en.Wikizine.org

Technical news

• [Autoblockedtext] - If you block a user you have the option to also block the ip address that this user is using. This appears in the blocklog as a number like "#47980". There is now a special message to be displayed to users who try to edit when the are blocked because of a hidden autoblock. The text of the page [[MediaWiki:Autoblockedtext]] is send to that user. The only way to know what the ip address is that is blocked is if the blocked user can give the block ID. This number is included in the default message so the blocked user needs to include this in his communication. A sysop can then look in the blocklist for that ID and unblock it.
• [image border] - There is a new display instruction for images. The new one is "border". The result is a very small gray border. The idea is that some images because of there colors flow over in the background of a page when used. By putting a small border around it the border between the image and the page is more clear.

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images -- Example,  see MediaWiki logo
• [Special] -  There is a new special page that gives a list of all articles that have no interwiki links. It is a stored lists that is only updated some times.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Withoutinterwiki
• [404] - The Esperanto Wikipedia, one of the older Wikipedias, has lost, possibly definitive, an old file from there early days. Due to changes of url's and systems for uploading files the path to the file is broken. To prevent this from happening it is best to look on your wiki to links to old files. The are using absolute url's using the wikipedia.com-domain. If the are not inside the current local or commons upload system then save them and re-upload them or put them somewhere safe. At least if you want to keep the early history of your wiki.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/31770
• [Wap] - A special gateway to Wikipedia for mobile devices is created under the Wikipedia-flag, a wap-portal. It exists in a few languages including German, Spanish and English and is fairly buggy. There is a good alternative: wapedia.mobi
• http://de.wap.wikipedia.org
• http://es.wap.wikipedia.org
• http://en.wap.wikipedia.org
• http://wapedia.mobi
  

Foundation

• [Wikimedia IT] -  Wikimedia Italia is working on an agreement to obtain part of the image archive of Società Geografica Italiana. SGI is one of the most important and respected geographical institutes of the world. Founded in 1867, the Society owns thousands of precious historic volumes, maps and a huge archive of photos related to colonialism and the XX century's explorations. On Friday May 18, some members of it.wiki met Franco Salvatori, president of Società Geografica Italiana. The meeting resulted in an exclusive interview for IT Wikinews.
• http://it.wikinews.org/wiki/La_Societ%C3%A0_della_Geografia
• [Legal] - The German Wikimedia chapter was sued by a powerful German lobby/public relations organisation. This because of a negative comment by an anonymous user on a archived talk page about them that did not amused them. The sued the German WMF chapter because in there opinion Wikimedia DE has control over the German language Wikipedia. The lost and also the appeal.
• http://www.wikimedia.de/2007/05/wikimedia-gegen-insm/
• http://www.golem.de/0705/52486.html
• http://www.onlinepc.ch/index.cfm?page=104029&artikel_id=13889
  

Community

• [RIP] - Norwegian Wikimedian, journalist, and author Tron Øgrim [[w:no:User:Togrim]] passed away last week.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-28/Wikipedian_death
• [Wikisource News]  - Presents the news from Wikisource from January to May 2007.
• http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:News/2007-05-01/Wikisource_report -- (en)
• [Wikiopen] - The Hakka Wikipedia, a spoken variation of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the Hakka ethnic group has been created.
• http://hak.wikipedia.org/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_language
• [Wikiclose] - The Old English Wikisource has been closed.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Old_English_Wikisource
• http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10059
  

Awards

• [IT Wikipedia] -  was granted one of the nine Special Prizes of the Grand Prix di Pubblicità Italia (Advertising Grand Prix of Italy)  for "succeeding in exploiting the Internet potential at its best, directly involving users for a widespread growth of culture". Wikimedia Italia board member Ivan Vighetto attended the gala, and received the prize, a plaque. The event had great resonance on Italian media.
• http://www.pubblicitaitalia.it/news.asp?id_news=41827 -- (it)
  

Media

• [Club of Rome] - Anthere at the Club of Rome
• http://euforic.blogspot.com/2007/05/behind-screens-at-wikipedia.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
• [Audio & video]  - Good audio interview with Jimmy Wales and David Weinberger. And Jimmy also made an appearance as a guest in the American satirical television program "The Colbert Report".  
• http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/wikipedia_is_ju.html  -- Audio interview, 22min
• http://www.newscloud.com/read/Jimmy_Wales_The_Colbert_Report -- video fragment, turn brain off before watching 
• http://blog.valuewiki.com/2007/05/29/more-stephen-colbert-wiki-pranks/
  

Stats

• [NL.wp & IT.wp] - The Dutch language Wikipedia has passed the 300,000 article mark almost exactly one year after the 200,000 mark.  The NL Wikipedia is the 7th largest Wikipedia. With only 22 million speakers the Dutch language Wikipedia is compared with the larger Wikipedias versus there number of speakers extremely large. Also the Italian language Wikipedia has now 300,000 articles. With 60 to 120 million speakers the are one step higher then the Dutch at the 6th place.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
• [FR.wp] - The French Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles.
• [The Wiki top 50] - An attempt to make a top 50 of the most popular wiki on the the internet according Alexa.com and Google PageRank.  Number one we know but on the second place is a surprize, we have "Adobe labs wiki" as the second most popular wiki.
• http://www.advolcano.com/blog/?p=11
• http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
  

Other news

• [Clean School WP] - This week a website went live with a "2007 Wikipedia selection for schools". Created by SOS Children, a charity focust on orphan and abandoned children,  is aimed at British school children following the National Curriculum, and consists of all of the English Wikipedia's Good and Featured Articles, excluding content SOS Children deemed 'adult'. The site uses the Wikipedia logo, with permission. The content of there website is also available as a CD-rom or DVD that can be downloaded for free from there website.
• http://schools-wikipedia.org/
• [The perfect logo] - The Wikipedia logo appears to be very "Wikipedia" in the meaning that there are mistakes on it. Some of the characters on the globe are reported to be incorrect. Editing the logo seems to be from a technical and possibly also from a legal (trademark) POV difficult.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ambuj.Saxena/Wikipedia-logo
• [Wikizine] - The last weeks the domain wikizine.org  has been down several times for longer periodes of time. This is a direct result of the hoster of Wikizine.org being down. When this is noticed the DNS-settings of the domain is changed to a back-up  hoster to be able to provide minimal service. Because of possible slow updating of DNS-servers it can take a long time before Wikizine resolves at your location. 

Weird ...
And now music ....
Quote

Encyclopedias are now suffering obsolescence (*), evolving from traditional publishing to a new form - I don't know what this form is [...] but we sure have a new horizon in front of us, related to the very bases of encyclopedicism, and '''you are the reality that matters now from this point of view'''. [...] Encyclopedia is not dead: its spirit is not dead, the Enlightenment spirit is not dead. -- F. Salvatori, SGI (La Società della Geografia)

(*) the state, process, or condition of being or becoming obsolete


Number of subscribers: 653 , Unique Visitors website last week: 295 , Editor(s): Walter, Garry Kirk , Corrector(s): ivanlanin , Thanks to: Jollyroger, ivanlanin  ,
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , New: Wikizine bahasa Indonesia , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a weekly 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

Labels: audio interview jimbo, award, DVD, SOS Children, video interview jimbo, wap, wikiclose, Wikimedia IT, wikiopen

=== Technical news ===

[Captcha] For anti-spam reasons you have to enter the code displayed as a
graphic to sign-up for an account on the smaller wikis. There is not yet a
solution for visually limited users.
http://fy.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&type=signup

[Anti-spam] Tim Starling has made spam-removing scripts. I your wiki is infested
with url-spam, Tim can wipe it clean. Ask at #wikimedia-tech.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/21785

[New Dump] of the database of all projects is running.
http://download.wikimedia.org/

=== Request for help ===

[WikiAuthors] - A new project proposal for the disambiguation of authors' names
in MEDLINE, an online database of biomedical literature.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/5949
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAuthors

=== Foundation ===

[reform] The board of the Wikimedia Foundation decided to reform their
organisation. The official positions are to be supplemented with a series of
new committees. Like the "Financial committee", "Executive committee" and so
on. All together 8 committees. The actual form how those committees will work
is still under development. Angela welcomes suggestions from people who have
experience with the organisation of non-profit organizations.

This board-meeting was special because of the high number of physical present
key figures of the Wikimedia Foundation. The meeting toeck place in Sint
Petersburg, Florida from January 13th until the 15th. The board members;
Angela, Jimmy (Jimbo), Michael Davis, and Tim Shell where present. And 5 others
involved with the Foundation; Brad Patrick (legal counsel), Delphine
(notafish), Danny Wool, Daniel (mav), and Jean-Baptiste Soufron (Wikimédia
France). Florence (Anthere), Brion VIBBER and Domas Mituzas (Midom,
dev&system-admin) joined by telephone.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings/January_14-15,_2006 - (does not
yet exist on 2006-01-29)
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/5957
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/5996 - concerns by Erik
Moeller

[Almost] Wikimedia Canada and Wikimedia Netherlands do not yet exist but there
founders are confident it will not take much longer.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada
http://nl.wikimedia.org/
http://nl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ledenlijst - list of users interested to become a
member

=== Community ===

[WikiNews] does original reporting. Suggestions are made by the Wikinews
community as to who should be interviewed. And in the best Wikimedia-tradition
there is a vote about it. And then they attempt to make it happen. Recent
interviews were with Ricardo Lobo, Brazilian online journalist, and Danny
O'Brien, Electronic Frontier Foundation's Activism Coodinator.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview_with_Brazilian_blogger_Ricardo_Serran_Lobo
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Interview:_Danny_O'Brien_of_the_Electronic_Frontier_Foundation
- The interview
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Interview_of_the_month
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wikinews/204

=== Media ===

[Print] Directmedia, the company who brought us the German Wikipedia on CD and
DVD, announced that they will publish the German Wikipedia in full print, 100
volumes with 800 pages each, starting with the letter A in October 2006, to end
with Z in 2010.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/26459
http://www.wp10.de/
http://www.pcwelt.de/news/unterhaltung/130716/index.html?NLC-Newsletter&id=130716

["News"???] A de-sysopping on the dutch language Wikipedia somehow became
international "news". Next week more about this.

[pants down] - Wikipedia Entries 'Cleaned' By Political Staffers from the U.S.
House of Representatives and it becomes big news in the USA general media.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Congressional_staff_actions_prompt_Wikipedia_investigation
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/29/1732238
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/United_States_Congress
http://news.google.com/news?q=wikipedia+meehan&filter=0

=== Stats ===

[Fund Drive] User:Tobacman has created statistics about the Wikimedia fund
drives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tobacman/Stats/Fundraising
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/5938

=== Other news ===

[Nature] - All the errors that "Nature" discoverd in the 50 articles the checked
on EN Wikipedia are now corrected. 50 done, only 943881 to go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review/Nature_December_2005/Errors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/Nature_compares_Wikipedia_and_Britannica

=== Did you know ... ===

... there is a special FireFox Wikipedia-toolbar?

The toolbar gives a easy way for inserting formatting commands, dialog based
creation of tables, many special characters and more. A very useful function is
the pull-down menu for selecting and inserting templates. Even if you do not
find it extremely useful you can always install it and deactivate the toolbar.
(right click on the toolbar) and use it when you need it. It works for all
MediaWiki-wikis, so its name should actually rather be "MediaWiki-toolbar".

http://wikipedia.mozdev.org/
http://wikipedia.mozdev.org/screenshots.html

=== The last Q4 fund drive quotes ===

"Information wants to be free; and I'm willing to pay for its freedom." by Mike
Sollanych
"Stuart Brand said "information wants to be free." We have to pay its bail." by
Bob McCoy
"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin"
by Jonathan Rosen
"Sterling stuff. If it wasn't for Wikipedia I'd have learned next to nothing
this week about norse gods, diamond mining, Rubik's cubes and Braille" by Chris
Rae
"The price I would pay monthly to Britannica I'd rather donate to Wikipedia." by
Piotr Przemyslaw Karwasz

"This project has been helpful in my graduate studies." by William Myatt
"I want to thank you (and your daughter) for this site - I owe my 'A' grades
this fall to Wikipedia and I thought you should know. As a student, this is all
I can afford! For now, anyway..." by anonymous
"I am a physics graduate student from China. I enjoy using Wikipedia!" by Meng
Lu

=== Privacy and Wikizine ===

The subscribers list of Wikizine was only available to the readers of Wikizine.
For a real discussion list that is not unreasonable because by posting you
expose also your identity and email address. But Wikizine is a read-only list
and that is not the same. The list settings are now changed to hide the
subscribers' addresses.

---

Editor(s): Walter, Oscar

Labels: board, captcha, DVD, spam filter, wikinews

=== Technical news ===

[Berlin roundup] Brion has gone to Berlin for a conference and to meet
some people like Magnus and JeLuf and posted a report about that on
Meta. Very interesting. Like that it seems that the mythical Universal
Login will become reality soon.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Brion_VIBBER/Berlin_roundup
[New Specialpage] Filepath that allows user agents to get the full path
of a file from its name. Active on all wikis, for all users
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Filepath
[Cite] Cite.php is a Cite extension that adds two parser hooks to
MediaWiki, and , these operate together to add
citations to pages.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cite/Cite.php
[SSL] Brion is experimenting with a HTTPS interface to the wikis. This
service is *not* ready for the general public or even real use. Do not
send your visitors to those url's. It is also buggy for some wikis. For
example on the dutch Wikipedia you get the message that the database is
locked when you try to edit. And when you block a user it appears
successful but it is not.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/21277
Example;
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ English Wikipedia
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikiquote/fr/wiki/ Frensh Wikiquote
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikinews/de/wiki/ German Wikines
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/ Meta
=== Request for help ===

[Q4] A Personal Appeal from Jimbo for donations. Please help translate
the personal appeal from Jimbo Wales. EN, IT and PT version are now online.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Personal_Appeal

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q4_planning/Translations#Personal_Appeal

=== Community ===

[Book/DVD] A 139 page book in German explaining Wikipedia, its history and policies was accompanied by a 7.5 GB DVD containing 300,000 articles and 100,000 images from the German language Wikipedia. The book with DVD is sold for 9.90 Euro; both are also available for free download.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/German_DVD/Book_release_-_december_2005

=== Media ===

[W$k$p€d$a] with ads? "Wikipedia chief considers taking ads" reports Times Online.

Responds of Jimbo about this;

"Somehow a statement from me "I continue to oppose having advertising on Wikipedia" is transformed into a headline "Wikipedia chief considers taking ads".
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1962714,00.html

=== Stats ===

The year 2005, and the month of December, were both record-breaking for Wikipedia.

The English Wikipedia more than doubled its body of articles in 2005, to almost 900,000; just over 50,000 of these were added in December alone - the first time we've grown by 50,000 articles in a single month. The Wikipedia project as a whole added almost 1.8 million new articles in 201 languages, 200,000 of them in December. With the exception of September, when the Italians and Poles went on a bot-rampage, December was the first time that the project gained 200,000 new articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Announcements


=== Did you know... ===

... that the only difference between non-digest and digest delivery of Wikizine is that digest readers have to wait between 12 and 24 hours longer before the receive the copy?

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/announce-l

=== Q4 fund drive Quotes ===

*"Wissen ist Macht. Und die Macht sollte beim Volk liegen und nicht bei Verwertungsgesellschaften." by anonymous (Knowledge is power. And the power should lie with the people and not with copyright collecting agencies.)

*"Knowledge will never be burnt again" by anonymous

*"How could I not donate to the Encyclopedia Galactica (well, in a hundred years or so... give it time)?" by Craig Hirsch

*"Wikipedia is better than corn chips, and I really like corn chips." by Chris Kilgour

*"Wikipedia is to the 21st Century what the library of Alexandria was to antiquity" by anonymous

*"With the stones of the past we build our future, and knowledge is how to use those stones." by Daniel Scallon

---

Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao

Labels: ads, DVD, fund drive, Single User Login, special page

# posted by Walter @ 10:14

=== Technical news ===

-[Sitemap] We now provide sitemaps for all Wikimedia wikis.
Sitemaps are XML lists of all the pages in a website.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/20316
http://sitemap.wikimedia.org/sitemap/

=== Policy ===

-[CheckUser] there is a draft-policy for the use of the "CheckUser" function.
Users who have this function can look-up the ipadress of any user.
This policy will apply for all Wikimedia projects.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_CheckUser_Policy


-[Bots] the page to request bot-status is from now on separated from the
general "Requests for permissions" page.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_bot_status

=== Foundation ===

-[Print Wikipedia] many media sources are reporting that Wikipedia will be
printed and sent to Africa around mid 2006.
Userfriendly has a nice cartoon about it.
Back in the real world; since end of 2004 there is a CD-rom and also a DVD
of the German Wikipedia.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/11/01/wikipedia.reut/
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20051102
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pressemitteilungen/Wikipedia-DVD

-[Wikimania2006] request for help for the organisation of Wikimania
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/4849

-[Wikiversity] the formal vote for this new project will close very soon
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity


=== Other news ===

- [New user level] the English Wikipedia is considering to create a new
category of users. Users with "Rollback privileges".
These will be registered users who have also a "rollback" link that you
see in the RC if you are a sysop.
Mediawiki supports this function but for the moment there is not yet an
interface to set this permission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_rollback_privileges

=== Quote ===

"To change time settings, do as Timwi instructed.

To change _time_, on the other hand, is a great deal more complex, and
I don't think anybody on this mailinglist wants to explain it." -- Mark
Williamson

=== Editorial comment ===

Wikizine has now the new section "Quote". In a ideal world this would contain
a new quote made the previous week by a member of the Wikimedia community.
But like you probably noticed already this is not an ideal world.
For this week I was lucky to find a good one on the mailing lists.
But mostly the quotes will be old ones from Wikipedians, geeks and similar.

After this Wikizine there is only one experimental issue left, number 0,
before we start with the real stuff. So if you have a comment about
Wikizine how to make it better or to help contact me.
I hope to receive at least the same response like on the Wikizine of last
week. I can now confirm there is at least one (1) reader of Wikizine.

---

Editor: [[w:nl:gebruiker:Walter]]

Labels: checkuser, DVD, editorial, print wikipedia, sitemap