedia projects. Last
week there was in my opinion nothing to report that qualified enough for
real news to make an edition. So there was none. Can happen again.
Filling a Wikizine with only Alexa and other stats, some Jimbo
appearances on CNN and "Did you know" and a Quote is easy but no news.
Something else;
Wikizine describes itself as "An independent internal news bulletin for
the members of the Wikimedia community". I need to give some
clarification about the "independent" part of it. Like many other people
working in our community I have a lot of different functions on several
layers of the Wikimedia community. Some of them are difficult to combine
with my function as editor-in-chief of Wikizine. As a member of the WMF
Communications committee I have access to confidential information that
is not (yet) for publication. So as committee member it can be that I
censor Wikizine by not reporting or not including all the information I
know. That is more the exception. By being on the committee I have
better access to people and information to inform you.
So, is Wikizine independent? Probably not really. But I find it is still
independent enough to call it independent. This is not a Wikimedia
Foundation publication. Texts are not approved by the board or so. I can
live with it.
Greetings,
Walter Vermeir
=== Did you know ... ===
... that Wikipedia, now at the 17th place of the top 500 of Alexa, is
the only dot org?
All the other websites getting more visitors than Wikipedia are commercial.
=== User Quote ===
"Like most decisions on Wikipedia which actually get things done, I
suspect large quantities of alcohol were drunk by someone who already
had extraordinarily large testicles and who had just finished reading
[[Wikipedia:Be bold]]." Rob Church 23:24, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
2006-04-17
Wikizine - number: 22
[ParserFunctions] The extension for mathematical expressions and conditional constructs has been enabled on all Wikimedia wikis.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27087/
[Single Login] is coming. The previous time frame for it was "end of February, early march". The current time frame is "It'll be done when it's done. - Brion". Make sure that you use for all your accounts the same email address so the can be merged when it is time.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/23027/focus=23029
=== Request for help ===
[Wikimania] There are two weeks left to submit presentation ideas for Wikimania. The design of the conference site is being discussed.
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_participation
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Sandbox
=== Policy ===
[Privacy policy] suggestion of a revised version of the policy
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6833/focus=6833
=== Community ===
[Answers.com] End of 2005 the Foundation announced a partnership with Answers.com The agreement included that Answers.com would provide a search tool where some of the revenue of the use of this tool would go to the Wikimedia Foundation. The tool is now available. There is controversy about this partnership. Anwsers.com is accused to be a company using dishonorable ways of doing business.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/4627/
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/44025/
http://wikipedia.answers.com/
=== Media ===
[Content review] BBC Focus magazine had experts compare three entries in Wikipedia, Britannica, Encarta and Infoplease in a quick study. Wikipedia was ranked http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/44112/
[Fake Bio] of "war hero" caught the attention of the media.
http://reddragdiva.livejournal.com/307381.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mcilwraith
=== Stats ===
[pdc.wp] The Pennsylvania German Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
http://pdc.wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch
[Alexa] rankings on a by-country basis
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Awareness_statistics#Alexa_country_rankings
=== Did you know ... ===
... that it is not so difficult to chat to many users of different instant messaging systems?
It can be very useful that you can contact your fellow Wikimedians in real time, to chat with them. But of course instant messaging is not like e-mail, a universal system that works. There are many incompatible systems for instant messaging. But you can use one program for that. There are several solutions. A good solution is Gaim.
Works with Windows, BSD and Linux. MacOS X can but not easy. Better use http://adiumx.com/
You chat with users of almost any system with one client. You can also access IRC and use it to join the Wikimedia IRC-channels. Very useful is that you can add IRC-users to you watch list just like with users of MSN, AIM and so. This way you can IRC easy for direct person to person contacts without the need to ask for authorisation or to know there exact user name because you find them in the chat rooms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaim
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_channels
=== Microsoft bashing Quotes ===
-The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners. - Ernst Jan Plugge
-"The box said, Win95 or better required... so I used a Mac !" — Tim Scoff.
-When you say: "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say: "Hey, I got those with the system -- for free." (Linus Torvalds)
-*Welcome to Hell. Here's your copy of Windows.
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter, Sj
2006-04-10
Wikizine - number: 21
[Outage] Wikimedia was down from 19:19 UTC on 9th April to around 01:30
UTC on 10th April. The explanation we have at this time is that one of the
800A circuit breakers between the generators/UPS and our servers failed at
our Florida co-location facilities causing obvious problems. Staff at the
datacenter struggled to resume service as soon as possible, and are now
investigating the reason said breaker failed.
Wikimedia sites were unavailable for just over six hours.
Several servers came up with bad clocks. Brion has corrected the times in
the 'revision' database entries for the entries edited from these servers
so 'history' and 'contribs' will be correct, but you might see some edits
listed in your watchlist etc 8 hours earlier than their actual times.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22810/
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22827/
[Parser functions] Tim Starling created a MediaWiki extension supporting
parser functions, along with four new functions: if, ifeq, expr, and rand.
These can replace inefficient templates such as {{{qif}}} and
{{{switch}}} from the English Wikipedia. Parser functions such as
LOCALURL have existed for a while; but including them in an extension has
only been possible since MediaWiki 1.6, released last week.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ed_Poor/subtract&action=edit -- example of inefficient template
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES
-- MediaWiki 1.6
[Move to Commons] Magnus Manske has made a online tool to make it more
easy to mo move files from a local wiki to commons
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27061/
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php
[SpamWar-IV] The coming of the Redirects - new way of link spamming
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22799
=== Request for help ===
[Wikimania] Needs volunteers and translators. Spanish, French, and
Chinese translators are especially welcome.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Meetings#General_volunteer_meeting
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6795/
[en.wikinews] Needs more people to help out with the daily audio recording
of the news. If you'd like to help contact User:Mrmiscellanious
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Mrmiscellanious
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews
=== New project proposals ===
[List of proposals] User:Robert_Harrison is working on a new version of
the new project proposals page on Meta
http://tinyurl.com/z5ek3
=== Foundation ===
[PR] Schwartz Communications, a public relations firm, provides on a
voluntary basis there services to the Wikimedia organization. The are from
now on included to the Communications committee as advisors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartz_Communications
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee
=== Community ===
[EN.wikinews] is now offering a podcast of their daily news briefs on a
daily basis and actively promoting it.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AudioWikinewsNewsBriefs
[EN.wp CD] User:BozMo produces a CD with 2006 articles and 8500 images for
use in UK schools to benefit the group 'SOS Children' from the English
Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BozMo/2006_Wikipedia_CD_Selection
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/education-cd.htm
=== Media ===
[no print] the print edition of German Wikipedia is postponed due to lack
of support from the community.
http://tinyurl.com/lhpmn - google translation
[AlistApart.com] Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters - about
registered and anonymous users and Wikipedia
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/identitymatters
=== Stats ===
[The TOP] The classic traffic ranking is from Alexa where Wikipedia has
the 18the place of all websites of the internet. But there are also
others. According to "Hitwise" Wikipedia is on the 38th place, just after
CNN.com That seems impressive but that is still only 0,17 % market share.
When limited to "Education websites" Wikipedia is the clearly the number
one. Also according Hitwise the visitors of Wikipedia are 47,2 female and
52,8 male and users of all ages are using Wikipedia.
According to the statistics of "comScore" Wikipedia is on the 28th place
and rising. All those reports are nice to know but it is important to
realize that the give an strong English / American POV of the use of the
internet.
http://tinyurl.com/g6uog -- Hitwise data and demographics (USA) for
Wikipedia, March 2006 (doc file)
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?id=783 -- February 2006 'top 50'
list (WP: #28)
[KW.wp] The Cornish Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. According to EN
Wikipedia there are around 3500 speakers of this language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language
http://kw.wikipedia.org
[jp.wp] The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
http://jp.wikipedia.org
=== Did you know ... ===
... that you *can* switch of your computer, go outside in the real world,
leave your phone, iPod and PDA at home, go to a forest of a park and watch
to the movement of the leaves in the wind and the breaking of the sunlight
in those leaves and enjoy its fantastic resolution?
=== MediaZilla-IRC Quotes ===
"And so, we don't need a business model, we're just doing it." [Jimmy
Wales, early 21st century]
Sweater: optional piece of clothing applied to child when its mother feels
cold.
"The life is too short, and Wikipedia too slow ..." - Anon
"George Bush is a good president. No really. Please stop laughing."
Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao, Sj
2006-04-03
Wikizine - number: 20
[CVS] The Concurrent Versions System of SourceForge's developer CVS has
been down. Because of this Brion has setup his own CVS for MediaWiki. This
is CVS system is a system for working on software with several people like
the wiki is for working on texts with many people.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22626
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Subversion
[Midi] files uploaded to the wiki should now be better handled by internet
explorer
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5277
=== Request for help ===
[Wikimania] The deadline for submitting proposals to the Wikimania 2006
conference has been extended, to April 15 for workshop and tutorial
submissions, and April 30 for presentation submissions.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6762
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org
=== Politics ===
[Proposal] A proposal to close the September 11 Wiki has been made.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Closure_of_September_11_Wiki
=== Foundation ===
[fr.wikiquote] The Foundation closed the French language Wikiquote because
of legal reasons. Despite first enjoined the French Wikiquote will be
reopened unless there are people interested in working on it. For once the
exernal media seem not to regard this as news.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6671
http://fr.wikiquote.org/
[Chapter] dutch Wikimedia chapters founded. Special in this case is that
there are created two dutch Wikimedia organizations by the same people, on
the same day but with two different legal entity's.
http://nl.wikimedia.org
=== Community ===
[Wikisource] started with one wiki for all. But more and more languages
migrate to there own wiki. cs.wikisource, ml.wikisource, sk.wikisource are
created. cs and sk imported pages from the mother-sourceswiki.
[9/11] one of the least know Wikimedia wikis, the "In Memoriam" about the
victims of the 9/11-attack is now under procedure for closing.
http://sep11.wikipedia.org
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects
[Meta] the project "to Overhaul Meta" (= To make extensive renovations or
revisions on; renovate) has put the more obscure Meta-wiki in the spot
light. Extensive discussion on the mailing lists about it. On Meta it
seems to result in a massive categorisation action and deletion of pages.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:MetaProject_to_Overhaul_Meta
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6623
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6730
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel#The_Meta_.22community.22.3F
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/43192
=== Media ===
[CBS] online video report about "Britannica Vs. Wikipedia"
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/28/eveningnews/main1448372.shtml
[Censure] Pakistan temporarily blocked Wikipedia
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/31/184222.php
=== Stats ===
[featured article] the English Wikipedia provides the service that you can
receive by email the first part of there featured article of the day,
anniversaries and a quote. That mailing list has now over 10,000
subscribers.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-article-l
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/daily-article-l/2006-April/000447.html - example
=== Other news ===
[CC] Creative Commons, a not-for-profit organization, adds Jimmy Wales to
its Board of Directors.
http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/5840
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons
=== Editorial remark ===
Some readers did not believe that the report in "Wikizine number 19 extra"
was true and that it was a early April Fool's Day joke. Wikizine.org will
never ever knowingly reports lies, whatever the date may be, so long it is
under the control of its current Editor-in-chief [[meta:user:Walter]]
=== Did you know ... ===
... that if you use FireFox or Internet Explorer you can add the Google
Toolbar to your browser?
That toolbar of Google is very usefull for your wiki-work because it
contains a spellcheck function that works very good (if your language is
supported).
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/ - For FireFox
http://toolbar.google.com/index_2 - For Internet Explorer
=== Quote ===
"We strive for three things: objectivity, factually correct information,
and understandable information. It's clearly evident others are not
achieving it." -- Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica
Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao
2006-03-29
Wikizine - number: 19 Extra
The French language Wikiquote is closed by the foundation.
This notice is placed on the main page of the locked wiki;
After analyzing the data contained in the fr.wikiquote site, the Wikimedia Foundation has determined that the material stored in the fr.wikiquote database does not provide the basic assurance of legal soundness necessary to the permanence of the project. Therefore, the site will be entirely taken down to be erased and relaunched. A policy requiring greater traceability of quotations will be put in place on fr.wikiquote version II. This action has been taken for the benefit of all Wikimedia Foundation projects.
http://fr.wikiquote.org
The new FR Wikiquote is announced to re-open for editing on 1 April with a new empty database.
The origin of the this dates back to August 2005. Wikimédia France received a letter from a company maintaining a
quote database. They claim Wikiquote extracted a substantial part of their database.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Closure_of_French_Wikiquote
The closing now of FR Wikiquote seems to be the end result of this.
On Meta a FAQ about this is posted;
*What was wrong with the French Wikiquote?
**Some contributor had apparently inserted material from copyrighted databases and other sources.
*What was the extent of the problem?
**It was sufficient to render the majority of the French Wikiquote database suspect, which is why it was deemed necessary to delete it.
*Was this a legal settlement?
**Yes, we reached an agreement with an outside party, and we are quite satisfied with the outcome.
*Can you tell us who the settlement was with, what the terms were, etc.?
**What we are doing now is fulfilling the terms. Not every precise detail should be or needs to be disclosed, in order to protect future relationships and negotiation strategies, but the terms that matter are reflected in the official announcement. The project should not incur any legal liability as a result.
*What about the French Wikiquote community?
**There isn't really a substantial community there. Activity significantly declined after this problem was discovered. Affected contributors have already been notified.
*Couldn't you have tried to salvage something?
**It would have required extensive work by the community to identify and remove the problems, much like the German Wikipedia recently did in a similar situation, but on a significantly larger scale this time. Since there isn't much of a community, the resources to do this don't exist. That's why we agreed to start it over.
*Are there problems on other Wikiquotes?
**It's possible, and those communities should let us know if they have any suspicions so that the problems can be addressed without involving outside parties. They should also look at adopting policies similar to the French Wikiquote's new citation policy.
*Will this sort of thing happen again? Is my project in danger of being deleted?
**No, not at all. Certainly not if you have an active community that is willing to respect copyright and is capable of responding to problems. Obviously if you're involved enough to be concerned about the welfare of your project, then there should be sufficient community oversight to ensure that problems like this do not arise, or are dealt with long before they reach this stage.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees/Press/2006/03/28_fr.Wikiquote_brief
There has not yet been a official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation about this to the community beside the service announcement on fr.wikiquote
Editor(s): Walter
2006-03-26
Wikizine - number: 19
[WP] Fourteen new wikipedias have been created: Dutch Low Sakson, West
Flamish, Ligurian, Kalmyk, Tetum, Papiamentu, Romany, Samogitian,
Ripuarian, Pennsylvania German, Franco-Provençal/Arpitan, Cantonese,
Banyumasan, and Norman.
The new Pennsylvania German Wikipedia has reached 26 articles. According
to Mark Williamson, the new Cantonese is very active in its first two days.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Approved_requests_for_new_languages#Recently_created_wikis
http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/26968
=== (Very) old technical news ===
[Account creation] the number of new accounts that can be created from a
specific IP address is limited to 6 every 24 hours. This is an
anti-vandalism function. It can cause problems for serious users on
larger Wikis. The message that users see when they hit the limit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Acct_creation_throttle_hit
[PDA editions] In addition to the TomeRaider copies of Wikipedia (last
available dump : January 2006), there are a number of commercial
software packages available for viewing Wikipedia on your PDA. The most
recent commercial tool is Quickipedia.
http://download.wikimedia.org/tomeraider/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TomeRaider_database
http://palmtops.about.com/od/palmtoppicks/tp/wikipedia_pda.htm
=== Request for help ===
[Slogans] An attempt is made to create a list of all project slogans and
logos in all languages (such as "the free encyclopedia").
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Slogans
[Meta clean-up] A proposal to rearrange meta and make it more useful:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:MetaProject_to_Overhaul_Meta
=== New project proposals ===
[Wikikernel] A proposal for a project incubator for new Wikimedia
project proposals
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_project_proposals_group
=== Politics ===
[Steward] - A steward temporarily loses stewardship.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6552
=== Media ===
[Britannica Vs. Nature] In December 2005 the famous journal "Nature"
published a news article comparing the science content of Encyclopedia
Britannica with that of the English Wikipedia. The message of the
article was that both Britannica and Wikipedia contain errors, that
there are more errors in Wikipedia then in Britannica, but that
nevertheless Wikipedia is not so much more innacurate than Britannica.
Britannica has finally responded to the article. They find that the way
Nature conducted their inquiry was unfair, and that the results are
invalid. Nature disagrees with Britannica's POV and stands by their
article. This does not directly affect Wikipedia; it is Nature that
claimed that Wikipedia is almost as good as Britannica, not the
Wikimedia Foundation.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html - the
original Nature article, from December 2005
http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf -
Britannica's response
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/Britannica_response.pdf - Nature's
reply to the response
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-6053754.html - A news.com article about
the matter
http://tinyurl.com/lprbg - A podcast with a Britannica representative
http://tinyurl.com/pz5so - more related content on Meta
=== Stats ===
[Commons] now has over 500,000 files.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/
[80.000 persons alive] the EN Wikipedia has biographical articles on
over 80,000 living people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Living_people
=== Other news ===
[Book] Chinese wikipedian KaurJmeb published his first book about
Wikipedia - ''Wikipedia: Forefront of knowledge sharing'' (維基百科 : 知
識分享最前線) ISBN 9867075064
http://tinyurl.com/l8fvp - A page about it on the new Chinese Wiknews
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:KaurJmeb - The author's userpage
http://tinyurl.com/lq5ks - The book on eslite books
=== Last weeks feedback ===
- The reason that non-sysops get an inactive "block" link in Meta's RC
is: it is included in the summary for the user creation log. This can
be changed by removing the $4 value from [[MediaWiki:Newuserloglog]]. If
you do that there will be no "block" link for that user in the logfile
of new created accounts.
- Not only on EN Wikipedia but also on EN Wikinews can blocked users can
still edit their own talk page. [[meta:User:Eloquence]] knows how to
enable this function.
=== Did you know ... ===
... that you can do free positive promotion for Wikipedia?
A lot of websites give away free stuff or let you register to make a
change to win tickets for something. That is nice but you need first to
have something before you can give it away.
Google Gmail invites. After 2 years, there are still many people who
would like to have an account but do not know how to get one. You can
give these away with the greetings of your language Wikipedia or sister
project.
1# make a "WikipediaXX at gmail.com account
2# make additional accounts like wikipediaXX01@, wikipediaXX02@, etc.
for harvesting invites
3# put in the external links section of your gmail signature a
mailto:link . "If you would like to receive free invite Wikipedia can
give you one. Send an empty mail to wikipediaXX at gmail.com"
4# give invites to you visitors with the greetings of your project. If
you are low on invites request that they send you one back.
This way you can give a freebie, and your visitors get a positive
association with Wikipedia. The Dutch Wikipedia has been providing this
service since the Summer of 2004, and has sent many hundreds of invites
in that time. If you need a invite yourself, contact Wikizine.
=== Quote ===
"A large portion of wikipedia is pornographic" - unidentified Britannica
representative, via podcast.
Source: http://tinyurl.com/lprbg
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter, Sj
2006-03-20
Wikizine - number: 18
[Move page] Normal users can now move back a moved page. Seems to work
on all WMF wikis.
Example; [[user:Tom]] moves page [[Tom's page]] to [[Tom's moved page]].
[[Tom's page]] is a redirect to [[Tom's moved page]].
Any user (non-sysop) can now move [[Tom's moved page]] back to [[Tom's
page]]. [[Tom's moved page]] is a redirect then. This only works if the
redirected page is not edited. If so you need to delete it first.
A sysop has a option to delete the target page directly when moving that
page.
[Blocked/edit] blocked users on the English Wikipedia can still edit
there own talk page. Seems to work only on the EN Wikipedia.
[renameuser] Bureacrats can change the user name of a user. But there is
a ceiling limit of the number of edits that a user can have done to be
able to change the username. That number used to be 6,800 edits. It has
been raised. Possibly to 20,000 edits. Because it is not sure that the
limit is really 20,000. Or even if it is so you can not trust that if
will not change without notice, it is best not to say to users with more
then 20,000 that the can not apply for a renameuser. Try it and you will
see of it works or not.
[SpamCop] the mail server of wikimedia has been blacklisted by spamcop.
The blocked made that emails send out by Wikimedia email handling system
OTRS where bouncing. According to SpamCop spam has been send by
Wikimedias systems. The block is now expired.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22368
[Weird] on Meta normal users get a "block"-link in RC for newly created
users. This block-link does not work. So far as know this behavior is
only on Meta.
(*) Remark: the meaning of the word "news" in the context of Wikizine
does not mean that it is really something new. It can be a new function
but also a function that is (not) widely known. So is the fact the
blocked users on EN Wiki still can edit there own talk page is many
months old. But if you are not from EN Wikipedia, it is news. Also can
it takes weeks before changes to the software are noticed so the report
of it is delayed.
=== Foundation ===
[Meetings] Wikimedia Polska is organizing a meetup at the end of April.
The big international Wikimania is at the begin of August 2006 in
Boston, SA. And the Chinese will hold a meeting in Hong Kong end August
2006. And also end of August or early September a meeting in the
Netherlands, Europe.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6501
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikimania_2006_to_be_held_in_Hong_Kong
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6428
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WCN
=== Community ===
[NW] The Chinese Wikinews starts. And the new Wiki seems already full of
live.
http://zh.wikinews.org
[Internal news] On the English Wikisource a local internal news section
is started in the spirit of the Wikipedia Signpost (EN wikipedia). On
the French Wikipedia the have since some weeks also a new internal
news-project. It is called "Wikizine". The seem to have discovered
Wikizine.org and are now voting for a new name.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikizine
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:News
=== New project proposals ===
[Proposal] New proposal: One encyclopedia per child.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#One_Encyclopedia_Per_Child_mainly_in_Simple_English
[Proposal] New proposal: Wikikernel, a new project incubator for new
Wikimedia project proposals.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikikernel
=== Media ===
[Wikia] is the commercial company of Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The
New York venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners is investing $4
million to help Wikia expand its Wikicities operation.
http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2006/03/13/story1.html?page=1
=== Did you know ... ===
... that we are *all* volunteers?
The core-editors are the people who are sharing there time and knowledge
to work on the projects and really make the product; a encyclopedia, a
dictionary, a free textbook and so more. You have also sysops,
bureaucrats and stewards. The are working on different layers of
management of the projects. The need to take in to account a bigger
picture and take responsibility also in the function as volunteers.
Without the software developers and the system administrators to make to
fantastic software we are all using and keeping it online there would be
no Wikimedia projects. And the are also volunteers (mostly).
And the board of the Wikimedia foundation whit elected community
members, the committees of the WMF, we are all working on the same
project. But on different levels, whit different responsibility's.
From the point of view of a blocked user a sysop can be seen as a
tyrant. But it is only a user, a sysop, who doing his job, his function.
Blocking user who hurt the project. A steward can also not please
everybody and that is also not his function. Rules and policies are
there for a reason.
So can it be possible that the Wikimedia Foundation, who needs to deal
whit the real world, needs to take discussions for the good of the
global Wikimedia family. Also when those actions can be unpopular. Do
not attack the Wikimedia Foundation for doing there job. The are also
volunteers working for us all. To keep the projects legally safe and
online. It is only that you can not vote about everything. Assume good
fiat.
=== MediaZilla-IRC Quotes ===
Doesn't "Votes for Deletion" mean we're deleting the votes?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm
not sure about the former. -- Albert Einstein
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe
is that it has never tried to contact us. [Just a note, that quote is
from Bill Watterson's 'Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip.]
Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao
2006-03-13
Wikizine - number: 17
[More anti-spam] On the smaller wikis you need from now on to enter a
word displayed as a image (captcha) if you are an anonymous user and you
are adding a URL to that page.
[Special Page] New option the find the edits done by newbies. use
[[Special:Contributions/newbies]]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
=== Politics ===
[zh.wikinews?] It seems that the Chinese Wikinews finally will be
created soon.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6343
=== Media ===
[BBC Radio Wales] interview with Wikipedian David Gerard. Audio link
will expire so do not wait if you like to hear it.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/41652
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/shows/mousemat.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/wales/mousemat.rpm - RealAudio stream
=== Stats ===
[BR] The Breton Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles. Breton is a very
small language so 5,000 is a real accomplishment.
http://br.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degemer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breton_language
[FR] French Wikipedia reaches 250,000 articles.
[Alexa] Wikipedia's Alexa rank rises to 19. And Wikipedia keeps raising
fast. In the draft version of this edition of Wikizine was written that
Wikipedia had the 20th place as the most popular website of the
internet. Only 18 places to go and you, dear reader, will not be bored
anymore with Alexa-updates.
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none
=== Other news ===
[Wikiepic] New proposal page posted for Wikiepic. Wikiepic could be like
a freeform mythology or fantasy world. The Neverending story. Articles
would focus around Characters, Places, Events, ect ect.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiepic
http://novelas.wikicities.com/wiki/The_Neverending_Wiki
[Wikipedia IRL] After showing up in newspapers and other media as a
source for more information about something Wikipedia starts now also
being used in parliaments as information source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-03-06/Politicians_citing_Wikipedia
=== Did you know ... ===
... that Jimbo is a real globetrotter?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales
=== Computer quotes ===
-To err is human. To really mess things up you need a computer
- "Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new
machines to behave like old ones." — Alan J. Perlis.
"Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb ?
A: It can't be done; it's a hardware problem."
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
2006-03-06
Wikizine - number: 16
[E-mail] Wikipedia e-mail confirmation has been enabled. To receive
Wikipedia e-mail, you must go to Special:Confirmemail, request a code,
and follow the link in the e-mail. The reason is that Wikimedias
mailserver is blacklisted by SpamCop, allegedly for sending mail to
spamtrap addresses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Confirmemail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Confirmemail_text
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Mail_server_blacklisted_by_SpamCop
[Conversion] sr WP now start Cyrillic alphabet ←→ Latin alphabet
automatic conversion.
http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Automatic_conversion_between_simplified_and_traditional_Chinese
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-March/043799.html
=== Policy ===
[OFFICE] New authority level on the EN Wikipedia; "Office actions". The
Wikimedia Foundations receives frequently emails or phone calls with
complaints about articles on the EN Wikipedia. Some complaint's need
swift action on the wiki as a responds to those complaints. To able to
do this to "Office" is created. "Office" members can take actions that
override all other policies. Reverting actions done by the office is not
allowed. Currently all office actions need personal permission of Jimbo.
But this can change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Office_Actions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-27/Office_actions
=== Community ===
[Close] The Moldovan Wikipedia votes to close its doors and instead use
the Romanian Wikipedia.
http://mo.wikipedia.org/
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-March/043799.html
=== Media ===
[Yahoo!] adds more Wikipedia links, new functionality has been added to
Yahoo searches which return Wikipedia articles in the results.
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000255.html
=== Stats ===
[1 million] The English language Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000
articles. Jordanhill railway station has been certified as the milestone
article. The deleted "One million articles" article nearly made it but
instead came in at number 999,999.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_Publishes_Millionth_Article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station
=== Other news ===
[iPod] Wikipedia is now available for the iPod. Currently only EN (753
MB), DE (321 MB) and IT (71 MB). Other languages can be created upon
request. For Win, Linux and Mac. *Use this software at your own risk. It
might damage your iPod, void your warranty or blow up your golden hamster.*
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/26639
http://encyclopodia.sourceforge.net
[MMN] Abid Ullah Jan - Wikipedia: A tool for expediting the clash of
religions.
"Wikipedia needs to do away with its controversial, biased and
hate-inciting material taken out of the work of hate-mongers. Otherwise,
the only way left for those in search of truth and those working for
peace among people of different faiths is to avoid Wikipedia,
particularly its articles on social and religious matters."
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/27261
[Firefox] It seems the the Mozilla Corporation decides against adding
Wikipedia to Firefox search box.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269198
=== Wikizine ===
[Announce-l] The digest function of this list is broken. The digests
where not send out automatically. Because of this digest subscribers of
Wikizine have not received Wikizine like it should be. There has come no
responds on the BugZilla ticket about this problem. Because of this the
list settings are now changed. Announce-l does not support the digest
option anymore. All digest subscribers are changed to regular subscribers.
[Licence] The licence of Wikizine is the GNU Free Documentation License
because Wikizine is constructed on Meta and Meta falls under that
licence. GNU/FDL covers all previous editions of Wikizine.
=== Did you know ... ===
... that your computer can do also something for "the good cause" when
your are Wikifying?
We are all volunteers working to the WMF-projects working for whatever
reason, but not for making money. This is not eBay. But when you working
on the wikis is for your computer not really a challenge. You can
donate your CPU-power to be used for something possibly not completely
utterly useless. The BBC Climate prediction project.
A project to do scientific study by using many computers to run
simulations of the evolution of the climate. You need a client for
Windows or linux.
Join this project and the Wikimedia-team;
http://bbc.cpdn.org/create_account_form.php?teamid=420
=== MediaZilla-IRC Quotes ===
- "NPOV is not just our secret sauce, it's a shield. (It's a dessert wax
*and* a floor topping.)" - David Gerard on wikien-l (Feb)
- It was a bad idea. The users made me do it. -- Tim Starling in wikitech-l
- The parser is a little dirty... OK maybe more than a little.
- Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
- [Brion Vibber] A captcha of course is that annoying little thing that
makes you type in a word or code to continue, to prove that you're
probably not an abusive bot. (Or a blind person. Whoops!)
Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao
2006-02-27
Wikizine - number: 15
[capitalize] All Wiktionary editions have been converted to no longer
automatically capitalize entry titles. This change came without prior
discussion in the affected communities.
[Vandal Fighter] A tool for watching "recent changes" and reverting
edits. User Henna has taken over the job of maintaining and improving
the Vandal Fighter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Henna/VF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CryptoDerk/CDVF
[Wiktionary] German Wiktionary enables sysop patrolling. This is a
option so that certain users can mark an edit as "checked". It can be
useful for vandal fighting. The user right to mar an edits as checked
can be given to all users or to sysops only. To request to get this
option active on your wiki get clear consensus on your wiki and make a
BugZilla ticket about it. And then be patience. The request for the
enabling of this function for Meta is waiting for some time now.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Patrolled_edit
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4747
[Thumb] Brion started a process of forcing old rendered png, jpeg and
SCG thumbnails to regenerate. This
will gradually replace old rendered images over the next couple days as
several issues have been fixed recently.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22176
=== Request for help ===
[Wikimania] Volunteers needed for the Wikimania Program Team
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/26630
=== Foundation ===
[interview] Signpost interviewed Jimbo Wales, asking him questions that
our readers have submitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-20/Jimbo_interview
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/21/0658223
=== Community ===
[1000000th] article on the English language Wikipedia will be written
very soon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Millionth_topic_pool
[Wikibooks] has been cited as an authoritative source of information.
Who would have thought that was possible?
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/columnItem/0,294698,sid14_gci1165662,00.html
[proposal] A new project proposal for a genealogy wiki currently at
Rodovid.org
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org
=== Media ===
[Chinese WP] February 20, Washington Post about Chinese Wikipedia
Series, and a letter appealing for an unblock for zh.wikipedia
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR2006021901335.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR2006021900851.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/18/AR2006021800672.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-20/China_revisited
=== Other news ===
[INSPIRE] new EU directive can put more intellectual property rights on
geographic data in the European union. Wikimedia projects are using data
like this.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6310
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/INSPIRE
[Multilingual] A first draft sorts out which features a future
Multilingual MediaWiki should have.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
=== Editorial ===
Dear readers,
First I would like to thank you all 300 readers of Wikizine. Knowing
that there are actually people reading this, and I suppose find it
useful, makes it all worth while.
I would like to ask for your assistance for Wikizine. Wikizine exist for
reporting news for the Wikimedia community about the Wikimedia
community. And Wikizine needs your help, the Wikimedia community.
There are three points about with I ask your cooperation;
1th
Report news from your home-wiki or from your personal experience when
using the wiki. Most news can be found on public mailing lists and
specific pages on the main wikis. But frequently I, Walter, find
interesting global-wikimedia news in the village pump of my home-wiki,
WikipediaNL. Or discover by pure luck changes to the behavior of the
software.
If I can find interesting things on my local wiki I suspect that on many
other wikis are also interesting things to find. News that not can be
found on other places. Please share your local news when you think it
is interesting for the global Wikimedia community or when you discover a
modification to the software.
2th
There seems to be still many users who do not know of the existence of
Wikizine. Inform on your wiki the users about Wikizine. Many will not
care about news from the Wikimedia world and only be interested in
working on there articles. But those who are interested should be
informed about it. I think especially about your sysops.
You can put a "Wikizine-banner" on your user page or, if there is no
objection by your community, on some highly visible page like the
"village pump".
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/banners
3th
One of the main problems for informing many users in the Wikimedia
community is the languages barrier. The glue for the communication
between the projects is English. Wikizine is written in something that
is supposed to be English. You, the reader of Wikizine, understand
English. But that is not enough.
It is my hope that you, user of your project, editor, sysop or
ambassador, act as a gateway for the news that you read in Wikizine for
your wiki. Inform your local community about the news in your own
language. If you do that then Wikizine has succeed in his mission.
Thanks for your attention,
Walter Vermeir
Editor-in-chief Wikizine
=== Quote ===
Stan Marsh "I am sorry that I killed your mom but the squirrel told me
that she was evil."
Mountain lion cub "You got tricked by a squirrel? Jee, you are not to
smart, are you mister?"
From "[[w:en:South Park]]"
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter