en.Wikizine.org

• [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.
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/27534/focus=27534
• [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.
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/27592/focus=27592
• [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.
  • http://report.wikizine.org
• [Wikimania2007] - Request for cooperation from the technical people for setting up the Wikimania 2007 Hacking Days
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/27576/focus=27576

• [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://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11426/focus=11426
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11430/focus=11430
  • http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/emeritus
• [Report from Frankfurt] - the members of the board & officer and also representaives of the different chapters has come togther in Frankfurt. This to discuss the futhere of the Wikimedia Foundation. meta:user:Oscar, chair of Wikipedia Nederland has written a report about it.
  • 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
• [Sep11] - The "In Memoriam" sep11-wiki, recently closed, has been cleand-up and moved outside the Wikimedia Foundation umberella.
  • http://www.sep11memories.org/
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11464/focus=11464

• [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.
  • http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_logo_mosaic
• [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.
  • http://www.wikipediaweekly.com/
• [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.
  • http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/28627/focus=28627 

• [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.
  • http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6387888
• [Not found] - A piece by an student who discovers you can not find everything in Wikipedia
  • http://www.statepress.com/issues/2006/10/26/opinions/698470
• [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.
  • http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/28/ftwiki28.xml

• [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
• [Wikimedia.org ] is now the 499th most-visited website on the Internet according to Alexa.
• [Wikipedia.org] - ComScore published new numbers of the traffic of the most popular worldwide websites for the month of September. Again has Wikipedia grown. 12% since August. Wikipedia is according these stats now the 6th most popular website on the internet. That is very good news. Only 5 places to go and there is not need anymore for this type of "news".
  • http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1049

... 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.

http://chat.wikizine.org
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/16/

# posted by Walter @ 15:45 4 comments links to this post

• [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.
• http://wikiangela.com/blog/wiki-spammers/

• [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.
• http://www.wikitheque.fr/
• http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-October/011101.html
  

• [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.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS
• [Report] from the Portuguese Wikipedia
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-09/Interwiki_report

• [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
• http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2006/10/wikipedia_and_academic_researc.html
• http://silverchips.mbhs.edu/inside.php?sid=6806

[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.
• http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/courses/wiki/

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

# posted by Walter @ 10:29 0 comments links to this post

• [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
  
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/27425/focus=27425
• 
  http://en.wikizine.org/2006/07/wikizine-number-34_17.html
  

• [Logo] - the last fase for the selection of new logos for Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiversity has started. Votes are open until 31 October.
  
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/logo
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary/logo
  
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/logo
  

• 
  [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.
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-10-16/China_unblock
• 
  http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2006/10/16/chart-wikipedia-access-in-china/
  

• [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.
  
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising
• [Wikimania2007] - A new Wikimania, a new wiki. Not (yet) very interesting .
  
• http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org
  

• [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.  
  

• [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.
  
• http://www.multiscope.nl/persbericht-volledig.phtml?uniek=20061017165834
  

• [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.
  

"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

# posted by Walter @ 22:44 0 comments links to this post

• [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.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Username_changes
• http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6849
  

• [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.

• [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).
• http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20061005/CGTH03005102006-1.html
  

# posted by Walter @ 06:06 1 comments links to this post

• [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.
• http://www.wikibooks.org/

• [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.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/10888/focus=10888

• [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.
• http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/10893
• [RFC] - On meta is there a page where users can write there comments about the organisation of the recent board election
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comments/Board_Election_2006
• [$] - 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
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-09-25/Interwiki_report
• [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.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore1
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference

• [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.
• http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-10-03-n18.html

• [en.wikt] - The English wiktionary has reached 200'000 entries
• http://en.wiktionary.org
• [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.
• http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/010448.html

• [+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:
• meta:Approved_requests_for_new_languages#Recently_created_wikis

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

# posted by Walter @ 11:16 0 comments links to this post