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

• [SyntaxHighlight] - This is a function that is now live on all wikis. Its function is to display text, more programming code, in colors like it is custom for editors used by programmers to make the code more readable.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/31108
• http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi  -- See here how it works
• [Wikiclosed] - The Kanuri Wikipedia, language spoken mostly in Northern Nigeria, has been closed. The Low Saxon Wikiquote has also been closed.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Kanuri_Wikipedia
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Low_Saxon_Wikiquote
• [Wikiopen] - An Italian Wikiversity has been created.
• http://it.wikiversity.org/

• [Brand survey] -  Erik Moeller (board) drafted a survey on Wikimedia's brands: their perception, use,
  protection, and various potential reorganization options.  Edits/feedback on the current survey questions are welcome.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/17159
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_brand_survey

• [New Hire] - The WMF has hired Vishal Pattel as part-time business developer for the WMF. Mr. Pattel was already working as an intern for the WMF. To see what he will be doing and all the comments about it visit
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/17174  -- Announcement by Anthere (Chair WMF) - there are more postings then in this thread because it was broken several times.

• [Czech Wikipedia] - The Czech edition of Wikipedia has won the "Czech Open Source 2007" award in the reader's vote in the category "Project" and it has also been declared the overall winner of the contest as the subject with the biggest total number of reader's votes without regard for category.
  The award has been organized by Root.cz, a popular Czech news server oriented on Linux and free software in general.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/30117
• [Intelligent Award]  - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikia, Inc. founder and Angela Beesley were named as the 2007 Intelligent Community Visionaries of the Year by the Intelligent Community Forum.
• http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/associations/5315/files/2007_VisionaryAward_4-23-07.pdf
• http://tinyurl.com/28rfcs

• [en.wikinews] – Original reporting with prominent New Zealand blogger, David Farrar, opens doors for an exclusive interview with the Leader of the New Zealand Opposition, John Key.
• http://gpollard.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/another-exclusive-interview-for-wikinews/  

• [Jimmy] - Good quality video recording of a presentation done by Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia and Wikia in Bayreuth, Germany.  If you like to know what Jimmy is doing while travelling around the world, this is good video to see. It is also informative about Wikia. This is a long video.(01:17, 943mb, fast download). If you have no time, download it now and view it later. It is not a waste of time.
• http://cms-sprachlabor.split.uni-bamberg.de/av/2007/dgpuk/Wales.avi
• ["Left Wikipedia"] - Wikipedia is 'politically slanted' by the left, who are 'in control'.
• http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/5/13/212015.shtml?s=lh

• [Paper] - Two studies about EN Wikipedia; "Visualizing the Overlap between the 100 Most Visited Pages on Wikipedia" and "What is Popular on Wikipedia and Why?"
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-14/Academic_journal_coverage
• http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/spoerri/index.html
• http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/wilkinson/index.html
• [en.wikibooks] - The English Wikibooks has exceeded 75,000 total pages and 25,000 non-stub book modules.
• http://en.wikibooks.org/
• [ca.wp] - The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
• http://ca.wikipedia.org
• [ci.wp] - The Vietnamese Wikipedia is edited for the 600,000th time as Trungda makes changes to the article on "Mạc Ngọc Liễn", a figure from the Mạc Dynasty of northern Vietnam.
• http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BA%A1c_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc_Li%E1%BB%85n
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BA%A1c_Dynasty

• {{spoiler}} Jesus dies … False ending! He comes back! {{endspoiler}}
• http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/05/17/snape-kills-dumbledore/  -- A blog posing about the template culture in Wikipedia, worthy to read.

... we have a project in our family called "Wikispecies"?

Wikispecies is a Wikimedia project intended to be a directory of species. There are currently about a dozen active editors and over 60,000 listings. It is similar to Commons in that it is multilingual. They are working on the fine line between being a framework of species with links to information in all of the various Wikipedias, and containing that information there. Searching is always challenging when working in multiple languages. Wikispecies hopes to utilize wikidata when it becomes available to serve up the data. Check it out at http://species.wikimedia.org/ .
 

Labels: award, new hire, Survey, video interview jimbo, wikiclose, wikiopen

Technical news

• [Password security]  - After several user accounts on EN Wikipedia where cracked password security has been increased. From now on if an incorrect password is entered you will need to pass a captcha test when trying again. The passwords of the sysops on EN Wikipedia and Commons has been checked against very weak passwords and some are locked. Those users can login again by requesting a new password, at least if the provided a valid email address in there preferences. The check could be expanded to other wikis also and it is possible that additional security measures will be taken. It is highly recommended to make sure you have good password and a valid email address for your account.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/71181
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-07/Admins_desysopped
  

Request for help

• [Board election] - WMF board member Jan-Bart de Vreede is looking for candidates for the "Election Committee" that will at least prepare and possibly also manage the upcoming board elections. Election committee members can not run as candidates for the board and are not allowed to vote. Applications can be send in until 13th of May. See lists posting for more information.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/16727
  

Foundation

• [New chapter] - A new Wikimedia chapter is founded; Wikimedia Israel.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Israel
  

Community

• [Re-branding] - WMF boardmember Erik Moeller has posted a proposal to change the names of the Wikimedia projects to a name starting with "Wikipedia" because that is the strongest brand. So for example Wikiquote would become "Wikipedia Quotes". This proposal is a personal idea of Erik and is not a board idea. This idea does not seem to get  a lot of support.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/16813  -- Main thread
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/16945
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/16931
• [Sponsor] - A Norwegian Wikipedian is awarded a scholarship for working on the Nynorsk Wikipedia by an organization aiming to promote the use of Nynorsk as a written language .
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-07/Wikipedian_scholarship
• [EN Wikinews] - Get original reporting by asking someone else to do it.
• http://wikinewsreports.blogspot.com/2007/04/wikinews-sends-reporter-to-province_30.html
  

Awards

• [DE Wikimedia] -  Wikimedia Deutschland, the german local WMF chapter, awards a price, the Zedler-Medaille, for an article (or the significant improvement of an article) in the german Wikipedia. The article must be in the area of humanities. The award is endowed with 3000 Euro and is funded by the German magazine "Gehirn und Geist" ["Brain and Mind"] and allocated in co-operation with the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz as part of the german "Year of Humanities".
• http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zedler-Medaille
• http://www.wikimedia.de/zedler-medaille
• http://www.abc-der-menschheit.de/coremedia/generator/wj/de/__Downloads/Pressemitteilungen__Partner/Zedler-Medaille.pdf
  

Stats

• [en.wikiquote] - The English Wikiquote has reached 10,000 articles. The milestone is Langdon Smith posted by Kalki.
• http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Langdon_Smith
• [ar.wp] - The Arabic Wikipedia announces that the are almost at 30,000 articles. The are now 35th largest Wikipedia. The have made a celebration logo for the event.
• http://ar.wikipedia.org
• [ga.wp] - The Irish Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• http://ga.wikipedia.org
  

Other news

• [Encyclopedia of Life] - Yet again a new encyclopedia project. But this one has very, very serious funding so most likely this one will not fail or at least not in the short run. There mission is ambitious; "Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available everywhere by single access on command." And is exactly what the are planing to do. The content will primary be imported from several existing sources, authenticated by scientists and used in the encyclopedia. The first pages are expected to be live by mid 2008. The hope to get the work done for creating articles about every organism in 10 years.  The also plan to have the encyclopedia available in several languages. The licence the will use is not yet known. If the can make true what the announce the Encyclopedia Of Life will be a very strong competition for Wikipedia and Wikispecies for fauna and flora.  The Wikimedia Foundation is a partner of "Encyclopedia Of Life".
• http://www.eol.org/home.html -- See the video and notice the interface
• http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/08/226230
• http://blog.valuewiki.com/2007/05/09/encyclopedia-of-life/
• http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/05/08/a-new-encyclopedia-of-life-announced/ -- Larry Sanger about EOL
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/16907
• [kab.wp] - A new Wikipedia is born; number 251. This one is on Kabyle language, a language the can use an encyclopedia. 
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabyle_language
• http://kab.wikipedia.org
  

Did you know ...

Ferengi Rules of Acquisition

"Peace is good for business" - Rule 35
"More is good. All is better." - Rule 242
"After you've exploited someone, it never hurts to thank them. That way, it's easier to exploit them next time." - Rule 299 (Unofficial Rule)

Number of subscribers: 647 , Unique Visitors website last week: 290 , Editor(s): Walter, Mbimmler , Thanks to: IvanLanin, .anaconda , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , New: Wikizine Auf Deutsch and en Español , 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: award, board election 2007, Encyclopedia of Life, wiki security, Wikimedia IL

• [Contact form] - Thanks to JeLuf there is now a contact form. This form makes it easier for visitors of the various projects to send a message to the email team of the Wikimedia Projects. Currently there is a live form for the Dutch and English language email team. Other teams can also get the form for their language. Contact JeLuF for that at #wikimedia-tech
• http://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/webform.pl?Language=en -- yes it works, grow up and do not test it

• [Open question] - What would the ideal wiki software be like? Discuss at [[meta:MediaWiki Ideal]].

• [Advisory Board] - Announced in june 2006, the Wikimedia Advisory Board has finally been created. Anthere presented the members of the new board. It consists of 18 people for now. The members were asked to join. See the list on [[wikimedia:Advisory Board]]. The all have an impressive and relevant curriculum vitae. Picking out a few for this article would not be fair.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14066
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
• [New hire] - The Wikimedia Foundation has hired a new full-time employee, Carolyn Doran, to work as Chief Operations Officer (COO). Carolyn was already working for the WMF but only part-time via an interim agency. The Chief Operations Officer (COO) is responsible for the overall administration and business operations of the Wikimedia Project. Areas of responsibility include administration, personnel and fiscal management.
• http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14063 -- Announcement by Anthere, Chair WMF
• http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14064 -- (must read!) long clarification about the difference between the COO, CEO and board
• [Other] - The board appointed Jan-Bart de Vreede, WMF board member, as Vice-Chair of the WMF-board. Anthere is and remains the Chair. The board also approved a gift policy.
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Gift_Policies

• [Pic of the Year] - Commons is holding a "Best picture of the year 2006" election. Every day the Wikimedia Commons showcases a "Picture of the Day" on their main page, the best from over one million files. In round one users can choose from all the pictures of the day over the last year. And in round two the community will vote for the best of them all. If you would like to vote but you are not active on commons you can use your seniority on your home-wiki as well. And if you do not vote, bookmark that page and view the photos later.
• http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2006

• [Honour] - The "Forum of Young Global Leaders" has published there yearly lists of people up to 40 years old whom they describe as "the top 250 young leaders from around the world for their professional accomplishments, their commitment to society and their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world." - The conection with Wikimedia is that Jimmy Wales is one of these 250.
• Younggloballeaders.org World Economic Forum Announces Young Global Leaders for 2007
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_of_Young_Global_Leaders

• [Podshow] - Jimmy Wales on the rusiriusradio.com podcast. Long interview with Jimmy starts at index 07:45
• http://www.rusiriusradio.com/2007/01/22/show-92-wikipedia-man-jimmy-wales/
• [WikiLaw] - In the USA, there are Wikipedia entries that are frequently being used by judges in their legal rulings.
• http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29wikipedia.html

• [hu.wikibooks] - The Hungarian Wikibooks has reached over 2000 book modules.
• http://hu.wikibooks.org
• [Lurkers] - Wikia has done some research on their wikis concerning what % of the traffic is coming from logged in users and people who were not logged in. For the Wikia wikis, 90% of all visitors are people who visit the wiki but rarely participate... (in other words, people who are lurking). For Wikia, there are great differences between the wikis. Some have almost no logged in users active, on others almost all users are logged in. Read Angela's post about it and discover some of very special wikis the have at Wikia.
• http://wikiangela.com/blog/participation-inequality/
• [Influential] - Brandchannel published its annual list of the most influential brands. Of the global top 5, Wikipedia takes 4th place in the category, "Which brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?" This is according the 3,625 people that answered that question. And while Wikipedia may be 4th place globally, it is only in the USA and Canada that Wikipedia seems to rank high. Everywhere else Wikipedia ranks below the 10th place.
• http://news.com.com/2100-1047_3-6153686.html  -- YouTube, Wikipedia storm into 2006 brand ranking
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandchannel

• [Help for Wikimania] - Wikia, Inc is donating 50% of the work time of Wikia staff member KJ for the next six months to work on Wikimania 2007. She will be one of the main organizers and will focus heavily on sponsorship for Wikimania.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14051
• http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User:KaurJmeb - Kj's userpage

... that what you see is not always what the visitor sees?

When you are working on the wikis, you are most likely doing that as a registered user. And there is a good chance you have selected the option in you preferences "Disable page caching". But when a normal visitor views a wiki, they normally see a cached version of that page. A cache is a copy of the page, and this is done because it is much less stressful for the servers then creating a new page from the wiki-text every single time. The result is that it is quite likely when viewing a recently updated page that an anonymous visitor will not see the updated version of that page immediately. By default, cached versions of a page expire after one week.

When a topic is popular in the media and you are working on that article's topic, what often happens is that visitors will not be able to see your changes. This is a shame.

Another problem involves the number of articles tally. Due to page caching, this number is also often out of date. So for example, news of a Wiki's 10,000th post may be going around and people may be celebrating and visiting that Wiki, but the number of posts they see will be less than the actual number, making it appear to be below the mark that they're celebrating.

To fix this you can manually flush the cache. To do this, click on "edit". This url should end with "action=edit". Change that to "action=purge" and reload. This will clear the cache and the new version will be shown to visitors.

"I don't know anything anymore, but that's all right. Wikipedia knows and remembers everything for me!" -- David Stattler
"As a university student, wikipedia has been an invaluable tool in furthering my education. I can't tell you how many times I used wiki for help or clarification with difficult concepts. Thank you Wiki"  -- Anonymous
"College life is a bitch, Wikipedia makes it a bitch worth putting up with" -- Dyne Li
"I am a Google Employee, and on behalf of everyone here we are all proud of what the Internet has become, and needless to say Wikipedia has played a very large role. Long live Wikipedia, and its users!" --  Anonymous
"I have no comment at this time." -- Anonymous
"I've probably learned more from Wikipedia that from Columbia University (Which I attend)" -- Haralampos Psaradellis
"In a world of increasingly sealed off knowledge, Wikipedia provides charitable enlightenment." --  Anonymous
"Eine der besten Ideen in der Geschichte der Menschheit!" --  Stephan Lindner
"This is for my girls who play on Wikipedia alllll day at work!"  -- Elizabeth McClellan

Number of subscribers: 600 ,Unique Visitors website last week: 368,  Editor(s): Walter, Corrector(s): Lantoka

Labels: advisory board, audio interview jimbo, award, contact form, new hire, wikimania 2007

=== Technical news ===

[IRC] IRC client restarted, allowing new channels on the Browne IRC server.
irc://browne.wikimedia.org


[Q4] and the money is pouring in! If you put the code below on any
page you get the donation status bar. Hit F5 and be amazed; it is
going faster then the article counter.

Already received
[http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/ ]

=== Policy ===

[Semi-protection policy] is a new policy from the English Wikipedia.
When a page is "semi-protected" then newest X% of registered users and
all unregistered users can not edit that page. The technical aspect of
it does not yet work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Semi-protection_policy
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2147680/vandals-force-wikipedia-lock


=== Politics ===

[Stewards] are users who can give and remove user rights to any
Wikimedia project, among such rights are: bot, sysop and checkuser.
There is now a nomination round for new stewards. Voting will start on
20th December 2005 and it'll end on the 10th January 2006. You can
list yourself during that time, but you'll have lower chances then.
The Board will eventually choose a group of users (from 1 to 10)
who'll gain steward status.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2006

=== Foundation ===

[Bravo Italia] Wikipedia wins two Awards in Italy.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goings-on&oldid=251967


=== Media ===

[Good] One week Wikipedia is "not trustworthy", the next we are
"almost as good as Encyclopedia Britannica". The result is a lot of
very good press around the world. And also Wikipedia traffic
skyrockets. We are now bigger then CCN.com (according to alexa.com).
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/v438/n7070/nature-2005-12-15.mp3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/Nature_compares_Wikipedia_and_Britannica


[Nobel Prize] In a program called "Noble minds", with the nobel prize
winners of 2005 in a round table talk with the BBC reporter John
Simpson Wikipedia got merit. The medicine prize winner Barry Marshall
mentioned the Wikipedia article about their discovery (he got the
prize together with Robin Warren) and he said that they could not have
written a better article themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori

=== Proposal===

A New proposal for a Wikimusic, "A Wiki with (1) both score and text
of a free piece of music, (2) the music itself in a playable music
file (in different versions, for example one version with trumpet, one
with a whole orchestra, not MIDI), (3) the sheet music in a wiki-text
format (MIDI can be made out of it) and (4) information about the
piece of music.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimusic_II


=== Stats ===

[milestones] The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:新闻稿/2005年12月

[Stats, no more] wikipedia.be and wikipedia.nl are probably the oldest
national portals of Wikipedia. Since the creation of them, end of
2002, they have been counting the visitors with their own visitor
counters. This until last thursday when these where removed by the
technical staff without any notice.

In those years traffic to Wikipedia.nl started with 255 page views a
month to 194372 page views in november 2005. And wikipedia.be from 128
page views a month to 33755 in november 2005.

=== Other news ===

[meetup] 10 December 2005, Taiwan Wikipedians meetup in Taipei. about 25 people.
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:聚會/2005臺北冬聚å
http://vista.tw/2005/12/10/39/
http://fancy.twbbs.org/blog/tsaiid/2005.12.10/
http://www.wretch.cc/blog/kaurjmeb&article_id=2709059
http://charlesc.ilovemeow.net/node/451?PHPSESSID=408e4d34d0606c4b1590530985460ddc

[Law] - ERRATUM: in last week's issue it was not very cleary indicated
the the website "www.wikipediaclassaction.org" is not a Wikimedia
Foundation website. They are people who say they will try to sue
Wikipedia. But some are also making fun of them because there exists
also a parody site of it: www.wikipediaclassaction.com
http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VPN#Wikipedia_Class_Action_Lawsuit
http://www.wikipediaclassaction.com

=== Quote ===

About Wikipedia;
"I call you my husband's mistress because you get his attention much
of the time..." by anonymous "

=== Editorial ===

Wikipedia was never very good in internal communication. But lately we
have seen some sad highlights. The implementation on the English
Wikipedia of the reduced edit powers came as a total surprise and we
have received the news from external news media. My first reaction
when I read about it was; what a load of bullshit! We, the
Wikipedians, would surely know about it if such change of a
fundamental aspect of Wikipedia was true?

Also the policy of "Semi-protection" only gets widely known after
articles in the traditional media about it.

And finally the removal of visitors counters after more then 3 years
of service without any word to there Wiki is also not nice. Wikipedia
has no working statistics about visitor counts. So when you try to do
it yourself you do not expect that your own system gets sabotaged. It
are not only the articles of Wikipedia that need improvement.

[[user:Walter]],
Editor-in-chief Wikizine

---

Editor:Walter, [[zh:user:Shizhao]], Oscar

Labels: award, editorial, fund drive, good press, Semi-protection, stewards

=== Technical news ===

-[Rename User] the special page to rename users has come back the same way
as it disappeared; unexpected. Bureaucrats should now again have the
option to rename a user-account to another name, given that the name of
the new user-account does not yet exist (see special pages). It also looks
like the original limit, stating that only users with less then 6800 edits
can be renamed, is still valid. Using Kate's tool, users can check
themselves their number of edits doesn't exceed this limit. If your wiki
does not have a formal policy for renaming users, please make sure at
least that all users requesting to be renamed have placed a properly
signed request on your wiki themselves. This to cover your ass as a
bureaucrat.

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kate/cgi-bin/count_edits


-[Fancy nicks]- For nicks including tags, such as color
tags, it was found that many times the closing tag, in this case
had been left out, messing up pages. The MediaWiki software has been
changed because of this. Wiki markup and HTML markup do no longer function
in the Nickname field any longer, unless the Raw signatures option is
checked in your preferences. The current version has been tested and found
to be secure against scripts, too. For more information follow the link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_fix_your_signature


=== Global ===

-[Wikimentary] a project about making documentaries of Wikimedia from
uncut source video made at Wikimania 2005. This project is looking for
people to help. "WIKIMANIA-ROUGH_CUT.mov" is a work-in-progress
documentary, 11min, QuickTime, 316 MB.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/5246
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimentary
http://www.archive.org/details/WIKIMANIA-ROUGH_CUT.mov


-[Wikimania 2006] is on it's way in being organized. There are many things
that need to be done for the organization of this event. To see how to
help go to [[meta:Wikimania 2006]] or at ask at wikimania-l

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l

-[Catalan Wikipedia]- The second Wikipedia to be created after the
original English Wikipedia, has reached 20,000 articles.

http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquipèdia:Twenty_thousand_articles_in_Catalan


=== Media ===

-[Award] the Wikimedia Foundation was awarded a World Technology Award in
communication, joining the ranks of other World Technology Network
members. (no article about this in WikipediaEN yet)
http://www.wtn.net/2005/summit/


=== Stats ===

-[Stats]- ERRATUM: In number 0 of Wikizine we wrote that "Erim Zachte" has
created the new stats. This is not correct. This is of course Erik Zachte
([[w:nl:Gebruiker:Erik_Zachte]]), also the creator of Wikipedia for Pocket
PC, Palm, EPOC and EasyTimeline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm
http://members.chello.nl/epzachte/Wikipedia/


=== Other news ===

-[Wikizine]- a new information channel for the Wikimedia community came
into being.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/announce-l

=== Quote ===

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free
access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." -Jimmy
Wales, July 2004

=== Editorial comment ===

The number of our readers has increased by +/- 110 subscribers, to a total
of 160 since last week. Nice :-)

---

Editor-in-chief: [[w:nl:gebruiker:Walter]],
Editor/corrector: [[w:nl:gebruiker:Oscar]]

Labels: award, rename user, wikimania 2006, wikimentary