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2007-05-30
Year: 2007 Week: 22 Number: 72
Technical news
And now music ....
Quote
(*) 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
- [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.
Usage: [[Image:Filename|border|100px|right]]
- 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.
- [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.
- [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
- [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.
- [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.
- [RIP] - Norwegian Wikimedian, journalist, and author Tron Øgrim [[w:no:User:Togrim]] passed away last week.
- [Wikisource News] - Presents the news from Wikisource from January to May 2007.
- [Wikiopen] - The Hakka Wikipedia, a spoken variation of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the Hakka ethnic group has been created.
- [Wikiclose] - The Old English Wikisource has been closed.
- [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.
- [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/
- [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.
- [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.
- [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.
- [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.
- [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.
Users of the public DNS service of opendns.com will be one of the first to resolve Wikizine if it is online. The hoster reported to have find the source of the problems. Hopefully Wikizine will stay online now.
In the last weeks users of several communities have contacted Wikizine to setup a translated edition of Wikizine. Wikizine does now also exist in German, Spanish and Indonesian. And for the readers who read this as a translation, there is also an English version :-)
For now and in principle the translations will contain exactly the same content as EN Wikizine. Possibly and hopefully these editions will become eventually more then only a translation but also include there own original content directed directly to there local language community. The homepage at wikizine.org provides easy access to the different editions and subscription possibility.
As always the assistance of the readers for all levels and all languages versions of Wikizine to Wikizine is very welcome.
Weird ...In the last weeks users of several communities have contacted Wikizine to setup a translated edition of Wikizine. Wikizine does now also exist in German, Spanish and Indonesian. And for the readers who read this as a translation, there is also an English version :-)
For now and in principle the translations will contain exactly the same content as EN Wikizine. Possibly and hopefully these editions will become eventually more then only a translation but also include there own original content directed directly to there local language community. The homepage at wikizine.org provides easy access to the different editions and subscription possibility.
As always the assistance of the readers for all levels and all languages versions of Wikizine to Wikizine is very welcome.
And now music ....
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
2007-05-21
Year: 2007 Week: 21 Number: 71
Technical news
- [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.
Request for help
- [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.
Foundation
- [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.
Awards
- [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. - [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.
Community
- [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.
Media
- [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.
- ["Left Wikipedia"] - Wikipedia is 'politically slanted' by the left, who are 'in control'.
Stats
- [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.
- [ca.wp] - The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
- [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.
Other news
- {{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.
Did you know ...
... 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/ .
Quote
Number of subscribers: 650 , Unique Visitors website last week: 401 , Editor(s): Brian, Walter , Corrector(s): Gabriel Pollard
Thanks to: IvanLanin, Angela, 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
"Simplicity is not an end in art but we arrive at simplicity in spite of ourselves." - Constantin Brancusi.
Number of subscribers: 650 , Unique Visitors website last week: 401 , Editor(s): Brian, Walter , Corrector(s): Gabriel Pollard
Thanks to: IvanLanin, Angela, 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, new hire, Survey, video interview jimbo, wikiclose, wikiopen
