en.Wikizine.org

Year: 2009 Week: 27 Number: 110

2009-07-02T22:32:00.000Z

Technical news

[Michael Jackson Kills WP] - Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop", died this week and nearly took Wikipedia down with him (as well as many other websites). Wikimedia sites were unresponsive for a whole due to the large number of page hits. The Michael Jackson article got nearly 6 *million* hits on June 26, more than the Main Page.

In the evening of the 2th July (UTC) Wikipedia&Co was virtually down because of power outage of the European servers. The remaining servers choked on the additional traffic routed to them.

http://stats.grok.se/en/200906/Michael_Jackson -- page hit statistics
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/current-events/ -- techblog explanation of issues
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/News_of_Michael_Jackson's_death_overloads_Internet_sites_and_sparks_hoaxes -- wikinews article
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/power-outage-in-wikimedias-european-servers/ -- wiki down

[Usability] - the Usability team has released its first set of usability improvement (the "acai" release) for testing. As of press time, the new "vector" skin has been made available on all wikis for users who select it from their preferences, please help test the new features!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/first-usability-release-is-coming-up-soon/ -- blog post
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases#Acai -- "acai" release description

[Usability BIS] - one aspect is already live by default; the new design of the search results. Just use the internal search and see.

http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Designs#Search_Results

Request for help

[Fundraising 2009] - the Wikimedia Foundation is preparing for its next fundraiser and would like feedback from the community on some of the pages it has developed so far. In addition to the creation of a new survey that they would like comments on, the Foundation is also trying to enhance the visibility of the donate button. The new buttons will be placed on the skin and will be viewable on every page. There are also several design proposals that need community input!

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/25/would-you-press-this-button/ -- blog post about it
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade -- buttons
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Survey -- survey

Foundation

[Licensing] - The "licensing update" changes have now been rolled out to all languages and projects, with the new license being featured in the footer and new interface items to translate for your wiki.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/30/licensing-update-rolled-out-in-all-wikimedia-wikis/ -- blog post
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-June/000959.html -- translation steps
http://tinyurl.com/LU-interface-trans -- betawiki trans interface

[Board election] - Once again an election for the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation is coming up. It is for 3 seats this time. But before there can be elections there must be someone to vote for. Submissions of candidacy are open between 6th and 20th July.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009

[New grant: Commons] - the Wikimedia Foundation was just awarded a US$300,000 grant that will research problems with and design new tools/fix current tools for uploading files to the global Wikimedia image repository, the Wikimedia Commons.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/02/ford-foundation-awards-300k-grant-for-wikimedia-commons/ -- blog post
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundation_Grant_July_2009 -- press release
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:WMF_Ford_Multimedia_Participation_Project.pdf -- full grant proposal

[Job: "Bookshelf"] - as a further development from the "Scribus operator" volunteer position noted in Wikizine a few months ago, a new job opening has been posted for project manager of the "Bookshelf" project. The "Bookshelf" project strives to develop a slate of basic educational materials (print, online and video) to attract new authors and editors to Wikipedia.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Project_Manager_Bookshelf -- job opening
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_outreach/Get_involved -- volunteer position, scribus operator

Community

[David Rohde] - it turns out that Wikipedia, along with tons of other media outlets, kept the kidnapping of journalist David Rohde out of its article on him. This has caused a few Wikipedians and Wikipedia critics to note this and either scream censorship or just point out the fact that it was unsourced information that could help save someone's life by erring on the side of caution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/technology/internet/29wiki.html?ref=media -- nytimes article
http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/06/29/was-wikipedia-correct-to-censor-news-of-david-rohdes-capture/ -- blog post about censorship
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/29/2120257/Wikipedia-Censored-To-Protect-Captive-Reporter -- slashdot discussion

[A reliable article?] - A new tool tries to help make scholars feel better about using Wikipedia by telling how reliable an article seems to be by using "wikibu-points". These points are based on statistical criteria and represent only possibilities, the creators hope that warnings will help people think to look at the discussion pages or article history. Wikibu is only available on the German Wikipedia at this time.

http://www.wikibu.ch/ -- site/tool
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2009-July/000833.html -- mailing list post

[EN Wikibooks] - is now using Meta's unified "user language" template. It will enable greater collaboration on the textbooks that teach foreign languages.
[enwp AFD] - An interesting AFD (deletion discussion) on the English Wikipedia was recently closed -- it resulted in the deletion of 4077 articles, probably the most ever from a single AFD on enwp!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Anybot's_algae_articles -- deletion discussion

Media

[No tourists] - an article by a New Zealand newspaper tells that "references to gang violence and crime on Palmerston North's Wikipedia page have seen overseas investors and professionals shy away from the city"!

http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/2516472/Wikipedia-entries-slag-off-Palmerston-North

Stats

[bn.wp] - The Bengali Wikipedia (bn) has reached 20,000 articles.

http://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/আন্তর্জাতিক_প্রকৃতি_ও_প্রাকৃতিক_সম্পদ_সংরক্ষণ_সংঘ -- 20,000th article

Other news

[Who owns transit schedules?] - Only marginally related but interesting nevertheless, the subject of a recent battle has been pretty simple: who owns the copyright to bus arrival times? Public transportation agencies are trying to assert that they own the times and stop people from making iPhone apps (and similar items) off of the content, so that they can do it themselves and charge people. Not very FOSS of them!

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090628/1419595382.shtml

[Wikizine@Foundation-l] - Wikizine will now be featured on foundation-l too! Thanks to Milos for proposing it and the list members for agreeing.

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation

[Firefox 3.5] - ... is finally out. This main stream browser supports natively Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis, the media file formats our projects are using.

http://www.mozilla.com/

Quote

"Programming languages are like cats. It is easier to get a new cat than to get an old cat fixed." -- Douglas Crockford

Editor(s): Casey, Walter , Corrector(s): Alex , Thanks to: Rand, Steve Bennett, Brion, Domas, Nando, Erik, Belayet, Naoko, Chad, Kul, Jay, Signpost, Adrignola, rainman-sr , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 26 Number: 109

2009-06-24T21:43:00.000Z

Technical news

[New "Green" Data Centers] - The Foundation announced a new "in-kind" sponsorship (valued at over €300,000) by "green" (environmentally friendly) Data Center EvoSwitch. EvoSwitch will be Wikimedia's new Internet HUB for Europe. Not only does this provide us with a long-term solution for delivering faster and better traffic in Europe and beyond, it also means that Wikimedia servers are taking advantage of cutting edge green power technology provided by Evoswitch.

[Public repositories for dumps] - A new public repository has been created to host WikiXRay database dumps, containing info extracted from public Wikipedia dbdumps. The image is hosted by RedIRIS (in short, the Spanish equivalent of Kennisnet in Netherlands). These new dumps are aimed to save time and effort to other researchers, since they won't need to parse the complete XML dumps to extract all relevant activity metadata. As of press time, only some of the biggest Wikipedias are available. However, in the following days the full set of available languages will be ready for downloading.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2009-June/000825.html -- mailing list post
http://sunsite.rediris.es/mirror/WKP_research/ -- respository

[Chinese search improved] - the search function for the Chinese and Japanese wiki's are improved due to to a better support of the language structure.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/chinese-language-search-fixes-for-mediawiki/

Request for help

[Spread the word!] - We are very happy with your readership, but the subscriber numbers are not really growing anymore. Wikizine could use some more readers. Maybe are there users on your wiki who do not know about Wikizine? Talk about Wikizine, put a Wikizine banner on your user page or on a community page if approved. Thanks.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/banners

Foundation

[Wikimania] - last year the were missing but now the are back; the hacking days. Those who love to work on MediaWiki & extensions, bot scripts, toolserver stuff, etc.can amuse themselves at Wikimania.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Days

Legal

[Plagiarism?] - There's a report that some parts of Chris Anderson's book "Free" were copied from various Wikipedia articles without attribution. This news has been picked up by a few gossip blogs, but has not been confirmed as accurate.

http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/

Agenda

[SF: Mozilla] - Mozilla Labs is holding their monthly meetup at Mozilla's new HQ in Mountain View Thursday (6/25) night. The topic should be of interest to local SF Wikimedians (some members from the WMF office are going too). Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, will talk about the "Open Social Web" initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. He will be discussing the social web, the underlying protocols that make it possible, and the potential role for the browser to play in this world.

https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/06/mozilla-labs-meetup-thursday-625/

[WMAT] - Wikimedia Österreich (the Austrian chapter of the Foundation) will be holding its second Annual General Assembly on 26 June 2009 at 19:00 at the AKH-Hörsaal Medical Center in Vienna. If you live in Austria, please attend!

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/vereinat-l/2009-June/000049.html (German)

Community

[Wikimedium #2] - Wikimedia Deutschland released its second "newspaper" aimed at (potential) sponsors, partners, friends and fans of Wikimedia, The new edition includes issues 'around the world' (from other Chapters), information about the recent conferences in Berlin (developers, board, and chapter meets), explanation of the Wikipedia structure, and a lot more. The next edition is planned for September. It's definitely worth reading if you know German!

http://wikimedia.de/fileadmin/wiki/images/Downloads/Wikimedium_2009-02.pdf

[New DVD (for Linux)] - Wikimedia CH (in collaboration with openZIM) has released a new edition of the German Wikipedia DVD on LinuxTag 2009. The DVD contains more than 900,000 German Wikipedia articles and a full text search index for phrasal search. The openZIM project develops a file format called "ZIM" to store hypertexts like Wikipedia, or other websites, with search indexes and images in the most efficient way. The data is highly compressed; the Wikipedia articles only take up 1.4 GB on the DVD. A new edition of the Wikipedia DVD, in Spanish, is also planned for the Wikimania conference from August 26th to 28th of 2009 in Buenos Aires.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediach-l/2009-June/001259.html (German)
http://openzim.org/2009-06-23_Wikipedia_DVD -- press release (multiple languages)

[Weather bot] - There's a new bot for the Serbian Wikinews that posts and updates weather information for Serbia. It is planned to increase this to the whole world and all Wikinewses, but help from bot operators is needed. This has brought up questions on how best to incorporate it into the sites (with OpenStreetMaps? a new weather.wikizine.org?).

http://tinyurl.com/wn-weather -- example of weather on sr.wikinews
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-June/001535.html -- mailing list post

[PLWP New Main Page] - The Polish Wikipedia is trying to design a new main page ("Strona główna") and is trying to solicit opinions and ideas on what the new one should look like.

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GDJ/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna/Debata (Polish)

[Vandalism survival] - A new study on Wikipedia attempts to determine the distribution of the length of time that vandalism remains on the English-language Wikipedia. This distribution is also known as the survival function for vandalism. The two primary results from this study are: (a) the median time to correction is down to four minutes, and (b) some subtle forms of vandalism still persist for months and even years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-06-22/Vandalism -- study was published in the Signpost

Media

[Interview] - Lichtenstein's "Vaterland" did an interview with German Wikipedia user "Dodo von de Bergen" where "dvdb" talked about his activities within Wikipedia.

http://www.vaterland.li/page/epaper/pdf_download.cfm?seite=09_mapc_01_2009-06-05 -- article (German)

[Video Upgrade] - Technology Review (a publication by MIT) gave an update about some future changes to how Wikipedia will handle searching, editing, and embedding video clips (and other media). This article combined a large number of "mini-updates" that Michael Dale has been giving the community about his work on MediaWiki's video handling (per a grant with Kaltura).

http://beta.technologyreview.com/web/22900/page1/ -- article
http://tinyurl.com/kaltura-pr -- press release
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/06/dotsub.html -- multi language subtitles for video

[Wikisource] - An info/law blog published an interesting post about using Wikisource as an alternative open access repository for legal studies. It turns out the author is actually an admin on Wikisource who works on expanding the texts too!

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2009/06/19/using-wikisource-as-an-alternative-open-access-repository-for-legal-scholarship/

Stats

[Wikt OC] - The Occitan Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.

http://oc.wiktionary.org

[WP Ru] - The Russian Wikipedia has reached 400,000 articles

http://ru.wikipedia.org

[Wp an] - The Aragonese Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles

http://an.wikipedia.org/wiki/

[Wp csb] - The Kashubian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles

http://csb.wikipedia.org/

Other news

[Give us your passwords] - Not exactly related to Wikimedia projects, but a US city tried to request that government job applicants turn over their user names and passwords to Internet social networking and Web groups. A flood of criticism has prompted a Montana city to drop this request, but it still started an interesting (albeit offtopic!) discussion on the Wikimedia mailing lists.

[Berkman files now in Ogg] - The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (a research center at Harvard University) has released its audio and video files in Ogg (and licensed under CC-BY).

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5444

Did you know ...

.... that some articles can make you feel stupid?

One of the articles on Wikipedia is about 1 car and 2 goats. And the probability of these goats and car to be behind a particular door.

If you have no problem to be disillusioned ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Quote

There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
--- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, almost all versions

Number of subscribers: 729 , Unique Visitors website last week: 192 , Editor(s): Casey, Walter , Thanks to: David Gerard, Eloquence, Nathan, Milos, Wiktoryn, John Vandenberg, Catrin, Brion, Petar Marjanovic, Signpost (fuzheado, Loren Cobb), Jay, MichaelSnow, Felipe Ortega
Special thanks to: The Wikipedia Signpost for publicity
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 29 Number: 108

2009-06-17T15:31:00.000Z

Technical news

[LiquidThreads] - One of the few things that has not changed since the start of the projects in 2001 is how the talk pages work. Correction: the name has changed, it is now "a discussion page". Besides that, that can change. The MediaWiki extension "LiquidThreads" is again in development by order of the Wikimedia Foundation. LiquidThreads makes from a discussion page more a forum, but in a good way. It is not like a traditional php-forum, it remains very wiki.

http://wiki.werdn.us/test/view/Talk:Main_Page -- LiquidThreads in action
http://blog.werdn.us/2009/06/discussion-threading-on-wikimedia-sites-with-liquidthreads/ -- if interested about this: read me

[Code updates] - In the past, the Wikimedia sites were updated roughly every week with the new code from Wikimedia's revision (or version) control system (SVN). But recently, this has not been taking place due to the developers being busy elsewhere -- the last update was on March 25, months ago! To help with this, Erik announced that the Foundation is planning to hire a full-time "QA engineer to help with code review, bug triaging and deployment". *Update*: After the writing of this entry, a code update took place to r51904 (r51864 for extensions). But as of publication, SVN's latest revision was r25015, so help is still needed.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-June/043336.html -- mailing list post
http://svn.wikimedia.org -- SVN

[MW 1.15.0] - MediaWiki 1.15.0 was released, this is the first stable release of the 2009 Q2 branch of MediaWiki.

http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_15_0/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES -- release notes
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-June/043387.html -- mailing list post

Request for help

[New study] - There is a new research study about effects of a modification to the Wikipedia editing interface. Participants will test an experimental change to one aspect of the Wikipedia interface. All that you have to do is edit Wikipedia as you would normally. After the observation is complete, you will be asked to fill out a questionnaire and you'll be able to continue using the interface modification if you like.

http://wikipedia.grouplens.org/NICE/consent/index.html -- consent form
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/100810 -- mailing list post about the subject

[Greenspun] - The Greenspun project, an initiative that tried to fund the creation and improvement of illustrations for Wikimedia, has been stalled and is currently looking for ideas on how to better go about the project. Suggestions and discussion are appreciated on the mailing list!

http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/213/reflections-on-pgip-phase-1 -- blog post describing what went wrong
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Greenspun -- project page
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/greenspun-illustrations -- mailing list

Foundation

[LU] - The licensing update is in progress. The license of the WMF website and the English Wikipedia is updated. Help is going to be needed for translations, please watch translators-l for details.

[BLP] - After the Wikimedia Board of Trustees released a statement about content on living people, a new global policy is being created that attempts to deal with those issues in the spirit of that resolution. Comments and help is appreciated on Meta.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/BLP -- proposed policy
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people -- Board statement

[WMF openings] - The Wikimedia Foundation is still looking for a software developer to help with the Usability Project, as well as a Communications intern. Both positions are based in San Francisco, but remote work is possible for the software developer position.

[OTRS Stats] - The Foundation is currently looking for a volunteer interested in evaluating and analyzing how the response system ("OTRS") has been working for the English Wikipedia.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Volunteering:Email_response_statistician

Legal

[Privacy violation?] - There was a bit of drama on the Foundation mailing lists when a KnowPrivacy study - a research project by the School of Information from University of California in Berkeley - hit the German media. It showed findings that Wikipedia, among many other websites, used "web bugs" like Google Analytics on its pages. Further investigation revealed this was triggered by content on vlswiki & huwiki. The former was added to confusion that it was a privacy violation and it turns out the Hungarian Wikipedia was just a false alarm (it was a private stats generator)

http://knowprivacy.org/
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Studie-Google-fuehrend-bei-Web-Bug-Nutzung--/meldung/139841 -- newspaper article (German)

Agenda

[Wikimedia Canada] - There is a planning meeting for Wikimedia Canada being organized for June 18, interested users and Canadians should definitely attend.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada/Meetings/2009-06-18 -- meeting sign up page

[Wiki-Conference NY] - The 1st Wiki-Conference in New York will be held over the weekend of July 25-26, 2009 at New York University, and hosted by Free Culture @ NYU and Wikimedia New York City. Jimmy Wales will be giving a keynote, and there will also be panels, lightning talks, and open space technology. There's also the Central Park picnic!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wiki-Conference_2009

Community

[WMDE-5 years!] - Happy 5th birthday WMDE! Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation celebrated 5 years of being an organization with a party in Berlin.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:5_Jahre_WMDE

[Paid editing?] - The English language Wikipedia has started a "Request for comment" on whether or not to allow paid editing, or under what circumstances to allow it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Paid_editing

[IRC GCs] - There are new IRC Group Contacts -- the group of people who help manage the Wikimedia Foundation IRC channels (setting cloaks, fixing access issues, etc.). More information can be found in the actual announcement.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/GC/N#Group_Contacts_Rearrangements

[Commons] - After some drama surrounding a "fight" between Wikimedia Commons community member and a Wikimedia Israel project, a large number of discussions have sprung up about the problems with Commons and whether it's a service project or a more independent one. The discussions can be found on foundation-l, commons-l, and the Commons Village pump.

[Toolserver outreach] - The Wikimedia Toolserver is trying to increase its communications with local wiki communities by (1) creating short page describing the toolserver, with the relevant links, (2) increasing the use of the blog, and (3) encouraging people to document/explain their tools. Feedback on this plan, as well as suggestions and offerings for help are appreciated!

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.toolserver/1405 -- start of the thread

[AR Wikinews] - probably inspired by the English Wikinews who added social bookmarking links to the story's has the Arabic Wikinews also done that. Probably most Wikinews editions will follow.

http://ar.wikinews.org

Media

[WP as a book] - An artist puts all 5,000 of Wikipedia's featured articles in one book.

http://www.rob-matthews.com/index.php?/project/wikipedia/ -- picture of the book
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wikipedia-would-look-like-printed-2009-6 -- newspaper article on subject

[Wikipedia in Google News] - Google News has been experimenting with links to EN Wikipedia on its homepage. The appear as a link for more information related to the news topic itself. So Wikipedia is not listed as news source, what is good because Wikipedia is not a news site. But it can provide much-needed context and up-to-date information that static news articles cannot always offer. The stories of the English language Wikinews, what indeed a news site is, does appear in Google News as news articles.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiropractic/3601011581/ -- example
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/google-news-experimenting-with-links-to-wikipedia-on-its-homepage/ -- blog post on the subject

[Sam Blacketer] - An English Wikipedia Arbitrator turned out to be a controversial politician who had been blocked before for editing his opponents' articles. A few British newspapers picked up on this story.

[Colbert Report] - The English Wikipedia's blocking of the Church of Scientology was picked up by American "spoof" news program The Colbert Report.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/229645/june-04-2009/wikipedia-bans-scientologists (video)

[Testimony to Congress] - not very Wiki-related but nevertheless interesting reading (only 3 pages). Statement from Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Product and User Experience of Google, about the internet changes the way people read news.

http://commerce.senate.gov/public/_files/MarissaMayerFutureofJournalismTestimony.pdf

Stats

[ko.wp] - the Korean Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.

http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%95%A1%EC%84%B8%EC%8A%A4%EA%B6%8C -- 100,000th article

Did you know ...

... that Google has released a very handy tool for translating a Wikipedia article?

Google offers since long a free automatic translation service. Based on that Google Toolkit is released. You have a personal overview page, "a desk", where you can upload text from files or websites.

For text from (the English) Wikipedia is there a special interface designed for translating Wikipedia content. The source text must be English, the target language options are limited but there is a fair collection.

The basic idea is that the toolkit will automatically translate the text for you and then you can make fixes to the text. Not only does this help you get the translations done but it also helps Google Translate to learn from your changes and become better and better. That translation in progress can be shared with other people so the can also work on it.

How good the automatic translation is will probably differ from language to language. Translations from English to Arabic should be fair because Google used that explicitly as in example in there press release.

This tool can make it very easy to translate an article from the huge English Wikipedia to one of the many small wiki's in other languages. The toolkit may change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages. If used correctly. It can also be used to import a lot crappy new articles to a wiki.

Google Toolkit could also be useful for making translations of Wikizine, if one is interested in doing so.

http://translate.google.com/toolkit -- google translator webkit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7W2NJFdoIg -- short video-overview of how it works, Wikipedia is used as example
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/09/google-translator-toolkit-supports-wikipedia/ -- Wikimedia Blog post about the subject

Quote

"The automobile has practically reached the limit of its development" – Scientific American, 1909

Number of subscribers: 729 , Unique Visitors website last week: 128 , Editor(s): Casey, Walter , Corrector(s): Alex , Thanks to: Avatar, shimgray, Jay, Erik, Brianna, MZMcBride, Henriette, Werdna, Deniz , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 23 Number: 107

2009-06-04T17:02:00.001Z

Technical news

[Chrome Support for Ogg] - Google's Chrome browser is going to support Theora video (the type of audio files that Wikimedia uses) natively with the HTML5 video tag. Earlier announced Mozilla also this support in there upcoming version Firefox 3.5

[Usability] - The Usability Team has been working on a number of new projects that hope to make editing easier. Among others, there is a new skin (vector) and an action-grouped toolbar. The toolbar which hides the overwhelming number of tool icons which are not being used by novice users and the new skin has a streamlined tab layout. Lots of clutters will be removed from the interface.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/02/ -- blog post
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Designs -- design descriptions on usability wiki
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vectorskin.png -- image of skin

[New search] - After some initial hardware issues, the new search backend/servers has been enabled on all wikis. This new feature has many cool parts, including "did you mean", wild cards, prefix, etc.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-October/040022.html -- full feature list

[Google Wave] - Google has recently announced a new communication and collaboration tool called Google Wave. There was a long thread on foundation-l about how this "wiki-like" tool could fit in with Wikimedia projects.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/052135.html -- mailing list thread
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave -- Wikipedia article

Request for help

[Licensing update] - GFDL wikis must migrate their licenses by August 1 to remain compatible with Wikimedia projects. Help is needed to identify and contact the wikis affected.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Outreach

[Signpost] - The Wikipedia Signpost is looking for writers. A few have signed up so far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-05-18/From_the_editor

Proposals

[Social bookmarking] - EN Wikinews has voted in favor of the introduction of links to add articles to social bookmarking sites such as Facebook and Delicious. On news stories, there is now a template available to share it.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-May/001512.html -- mailing list proposal
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Water_cooler/proposals#Social_bookmarking_of_Wikinews_articles -- onwiki discussion

Foundation

[Trustee elections] - Three community representatives will be elected to the Wikimedia Foundation board this summer. The election is scheduled to run from July 28-August 10, the vote time was extended to two weeks after input from the community.

Community

[TS: New servers] - The Toolserver received a new shipment of servers that will be used as a new place for user home directories, a replacement for zedler (s2 database), a second login server, and an extra toolserver for OpenStreetMap stuff. All the new servers should be up and running before the next maintenance period, July 6.
[POTY 2008] - The Third Annual Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year Competition has concluded and the results are now available. The winner was "Horses on Bianditz mountain" by Mikel Ortega.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Biandintz_eta_zaldiak_-_modified2.jpg -- Winning image
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2008/Results -- Results

[First logo creator] - The creator of Wikipedia's first logo has finally realized that we used his logo when he googled himself! ;-) Bjørn Smestad, had submitted his idea to a Nupedia logo competition and, while it didn't win that competition, it became the official Wikipedia logo for around 8 months (and served as a basis for the current logo).

http://bjornsmestad.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-wikipedia-logo.html -- creator's blog post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_logos -- Wikipedia logos through the years
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2009/05/28/another-reason-not-to-copyright-logos/ -- blog post by sj on the subject

[SF+MakerFaire] - The San Francisco Wikimedians and the Wikimedia Foundation office made an appearance at the San Mateo MakerFaire. The event went very well and was mostly community run. Visitors to the booth found Wikimedia trading cards and a guess the language game!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_Faire -- Wikipedia article
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_-_Trading_Card_Game.pdf -- trading cards
http://austinhair.org/guess/ -- guess the Wikipedia language

Media

[ArbCom + Scientology] - The English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (final level of dispute resolution) closed a 6-month long case involving the Church of Scientology articles. This news was quickly picked up by the tech press and is making its way through the mainstream papers, with articles in many languages (including English, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Danish).

http://tinyurl.com/ScientologyWiki -- Google News results
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Scientology -- arbitration case

[nowiki comparison] - A Norwegian newspaper (VG, Verdens Gang) compared Wikipedia in Norsk (Bokmål) and Store Norske Leksikon. The latter encyclopedia is a large traditional paper lexicon transferred to a web portal, together with to other lexicons; one medical and health lexiconand one biographical lexicon. The roundup focused on five different areas; history, culture, entertainment, society and politics, and sport. Wikipedia either won or tied in all categories.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-June/052282.html -- mailing list post description
http://bayimg.com/image/laannaacf.jpg -- scan of the article

[WMUK denied charity] - Wikimedia UK, the British chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, was recently denied charity status by HMRC (the organization that controls charity status in the UK). The HMRC stating that production of an encyclopaedia is not a charitable purpose; the story was listed on the front page of Charity Finance, a charity-related news site.

http://www.charityfinance.co.uk/home/content.php?id=2876&pg=15&cat=30 -- story
http://uk.wikimedia.org -- Wikimedia UK

Stats

[wp] - The Ukrainian Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles, the Arabic Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles, and the Malayalam Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.

http://tinyurl.com/ukwp150k -- 150,000th article (uk.wp)
http://tinyurl.com/arwp100x -- 100,000th article (ar.wp)
http://tinyurl.com/mlwp10k -- 10,000th article (ml.wp)

[wikt] - The Italian Wiktionary has reached 100,000 entries and the Ukrainian Wiktionary has reached 20,000 entries.

http://tinyurl.com/ukwikt20k -- 20,000th entry (uk.wikt)

[more] - More stats: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_News

Other news

[Open Source City] - The Vancouver (in British Columbia, Canada) city council has stated it will try to make its data open and accessible to everyone (when possible), opting for open standards and considering open source software when replacing existing applications.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/05/22/tech-vancouver-open-source-standards-software-city.html

[OSM Italy] - The first conference of the Italian Open Street Map (OSM) will be held in Trento, Italy between June 5 and 6. The OSM software will be integrated into Wikimedia sites and Wikimedia Italia is also sponsoring this conference.

http://osmit.fbk.eu -- conference website
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OSM -- Meta page on the integration

[WMDE: Job] - Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, is currently hiring a new Executive Director/Geschäftsführer. Applications are being accepted until June 13.

http://neu.wikimedia.de/index.php?id=95 -- more information (German)

Quote

"I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Two years later we ourselves made flights. This demonstration of my impotence as a prophet gave me such a shock that ever since I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions."

-- Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer, speech to the Aero Club of France, 1908

Number of subscribers: 728 , Unique Visitors website last week: 142 , Editor(s): Casey, Sj, Alex, Walter
Thanks to: Shipmaster, Kat, Ec, Frieda, John at Darkstar, Brianmc, Mpeel, Aude (Signpost), Phoebe, Avatar/Angela , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org ,
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to,
correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].
Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 7-22 Number: 106

2009-05-25T20:05:00.000Z

Technical news

[dumps] - Dumps are becoming more regular now and are actually working, thanks to Foundation developer Tomasz Finc. Two new mailing lists were created to discuss dumps.

http://dumps.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/xmldatadumps-l -- discussion list for the dumps
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/xmldatadumps-admin-l -- admin list (Failures / Upgrades / Changes)

[Abuse Filter] – After all the research done by the English Wikipedia, many other wikis have reached consensus about activating the Abuse Filter and are now carefully exploring the possibilities (including: alswiki, arwp, elwp, fiwp, hewp, nlwb, nlwp, ruwp, svwp, zhwp).
[Books & PDF] - In April a new function was enabled to make "books" of pages of the wiki. The added pages can be stored, exported as PDF or OpenDocument. Also is there the option to order your "book" (= collection of wiki-pages) in print. It is enabled on most projects and wikis but not on all. Look for a book toolbox in the side menu.

On the English Wikipedia this function is removed again after objections of the community. On most Wikis is there also an option to download a PDF-version of the page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books

Request for help

[wikizine] - Wikizine is planning on becoming more regular and to do that, we need your help. Please post news tips or even help us with writing by joining the editors mailing list.

http://report.wikizine.org -- tip line
http://mail.wikizine.org/mailman/listinfo/editors_wikizine.org -- editors mailing list

Foundation

[new board members] - The chapters have finally selected their choices for the board, choosing Arne Klempert (akl) and Michael Snow.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/052037.html announcement on foundation-l

[usability] - The usability project published a sneak preview of their research results. The project is also still looking for a software developer.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/24/usability-study-results-sneak-preview/ -- blog pos
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project) -- job opening

[strategic planning] - The board announced that they are starting a long-term strategic planning process to lay out the next 3-5 years. The foundation is currently hiring 3 people to work as a part of that project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-April/051565.html -- board resolution
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings -- job openings

[auditcom] - The audit committee is currently looking for volunteers. The only requirement is to be financially literate.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/051977.html -- call for volunteers

[BLPs] - The Board released a statement about biographies of living people.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people -- resolution/statement

[Public outreach] - The public outreach hub on Meta-Wiki was recently revamped. Among other things, the Foundation is seeking a volunteer for the bookshelf project and tips from public outreach/Wikimedia-related presentations.

Legal

[licensing update] - The licensing update vote results are now available. 75% has voted in favor of the license update (with 14% remaining neutral). 43% of all votes came form the Enlgish language Wikipedia.

This means that the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license will be be added in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) CC-BY-SA) for most of the Wikimedia Foundation projects. Actual change of the license on the sites will be arround the 15th of June.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Results
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Dual_license_vote_May_2009 -- press release

Agenda

[Maker Faire-SF] - The Wikimedia Foundation is planning to have a booth at the San Francisco Maker Faire again this year. If you're near SF, stop by and say hi or volunteer to help out with the booth!

http://makerfaire.com/ -- Maker Faire home page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/San_Francisco/Maker_Faire -- volunteer signup

[Wiki Loves Art/NL] – In collaboration with Creative Commons NL, the Dutch Wikimedia chapter, Wikimedia Nederland, is organizing Wiki Loves Art/NL this June. More than 30 museums and other inheritanc-agencies are cooperating with volunteers to free their collections, amongst them the well-known Van Gogh museum. More information: www.wikilovesart.nl

Community

[embassies contest] - Norwegian & Estonian embassies sponsor article-writing contests in three languages (Norwegian: nb/Bokmal & nn/Nynorsk, et/Estonian).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-05-18/Multilingual_contests

[japanese conference] - a one-day Japanese conference is currently being planned for November 22 in Tokyo, planning is on Meta.

[Wikimania 2009] - The scholarships and program committees are currently reviewing all the submissions they received; more information should be given by the end of May.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/

[Wikimania 2010] - It is official, Wikimania 2010 will be held in Gdansk, Poland, Europe on July 9-11, 2010. The event site is beautifully located on Ołowianka Island.

http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/
http://www.epgd.net/grafika/wilga/images/37.jpeg -- air picture of Ołowianka (Bleihof) island

[Picture of the Year] – Wikimedia Commons held their annual Picture of the Year election. The votes have been cast, and now we're waiting for the final results to appear. The unofficial results can be found at http://is.gd/CKHG

Awards

[webware] - Wikipedia was one of the Webmare 100 winners, which recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10237659-29.html

[WMIT award 2009] - Wikimedia Italia, the Italian chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, issues an Award for people who gave significant contributions to the open projects supported by Wikimedia Foundation and/or Wikimedia Italia. The winners were announced on May 23 at the Digital Freedoms Festival.

http://www.wikimedia.it/index.php/Premio_Wikimedia_Italia_2009/en -- description page
http://www.libertadigitali.org/ -- festival webpage
http://wikimedia.it/index.php/Vincitori_del_Premio_Wikimedia_Italia_2009 -- winners list

Media

[ta.wp] - Tamil Wikipedia got a nice article in "The Hindu". New account creations on that wiki doubled on the day the article was published.

http://www.thehindu.com/mp/2009/05/21/stories/2009052150760100.htm

[Censors of Wikipedia?] - an article with comments from our General Counsel, Mike Godwin, about the censorship of Wikipedia in the UK a few months back.

http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2009/05/features/the-hidden-censors-of-the-internet.aspx

Stats

[de.wp] -- The German Wikipedia has reached 900,000 articles.

Other news

[Marriage for CTO] - Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer for the Foundation, got married this weekend. Congratulations to Brion & Marti!

Did you know ...

... that there are also browser, operating system (and more) statistics of the projects available?

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/VisitorsSampledLogOperatingSystems.htm

Quote

"Man will not fly for fifty years" – Orville Wright, 1901

Number of subscribers: 730 , Unique Visitors website last week: NA , Editor(s): Casey, Alex , Corrector(s): Rjd
Thanks to: the #wikimedia-tech crew, Mwpnl , Contact: http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org

Request for assistance for EN Wikizine

2009-05-19T23:36:00.001Z

Dear reader of Wikizine,

Wikizine depends on volunteers to provide you, our readers, this service.

There are no volunteers for Wikizine who help out on a core level who
are needed to be able to continue to provide this service.

If you find Wikizine useful consider to help me. Only by substantial
assistance on a more then occasional basis can wikizine continue. Who
helps out gets wide editorial freedom to give form to Wikizine.

If you would like to help out with the creation of Wikizine please
contact me.

Greetings,

Walter

--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community

Year: 2009 Week: 6 Number: 105

2009-02-05T23:12:00.000Z

Technical news

[Oversight] - the OverSight function to remove edits is replaced with a new OverSight function. Edits are now not longer removed from the history but hidden. A revision of a page can be hidden (not new), but you can also comments, log entry's, user names or an ip address. And also define of that will be hidden also from administrators or not. This is live on all wikis (if there are users who have OverSight status)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/41519

[AbuseFilter] - A new extension "AbuseFilter" is nearly ready to be used and will probably be go live fairly soon on the English Wikipedia. This extension makes it possible to create rules that will invokes certain automatic reactions to user behavior of a user according to the programmed rules. That reaction can be like giving a warning, blocking a user or some other action. It is like the name indicates intended to help to protect the wiki against vandalism. This is a very powerful tool.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/41442 -- posting of Brion about it
http://wiki.werdn.us/test/view/Main_Page -- developer test-wiki

[Auto NOINDEX] - From now on when you block a user the user page and talk page those pages get the status "NOINDEX" so it will no longer show up in google anymore.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11443

[E-mail us] - The email contact form to send an email to Wikipedia is gone. If you get surpisingly few emails in your local contact queue maybe this can the reason.

[Interwiki OTRS] - the links to OTRS tickets using the [[OTRS:Ticketnumber]] works again after around 6 months. When you make a new link use the new prefix [[Ticket:Ticketnumber]] instead because that has better changes to keep working in the long run.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15681

[Suppressredirect] - ever had to revert page-move vandalism? or just move a page without leaving a redirect? This is no possible for sysops on all Wikimedia wikis thanks to a vote on Meta.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14998

[Sex] - there is in the preferences section (user profile) an option now to specify your gender. That information is to support the function to present different interface messages depending on your sex. In some languages is text gender specific.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13040

Request for help

[Licensing] - the saga on the licensing migration to CC-BY-SA continues! There is a new page on Meta for coordinating the migration (including an FAQ). Please join in the discussion!

[Wikimania] - work on Wikimania 2009 is under heavy development, but they need your help with translations and expanding the existing pages. More information about volunteering, call for participation, and registration will be released soon.

Policy

[Wikibooks logo] - It has been a process of years but now it is there; a new, final and live logo for Wikibooks.

[New ombudsmen] - There are new ombudsmen (you know, the people who review privacy policy/checkuser abuse cases) and an increase in number from 3 to 5.

Foundation

[Stewards] - the steward election is open and this until 22 February. Request for comments about the current stewards is also open.

[Mozilla grant] - The Mozilla Foundation is giving the WMF $100,000 (USD) for the development of improved Theora encoders and more powerful playback libraries. Theora is the video-format that Wikipedia&Co is using as the only high profile website. Mozillas FireFox version 3.1 that is to be released soon will have build in support for playing Ogg Theora video. It is intended that the results of this grant will flow back for improved playback in FireFox.

[Committees] - the Wikimedia Foundation board has reviewed the committees structure at its last meeting. The result was the official closure of a few inactive committees and a resolution describing how committees work (including a list of current committees).

Agenda

[FOSDEM] - It is this upcoming weekend again FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, Europa, Sol3. On Sunday, the 8th of February, will Brion (Chief Technical Officer) give there a presentation about MediaWiki.

[MediaWiki meet-up] - It will take place in April 3.-5. in Berlin. The event is for everyone who works on MediaWiki, writes extensions, builds bots, writes scripts for the toolserver, or is otherwise interested in the technical aspects of Wikimedia.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Developer_meet-up_2009

Community

[Wikimania 2010] - The Wikimania 2010 bidding process has officially opened and the jury (those who review the bids and select the host city) has been selected.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2010/Bids/Timeline

[EN Wikinews] - Is electing the "Picture of the year 2008".

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Picture_of_the_Year_2008

[Flagged revisions] - after some normal vandalism on high profile pages and media reporting about that EN Wikipedia is moving forwards to use it on there wiki. Jimmy Wales expressed public support for using it. A vote resulted in 59% in favor of doing a trial activation of Flagged revisions. The English Wikibooks is already using it.

Awards

[IT Wikipedia] - wins the "Premiolino", which means "little award", and is the most important Italian journalistic award. IT wp wins in the category "New media" for this reason:"(because) it's a great, open, accessible for everyone, democratic encyclopedia, always updated in real time, very useful for every writer". The award consists in a parchment and a 5000€ cheque.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/36862

[Character Approved] - An American television station "USA Network" has selected several people in different fields to give them an award. Jimmy Wales has been selected in the "New media" category. The prize money of $10,000 goes to the WMF. USA Network is also running clips of the "character approved" people, including Jimbo - and are so sending out a sort of advertisement for Wikipedia on TV for free.

http://www.usanetwork.com/characterapproved/honorees/wales/

Media

[Google Knol] - ArtsTechnica has an evaluation of Google Knol six months later. There conclusion is that Wikipedia does not need to worry.

http://tinyurl.com/cr6bm6

[Negative press] - The Indepentent has published a very negative article about Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Jay Walsh, Head of Communications of the WMF responded by means of the comment function of the article and stated "A number of the facts in the story are blatantly false, and further details are sloppily reported or incorrect."

http://tinyurl.com/bqmede
http://blog.reidster.net/2009/02/more-publicity-for-my-wikipedia-work.html -- responds about the article

Other news

[New wiki-manual] - In January, a new user guide about Wikipedia was published by the University Press of Grenoble (France), in French language. The authors of this 80 pages guide are Guillaume Paumier (aka guillom) and Florence Devouard (aka Anthere). The user-guide is published under the GFDL and has already been transferred to Wikibooks. The book is for sale in paper version and electronic version.

http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikipédia
http://www.pug.fr/titre.asp?Num=1072
http://tinyurl.com/bf72r6 -- WM France Press release

["Old" wiki-manual] - A user manual for Wikipedia that was published one year ago has been released under GNU/FDL by the publisher O'Reilly's and is now on the EN wp for all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual

[Epistemia] - Once again a new wiki Encyclopedia project is started like Wikipedia but also is different some how. Epistemia has strong emphasis on civil and polite conduct. If you are wishing it was like 6 years ago when Wikipedia was much smaller, and maybe also better from your POV, then maybe you start over at Espistima. The have vacancies there for editors and unborn policy pages to be written.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/36770

[AnswersWikia] - ... and Wikia (Jimmy&Angela) has started AnswersWikia, what is just like WikiAnswers.com A website where you ask questions and other people can answer those.

http://answers.wikia.com

Quote

"Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

-- Irving Fisher, Yale University Professor of Economics, 1929
(two weeks later, the stock market crashed and the Great Depression started)

Number of subscribers: 730 , Unique Visitors website last week: 98 , Editor(s): Walter, Casey , Thanks to: Anthere, Purodha, bawolff, werdnum, Frieda , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Anno Domini MMIX Week III Number CIV

2009-01-15T01:07:00.001Z

Happy Wikipedia-day!

Technical news

[Upload size] - The maximum allowed upload size of files in increased from 20 megabytes to 100 megabytes. That is especially important for Commons that now can receive more easy video. Brion says there is now 48 terabyte of storage space for the media. 5 terabyte is used currently.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/011309-wikipedia-digital-media.html

[Time zone] - in the user preferences, section "Date and time", is there now an option to select your location. This way the correct local time can be used automatically.

Request for help

[Wikimania] - volunteers are requested for taking care of the scholarship applications that will come for next Wikimania.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/35468

Foundation

[ $:) ] - The WMF succeeded in collecting the 6 million dollar in the fundraiser. According to the WMF more then 130,000 donors from around the world are responsible for that result. 4 million of the 6 came from small donations, the rest from major sponsors. After the very successful request for donations by Jimmy Wales is the "thank you" message now also presented by Jimmy. The WMF has now the funding to carry out all the plans for 2009.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/01/02/
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/ThankYou/en
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/31/1315209 -- some /. discussion about it

[Wikimania 2009] - We knew next Wikimania would be in Argentina, Buenos Aires. Now we also know it will take place on August 26th, 27th and 28th.

[Steward election] - A new steward election is coming up. The first candidates have already showed up. Confirmation of the current stewards will also take place. It is supposed to start on the first of February.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2009

[Board update] - the term of 3 board members; Jimmy Wales, Jan-Bart de Vreede, and Stu West expired end of 2008. The terms of all 3 are renewed by the board. Work is in process to select a couple of other people to join to board by appointment. Being a WMF-board member is an unpaid position. (some media suggested otherwise recently)

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/35398

[Job openings] - the WMF is looking for 3 persons to work on the "Wikipedia Usability Initiative" in San Francisco.

[Advisory board] - A new member is added to the WMF advisory board, Roger McNamee. For some reason the blog "The Register" finds that interesting. But this item is more to remind that such a thing as the WMF Advisory board actually exist.

Agenda

[Wikipedia Day] - it is again 15 January, Wikipedia Day, Wikipedia's most important holiday. On this day we remember the eviction of the seed of the project from the late Nupedia encyclopedia project and birth of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, under this name as an independent project. The oldest of all projects is now just only 8 years old .... and is also the 8th most popular website globally. Applause.

Community

[Year in review] - also EN Wikinews made an overview of the news of the year 2008. And there is also a News Quiz of the year 2008 to see how short term your memory is.

[ZH Wikinews] - the Chinese wikinews is reported to be blocked in China. EN WIkinews is not blocked.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chinese_version_of_Wikinews_gets_blocked_in_China

Awards

[Knight Anthere] - the French National Order of Merit has been awarded by President Sarkozy of France to [[w:fr:User:Anthere]] (Florence Devouard). She received the rank of knight as "chair of an international foundation" (= WMF).

http://tinyurl.com/9ytx8p

Media

[Jimbo gossip] - the story has come up that Jimmy Wales was not longer a WMF-board member. The term for the seat on the board of Jimmy did indeed expired end of 2008. But his term is extended as usual by the board. Jimmy Wales was and is a WMF board member and Chair Emeritus of the WMF.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5122766/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-out-of-a-job

[Bad edit] - one year ago (2008-01-18) some anonymous user added some POV-info to the Dutch language edition of the Mohamed article (an edit that was reverted one minute later). The edit was done by people working for the Dutch justice department. Several large newspapers in the Netherlands and Belgium have now one year later reported this event as "news". In the meantime is discovered that the bureaucrats who did the edit where punished by there superiors by blocking access to Wikipedia for 2 months. A block that was lifted later because the need Wikipedia for there work.

http://www.telegraaf.nl/digitaal/2978623/__Ambtenaren_knoeien_weer_met_Wikipedia__.html

Stats

[Wikigeits] - [[user:Tookam]] has created Wikigeits. It is an attempt to build the Wikipedia equivalent of Google's Hot Trends. It tracks, aggregates, ranks and reports the page views on en.wikipedia.org.

http://www.wikigeist.com/

[Survey results] - A personal survey was handed out to many of the attendees at Wikimania 2008. These are the results of that survey.

http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Survey_results

The Simple English Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
The Old Belarusian Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.

Other news

[Wikizine licence] - for compatibility with Wikinews has changed Wikizine by request its license. This newsletter is from this edition on, in all versions, dual licensed GNU/FDL and also Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

[VisualWikipedia] - A website that provides as the say themselves "a visual, intuitive, and interactive web interface to encyclopedic knowledge/information."

http://visualwikipedia.com/

Quote

Max Planck: May I ask you a very serious question? What if God were to say you were mistaken? If he said "Stop. Newton is right"?
Albert Einstein: Then I would thank God for his POV, and we would agree to differ, and I would be left feeling very sorry for God.

from;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_and_Eddington

Number of subscribers: 728 , Unique Visitors website last year: 22453 , Returning Visitors website last year: 800 , Editor(s): Bawolff, Walter
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2008 Week: 52 Number: 103

2008-12-28T16:58:00.001Z

Technical news

[Hosting move] - the servers located in Amsterdam, Europe, are on the move to a new data center. At the old data center where around 40 servers located mostly for caching pages and images requested by European users. According to an unconfirmed source has Kennisnet ended its sponsoring of this cluster. Since May 2005 has Kennisnet paid all expenses for the cluster in Amsterdam.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/35389

[404] -If you follow a link to a page that doesn't exist (to the actual page, not including the edit pages), the servers now give a 404 (not found error code) where before they gave the 200 (ok) error code. This may help some automated programs, is more inline with what you are "supposed" to do, but most people will not notice as the page returned is still the same.

http://leuksman.com/log/2008/12/22/fixing-404-for-wiki-pages

[MediaWiki messages] - revision-info, revision-info-current, cannotdelete, redirectedfrom, historywarning and difference messages now use Wiki text rather than raw HTML markup. Some wikis will need to fix their customized messages.

Proposals

[Licence discussion] - the new version of the GNU Free Documentation License contains a section that gives the projects now using the GNU Free Documentation License the option to change the licence of those projects. The option to migrate to an other license expires on August 1, 2009. Discussion about this is requested.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update

Foundation

[Jimbo's appeal] - The post of a message from Jimmy Wales to ask for money that is announced exceptionally prominent at the sites has resulted in a temporary increase of donations of 892%.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/12/24/a-great-day-for-our-fundraiser/

Legal

[Wikimedia NL wins] - Wikimedia Nederland wins a preliminary injunction. Not a big surprise because the wrong Wikimedia was sued, but nevertheless good news.

http://tinyurl.com/7l4zc2

Community

[Photo-print service] - a partnership has been established between the French language Wikipedia community and a photo printer service. it is now possible to order a print of an image on the wiki with the menu "Get a poster of this image". For every order is 1,5 EUR donated to Wikimedia. At present a 1000 EUR is donated this way. You see only the option if the site language is French. So logout or change your setting.

[Everyone Bureaucrat] - the community of the Italian Wikiquote has decided that all sysops also will be a bureaucrat. On IT Wikiquote are only 6 sysops, so now also 6 bureaucrats. That have found inspiration from the Spanish language Wikipedia. There are nearly all sysops also bureaucrats, all 126. How to become a bureaucrat differs strongly from wiki to wiki. For example; on the English language Wikipedia you need to be elected in a extremely difficult bureaucratic process. And on the Dutch language Wikipedia all sysops active for at least one year can become bureaucrat by simple request.
[EN Wikinews] - the main page is decorated for the holidays. It has a tree , menorah, Kwanzaas and snowman. This unusual. Normally the do not do this, but (strangely) no one complained.

[New planet] - At the location "planet.wikimedia.org" are several language based websites who collect the posts of many different blogs with postings who are supposed to be related to WMF-projects. For example Wikizine is also listed there on the English language version. There is now a new planet; the "North Germanic languages". Normally it is for one language only but because the amount of posts would be to few the languages Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese form one planet.

http://gmq.planet.wikimedia.org/

Awards

[Picture of the year] - Wikinews is gearing up for end of year. The 2008 picture of the year will be voted on shortly . You must be active somewhere in wikimedia to vote, but that does not necessarily have to be wikinews.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Picture_of_the_Year_2008

Media

[Wiki first] - A scientific journal "RNA Biology" has requested their contributors create wikipedia articles on their research subject before publishing a paper. Although some people have expressed concerns that a research paper is not that same as a good article.

Stats

[SV wp] - Swedish Wikipedia passed 300 000 articles and have send out a press release.

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipediadiskussion:300K

Other news

[Betawiki bounty] - If you translate 500 mediawiki messages before the end of the year, you can get a 1000 euro prize!.

Donation comments

"Find a clean way to make profitable enough to survive for we count on you but you can't really count on us, we don't have money!..." -- Anonymous

"When I first started working with computers in the '70s, I dreamed of an electronic library with all the information anyone needed on a portable device. You're making that happen. Thank you." -- Harvey Platter

"Une modeste contribution ainsi qu'un grand MERCI... continuez..." -- Mathieu TARTARE

"DONATION, BUT I DISLIKE JIMBO"

Number of subscribers: 725 , Unique Visitors website last week: 103 , Editor(s): Bawolff, Walter, Casey , Corrector(s): none , Thanks to: Plyd, Nemo_bis, Ainali , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 50 Number: 102

2008-12-08T10:30:00.001Z

Technical news

[Wiki rename] - the first letters of the url of our projects indicate the language of that project. For some of them those will change to other ones. Effected languages are; Aromanian, Low German, Moldovan and Belarusian. Redirects will be created.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/34563

[WikimediaNotifier] - A system has setup to create a message on Meta that then is copied automatically to all the wikis. The purpose is to improve the internal distribution of important news to the community. The messages are posted in namespace of the bot [[user:WikimediaNotifier]] but wikis can request to post them somewhere else like in there village pump if the wish it so.

[MediaWiki extension Testing] - Many of the extensions written for MediaWiki are used outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. Installing is not always easy because they do not come with a guarantee that they will work. ExtentionTesting provides a testing environment where these extensions can be tested against the stable releases of MediaWiki. This way it is easier and more predictable to use extensions with the MediaWiki software.

http://extensiontesting.wikiation.nl/Main_Page

[Interwiki map] - the interwiki map is updated. The means that the many changes done to it are now live. For example you can now link to an OTRS-ticket with the interwiki [[Ticket:]]. The old prefix [[OTRS:]] was broken and no support was found to repair it.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map

[Turnkey MediaWiki] - A Ubuntu-based distro created for one purpose; running MediaWiki. Ideal to try out MediaWiki on your own computer.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/TurnKey_MediaWiki

Request for help

[Web Designer/geek] - Wikizine.org seeks the help of a volunteer who can realize an idea the involves building a website that is intended to besides being useful also create revenue to support Wikizine.org Contact [[user:Walter]]

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Walter

Foundation

[Wikimedia Foundation] - The Stanton Foundation donates US$ 890,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to develop an easier way to write and change articles. The goal is to increase usability so that more people can edit articels, which have less technical knowledge.

http://tinyurl.com/64zmen -- WMF press release
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/StantonGrantQA

[WMF Audited financial statements] - the new ones for the period 2007-2008 are published. If you like the know the official financial numbers then this is what you need to read.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/34390

Legal

[Wikimedia Deutschland] - The German chapter Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. are hosting a website (www.wikipedia.de), where the German wikipedia can be searched. A German court enacted a temporary restraining order that this website must not link to the German wikipedia (de.wikipedia.org). The reason is a lawsuit between Wikimedia Deutschland and Lutz Heilmann, a member of the German Parliament (Bundestag), about some statements in the article about him. He also sued three Wikipedia users because of their work on this article. The restraining order was abolished after 2.5 days. Because of the news coverage the donations for the Wikimedia Deutschland was increasing signifcant.

[European Copyright] - A working group of the Dutch Wikimedia, German Wikimedia, Hungarian and Italian Wikimedia Chapter has issued a reaction on the EU Green paper Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.

http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Groep_Groenboek/en
http://tinyurl.com/6djgwy -- The text of the green paper

[WM Netherlands] - a request for an preliminary injunction is issued by Bob Sijthoff against the Dutch Chapter to obtain the identity of particular user and the removal a specific article. The position of WM Netherlands is that the are not legally or technical capable of doing that. Ruling is expected by the 10th of December.

Agenda

[WM Serbia Conference] - The Regional Conference of Wikimedia Serbia will be held at 19th, 20th and 21st December in Belgrade, in the Belgrade Youth Home.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/34612
http://tinyurl.com/6hx9vo -- WM Serbia conference

Community

[Commons: Bundesarchiv Project] - The German Federal Archive has about 170.000 digital photos since 2007. Using this photos was not free of charge. After long discussions with the Wikimedia Deutschland almost 100.000 photos are now licenced by the cc-by-sa 3.0 DE. Currently the photos are uploaded to Commons.

[New Wikibooks logo] - The selection process of new logo for the Wikibooks project is coming to a close. Only the colors of the new logo still need to be decided.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks/Logo

Media

[Censor] - British internet service providers have been blocking a Wikipedia article and so also causing problems for there users to edit Wikipedia. The blocked article was flagged as child-pornographic in nature. Interestedly also Chinese media are reporting the blocking of Wikipedia in the UK.

http://tinyurl.com/5eo9s7 -- Wikinews article about it
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Censorship_of_WP_in_the_UK_Dec_2008

[Winkler Prins] - in the Dutch language is the Winkler Prins, founded in 1870, the last surviving encyclopedia. Winkler Prins announced that there 10th edition will no longer be published in paper from. Reasons are lack of interest in a encyclopedia on paper and huge work to get the information that can fill 50 book down to 26 books. The 10th edition be published online subscription based.

http://www.deredactie.be/cm/de.redactie/cultuur%2Ben%2Bmedia/1.419229

Stats

[EN wp] - out of frustration of lack of good statistics on the number of active editors on the EN wp [[User:Dragons flight]] has made some.

[NL Wikipedia] - the Dutch language Wikipedia passed the 500,000 article mark
[Fundraiser] - while the funding is coming in some stats are available about the success rate of the different banners.

Other news

[Wikipedia Loves Art] - is a free content photography contest coordinated with the Brooklyn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and possibly other museums worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009, and the name is a play off of Valentine's Day.

[WikiVoices] - The podcast "Not The Wikipedia Weekly" changes its name to WikiVoices.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiVoices

Quote

"Fair use is not a right. [..] Fair use is only a... ...legal defensible position" ~ A Fair(y) Use Tale!

http://dotsub.com/view/4918f3c8-8f04-4aa1-b300-39048dca6822

Number of subscribers: 725 , Unique Visitors website last week: 110 , Editor(s): Walter, Anonymous , Thanks to: Angela, Ellywa, GerardM , Especially thanks to: Sannse , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 45 Number: 101 Tech flash

2008-11-07T09:44:00.000Z

As you all noticed the most visual form of the fundraiser has shown up on the wikis in the form of a very large banner. The banner is the main way to get people to donate. This fundraiser is the banner exceptional huge and not universally appreciated.

Erik Möller, the Deputy Director, has posted a statement about this topic;

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/34123

All projects must do there part to help with the fundraiser by displaying the banner to all there users by default. But that does not mean that on a personal level you need to keep that banner in your face until the end of the fundraiser with is announced to run until Wikipedia Day.

How to hide the banner

Personal

Include the following code to your *personal* CSS;

/* Remove fundraiser banner and sitenotice */
#siteNotice, #fundraiser, .fundraiser-box { display:none; !important; }

Example; If your username is "Joe" and you use the default skin "monobook" the your personal CSS-page is [[user:Joe/monobook.css]]. That can be an unborn page if you have never done that. If you use a different skin, like "Modern", then it is [[user:Joe/modern.css]].

Do *not* include this to the site skin, only to your personal one if you wish to hide it.

Include an extension to your wiki

You can create an option (gadget, extension) for the users of your wiki to hide the banner with an option in the user preferences section.

You need to do 3 things (well, maybe 4) and have admin access.

Copy the contents of [[en:w:MediaWiki:Gadget-HideFundraisingNotice.css]] to your local wiki (name after the - can be localized)
Create a page with a description to show in Special:Preferences (e.g. [[en:w:MediaWiki:Gadget-HideFundraisingNotice]], again: can be localized after the -)
Add to your local [[en:w:MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition]]-page ( where the first part is the name of your description page, second the actual script page).

This should do the trick and make the option appear in [[Special:Preferences]].
If it doesn't, you might want to erform a null-edit on your local [[en:w:MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition]]-page (edit the page, don't change anything and save).

Using this option is better then editing the personal skin because a menu in the preferences is more easy for users to make use of it.

Take first a look at the gadget (can have an other name) section of the user preferences menu on your wiki to see of this gadget is maybe already installed. It is at least live on the English and Dutch Wikipedia.

Number of subscribers: 720 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Niels , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org ,
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 45 Number: 101

2008-11-05T00:20:00.001Z

Technical news

[Image: => File:] - Brion announced that he will be fulfilling a long-time wish: renaming the "Image:" namespace to "File:" due to the fact that it contains much more than just images. He will be making this change soon, so please update any scripts that rely on it *when* it is live. "Image" will remain as an alias.

[Ubuntu] - The Wikimedia Foundation tech team decided to simplify things by moving all of their servers to a GNU/Linux distribution: Ubuntu.

[New Search] - Another long-awaited tech improvement: the search feature! Thanks to some work by Robert Stojnic, we are currently migrating to lucene-search 2 which includes new features like much better searching and interwiki matches. When a search matches a title from another project in the same language, a box on right appears which holds the link to the sister project page.

[RenameUser] - There are now additional options when renaming an account: automatically recreate and block the old account. Previously, all this had to be done by the bureaucrats themselves -- this process is now simplified.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15181

[CodeReview] - Brion enabled the CodeReview extension on MediaWiki.org. This is an extension that greatly helps with the review of coding and will hopefully allow the sites to be updated with newer code more quickly.

[Textbook-l] - Wiki-to-print and ODT are now live in all Wikibooks editions.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2008-October/001367.html

Proposals

[Essentialpedia] - A more concise Wikipedia, containing only the most essential topics.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Essentialpedia

Policy

[GFDL 1.3 released] - A new version of the GNU Free Documentation License, which is used by most of the WMF projects, has been released. The new version makes it possible to migrate to the Creative Commons by-sa-3.0 license.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/34061

Foundation

[Fundraising 2008] - This year, the fundraiser has started discretely. By the time you read this, or soon after it, the classic site notice will be live. The donation pages have been redesigned, the Jimbo video is back, and a new feature is a form to give your answer to the question "How has Wikipedia made your life easier?". Like in previous years, the listing of the donations and their comments remains.

[Annual Report] - The first annual report of the WMF has been released. This is like a PR publication that contains financial information about the WMF. It may be useful to explain what the WMF actually does.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report

[New Chapters] - Two new chapters were approved in the October and November 2008 board meeting. Let's all welcome Wikimedia Brasil, Wikimedia Indonesia, Wikimedia Hungary, and Wikimedia Norway to the group of chapters!

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Local_chapters

[Chapter news list] - A new mailing list has been launched. It is meant to be an announce-only mailing list, for those who wish to keep in touch with what the chapters around the world are doing. It will receive regular updates from various chapters about their activities.

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/chapters-reports

[Meeting Report] - Michael gave an unofficial recap of the recent October Board of Trustees Meeting. In it, he discussed updates to two policies, update on board calendar, discussions about open standards, file formats, and some changes to the Advisory Board. He also said that the minutes will be posted soon after they are approved.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-October/046554.html

[Sub-national Chapters] Another topic of discussion at the board meeting was sub-national chapters. The board supports the development of sub-national chapters where appropriate and is starting a workgroup to figure out how the sub-national chapters will be handled.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-October/046590.html

[Wikimedia Argentina] - is going to give the "Wikipedia Academy" conferences and workshops next November 6th.

http://www.wikimedia.org.ar/wiki/Academia_de_Wikipedia

Community

[General Survey] - A multilingual Wikipedia survey has been launched by the Wikimedia Foundation and UNU-Merit. Currently, there are versions available in Dutch, Tamil, and Vietnamese with many other languages (including English) going live in the next few days to weeks. Please complete the survey so that the Foundation can more accurately get a picture of who contributes to the projects! Don't worry, no personally identifiable information will be released by UNU-Merit or the Wikimedia Foundation without permission of the respondents.

[Wikipedia Logo Updates] - A project spearheaded by the Foundation and Wikipedia community members to fix the errors on the globe of Wikipedia's logo and to fill in the blanks on the "other side" has begun. This project was started in response to many concerns over the years that there were many errors in the globe. Community and staff members both agreed that it would also be nice to have a full globe for memorabilia and for a 3D prop at events. It is requested that all community members join in on the discussion at Meta-Wiki!

[Wikis Take Manhattan] - A scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and the transportation-oriented Streetswiki (covering sites in Manhattan and New York City) was held. It was coordinated by New York City Wikimedians, Free Culture Columbia, Free Culture NYU, and The Open Planning Project with 23 teams and over 50 participants (the great majority non-Wikimedians). The grand prize winners will be having a free dinner with Jimmy Wales.

[Wikinews Meets Google News] - After a long series of discussions with Google, Wikinews is finally listed in the search results of Google News site: http://news.google.com/. The problem was that Google did not think it was reliable enough to be included (since anyone could edit), but after Wikinews had FlaggedRevs enabled it was finally deemed reliable!

http://news.google.com/news?q=source:%22wikinews%22

Awards

[DE wp] - The German Wikipedia won the audience award "OnlineStar" in the category "knowledge, news & information".

http://www.onlinestar.de/gewinner-2008.html?&no_cache=1

Other news

[Probably off-topic] - nevertheless - A 6-year old, heavily brain-damaged girl is now able to talk to hear parents with a computer that tracks her eye movements. She's also able to browse the internet, and maybe to read Wikipedia one day?

http://tinyurl.com/6nokso

Quote

"Wiki is 2/3 of planning, the rest is a loop in the dark" (Napoleon
Bonaparte, according to Eric Johnson at Wikimania 2008)

Number of subscribers: 720 , Editor(s): Cbrown1023, Walter , Corrector(s): Oliphaunt Thanks to: Effeietsanders, Pharos, bawolff, Sabata, Gizmo Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 40 Number: 100

2008-10-02T14:05:00.001Z

Technical news

[Global blocking] - Stewards are now able to block an IP address or range from editing on all Wikimedia projects (except Meta). This option is intended to be used with restraint and for a short time frame.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_blocking

[Robots.txt] - this is file that exists to control what pages are allowed to be indexed by a search engine. Basically you can use it to keep stuff out of Google. A recent added magic word __NOINDEX__ gives the same result on a specific page. Until now only the developers could edit the robots.txt for all WMF-projects. But now it there a new MediaWiki-page to control that. There is a central part of the Robots.txt that is not in local control. But on the page [[MediaWiki:Robots.txt]] you specify wiki-specific instructions for the spiders of the search engines.
[Global bot] - it is now possible for bots to get a global bot status.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bot_policy#Global_bots

[New tools] - Several users have created external tools for analyzing the history of articles. Statistics, a history search function, page view diagrams.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/09/09/more-story-in-wp-history/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Histlegend -- example of how to include the tools to the history function

[Flood flag] - only at Meta, but it can be requested for other wikis also, is the now the flag "flood". It is actually exactly the same as the "bot flag" only is it named "Flood". The idea is that when a sysop wishes to do many similar, repetitive and non-controversial changes then that user can ask for the "flood"-flag on a bureaucrat. The result is like with a bot that the edits are hidden by default.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Flood_flag

Policy

[New logo] - Meta, the neutral ground wiki for all Wikimedia Foundation projects and wikis, has a new logo. This was decided after a one week running poll. It used before the WMF-logo and the now changed to a different one but in the same general style.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel/Metawiki_logo_poll

[use of global groups] - the function of global groups is used to give certain groups certain levels of global rights. For example WMF office staff and systems administrators have been given certain global rights.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_global_permissions

[Delete Wikiquote] - a proposal to close the Wikiquote project was closed without consensus. The argument to delete Wikiquote was that some see it as one giant copyright violation and not compatible with WMF goals.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metapub/On_disbanding_Wikiquote

Foundation

[Board] - user Frieda of the Italian Wikipedia has resigned from the board of the WMF. The board does not know when she will be replaced for now.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/32774

[Wikimedia Nederland] - On November first will Wikimedia NL hold there 4th conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Early registrations are open.

http://www.wikimediaconferentie.nl/

Community

[Books] - It was announced this week that three books were published relating to Wikipedia. Lennart Guldbrandsson from Wikimedia Sverige wrote a book in Swedish titled "Så fungerar Wikipedia", which translates to "How Wikipedia works". Wikimedia Sweden also has its first WikiReader available (about Swedish Birds).

Also, a few English Wikipedians wrote their own book "How Wikipedia Works" (same title, different book then the Swedish) and they were published around the same time. This book was written by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. Wikizine is mentioned in it on page 345 in chapter 12.
Earlier in 2008 was also published the book the book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual". (ISBN 0596515162)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/32914 for Swedish books
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/95320 for English book
http://nostarch.com/wikipedia.htm -- How Wikipedia Works (free chapter download & order info)

[EO Wikipedia] - the Esperanto Wikipedia is proud of there new main page design. From a text only layout in 2001 has it grown in several steps to the current modern look that was elected out of 7 proposals.

http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%88efpa%C4%9Do/Nova_aspekto

[source:"Wikinews"] - Wikinews is now partially listed on google news (due to flagged revs). The are still working on meeting google's requirement of unique numbers in URLs, so so far only lead articles have been listed. Before this only mirrors of Wikinews where listed.

http://tinyurl.com/3prv5u -- view all Wikinews story's in Google News

[RU wiki] - On October 18 and 19 Moscow will play host to the second international Russian-language Wiki-conference related to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, as well as other Wikimedia projects. Registrations are open.

http://tinyurl.com/4y6ll4

Media

[Sweden] - Recently the former national telephone company of Sweden (and still the biggest telephone company in Sweden) ran a commercial for their mobile internet. The commercial ran like this: three men sit in a outside oak hot tub. One of them tell the others about how a former king planted oaks in Sweden. The others say: "Well, you know a lot." Another goes out of the water, is gone for a few moments, comes back and gives a comprehensive description of oaks, including their Latin name, while the others are more and more impressed. Then we cut to a sign that says: "Wikipedia in your mobile phone."

http://media.resume.se/resPlayer.aspx?type=1&id=1250

[Report about wp &win prize] - Wired.com won a $10,000 award for their reporting about Wikipedia and the Wikipedia-scanner

http://www.journalism.co.uk/14/articles/532334.php

[Jimmy] - A classic item once more; interview of Jimmy Wales on TV, Canadian this time.

http://tinyurl.com/3h8ppr

Stats

[No interest?] - after the unblocking of the Chinese language Wikipedia in China the statistics do not indicate a special increase of traffic.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/09/pretty-much-none-whatsoever/

[ES Wikipedia] - reached 400.000 articles on Saturday, September 22. The Spanish language Wikipedia is the 9th of 256 largest Wikipedias.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

[Special:Statistics] - the statistics page of the wikis now also lists the number of active users of last 30 days. What a lot more meaningful is then the number of user accounts created. For EN Wikipedia is it 153,000 active users.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

[If the editors where paid ...] - how much would it have cost? A lot.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/10/quantifying-volunteer-contribution/

[Bangla Wikisource] - has reached 1,000 pages milestone on 25th September, 2008.

http://bn.wikisource.org/

[EN wikinews] - The English language Wikinews has recieved its 700 000th edit. First edit was Tim uploading the draft version of our logo. The 700,000th edit was by 207.108.15.1 commenting about how connecting strongly religious people with "extremists" (aka the type who blow things up is a bad thing)

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WC#700.2C000_edits
http://tinyurl.com/5yf4n9 -- this is how a 700,000th edit looks like

Other news

[Delitionpedia] - Where do articles go to when the get deleted?" - The go to Deletionpedia.

[Wikizine] - the good news; Wikizine ID - the Indonesian language version of Wikizine is back after its formal closure in April 2008. This thanks to the effort of [[meta:user:REX]]. The bad news; DE Wikizine - the German language version of Wikizine is now formally closed because of lack of support.

http://id.wikizine.org -- reborn
http://de.wikizine.org -- closed

[Wikisage] - Wikisage, a "second generation wiki encyclopedia", is founded by Guido den Broeder. The active users have most a Dutch language Wikipedia background. The difference is that users can also write essays, so a personal POV. And some users can become labeled as an "expert" and be in charge of certain articles. Basically the expert voice gets more important than on Wikipedia. The project exists in Dutch and English but the Dutch version is stronger on this moment.

http://www.wikisage.org/

[Interwiki sync] - A page on Meta is created to discus interwiki synchronization problems.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization

[681 hits for wikipedia] - to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Google the have put online a dump of google from January 2001. Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001. In this google there are 681 hits for "wikipedia", now it is 251 million.

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia
http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/ -- one of least know WMF-sites ; EN Wikipedia edition December 2001

Was ist das?

Well, if you not know it you look it up .. and there is a very handy FF extension to do so in Wiktionary.

Users of FireFox can install the WikiLook exstension. When installed you just press shift and point to a word in a text. And you get in a small overlay screen the dictionary description of it and a link to look it up in Wikipedia. English language editions only. But due the multi-language nature of Wiktionary the extension remains useful also for non-English language users.

http://wikilook.mozdev.org/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7675

Quote

"If a man speaks in a forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/If_a_man_speaks_in_a_forest_and_there_is_no_woman_around_to_hear_him_is_he_still_wrong

Number of subscribers: 715 , Editor(s): Walter, Hannibal, Cbrown, bawolff , Thanks to: Platonides, Londenp, Bellayet, Arno Lagrange, Lvova , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to,
correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 37 Number: 99

2008-09-10T10:14:00.001Z

Technical news

[API] - Brion has disabled the old BotQuery interface and enabled the MediaWiki's machine-readable query API.

Foundation

[Job offer] - The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Chief Program Officer.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Program_Officer

Community

[AR wp] - small groups of Wikipedians in Egypt organize a "regional Wikipedia Day" to try to boost the low number of articles in there wiki compared to the languages population. Despite some disappointments about 3500 new articles where written and 10,000 edits on other articles in one day.

http://dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=16154

[ID wp] - The Indonesian Wikipedia community officially met with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of Indonesia who organized an event like Wikipedia Academy: a seminar and workshop titled "Contributing to Wikipedia" for the public and for organizations. This event was held on 8 August 2008 at Jakarta, Indonesia, within the bigger event Indonesia ICT Award 2008.

http://www.inaicta.web.id/2008/07/22/menulis-di-wikipedia-untuk-umum/ -- Announcement on official website of Indonesia ICT Award 2008
http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lokakarya_Wikipedia_bahasa_Indonesia-INAICTA_2008 -- Page at Indonesian Wikipedia

[Wikisource] - Ever wondered what the people at Wikisource are actually doing? Here below you can find the results of the latest efforts of EN Wikisource. Two books who are scanned, uploaded to the wiki and then text of the images are written over and proofread. Who likes to help can currently proofread a cookbook.

Awards

[Quadriga] - Wikipedia is one of the recipients of the Quadriga, a German award. Jimmy Wales will in Berlin on October 3, Germany's national holiday, to accept the award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga_(award)
http://tinyurl.com/5nx89h -- WMF-blog posting

Media

[Amazon goes wiki] - One of the uses of Wikipedia is to look up information about a music band. Amazon has started a website to compete with Wikipedia for that aspect of content. At soundunwound.com users can look up music related information and edit the content. The well known "edit" button is present. But you need to login and all edits need to be approved by Amazon staff.

[Sarah Palin] - A story has appeared around the EN Wikipedia article of a US Vice-president candidate. A new user who worked at the article before it was known publicly that the candidate was candidate attracted attention.

http://tinyurl.com/5jk3wz

[The Power] - a spider of google gets confused about the data of an article its discovers and lists by mistake an old article as new in google news. Result; the stock prize of an airline crashes because the article announced the bankruptcy of the airline. In this story are the Wikimedia projects not involved. But it shows clearly to potential effect of incorrect information in a highly visual used source of information, like the WMF are also.

http://searchengineland.com/080909-081840.php

Stats

[Golden wikipedia] - Just How Powerful Is Wikipedia?

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/09/04/just-how-powerful-is-wikipedia/

[EN wp] - The English Wikipedia has reached 2,500,000 articles. Allegedly, the 2.5 millionth article was Joe Connor.
[Small poll] - when asked to 200 college students; "90% of students have used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, 73% of students have been explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia."

http://tinyurl.com/6gql6j

Other news

[Court ruling] - The US appeals court ruled that Wikipedia is not highly accurate. No, seriously, this is not a story form UnNews.
The case was that the "Department of Homeland Security" (Big Brother USA), had used information from Wikipedia to decide to reject a request from a refugee to receive protection inside the USA.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/03/court-rules-wikipedia
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/UnNews:Main_Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer -- the POV regarding its authoritative status

[Medical wiki] - A new wiki is preparing to launch end of 2008 to provide medical information. It is a project in co-operation with several universities. People who have a medical degree can request to become an editor. Other people can only suggest changes. Content will be released under the GNU/FDL.

http://www.medpedia.com

[Google News Archive] - Google is working on a project to digitize on a large scale old printed news archives. This will make it possible to search in to articles who until only existed in box in some seller up to a century or more ago. This could be very useful to fix some "[citation needed]" needs. There is already an option to search old news present. Some of the results point to archives that are not free to access. But that are not google archives.

[GNU] - If you work on Wikipedia, or most of the other projects, you have heard of GNU. The content of our projects is mostly under the GNU/FDL licence. MediaWiki, the website, uses the GNU/GPL-licence. And the servers are using the GNU/Linux operating system. Just like the Wikimedia projects stands GNU-philosophy for openness of information. And now is it the 25th birthday of GNU.

http://www.gnu.org/fry/happy-birthday-to-gnu.html

Quote

"There are many ways to commit career suicide. Wiki is just a new
one." (Eric Johnson, Wikimania 2008)

http://tinyurl.com/6kfnfn

Number of subscribers: 715 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Effeietsanders, Tawker, REX , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 33 Number: 98

2008-08-12T12:56:00.001Z

Technical news

[New and useful] - it is now possible to insert the magic word __NOINDEX__ into a page. The result of this is that when a search engine spider comes by, it gets the instruction not to index that page. This way, it should for example be possible to keep certain pages out of the search results of google. This only works on pages that are not in the content namespace; for example, on Wikipedia it will not work in an article like [[Michael Shmerkin]].
Note that anyone who can edit a page can insert this magic word in a page. There is also a magic word __INDEX__ now. Its use is not clear.

[Double redirect] - a long-standing problem is the creation of double redirects when a page is moved. The user then needs to click on a redirect link to continue. There is now a "double redirect fixer". It works at the MediaWiki level but it behaves like a bot. Sometime after the move is done, the wiki will check if there is a double redirect. If so, it will be fixed automatically. By default, the correction will be done by [[User:Redirect fixer]]. Those edits do not appear in recent changes.
The name of this "user" can be specified by the setting [[MediaWiki:double-redirect-fixer]]. If for some reason you wish the system to not get involved in a double redirect you can insert the magic word __STATICREDIRECT__ .

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-July/038751.html

[Wikisets] - Not so long ago, a new functionality was activated to create "global user groups". These groups can be given certain rights (like "grant and revoke bot flags"); when users are enrolled, they have the rights of that group on all Wikimedia wikis.
The problem is that those rights are valid either everywhere or nowhere, and not all communities agree with external users having special rights on their wiki.
To solve this problem, the "wiki sets" option has been created. This makes it possible to have "global groups" that are not global. Certain wikis can opt out, or a global group can be made opt-in.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Steward_handbook#wikisets

[New mail] - Almost (*) all wikis now offer an user the option to receive an e-mail when their talk page has been changed.
(*) exceptions are enwiki, eswiki, frwiki, plwiki, jawiki, ptwiki, ruwiki, zhwiki, itwiki and dewiki.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15031

[Download wikipedia] - You are free to download the database dump of wikis, but for most users this is not very useful. As an alternative, you can also download a static HTML dump: a huge collection of HTML files that gives you a local copy of the Wikipedia of your choice. This makes it very easy to bring Wikipedia to places where there is no internet or where it is prohibitively expensive.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/07/03/new-wikipedia-downloads-available

[Ogg support in Firefox] - The fairly popular internet browser Mozilla Firefox now supports the Ogg Vorbis and Theora media formats in its experimental version 3.1. It is considered normal that a webbrower is able to display images by itself; however, for video or audio an external program or a plugin is required. The Wikimedia Foundation projects use Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis for their video and audio recordings. However, besides Wikimedia, these formats are very rarely used by websites for end users.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/31/1752206

Request for help

[Illustration Project] - In November 2007 it was announced (wikizine 84) that a donation was received of US $ 20,000 for creating and improving illustrations. The "Philip Greenspun illustration project (PGIP)". It has taken some time to organize but now round 1 is open. Requests for illustrations can now be submitted. People who make a good illustration that is requested can get paid for it. US$ 40 or 15 US$ will be paid. Organizer is [[commons:User:Pfctdayelise]]

Proposals

[Flood flag] - A proposal has been made for a new sysop function called the "flood flag", that would allow users to hide batches of repetitive edits from recent changes, like a bot flag does.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flood_flag

Foundation

[Job offers] - Wikimedia is offering several technical jobs; at least a few of the new employees are to work in the San Francisco office, but remote development and system administration is also possible.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/39257

[WMF budget] - The financial plan for the next fiscal year of the WMF has been presented. The WMF plans to spend almost 6 million US dollars and have an income of 7,33 million US dollars. This is a big increase compared to the budget of 2007/2008. The hiring of several new staff members, especially for technical functions, has been budgeted. An extensive "FAQ" on the budget is available.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/07/01/wikimedia-foundation-2008-2009-annual-plan/

Community

[EN Wikinews] - has started to use the flagged revisions system on the wiki. The community is working to integrate this function into the publishing procedures.
[Move Main Page] - Traditionally, the main page of a Wikimedia project is in the content namespace. This is because the main page was the first page created of every wiki. And for most wikis, that was before namespaces existed. Some wikis have moved their main pages to another name space. For example, the German Wikipedia uses the "Wikipedia:" namespace and the Swedish Wikipedia uses the "Portal:" namespace. The English language Wikipedia is now also discussing a move.

http://tinyurl.com/6dvldz

Media

[Hebrew Wikipedia] - an Israeli newspaper published extensively about Wikipedia. Some fragments have been translated in English. It tells the Wikipedia story from the Hebrew Wikipedia point of view.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1005293.html

Stats

[布拉沃] - The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles. Due to the Olympics, the Chinese wikipedia is mostly unblocked in China for now.

http://zh.wikipedia.org

Other news

[Wikimania 2008] - More videos of Wikimania 2008 have become available. An overview can be found on a special Wikizine posting and the Kaltura site. WikipediaWeekly also has some new Wikimania-related postings.

[Wikipedia.org] - The poll discussing which Wikipedias are to be listed on the central space of the portal Wikipedia.org is now closed. The result is a very simple criterion: a ranking by most visitors, without any further specifications or exceptions. These rankings are to be obtained from Alexa.com.
The portal has been updated according the new system. As a result of this the Dutch language Wikipedia has been replaced by the Chinese Wikipedia. According to Alexa, 1% of all traffic to wikipedia.org is to the Chinese Wikipedia.
Alexa gets those statistics by monitoring the internet usage of people who have installed the (English language) Alexa toolbar.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Wikipedias/poll

Did you know ...

... that the definition of a "community member" can differ strongly between wikis?

... that the Hebrew-language Wikipedia only gives users the right to vote if they have made at least 100 edits in the last 90 days?

... that the idea for using this system is to make it more difficult for users with sock puppets to control votes?

Quote

'It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be 'Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.' —Philip Greenspun

Number of subscribers: 714 , Unique Visitors website last week: 76 , Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): Oliphaunt , Thanks to: Yonatan, adambro, pfctdayelise
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Special post: url's to the Wikimania 2008 streams

2008-07-26T13:38:00.024Z

The video recordings of Wikimania 2008 are online at the Biblotheca Alexandrina webcast section But these do not work if you are not using Windows it looks like.

To make it more esay to watch them Wikizine provides you with the direct links to the files. Try several players if needed. It seems to work mostly with VLC. But for some I needed Mplayer to get it working.

The "Kalura" videos are copys of the Biblotheca Alexandrina webcast streams. So there are not better but the are maybe more easy te view.

Overview of all Kaltura videos can be found at the Kalutra website at the Wikimania2008 section.

Opening Ceremony
Ahmed Darwish, Florence Devouard, Hoda Baraka, Ismail Serageldin
Thursday July 17, 2008

View by streaming

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-3.wmv

Download the video;

http://www.badongo.com/vid/816416 this is wiki-17-3.wmv
note: this video breaks down in the middle of the speech of Florence , sorry, it is the best I can do

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Wikimedia Foundation Board Panel
Domas Mituzas, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Jimmy Wales, Kat Walsh, Michael Snow
Thursday July 17, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-7.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Content creation strategies for emerging countries
Jürgen Galler
Thursday July 17, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-4.wmv

Kultura;

Kaltura

Keeping the Media accountable
Rhonda Shearer
Thursday July 17, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-6.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

New Paradigms For New Tomorrows
Ismail Serageldin
Thursday July 17, 2008

Vieuw by streaming;

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-1.wmv

View by downloading;

http://www.badongo.com/vid/817019

Kaltura:

Kaltura

Recent Developments in Search Technology
Usama Fayyad
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-2.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Wikimedia and libraries
Jakob Voss, Phoebe Ayers, Sohair Wastawy, Tim Spalding
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-5.wmv

kaltura;

Kaltura

Free Knowledge & Wikimedia Projects
Oliveir Hugot
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-4.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Open culture and the Internet in the Middle East
Ahmed Tantawy
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-1.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

LibraryThing and Social Cataloging
Tim Spalding
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-3.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Diplopedia: Wiki Culture in the U.S. Department of State
Eric M. Johnson
Saturday July 19, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-19-1.wmv

Kaltura

Kaltura

Communication issues : Musings of a Dinosaur

Florence Devouard
Saturday July 19, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-19-2.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Closing Ceremony
Florence Devouard, Ismail Serageldin, Jimmy Wales, Michael Snow, Noha Adly, Sue Gardner
Saturday July 19, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-19-3.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Year: 2008 Week: 30 Number: 97

2008-07-24T21:59:00.001Z

Notice from the editor: this edition does not includes all relevant news for the time frame between the previous Wikizine and this one. I decided that getting something out is more important then more delays. Walter

Foundation

[New board chair] - The board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation has a new chair. All board members where in favour to appoint Michael Snow for the job. Michael, who is a board member since February 2008, is best known as the founder of the Wikipedia Signpost. The former chair, Anthere (Florence Devouard), was Chair since October 2006 and board member since 2004. She is now not longer a WMF board member. Anthere has joined the WMF Advisory board.

[Board election] - [[meta:user:Wing]] (Ting Chen) is elected as a community board member to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. His term will expire in July 2009. 3019 valid votes where registered.

[New hires] - The WMF has hired 5 new staff members; Erik Zachte (Tech stats guy), Sara Crouse (Head of Partnerships and Foundation Relations), Rebecca Handler (Major Gifts Officer), Rand Montoya (Head of Community Giving), and Frank Schulenburg (public outreach coordinator). Erik Zachte starts in September as a part-time contractor. Erik is a Wikipedian from the Dutch language Wikipedia but is mostly know for his volunteer work in creating detailed statistics for the Wikimedia projects. As a contractor for the WMF Erik will also work on this.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31508 -- Erik Zachte
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31661 -- Sara Crouse
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31367 -- Rebecca Handler / Rand Montoya
http://stats.wikimedia.org/ -- the stats of the WMF by Erik Zachte
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Current_staff -- overview staff

Technical news

[SUL] - Bureaucrats can now rename a user to a name that is already migrated to the Single User Login. This at least when if the global account and the local account have the same email address or password.
[Video on wiki] - Kaltura, Inc is sponsoring Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project, to work in the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco beginning in August. Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31756

[ERATA] - the item "Restrict upload", section "Proposals", in Wikizine 96 was not correct. Restricting uploads to auto confirmed users only is not a proposal but is live on all wikis ... except those wikis who have requested to disable this function explicitly.

Request for help

[Wikizine] - assistance would be useful (understatement)

http://report.wikizine.org

Proposals

[Front door] - Just like most people have a very hard time to understand that a domain of a website can end with something else then .com have visitors the urge to put "www" before everything. The means the url "www.wikipedia.org" is an important page and the front door for many visitors of Wikipedia. 10 Wikipedias have currently the honour to be listed very prominently around the wikipedia-globe, the Wikipedias who have the most articles. When a Wikipedia breaks the 100,000 articles milestone the also like to move up and get a spot around the globe. But space is limited. This a long standing source of discussion.

A poll is currently opened to find a solution. Users can indicate there support for different ways to present the Wikipedia-options to the visitors. The poll is open until July 31, 2008 at 23:59 UTC.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Wikipedias/poll

Community

[Wikimania 2008] - For this year is it over. WikipediaWeekly provides audio reporting about Wikimania.The 2009 Wikimania conference will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

http://wikipediaweekly.org/ -- podcasts 52 / 57
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2008_Alexandria -- some
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery pictures from Wikimania 2008
http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Wikimania_Sessions -- If you are very lucky you can find some video recordings there
http://tinyurl.com/6l4gwr -- Bibliotheca Alexandrina Webcast
http://linuxawy.org/node/28 -- how to get those streams working
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2008/07/wikimania-alexandria.html -- Impression by GerardM, who was there
http://tinyurl.com/6fu5hy -- and also one from User:Pfctdayelise

[Most read] - The English Wikinews has a new page that displays the top 20 of the most read articles of the last hour. This is not done by MediaWiki but by means of the Domas's wikistats.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Popular_articles

[The Other Side] - Once was it a mystery and cause to speculation how the dark side of the Moon would look like. Now the question is raised; how does the other side of the Wikipedia globe looks like?

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31763

Other news

[Knol] - Google has gone live with their project to create user written information articles. It is not like Wikipedia in the sense that an article is owned by an author, at least as default. When you start a new "knol" you can also allow everyone to edit if logged in. That author can write about what he wishes to write, even when there is already an article about that topic. Other people can give a rating (stars) and give comments. Authors received a part of the earnings of the advertisements displayed on there articles if the switch the advertisements on. The default license is "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0". It is currently not clear of the GFDL-licence that Wikipedia is using is compatible. But you can also pick a licence that does not allow commercial use or you can disallow all use elsewhere. So knol be very open or very restrictive depending on what you chose as author of a knol.

http://knol.google.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PYO-fN_VgU -- Jimmy Wales gives his idea about Knol & Wikipedia

[China] - The Chinese language Wikipedia is now, months after the unblocking of the other languages editions, also unblocked. At least in some parts of China. It is expected the will be blocked again as soon as the Olympic fire is extinguished.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia_unblocked_by_government

Quote

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.

from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla

Number of subscribers: 710 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Platonides, bawolff , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Notification of delay of EN Wikizine

2008-07-15T14:47:00.001Z

Dear reader of Wikizine in English,

The next edition of Wikizine is delayed. At this time it is still the
intention to provide you with this edition.

If you would like to help out with the creation of EN Wikizine please
contact me at <walter@wikizine.org>

Greetings,

Walter
--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community

Year: 2008 Week: 25 Number: 96

2008-06-16T23:36:00.001Z

Technical news

[Upload] - When you upload an image that is already online with another name you get a warning about it. It works by calculating the hash of the file and compares it with the already online files.
[Move] - sysops have now the option to rename all sub-pages in one move when moving the parent page.
[Global user groups] - a WMF-global user group can now be created that has a much or as little user rights as desired. Users can then be added to that group. Global user members then have the user rights assigned to that group on all wikis. Currently this function is only used to give stewards administrative rights on all wikis.

Proposals

[Global sysops] - there is a proposal and a poll about the possibility of creating a "Global sysops user group". That is creating users who are sysop on all wikis. The idea is to make it more easy to maintain the many small wikis. Users who would be "global sysop" would be only allowed to use there rights on small wiki where there is no local community or one that not yet take care of there own wiki. The opposition against this idea does not like that "Global sysops" would also have the technical sysops rights on large wikis, like the English Wikipedia, despite it would not be allowed to use it.

[Restrict upload] - there is a proposal to restrict upload rights of new users on all wikis except commons to autoconfirmed users. That are users who have an account that it at least 5 days old. The idea is that this will prevent the upload of a lot of problems.

http://tinyurl.com/56z4fs

[Interwiki] - a proposal to introduce the Interlanguage Extension on Wikimedia projects to change the system of the language interwiki links.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interwiki_link

Policy

[Draft] - Mike Godwin has drafted a new version of the privacy policy. Feedback and input is requested.

Foundation

[Board elections] - the election for one position on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation is open. There are 15 candidates. You can vote until 23:59 21 June 2008 (UTC). Note that the voting system has changed. Read the manual. The result are expected to be announced on or around 26 June 2008.

[Enquête] - In July 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with UNU-Merit, plans to launch the first general survey of Wikimedia readers and contributors. Attempts are made to make it available in as many languages as possible. Translation assistance is requested.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/06/06/help-translate-our-first-survey-of-readers-and-contributors/

[Lawsuit Germany] - a German publishing company sued Wikimedia Deutschland over their article in the German Wikipedia. This because there was critical information in the article. The court ruled that it was legal to include to critical information and rejected the claim that Wikimedia Deutschland was legally responsible for the article in question. The publishing company intents to appeal the decision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-05-26/News_and_notes

Media

[Live; dead on wiki] - Wikipedia vs Associated Press.

http://blog.syracuse.com/newstracker/2008/06/wikipedia_vs_ap.html

Stats

[Voters stats] - parcial statistics of the voter turnout indicate that few actually vote. The Hebrew Wikipedia has most users who use the voting right. Most in numbers is the English language Wikipedia.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30693

[Bla-bla] - Wikipedia NL has more spoken articles (735) then EN Wikipedia (728).

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_en_Ernie -- example (press play button)

Other news

[Britannica] - a new website run by the Encyclopaedia Britannica will be a bit like wikipedia. EN hopes to created a community of people who work on their encyclopedia under thiee real name and revise articles and write articles. The EB Staff keeps editorial control. Submissions will need to be approved to be included in the article.

Offtopic request for help

[Vote for Oscar!] - this is an experiment. This to see what, if any, the responds is. You are requested to vote for Oscar, a Belgian cat (you can see that because of the beer bottle) in a competition of Whiskas.

go to the vote page (link below)
enter your name ("Voornaam" and "Naam") and email.
ignore the check box (check if you like to get Dutch catfood emails) and the lower input options
click on the purple "Breng je stem uit" button.
You get an email from "makeyourcatastar@whiskas.be" - click on the purple button "Ik bevestig mijn stem!" to confirm your vote
done

Oscar says; "burp" (= thank you)

http://tinyurl.com/6eubno

Quote

"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." -- Bruce Graham

Number of subscribers: 710 Unique Visitors website last week: 154 Number of votes for Oscar: 21 Editor(s): Walter
Thanks to: Spacebirdy, Nathan Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 22 Tech flash

2008-05-27T22:01:00.001Z

Single User Login (SUL), the system that you have one user account for all Wikimedia Foundation wikis is now live for all users. Until now it was only for sysops.

Please read first the documentation before about it before using it. Stewards can undo the merge of an account be try to avoid the need for it. If you wish to unsurp an account on some wiki do that before you merge your account.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MergeAccount
#wikimedia-tech
#wikimedia-stewards

http://chat.wikizine.org

Editor(s): Walter Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 21 Number: 95

2008-05-21T22:35:00.001Z

Technical news

[Sighted revisions] - a system to hide edits made by certain groups of users from visitors as long as the edit is not approved by a user who has the user rights to approve the edit - This is now active on the German language Wikipedia. "Surveyor" is the title of a user who has approval rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-05-12/Sighted_revisions

[Special:GlobalUsers] - on this special page you can see who has a global account. Works on all wikis, not only Meta.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalUsers

Request for discussion

[Wikibooks logo] - For the last 2 years Wikibooks is in the process of selecting a new logo for Wikibooks and Wikijunior. Community involvement and feedback, discussion is requested to move things forward.

Foundation

[Board election] - one seat on the Board of Trustees is open for election. Candidates can submit their candidacy until 22 May.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008

[Board restructuring] - the WMF board of trustees will increase from the current 8 to 10. The board will be comprised of: 3 elected community members, 2 members selected by the chapters, 1 board-appointed 'community founder' seat and 4 "specific expertise" seats (also Board-appointed).

[Exit Anthere] - Florence Devouard, Chair of the WMF board of trustees, will not seek reelection for a seed in the board. As a result after the conclusion of the current board election Anthere will not longer be a member of the board and chair of the board. Anthere is a board member since June 2004.
[WMF bylaws] - the WMF passed a resolution to update the bylaws.

http://tinyurl.com/66krxt

[Wikimania 2008] - registration is open. The price is $45 until 30th of May. After that it is $60.

http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration

[MS MediaPlayer needed] - Based on the current information users who wish to view parts of Wikimania 2008 online will need to get access to a Windows system with MS MediaPlayer to be able to view the video content.

http://webcast.bibalex.org/home/home.aspx

[Wikimania security] - a FAQ is posted regarding security concerns regarding Wikimania. Also an "Egypt Country Profile prepared by Clayton Associates" that can be useful reading for all who go to Wikimania is online

Media

[Good reading] - Article about Wikipedia and Britannica

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080516/0916211136.shtml

[OMG! WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDEREN??!!] - Some people are concerned about pictures of (parts of) people without clothes that can be found in Wikipedia.

Stats

[MediaWiki stats] - some stats of several wikis, also non WMF wikis, who use MediaWiki.

http://s23.org/wikistats/

Other news

[Google Translate] - the translation function of Google is expanded with many new languages (and even identifies the language for you!). This can be useful to solve the babel problem when you try to communicate on a projects whose language you do not know.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-translate-becomes-best-online.html

[Wikibook2pdf] - online tool to create a pdf-book of a wikibook book.

http://blogpaper.com/mediawiki2pdf

Did you know ...

... that a pencil sharpener 'is a device for sharpening a pencil's point by shaving the end of the pencil'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_sharpener

This was the first "Did you know" of the English language Wikipedia, posted on February 22, 2004.

Quote

"My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel." -- Saudi Arabian saying

Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): Philippe, Cbrown , Thanks to: mutante, Mike_lifeguard , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 17 Number: 94

2008-04-24T09:07:00.001Z

Technical news

[Suggestions] - A function has been enabled on the projects that gives a drop-down menu with search suggestions.
- http://leuksman.com/log/2008/04/21/suggestion-search-drop-down/
[New search tests] - Testing is underway of a new search system to replace the current wiki-search function. The new system is supposed to give a more "google-like" search experience.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/37611
- http://ls2.wikimedia.org/ - location of experimental search system
[Global blocking?] - A MediaWiki extension has been created that makes global blocking of IP addresses on all WMF wikis possible. Discussion is opened about whether this is a good idea, how it can be used, and by whom.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/37704
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_blocking
[Global login] - Users who already have a global account for the projects still need to login to every wiki independently. There is a global login but no global session. The developers are working on this. Brion explains a possible way for doing this and the security risks.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/37661
- http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_session_threat_assessment
[OpenID] - Regarding the possible implementation of OpenID on the WMF-projects, Brion says: "We may [implement this] at some point, but it's a much lower priority atm, and requires more review to make sure we're happy with how it'll look and behave."
- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/37671
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID

Foundation

[Board Treasurer] - A non-elected seat on the Board of Trustees has been filled by Stuart West, who is the new Treasurer of the Board.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/28722 -- announcement on Foundation-l
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/28753 -- "Hello" from Stuart West
- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board#Stuart_West
[New jobs] - the Wikimedia Foundation has job openings for 3 functions related to the organisation of future fundraising drives.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/28517
[Wikimania 2008] - Requests for scholarships (financial support) to go to Wikimania in Egypt were opened but are now closed again. Sorry. The timeframe was to short to make it in time for Wikizine.
- http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
[Large donation] - the WMF has received a new large donation. It is US$500,000 from Vinod and Neeru Khosla.
- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_Releases/Khosla_Gift
[WMF blog] - a Foundation blog has been started. WMF staff will post news and information about the work they're engaged in that is not large enough to need a press release, but is still noteworthy. Also, guest contributors, board members and so on can post... but anyone can comment!
- http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/04/11/welcome/

Community

[Wikiportret] - the Dutch Wikimedia chapter presents a service to make it more easy for famous people or there managers to submit pictures for use on the projects.
The front-end is a basic website with clear and easy instructions to submit a picture. After this an email is sent to the OTRS team (who need to verify the submission) and if is is accepted they put in on Commons.
Currently there is only a Dutch language version of this service in use, but support for more languages is possible and intended. (However, for many languages this already exists by use of a page on the wiki Contact form.)
To support this project templates are placed on (Dutch) articles of people who have not yet a picture to point to the special website. Also an advertisement is created that can be used for publication by people who wish to support this project.
- http://www.wikiportret.nl
- http://www.wikiportrait.org -- multi-language version (only Dutch works)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us/Photo_submission -- English Wikipedia (and four other language versions linked from the sidebar)
[EN Wikinews] - a bot active on the English Wikipedia is helping to bring the news articles of the sister project Wikinews to the attention of the Wikipedia readers. This bot will update pages on Wikipedia with relevant Wikinews articles, including the addition of Television portal links to recent Wikinews articles that are about television related topics.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikinews_Importer_Bot
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Television

Media

[Documentary] - On the Dutch (Netherlands) public television, a 50-minute documentary about Wikipedia has been broadcast at prime time, and uninterrupted by commercials. An English-language version is available on YouTube.
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMSinyx_Ab0
- http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/afleveringen/39405191/

Stats

[By page view] - Overview of how much traffic the different Wikipedias receive. English gets 50%, German 10% and Japanese 9.5%.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/27602
[2000th featured article] - the English language Wikipedia now has 2000 featured articles. The latest Signpost features an interview about it.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-04-14/2000th_FA
[Wiktionary] - the Japanese has 30,000 definitions, the French has 800,000 definitions and the English also has almost 800,000.
- http://ja.wiktionary.org
- http://fr.wiktionary.org

Other news

[Britannica free!] - ... at least for bloggers. The Encyclopædia Britannica is now giving away free accounts for their encyclopedia to "web publishers". Also articles of EB are now free for all to read, if you go to the article by means of an hyperlink posted online. You can only read that one specific article, if you jump to any other article the text is shielded by a subscribe option.... at least if you have javascript enabled. If you disable javascript in your browser, everyone (without the need to login) can read all articles of Britannica.
- http://britannicanet.com/?page_id=15
- http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/18/encyclopedia-britannica-now-free-for-bloggers/
- http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192818/Wikipedia -- The "Wikipedia" article on EB (if this doesn't work use the online link on en.wikizine.org)
- http://www.britannica.com/bps/home -- MainPage (disable javascript)
[Wikipedia book] - come autumn 2008, the publisher Bertelsmann will publish a German-language printed edition of Wikipedia that contains information on about 50,000 topics on 1000 pages. The price will be EUR 19.95 (US$32). The Wikimedia Foundation will receive EUR 1 for every copy.
- http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/04/22/wikipedia-in-german-book-form/
- http://tinyurl.com/4fx4n2 Slashdot news item
[Wikipedia Chemistry] - Yet another book: KnowledgePublications is publishing an English language book about hydrogen (H). It contains large parts of the chemistry related articles of EN wp. The book is titled, "The Chemical Educator: for The Chemistry and Manufacture of Hydrogen". The published says it is one of the best books ever written on the manufacture of hydrogen.
- http://www.send2press.com/newswire/2008-04-0416-003.shtml
- http://tinyurl.com/65c49c -- view of the book
[ID Wikizine] - the Indonesian language edition of Wikizine has been closed due to lack of interest and assistance.

Did you know ...

... that even changes that were active during a very brief amount of time can pop up for a long time afterwards as the version a visitor will see?

On the first of April was the tag-line changed several times. That is the string of text that normally says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Seven days later, when requesting an article as a visitor, the version of the article displayed contained the version of the tagline that was active for only one minute on the first of April.

The reason is that for the servers to be able to take care of the very large volume of traffic the sites get, pages are cached. Anonymous users get a previously saved version to see. The cache of a page expires after 31 days.

Moral of the story: even a "joke edit" that is only live for a minute or so can show up to visitors up to a month later.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/37598

Quote

"Spanking or hitting a skunk is not recommended"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-04-14/WikiWorld

Number of subscribers: 710 , Unique Visitors website last week: 86 , Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): Philippe, Oliphaunt, Cbrown1023 Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 14 Number: 93 Extra

2008-04-03T20:41:00.001Z

Foundation

[Wikimania 2009] - on March 28, after a long wait since February 28, the jury that would determine the location of Wikimania 2009 chose Buenos Aires, Argentina. This is the first time that a Spanish-speaking country will harbor the largest gathering of Wikimedians. Other bids for Wikimania 2009 were from the cities of Toronto (Canada), Brisbane (Australia), and Karlsruhe (Germany).

This is the first occasion that the convention will be done in two languages (English and Spanish) and will be carried out in the southern hemisphere of the planet, on August 28-30, 2009, according to information presented by the local organization.

Backing this bid was Wikimedia Argentina (presided by Patrician Lorente), which did everything to present to the capital of Argentina as a place for Wikimedians to come and visit.

The jury picked the Latin American city due to the large Spanish-language projects of the Foundation (wikipedia, wikinoticias, wikilibros, etc.) and the cultural significance of the city. The jury also emphasized the great commitment of the organization and the activity that has developed Wikimedia Argentina from December 2007.

[Interview] - In a brief interview, Patrician Lorente (President of Wikimedia Argentina) responded to questions about Buenos Aires as headquarters of Wikimania 2009.

This interview was arranged and published in the Spanish language edition of Wikizine ( ES2008-93 extra). A machine translation of it is in included below.

<babelfish translation>

Wikizine: How arose the restlessness from Wikimania in Wikimedia Argentina?

Patricio: It even arose before organizing to us like Wikimedia Argentina formally. Our sensation is as much the Spanish-speaking world as the South hemisphere has, by different reasons, a marginal participation in the global community of Wikimedia, that does not correspond with the real participation in the projects. Even let us remember that the Wikipedia in Spanish second more is visited and than the Spanish-speaking community, with its overwhelming heterogeneity and complexity is growing and it is being organized of admirable way.

W: Which were the main problems that were in the organization?

P: We have not had serious problems still, but the hard work just begins. Until now we have had to work in the development of a project, from the resolution of the jury of Wikimanía 2009 we will have to take that project to the practice.

W: What is the hope of this event?
P: We hope to turn to the Spanish-speaking community and the South hemisphere assets protagonists of the global dynamics of the Wikimedia projects. We want to show our European and North American friends whom an anxious community exists here and worker who is perhaps sometimes invisible for many. Perhaps that the ideal of the free knowledge has a more meant and particular importance in these places of the world in which the difficulties to the access to the education and the knowledge are multiplied for vast social sectors.

W: A message for the readers of Wikizine.
P: That we waited for them in Buenos Aires! The projects brothers of the Wikipedia already take own flight and is necessary to show them the community.

</babelfish translation>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buenos Aires
http://wikitravel.org/en/Buenos_Aires
http://www.wikimedia.org.ar - Wikimedia Argentina
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2009/Bids/Buenos_Aires - Candidatura de Buenos Aires para Wikimania 2009

Editor(s): Dennis Tobar ([[meta:User:Superzerocool]]) Translator: Casey Brown Thanks to: Patricio Lorente Construction: Walter
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 13 Number: 93

2008-03-26T16:09:00.001Z

Technical news
Single User Login

SUL. Single User Login. Bug 57. Unified login. One login for all wikis. The mythical uberlogin has migrated to The Real World.

The migration function is enabled currently for sysops only. The options to migrate can be found on the first page of the account preferences page on the projects were you're a sysop. From there you can follow the instructions to claim all you accounts on all wikis that have the same username. After the migration you can log on all these wikis with the same password.

For the migration to work you need to have the same email address or password on all your user accounts. You can claim the rest of the accounts with your name by providing their password.

The current sysop-only migration is to collect information for the general user migration later. Sysops who have problems are strongly encouraged to report them so that they can be fixed before SUL is rolled out generally.

By migrating now (if you can) you have the advantage that you can use that username to log in to all WMF wikis as long as there is not a local user account with your name that is not yours.

Please note that not everhings works yet when you migrate. For example renaming an account can not be done (for now at least). Inform you before you do it.

[Upload auto-confirmed] - upload of files on all Wikimedia sites except Commons is now restricted to auto-confirmed users. That are user accounts older then 4 days.

http://tinyurl.com/2vuz8m

[Search changed] - the technical side of the search function of the wikis has changed. As a result some wikis who have used javascript to include external search engines may experience glitches requiring an update of the local code.

Request for help

[Stable Versions] - testwikis are setup for tests of the stable versions function. This function makes it possible to rate the quality of an article. Feedback is requested from users who volunteer to test the function.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/37372

[Scholarship] - translations are requested of the Wikimania 2008 scholarships information page.

http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Translation/Scholarships

Foundation

[+ $3,000,000] - The board of the "Alfred P. Sloan Foundation" has granted the Wikimedia Foundation 1 million dollars (US) per year for the next three years. This is the largest donation made to the Foundation in its history. Note: 1 million USD = 642302 EUR / 501669 GBP

[New hire] - the WMF has hired a new accountant, Mary Lou Secoquian, who will work in San Francisco.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/27279

Community

[NotTheWikipediaWeekly] - On the English language Wikipedia a new audio podcast project about Wikipedia has started. They announce a time to meet in a skypecast, talk about Wikipedia topics and publish the recordings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NotTheWikipediaWeekly

Awards

[IT Wikipedia] - The Italian Wikipedia has won the a category award of "PremioWWW-Il sole 24 ore" a competition organized by the most important business newspaper in Italy (Il Sole 24 ore). The winners were selected by jury from the shortlist composed by the 5 sites that obtained the highest score through a popular vote. This is the second time that it.wiki wins "PremioWWW-Il sole 24 ore". Last time was two years ago.

http://premiowww.ilsole24ore.com/vincitori.php

Stats

[Animated stats] - Our grandmaster of statistics Erik Zachte has made a new form of Wikipedia-stats. Animated statistics; bubbles representing the projects floating true time and number of articles. It is available in an interactive format that works currently with FireFox 3.0 release candidate. A flash version that works with any browser (8MB) is also available.

Other news

[Schoolbook] - A publisher of schoolbooks in Japan is using a Wikipedia map as illustration. It is the world map of death penalty sentences.

Did you know ...

... Microsoft also uses MediaWiki ?

Microsoft researcher Steve Ickman said while Microsoft SharePoint is great, MediaWiki has valuable features not found in SharePoint - particularly the ability to archive.

http://tinyurl.com/ysbz6n

http://tinyurl.com/2ar5jo

Quote

"Do not leave your children unattended. All unattended children will be eaten." -- Friendly advice from vulture in movie "Ice age 2"

Number of subscribers: 712 , Unique Visitors website last week: 132 , Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): 2 who do not wish to take credit for it , Thanks to: Nick , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

Year: 2008 Week: 10 Number: 92

2008-03-07T11:26:00.001Z

Technical news

[__HIDDENCAT__] - there is a new magic word __HIDDENCAT__ When used on a "Category:Foobar"-page it is not listed among the other categories at the bottom of an article in the category.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/36831

[New dump!] - There is a new database dump of the English language Wikipedia. The full dump of EN Wikipedia, all articles, full history is 130gb (compressed).

http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20080103/ -- EN Wikipedia dump
http://download.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html -- other wikis dump

[New Skin] - When you go to your "preferences" you have the option "skin" where you can select what the interface will look like. The default skin is Monobook. There are several others to choice from but besides "classic" they are not very usable. But now is there a new good looking and usable skin: "Modern". Check it out.

http://tinyurl.com/22gsy6 -- Wikipedia style "Modern"

[RC on IRC] - Recent changes of the projects are posted on IRC by means of a Wikimedia IRC-server. By request access to this service has been added to the Wikizine IRC gateway for a selection of projects.

http://chat.wikizine.org

Request for help

[Wikimania 2008] - Call for Participation; Submissions are open until 16 March. Submissions are warmly welcomed

http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Participation

Foundation

[4 new Wikimedia Chapters] - The board of the Wikimedia Foundation approved 4 new chapters. The new chapters are: Wikimedia Česká republika, Wikimedia Österreich, Wikimedia Australia Incorporated, Wikimedia Hong Kong Limited

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters

[Wikimanina 2008] - A site risk assessment will be ordered for Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt announced Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. Concern for the safety of Wikimanians in Alexandria has been a topic on Foundation-l and the assessment will look at various threats.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/26221

[Board elections 2008] - there is a call for election officials

Media

[Sue on CNET] - Video intervieuw of Sue Gardner (executive director of the WMF) about the Jimmy Wales buzz and Wikipedia.

http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-32449.html

[Wikipedia in Africa] - story about Wikipedia on DVD in Africa.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/23906

[1984] - Japan is considering legislation to "govern top news Web sites"

http://tinyurl.com/2dt26j

[The Economist] - inclusionists versus deletionists

http://tinyurl.com/23agss

Stats

[WikiWoordenboek] - the Dutch language Wiktionary passed the 30,000 page milestone.

http://www.wikiwoordenboek.org

[Counts] - The Wikimedia Commons has reached 2,500,000 media files.
[Again new stats] - A site that is using the squid logs to generate Wikipedia article traffic statistics. You can get the stats for a specific article or get a list of the most popular pages. There can you learn that for some reason "Canine reproduction" is very popular.

http://stats.grok.se

[Wikipedia is 2nd in the world!] - at least in the "2008 Web Globalization Report Card". The number of languages supported is a big factor in this ranking.

http://bytelevel.com/news/reportcard2008.html

Other news

[Dirty dishes] - Bad week for Jimmy Wales. His personal life is getting media coverage. It is reported that Jimmy had a brief relationship with Rachel Marsden, a conservative blogger who works in the media industry. The relationship broke off and Rachel Marsden provided private communications between herself and Jimmy to a gossip site, which published them. Jimmy published a statement about it on his blog.

And at the same time Danny Wool, ex WMF staff member, published a blog posting where he writes about his time at the Wikimedia Foundation and requests for reimbursement of expenses by Jimmy, among other things.

http://blog.jimmywales.com/index.php/statement/
http://tinyurl.com/22t42g -- Wikinews article
http://allswool.blogspot.com/2008/03/money-for-nothing-chicks-for-free.html
http://tinyurl.com/23f3am -- Signpost article about it

[Encyclopedia of Life] - the EOL has gone live with more than one million species pages that are mostly minimal articles. Only 25 articles are like the EOL wishes the articles to be, articles containing rich media with extensive information.

http://www.eol.org/

[About Wikipedia] - author John Broughton wrote the book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" . A guide to editing Wikipedia. ISBN 0596515162

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-03-03/Book_review

[CNN goes (a bit) Wikinews] - CNN, an American news network, has started a website where everyone can submit news and pictures. As it looks now every article has only one author and people can post comments about it. So it is more a blog than a wiki.

http://beta.ireport.com/

[Wikileaks] - An attempt to bring down Wikileaks has failed. There was a DOS-attack, a fire at their web hosting facility and the release of lawyers who obtained a court order to remove the domain "wikileaks.org" from DNS. Wikileaks did remain online by means of other domains and by entering the ip-address. The court order was later revoked. Wikileaks.org is again online.

http://tinyurl.com/2pbk3q

[Wikirace] - Wikirace.org is game where you compete with other people to try get from one "start-article" to try to reach the "end-article" in as few steps as possible.

http://wikirace.org

Message to the readers

Wikizine is there to inform you, readers, about the news related to the Wikimedia projects or what seem relevant to inform you about.
It has been increasingly more difficult to get a new edition ready for distribution the last half year. At present the publication rate is below the necessary frequency necessary to inform our readers in a timely manner about the relevant news.
Because of this I recommend, as editor, that the readers of Wikizine read the Wikipedia Signpost as their primary internal news source to keep informed. -- meta:user:Walter , Editor of Wikizine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost

Did you know ...

... there is dedicated program to browse Wikipedia visually?

The program is called indywiki. (And no, it has nothing to do with Indymedia.) Basically it is a GUI that displays Wikipedia content in a different way then your browser. Focus is on the visual aspect. You search for a entry, you get a selection of pictures related to that article. By clicking on an image you can browse Wikipedia. Also is there a text box that displays text sections of the article, a list of sections of the article and a list of external links. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Indywiki is young software and the main developer is looking for assistance with this project. The developer is looking for a python developer to work on features and people who can work on the GUI to make it better looking.

http://indywiki.sourceforge.net/ -- website
http://indywiki.sourceforge.net/indywiki_fosdem.pdf -- presentation of Indywiki
Contact indywiki: <mgogoulos AT gmail DOT com>

Quote

"[..] And for the encyclopedia, it turned out
that a volunteer model was able to do quite a reasonable job." -- Bill Gates reffering to Wikipedia

http://tinyurl.com/32kpw9

Number of subscribers: 714 , Visitors website last week: 170 Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Annabel, Effeietsanders , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html