en.Wikizine.org

• [Page protection] - It is now possible to protect unborn articles and deleted pages, with the normal protection levels: only sysops or semi-protection. Also, auto-expire of the protection is available. To protect a non-existent page (as sysop), you only need to request the page and hit the "protect" button.
• [Title blacklist] - A new extension is live on the wikis. The Title Blacklist extension allows wiki administrators to block the creation, movement and upload of pages whose title matches any among a list of regular expressions.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklist
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Title_Blacklist
• [Special:Userrights] - Bureaucrats now have access to the special page "Userrights". At this time this page is listed in the special pages overview, but not yet in the sysops section. Manually enter "Special:Userrights" in the location bar of your browser or in the search box of Wikipedia to request this page. In the current form this does not give extra rights to bureaucrats. The new special page only combines the functionality of "MakeSysop" and "Makebot".
  

• [Fundraising] - The Fundraising website's layout and usability have been enhanced. However, this also implies that new translations are required.
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/en - The English version of the new donations page
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Cbrown1023/Donate - More information about the translation request
  

• [Stewards] - A rewrite of the steward policy is in progress. Comments are welcome on the talk page. A vote is expected around the 15th.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Rewriting/Stewards_policy
  

• [Fundraiser] - Now at the very end of the fundraiser, a modest matching donation of $50,000 has been made by an anonymous donor. The current total balance is $ 1.43 million.

• [Image service] - A project on the English Wikipedia provides a really quick and easy way to add an image to a person's biography article in various language Wikipedias.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BOTijo/Images_for_biographies
• [Wikimania dates] - The dates for Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria have been changed after a request by a group of people. The conference now covers Thursday-Friday-Saturday, and is held 17 - 19 July 2008. This way, the conference will fall into a single week, so that people have to take less days off from their work to attend. 
• http://www.wikimania.org - The Wikimania website
• [Photo submission] - Many Wikipedia articles about a person don't feature a photograph yet. A new project on the English language Wikipedia has started to ask people whose articles have no pictures to submit one. A request for people to submit their images by email, together with usage permission, has been included on the contact page of the English Wikipedia 
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us/Photo_submission
• [Stewards] - The confirmation of the "old" stewards has been concluded. Four stewards did not make it, all due to inactivity: Ausir, Romihaitza, Snowdog and Suisui.
  

• [Video] - Sue Gardner and Erik Moeller gave a presentation at Stanford's Open Source Lab about Wikimedia and the Wikiversity project, and shot a video of it.
• http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Stanford_Open_Source_Lab
• http://blip.tv/file/551254
  

• [Stats for all] - On the English language Wikipedia, an extensive statistical overview of all the Wikipedias is included. In this overview, you can see for example that the Volapuk Wikipedia (the 15th largest) has grown by a stunning 18634% in 2007.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics
• [WP numbers] - The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles and the French Wikipedia has reached 600,000 articles. 
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_News -- more on this subject
  

• [Reminder] - Soon, it will be the most important holiday of the year: Wikipedia Day. On January 15, Wikipedia will be 8 years old.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_day
  

"An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in.  A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves."  -- Bill Vaughan

"It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets." -- William Thomas

# posted by Walter @ 19:44