en.Wikizine.org

Year: 2009 Week: 41-42 Number: 120

2009-10-24T01:09:00.000Z

Technical news

[Wikimedia data sets] - Wikimedia XML data sets have been released on Amazon Public Data Sets. This should help Wikimedians who do analysis on project data.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/wikimedia-xml-data-sets-released-on-amazon-public-data-sets/

[Media Features Gadget] - there is a "New Media Features" gadget on Commons. When it is enabled, you can test out the new media developments from the Kaltura sponsorship.

[Click Tracking Deployed] - click tracking has been deployed for the edit toolbar. This collects information about which buttons are clicked on the toolbar during editing for the Usability Initiative.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/click-tracking-on-edit-toolbar-deployed/

[Babaco: Now ready] - preview of the second set of usability features, Babaco, is now available through user preferences. Be sure to try out the new tools.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/babaco-is-ready-for-tasting/

[Book creator updated] - the new version of the Book creator interface has been deployed within the Wikimedia projects. The extension is now a lot more intuitive and useful.

http://blog.pediapress.com/2009/10/create-books-easily-new-version-of-book.html

[WP Mobile Update] - Hampton Catlin, the Wikipedia Mobile developer, posted a blog entry detailing the updates done to the Mobile interface this month.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/october-mobile-update/

[en.wp: FlaggedRevs update] - two people, William Pietri and Howie Fung, have been signed on as contractors to help with the deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-October/104938.html

Request for help

[Perspectives from other projects] - the Wikipedia Signpost is calling for editors active in one or more non-English Wikipedias to write accounts comparing governance, process and policy, and editing culture across languages. The key questions are: how is it different working on another Wikipedia?; and what could English Wikipedia learn from that project—and vice versa?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-10-12/From_the_editor

Foundation

[Bookshelf Project: Manager Announced] - Frank Schulenburg (Head of Public Outreach) announced that Wikimedia's Bookshelf Project will be led by Marlita Kahn. The Bookshelf project aims to develop a slate of basic educational materials -- print, online and video -- to attract new authors and editors to Wikipedia.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055518.html

[Office hours] - the log of the Office Hours with Mike Godwin, the Foundation's General Counsel, has been published.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055517.html
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-10-09

[Job openings] - two job openings are now open: Chief Development Officer (a fundraising-related position) and Code Maintenance Engineer (a technical position).

[Wikimedia Report Card] - Erik Zachte has published the first Wikimedia "report card" that aims to help everyone get a quick overview of trends in the Wikimedia projects.

[Multimedia Usability: Product Manager] - Guillaume Paumier ("guillom") has been announced as the Project Manager for the Ford Multimedia Project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055659.html

[Report to the Board August 2009] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, has published her Report to the Board for October 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055639.html

[OpenMoko Launches WikiReader] - OpenMoko, a company that previously created an open source smartphone, has just launched The WikiReader, a dedicated reader device with an offline copy of the entire English Wikipedia (without images) stored on a small chip.

Community

[Nobel Prize] - when announcing the recipients of its Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize committee used free photos from Wikimedia Commons to depict two of the prize winners.

http://bit.ly/2BWN4Q

[German ArbCom dissolves] - the German Wikipedia has dissolved its Arbitration Committee. On projects that have them, the Arbitration Committee (or "ArbCom") is the final step in on-site dispute resolution.

http://bit.ly/3hg64n

[Wikinews: new Main Page and skin] - in addition to selecting "Vector" (the Usability skin) as its default skin, Wikinews has also created a new Main Page design. There are even "copy us" and "social networking" links on the page, like other news sources.

[Academy: Telugu wiki] - on October 6, the first Telugu Wikimedia Academy was held in Chirala, India.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2009-October/000209.html

[Wiktionary lookup gadget] - A new gadget is being developed on English Wikinews and slowly being spread to other wikis. The gadget looks up the wiktionary definition for the language of the wiki you are reading, but what it returns is the definition in your user-preferences language.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WiktLookup

[Bing search] - Bing.com, the Microsoft search engine, is offering "Bing Reference", a way to search "enhanced Wikipedia articles". The Wikipedia Signpost has a detailed story on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-10-12/Bing_search

[WikiTrust demo now live] - demos of WikiTrust are now up on some Wikipedias. WikiTrust is a Firefox add-on that changes the color of the text based on how reliable or unreliable it seems to be.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikiquality-l/2009-October/000560.html

Media

[Encyclopedias + China] - CNN published a very good article about the situation in China with regards to Wikipedia and other encyclopedia sites.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/14/wiki.china/

[Meet Jimmy Wales] - the newspaper of Yale, a prestigious university in the United States, recently interviewed Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).

http://www.yaledailynews.com/scene/interview/2009/10/09/meet-jimmy-wales-founder-wikipedia/

[Real fight becomes Wikipedia War] - a rivalry fight on a college campus turned into a big edit war on the English Wikipedia.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2009/10/10/war-over-bladderball-extends-wikipedia/

[Wikipedia + Olympics Committee?] - Wikipedia seems to be at the center of a recent copyright battle between a photographer and the International Olympics Committee.

http://ragesoss.com/blog/2009/10/09/wikipedia-and-olympics-committee-heading-for-collision/

Did you know...
...about the proposal for global sysops on Meta-wiki?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysop

Quote

"I really have no idea what most of those languages are, but I'm also super happy to support them." - Hampton Catlin, Mobile Wikipedia developer, after reporting the localization status of the Mobile Wikipedia site.

Editor(s): Casey, Alex Corrector(s): None Thanks to: Frank, Cary, Daniel, Philippe, Rodrigo, Liam, Infodisiac, Signpost, Tomasz, Sage, Michael Dale, Nimish, Bawolff, ShakataGaNai, ErikZ, Naoko, Arjun, Brianmc, Sage, Phoebe, Hampton, Sue, Jay, Luca, Erik, Greg 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: 41 Number: 119

2009-10-10T23:38:00.000Z

Technical news

[Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet] - Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer, announced that he's leaving the Wikimedia Foundation after four years.

[Labs: FlaggedRevs] - due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn't realize that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for people to poke at it for a month. The developers need interested people to be set up as local administrators to try out the per-page stabilization settings (accessed via the "protect" tab); by default most pages do not activate FlaggedRevs in the configuration we're testing for English Wikipedia.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/

[Labs: LiquidThreads] - another Wikimedia Labs wiki has been created, this time for Liquid Threads. Liquid Threads aims to clean up the way we communicate about articles, turning talk pages into cleaner/threaded discussion pages.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/mediawikis-new-discussion-system-in-testing-on-wikimedia-labs/

[Supporting translatewiki.net] - the Wikimedia Foundation has hired Siebrand Mazeland as a contractor. He will get paid one day a week to work on translatewiki.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/supporting-translatewiki-net/

Foundation

[WMFI and WMMK] - Wikimedia Suomi (Finland) and Wikimedia Macedonia were recently approved.

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner has posted her Report to the Board for the month of July 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055326.html

[Fundraising page demos] - Rand Montoya, the Head of Community Giving, has posted some demos of the new Fundraising pages. Your feedback would be appreciated.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Website_Design

[WMF IRC Office hours] - Following the Wikimedia Foundation Office hours with Sue Gardner, one with Rand Montoya was held on Thursday. The log is available on Meta.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-09-25

Agenda

[NO: Academy] - Wikimedia Norway is planning a Wikipedia Academy for October 14-15, 2009.

Community

[DE: New Wikimedium] - Wikimedia Deutschland has published its third newspaper. This German newspaper is intended for sponsors, partners, friends and fans of Wikimedia. It's very visually appealing and even includes content about Wikimedia "around the world".

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/09/30/neue-ausgabe-der-vereinszeitung-wikimedium/ (de)

[Bug: Google News and Wikinews] - the recent MediaWiki updates caused yet another problem: now Wikinews isn't being indexed by Google News anymore!

[Translatewiki.net as a WMF project?] - Siebrand asked what Translatewiki (the website where the MediaWiki interface is translated) and the Wikimedia Foundation would gain by translatewiki being made an official Wikimedia project. Gerard offered a few of his own thoughts.

[Wikipedia Journal] - Liam Wyatt made a proposal about a peer-reviewed journal for academics to write Wikipedia articles. It might be interesting to read the proposal and discussions about it.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/844

[en.wn "Report"] - an English Wikinews user posted a mini-report about what happened in September 2009 on the project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-October/001671.html

Media

[BD: Chapter planning] - there has been more coverage on the planned Wikimedia chapter in Bangladesh.

http://www.theindependent-bd.com/details.php?nid=144160

Stats

[sr.wn] - the Serbian Wikinews became the largest Wikinews version (by number of articles), ousting the English Wikinews from that spot. This is the second time that a Wikimedia project has surpassed the English version, the first time being the French Wiktionary.

http://wikinews.org/
http://sr.wikinews.org/wiki/Vikivesti_na_srpskom_prve_po_broju_%C4%8Dlanaka -- (sr) Wikinews article on its own milestone

[fr.wikt] - the French Wiktionary has reached 1,500,000 entries.

http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A9coredevance -- 1.5 millionth article

[ru.ws] - The Russian Wikisource has reached 50,000 texts.

[hy.wp] - The Armenian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.

Other news

[Google Search] - Google Search results now actually link directly to the section that you're looking for.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/jump-to-information-you-want-right-from.html

[WikipediaVision] - A student from Helsinki has created "WikipediaVision", a live visualization of anonymous edits to Wikipedia by location. The site combines Wikipedia's Recent Changes feed with Google Maps. Although this seems to have been around for a while, the link has resurfaced after it was exhibited live at MFK in Bern (from April until August).

http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html

[Why do they edit?] - Ziko offers some suggestions on the different reasons people choose to edit (and what/where they choose to edit).

http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/why-do-they-edit-ego-subject-wiki-and-language/

Did you know ...

...that you can even upload home movies to Wikipedia? Wikipedia's video support is improving, Wikimedians have even been uploading videos of their children illustrating certain Wikipedia topics.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-September/104617.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_reflex

Quote
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -- Mohandas Gandhi

Editor(s): Alex, Casey Corrector(s): Thanks to: Sue, Liam, Kat, jeblad, Rand, Judson, Belayet, Shizhao, bawolff, David, Brion, Otourly, Cary, Sage, Gerard, Signpost, @WikimediaDE, Andrew, Ziko, Erik, Philippe, Filip, Milos, Belayet, Jon, Platonides 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]].

Year: 2009 Week: 37 Number: 118

2009-09-27T01:48:00.001Z

Technical news

[Image renaming re-enabled] - Image renaming has been re-enabled for administrators on all Wikimedia projects.

[LocalisationUpdate deployment delayed] - The deployment of LocalisationUpdate, an extension meant to keep the localized messages as up to date as possible, was delayed after it killed the entire site. You don't have to be a tech to interpret the blog post graph as "bad news".

[Feature deployment updates] - Brion mentioned that the system administrators are starting to maintain a list of feature & extension deployments that they're rolling out in the very near future (and their status) on the Wikitech wiki.

[MakeSysop Removed] - MakeSysop, the old extension for managing user rights, has been disabled on Wikimedia sites.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20291

[CTO Job Opening] - back in issue #115 we reported that the current Chief Technical Officer position would be splitting into two, with Brion's position being changed to something with more of a MediaWiki software focus. The job opening for the new CTO position has been posted on the Foundationwiki.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Technical_Officer -- job opening
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- reminder about the details of the split

Request for help

[Strategic Planning CFP] - the Strategic Planning Team has released a call for participation. The CFP was distributed through a CentralNotice with a link to a letter from Jimmy Wales and Michael Snow, but there is also a blog post giving more details on the process.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/help-shape-the-future-of-wikimedia/

Foundation

[Jennifer Riggs leaves] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, announced on Thursday that Jennifer Riggs would be leaving the Wikimedia Foundation. Jennifer was the Chief Program Officer and, although she has made good contributions so far, she and Sue decided she wasn't the right fit for the job.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055215.html

[Wikimedia and OneWebDay] - September 22 was OneWebDay, a day that aims to highlight the critical importance of protecting the values and principles of an open, participatory web. In a blog post, Jay Walsh used the OneWebDay initiative to thank Wikimedia's huge volunteer force.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/wikimedia-and-onewebday/

[New volunteer position] - the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a local volunteer to help catalog customer service correspondence at the local office in San Francisco.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Volunteering:Customer_service_clerical_volunteer_(RPP)

Agenda

[Wikimedia Staff office hours] - after the success of the Strategic Planning "Office Hours", the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to hold its own as well. Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, will be online to answer questions in #wikimedia-office on freenode. The "office hours" will be between 15:30 and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30) on Friday, September 25, 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055246.html

[Wikis Take Manhattan] - the third Wikis Take Manhattan, a planned scavenger hunt and free content photography contest in New York City, will be held on Saturday, October 10, 2009.

Community

[Chapters reports] - Lodewijk Gelauff reminded the community about the chapters-reports mailing list and highlighted a few of the ones he thought were the most interesting.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055242.html

[European Heritage Days] - "European Heritage Days" are held in several European countries. On these days, many buildings notusually open to the public are open for visiting, as are the workshop of certain artisans. Some French Wikipedians found a way to take advantage of this by running a sitenotice mentioning the event and pointing out that the general public can help Wikipedia get more photos.

[Wirtualna Polska] - in our last issue we reported that there were a few problems with the local press when Orange Poland launched its branded Wikipedia mirror. The Polish Wikipedia community has written a statement that they hope will clear up the confusion.

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:O%C5%9Bwiadczenie_nt._Wikipedii_na_WP (pl)
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Wpedzich/O%C5%9Bwiadczenie -- English translation

[IRC: GC Review] - the new IRC Group Contacts have published a review of the last three months, highlighting what they've done, what they plan to do, and how you can help.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Noticeboard#3_month_review

[WMFR + Cultural institutions] - David Monniaux gave an update on what Wikimedia France has achieved with cultural institutions in France. He also highlighted some issues that they ran into.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/5147

Media

[Where Wikipedia Ends] - Time Magazine published an article questioning if Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. The article includes a few quotes from Wikimedia Foundation representatives.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492-1,00.html

[Jimmy Guest Blogs] - Jimmy Wales guest-blogged on the Huffington Post about what the mainstream media gets wrong about Wikipedia and why.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmy-wales/what-the-msm-gets-wrong-a_b_292809.html

[Small Businesses & Wikipedia?] - Small Business Search Marketing, a blog about small businesses, published an article about whether or not "small businesses" should have a Wikipedia article. The article actually mentions quite a few English Wikipedia policies too.

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/should-small-business-have-wikipedia-article/2311/

[German courts and wiki] - a German website attempts to teach its readers how to more accurately cite Wikipedia -- by using the permanent link to the article.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Wikipedia-korrekt-zitieren--/meldung/145444 (de)

[Wikipedia Falsified from Parliament] - the Swedish media reports that articles of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia have been falsified from computers placed in the Swedish parliament.

http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/International/nyhetssidor/artikel.asp?ProgramID=2054&format=1&artikel=3116556

[Strategic Planning] - the Harvard Business Blogs published a good post about Wikimedia's Strategic Planning Initiative.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/09/one_fine_winter_saturday_in.html

[Chinese trademark donation] - Hudong (a large Chinese encyclopedia) donated the Chinese trademark of Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Foundation.

http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20090922/CNTU04822092009-1.html

[Grass Is Greener on a Million Little Wikis] - a humorous article from Wired.com explains what the article "Grass" on the English Wikipedia would look like in different "language" Wikipedias (ranging from Limerick Wikipedia to "Even More Simple English" Wikipedia).

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/09/alt-text-million-little-wikipedias/

Stats

[hi.wp] - The Hindi Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.

[ca-wp] - The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.

http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval_de_Solsona

[cbk-zam] - The Zamboanga Chavacano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

[translatewiki.net hits one million] - Translatewiki, the website for translating the MediaWiki software, has reached a million translations. Congratulations to the Translatewiki staff and all of their translators!

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-size-is-good-cool-million-for.html

[Forget articles, it's editors] - Erik Zachte, the maintainer of Infodisiac (the Wikimedia statistics website), wrote a blog post about how we should stop focusing on the article count. Instead, we should be focusing on the number of editors the site has (and other aspects of community participation).

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/partipication-level-a-new-metric/

Other news

[WikiMarriage] - two Wikimedians got married this weekend: Arne Klempert (akl) and Delphine Ménard (notafish). Arne is currently a member of the Board of Trustees and Delphine is the former Chapters coordinator and current Treasurer of Wikimédia France. Congratulations to the new WikiNewlyweds!

[PediaPress: Job opening] - PediaPress, Wikimedia's partner in printing personal "Collections" of Wikipedia articles, is hiring. The job matches the predominant skills of Wikipedians and is specifically looking for "wikifriendly" people, you may want to apply.

http://blog.pediapress.com/2009/09/hiring-community-and-communications.html
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable -- background information about the partnership

[FR: GNU GPL Legal Win] - the GNU General Public License, a widely used free software license, has been held up by a French court. (They ruled in favor of the author of the content rather than a company who used it.)

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/09/big-win-for-gnu-gpl-in-france.html

Did you know ...

...that the Wikipedia Mobile interface provides anonymous statistics about its use? The stats page provides total traffic, average page serving speed, and more.
http://stats.m.wikipedia.org/

Quote

"I am not asking you to explain Wikipedia here, I'm asking for a vision!" - Femke Halsema

(The Chair of the Netherlands's Green Party interrupted the presentation of the new government budget to Parliament with that when the Prime Minister referred to the many committees that are going to search for potential budget cuts.)

Editor(s): Alex, Casey, Thanks to: Sue, Sage, Brianna, Leinad, Pharos, Dcljr, Hampton, Sj, Erik Z, Lodewijk, Rjd, Brion, Cary, Submarine, Philippe, Eugene, Gerard, Janson, Anders, Nihiltres, Frank, Amgine, David, 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: 36 Number: 117

2009-09-17T02:28:00.000Z

Technical news

[Software updates] - Brion is in the process of updating the Wikimedia sites with several weeks of new updates.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-September/045179.html

[Mobile survey] - the Wikipedia Mobile team is running a survey, hoping to get feedback on their progress so far and suggestions for future additions.

http://bit ly/LBXdK
http://m.wikipedia.org/

[Sever donations] - do you know of a non-profit that needs servers? The Wikimedia Foundation is donating 35 servers (over 3 years old) that aren't fast enough to run our sites anymore, but would probably work fine for smaller projects.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/server-donation-time-again/

[TIFF support] - the tech team is adding full TIFF support in the near future. This support will help MediaWiki render TIFF images (an image format widely used by museums and in scientific research) so that users can view them in their browsers.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/full-tiff-support-is-comming/

Foundation

[Board Minutes] - the minutes for the April and June Board meetings have now been published. You can view them on foundationwiki.

[Wikimedia IRC meeting] - the new three new Board members held an introductory meeting on IRC where they introduced themselves and answered questions. A full log is available on Meta and minutes are to come.

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, published her Report to the Board for the month of June.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/054904.html

[Foundation-l LSS] - The latest summary for foundation-l has been posted on Meta-Wiki, thanks to Phoebe. In addition, you can now also follow updates to the LLS on identi.ca, either from the site there or via RSS.

[Orange Poland] - the Orange partnership has expanded into Poland. Unfortunately, though, there were a few issues with local press during the launch (see the foundation-l post).

[Usability Beta Status] - Naoko Komura, Program Manager for the Usability Initiative, gave an update on the status of the usability updates (the "Try Beta" link). She also included statistics on how often they were enabled/kept enabled.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/14/usability-beta-status/ -- blog post

[Omidyar Grant] - the Wikipedia Signpost has an article further explaining the nature of the Omidyar Grant of US$2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-09-14/News_and_notes

[Job openings] - the Wikimedia Foundation has three job openings, as of press time, including a software developer, project manager, and development associate.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

[Transcom] - the translation committee has released another newsletter summarizing open requests.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-September/001004.html

Legal

[WMIT being sued] - Wikimedia Italia, the Italian chapter, has been sued for €20,000,000 over a possibly defamatory article. WMIT is in no way connected to the article or edits in question, but they still have to pay the legal fees and fight a court battle due to the Italian legal system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gianfranco/Wikimedia_Italia_sued_for_20,000,000_%E2%82%AC -- unofficial summary (en)
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Sabato_19,_a_Roma,_abbiamo_bisogno_di_te -- community notification (it)

Community

[University course about WP] - a university course solely devoted to Wikipedia has recently been started in Sweden.

http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_release_August_30,_2009

[Translatewiki.net update] - Gerard and Niko both published blog posts giving updates on Translatewiki, the site for translations of the MediaWiki software.

[Office Move] - the Wikimedia Foundation officially announced its upcoming office move (to be completed in mid-to-late October). It has also publicized the address, something the Foundation has shied away from in the past.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055204.html

[Improving Foundation-l] - Foundation-l, the mailing list intended to discuss Foundation issues, has started a request for comment. Do you know ways the mailing list could be improved or replaced?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l

[Restoration Discovery] - Durova, one of the people on Commons who works on restoring images, received a pleasant surprise. While restoring a photo, she discovered that there was actually human remains in picture. This discovery has been noted in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress even credited her in its bibliographic record.

http://durova.blogspot.com/2009/09/synergies.html

[WMBD Meeting] - Wikimedia Bangladesh (a planned local chapter) had a meeting on September 10

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh/Online_Meeting_2009-09-10

Media

[Biggest blunders] - CNN has assembled a list of "Wikipedia's Biggest Blunders".

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/09/06/wikipedia.biggest.blunders.cnn

[Wikipedia grows up] - the UK Telegraph wrote an article saying that Wikipedia and the Internet are growing up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6122514/Wikipedia-and-the-Internet-grow-up.html

[Strategic Planning] - the New York Times covered the new Strategic Planning Initiative and the other consultants that are helping professionalize the Foundation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=2

[Editing For Beginners] - the Australian Lifehacker wrote an article trying to teach beginners how to contribute to Wikipedia.

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/09/wikipedia-editing-for-beginners/

[Wikipedia reacts to outburst] - a reporter for the New York Times wrote a blog post describing the Wikipedia community's response to a US Representative shouting at the president during his speech.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/wikipedias-rapid-reaction-to-outburst-during-obama-speech/

Stats

[Commons reaches 5 mil] - just in time for its 5th birthday, the Wikimedia Commons has reached 5 million files. See the blog post and chapter press releases for more information.

[Wikistats Portal 2.0] - Erik Zachte, maintainer of Infodisiac (a set of Wikimedia statistics), wrote about a recent overhaul of the statistics portal.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/wikistats-portal-20/

[Wikipedia's Growth Animated] - all the Wikipedias grow at different rates and have started at different times. How can we compare them other than just by the numbers? Erik Z has updated an animation that shows this growth visually.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/wikipedias-growth-animated/

[vi.wp] - the Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.

http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-11

[th.wp] - the Thai Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.

[cs.ws] - the Czech Wikisource has reached 10,000 pages.

http://cs.wikisource.org/wiki/Ilias/Zp%C4%9Bv_p%C3%A1t%C3%BD

[bo.wp] - the Tibetan Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

http://tinyurl.com/bowp1k

Other news

[Semantic Web Problem] - TechCrunch wrote a humorous article centering the unfortunate results when robots try to get meaning from Wikipedia text.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/02/netbase-thinks-you-can-get-rid-of-jews-with-alcohol-and-salt/

Did you know ...

...the first public cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973 by Martin Cooper?

Quote

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Corrector(s): Rjd0060, Thanks to: Ainali, Mike, WikimediaMobile, infodisiac (Erik Z), Hampton, Mathias, Sj, Gerard, Durova, Austin, Sue, Marcin, Rand, Frieda, Tanvir, David, Phoebe, Naoko, Brion, Kat, Signpost, Mxn, and Daniel 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: 34-35 Number: 116

2009-08-29T16:14:00.000Z

Technical news

[Tech Update] - Brion posted an update on the status of a few projects, before shipping off to Wikimania.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update-pre-wikimania-edition/

[Commons: ImageAnnotator] - Wikimedia Commons added a new gadget: an Image Annotator, where users can place comments *onto* images (like flickr).

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator

[Bugs] - Trevor Parscal, of the Usability Project, gave an update on the Usability Beta by saying that more than 40,000 users have now participated in the process.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/squashing-the-bugs/

[iPhone app released] - the Wikimedia Foundation released its own official iPhone/iPod application for Wikipedia, in addition to the regular mobile interface.

[SmartWikiSearch] - Smart Wiki Search, a "concept similarity" search, tries to make your Wikipedia search experience better by finding other Wikipedia pages that discuss the same or similar concepts to the one you searched for.

http://www.smartwikisearch.com/

Request for help

[Wikipedia Signpost RfC] - the Wikipedia Signpost, the English Wikipedia's newspaper, is looking for comments about what is their mission, purpose and where they should go from here. Feedback is appreciated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/About#Where_does_the_Signpost_go_from_here.3F

[Multimedia Usability Meeting] - we previously reported on the upcoming Multimedia Usability Project by Wikimedia France, suggestions and feedback are being requested on Meta-Wiki. There is also a planning event to take place in October 2009.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Usability_Project_Meeting_October_2009

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published her report to the board for May 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054008.html

[New "labs" sites] - two new "labs" sites have been created to test out the flagged revisions and reader feedback extensions. In general, "Wikimedia Labs" is the name given to sites created to test out new extensions before they are used on Wikimedia wikis.

[Hewlett Foundation grant] - the Wikimedia Foundation received a US$500,000 grant towards operational support from Hewlett Foundation. The grant's purpose is to allow the Foundation expand its work bringing free educational content to everyone on the planet.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Hewlett_Foundation_grant_August_2009

[Omidyar Network Grant] - the Omidyar Network gave a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grant will support Wikimedia's key goals: to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia?s projects.

[New board members/officers] - at Wikimania, the Board of Trustees officially accepted the results of the election, welcoming Samuel Klein (Sj) and thanking Domas for his service. Kat Walsh has also taken the position of executive secretary. In addition to these community-selected board members, an "expertise" seat was filled with Matt Halprin.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054318.html
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/user:Mhalprin -- biography of Matt

[Wikimania 2009] - Wikimania 2009, the international Wikimedia conference, ended this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even if you were not there, you can enjoy it too with twitter, flickr photos, and presentation videos.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23wikimania+OR+%23wikimania2009 -- twitter for #wikimania2009 or #wikimania
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wikimania2009/ -- flickr
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2009_presentations -- videos of the presentation

[WikiExpedition 2009] - a summary (in English) of the recent Polish Wikimedian's "WikiExpedition" was published.

http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja/Summary

[mediawiki/ IRC cloaks now available] - the Group Contacts are now offering "mediawiki/" IRC cloaks for developers.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054120.html - mailing list post
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Cloaks -- IRC cloak explanation

[GLAM-WIKI Recommendations] - now that the GLAM-WIKI conference is over, Liam Wyatt (the conference coordinator) has compiled a list of recommendations to "GLAM", to Wikimedia, and to the government. This list is based on the discussions and findings at the conference.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_Recommendations

[Wikimedia UK blog/twitter] - Wikimedia UK, the British chapter, has started a blog and twitter account.

[WMES: Planning Reboot] - Wikimedia España, the planned Spanish chapter, has had a planning reboot. Join the mailing list if you're interestd in creating a Spanish chapter.

http://lists.wikimedia.org.ar/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-es

[WMSE: Image donation] - Wikimedia Sweden has helped Regionarkivet (the municipal archive of the Gothenburg area in Sweden) upload some of its most prized images to the Wikimedia Comons.

[Chapcom membership update] - the Chapters committee (those charged with coordinating the chapters, especially with getting new chapters started) welcomes two new members. Milos Rancic and Lodewijk Gelauff replace the seats of Carlos Barcenilla and Michael Bimmler, who recently resigned.

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

[Wikinews ArbCom] - Blood Red Sandman, Brian, Brian McNeil, Cirt, Cspurrier, and Tempodivalse were elected to the Arbitration Committee on the English Wikinews.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Arbitration_Committee/2009_elections

[Wikimedia Belgium Meeting] - Wikimedia Belgium, the proposed Belgian chapter, had a coordination meeting on August 28. The English and French minutes are available.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediabe-l/2009-August/000006.html

Awards

[UK Wikipedia Loves Art - prizes] - Wikimedia UK's Wikipedia Loves Art project finally announced its winners.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediauk-l/2009-August/004565.html -- mailing list post
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2009/08/wikipedia-loves-art-prizes/ -- WMUK blog post

Media

[Generate PDFs from Wikipedia] - Lifehacker.com covered the ability to creates PDFs and Multi-Article Books using PediaPress, something that happened a while ago.

[Tale of another Mangalore on Wikipedia] - some commentary on a local Wikipedia Academy in Mangalore, India.

[Health Care and Wikipedia] - Columbia Journalism Review compliment's the English Wikipedia's coverage of the American "health care debates".

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/health_care_and_wikipedia.php

[Wikimania 2009] - a pre-Wikimania article about Wikimania 2009 and the Wikimania idea.

http://www.en.argentina.ar/_en/science-and-education/C954-wikimania-2009-in-argentina.php

[Wikinews: The unsung news source] - Wikinews got a favorable blog post that includes a Q&A and explanation of the project.

http://perspective.cfezra.com/?p=105

[AP tries to rival WP?] - apparently the Associated Press is going to try to rival Wikipedia in the search results. The AP will hold back some content from member websites and hope that Google will rate it higher due to the increased number of links to that page.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/how-the-associated-press-will-try-to-rival-wikipedia-in-search-results/

[Wikiversity media coverage] - Wikiversity is in the news again, with a whole article devoted to it. According to the article, "Wikiversity" is to be a university for every Internet user. Some professors are smitten with it - others are skeptical.

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/magazin/wissen/Wikiversity;art304,2876731 (de)

[Inkblot Poster] - remember the controversy on the English Wikipedia because there were copies of the Rorschach inkblot tests in the article? Well, according to the New York Times, te doctor who helped publish the 10 inkblots is being investigated by his local doctors? organization after it received complaints that his actions were unprofessional.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/24inkblot.html

Stats

[enwp: 3m] - the English Wikipedia has reached 3,000,000 articles with the creation of "Beate Eriksen", a Norwegian actress.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/17/3000000/

[cswikt] - the Czech Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.

http://cs.wiktionary.org/

Other news

[Growing Wikipedias] - Hausa Wikipedia, one of the African-language Wikipedias, was previously in danger of being closed but now it's growing very quickly. This comes at an interesting time, there have been recent foundation-l discussions about the process for closing projects.

http://hausaonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/hausa-wikipedia-is-growing/ -- Hausa Wikipedia
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/175836 -- mailing list thread
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects -- current project closing process

[Wikipedia Diver] - a new Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10315483-248.html

[Enterprise Wikis] - a blog post gives 8 more reasons to use a wiki for you internal corporate site.

http://www.ikiw.org/2009/08/21/8-things-you-can-do-with-an-enterprise-wiki/

[Citizendium founder ready to leave] - Larry Sanger, the founder of Citizendium (another encyclopedia created to rival Wikipedia) and one of the first contributors to Wikipedia, is ready to leave his project and move on.

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/08/citizendium-founder-ready-to-jump-ship/

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Corrector(s): MarkW, Thanks to: Too many to name. 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.

Year: 2009 Week: 33 Number: 115

2009-08-14T05:53:00.001Z

Technical news

[Tech Update] - the sysadmins posted a tech update of what happened last week and what will be coming up this week and beyond.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update/ -- techblog post

[clone $brion;] - Brion Vibber, the current Foundation CTO, announced that they want to split his position into two. There will be a new Chief Technical Officer and Brion will become the "Senior Software Architect"; more information about the responsibilities of each can be found on the blog post.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- techblog post

["Try Beta"] - Have you noticed the new "Try Beta" link at the top of Wikimedia project sites? The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the newly enhanced edit toolbar. Check it out and give them your feedback!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/try-the-usability-beta/ -- techblog post

[pl.wp: Report a Problem] - The Polish Wikipedia has put together a neat little pop-up tool for reporting errors in articles. (The "Zgłoś błąd" link in the sidebar.)

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-August/102708.html -- post on wikien-l

[MW.org: FlaggedRevs] - MediaWiki.org is currently testing out Flagged Revisions in their Manual and Help namespaces.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/043806.html -- reason for FlaggedRevs
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-August/044582.html -- brion telling about it being enabled

[Image Annotations] - a hack for Wikimedia Commons allows for image annotations, just like Flickr has them, be sure to check it out!

http://ur1.ca/8tik -- example image
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator -- help page

[MediaWiki Wave] - a new project, "MediaWiki Wave", has been launched. It attempts to find a way for Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in development, to work with and make the best of MediaWiki.

http://mediawikiwave.blogspot.com/ -- blog
http://code.google.com/p/mediawikiwave/ -- project code

Request for help

[BBC & Wikimania] - this is a weird request for help, because it doesn't come from the community. The BBC's "Digital Revolution", an open and collaborative documentary on the way the web is changing our lives, wants to come to Wikimania 2009 but can't make it! They're looking for people to film some content for them, are you going to Wikimania and interested? Visit the blog post for more information and contact them ASAP.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/08/wikimania-2009-are-you-going-w.shtml

Proposals

[Global sysop opt-out] - a new proposal about global sysops has been created and feedback is requested!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops/opt-out_proposal

Foundation

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, has published her report to the Board of Trustees for April 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053920.html

[Board Election Results] - the results of the Board of Trustees elections have been released; the three winners are: Ting Chen (Wing), Kat Walsh (Mindspillage), and Samuel Klein (Sj). The Election Committee started a "post-mortem" section to collect commentary for future elections. Your comments on what went wrong and what went right will be highly appreciated.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Results/en -- results
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2009#Post_mortem -- post mortem

Agenda

[IN: WP Takes Chennai] - Are you in India? Love Wikipedia? Got a camera? Then participate in 'Wikipedia Takes Chennai' this Sunday (August 16).

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

Community

[WMFR: Multimedia Usability] - Wikimédia France has announced a new Multimedia Usability Project. It is intended to support and compliment the Wikimedia Foundation's project funded by the Foundation.

[MW Translation Rally] - Translatewiki.net, the site that coordinates translations of the MediaWiki software, is running a translation rally. Contribute 500 MediaWiki translations and share in 1,000 Euro!

[WikiExpedition] - the Polish community has had its first annual WikiExpedition. The ten-day journey to the Polish region of Podlasie (northeastern part), focusing on collecting material that would be used to enrich Wikimedia project content with photographs, has brought gigabytes of photos and tons of material.

http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja (pl)
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja#Wikiekspedycja_w_mediach -- media coverage (pl)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikiekspedycja_2009 -- images

[New wikis] - a large number of new projects were created this week: 5 content projects and 2 chapter wikis. The 5 content projects were Sorani Wikipedia (ckb), Western Panjabi Wikipedia (pnb), Mirandese Wikipedia (mwl), Acehnese Wikipedia (ace), Turkish Wikinews (tr) and the 2 chapter wikis, Wikmedia Ukraine (ua) and Wikimedia Colombia (co; in planning).

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20181 -- bug: content projects
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19533 -- bug: ua.wikimedia.org
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19609 -- bug: co.wikimedia.org

Media

[Usability Feedback] - Mashable, "the social media guide" has posted an article covering Wikipedia's recent usability release.

http://mashable.com/2009/08/07/wikipedia-redesign/

[Wikipedia's on the wane] - the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian both ran an article about a new California study related to Wikipedia. The study found the number of new articles added a month was on a steep decline and new contributors were being pushed out by the rusted-on Wikipedia elite.

[Wikimanía] - a Spanish technology site reports on Wikimania and Richard Stallman's keynote ("the Father of the Free Software Movement")

http://www.infobaeprofesional.com/notas/85723-El-padre-del-software-libre-dara-una-conferencia-en-Buenos-Aires.html&cookie (es)

[GLAM-WIKI coverage] - the GLAM-Wiki conference in Australia has gotten a lot of media coverage, and the organizers are keeping a list on their site. One of the articles has an interesting analogy from Liam Wyatt, "People who like sausages or obeying the law shouldn't see either being made, and the same goes for encyclopedias - it's a messy process but the outcome is good." Tim Starling has also posted a report on what he saw while he attended.

http://glam.wikimedia.org.au/ -- glam coverage listed
http://wikimedia.org.au/w/images/5/52/GLAM-WIKI_twitter_hashtag_transcript.pdf -- 59 page pdf with all the #glam-wiki tweets
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053946.html -- Tim's report

[Wikiversity] - Wikiversity was mentioned in a news article! The Colombia news site, Unviersia, ran an article entitled: "Web 2.0 to share and build collective knowledge" and used Wikiversity as one of its examples.

http://www.universia.net.co/noticias/mas-noticias/web-2.0-para-compartir-y-construir-conocimiento-colectivo.html (es)

Stats

[sr.wn 10k] - the Serbian Wikinews has reached 10,000 articles and is now the second largest Wikinews.

http://tinyurl.com/srwn10k -- ten thousandth article

[pt.wp 500k] - following closely behind the Spanish Wikipedia (es), the Portuguese Wikipedia has also reached 500,000 articles!

Quote

"Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were." - Cherie Carter-Scott

Editor(s): Alex, Casey, Corrector(s): Ryan, MarkW, Thanks to: Techman224, Wpedzich, Naoko, Erik, Brion, Milos, Pharos, @wikipedian, private musings, Sage, Siebrand, Julien, NuclearWarfare, Liam, Lijealso, Gerard, 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.

Year: 2009 Week: 32 Number: 114

2009-08-06T22:21:00.000Z

Technical news

[Full downtime] - All of Wikimedia's services (sites, mailing lists, etc.) were down on July 31 at 12:00 (UTC) to allow the primary router at the Tampa hosting facility to be rebooted.

[SysAdminDay] - System Administrator Appreciation Day was held on July 31st; it's the day where you appreciate and thank all the system administrators who make your lives easier!

http://www.sysadminday.com/

[Override this function] - on August 6, users were temporarily getting the message 'Override this function' when visiting pages on Wikipedia, due to a server only partially getting an update. The issue was supposedly fixed but the sysadmins are still getting reports, it needs further investigation of the problem.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20081

Request for help

[WikimediaMobile] - Wikimedia Mobile, the mobile interface for Wikipedia, has started accepting translations on betawiki. Help is greatly appreciated in localizing it for your local Wikipedia.

[Flickr tool maintainers] - Bryan Tong Minh posted a request for co-maintainers for his flickr tools on the toolserver. The bots are written in Python and use the mwclient library to edit and upload.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2009-August/004976.html

[Best practices team] - "Best practice in public outreach" is a collection of articles describing experiences in winning new volunteers, partners, content and audiences. The group will help coordinate the creation and enhancement of the best practices documentation pages on Meta-Wiki, which will help share the knowledge about engaging new target groups or deepening relationships to new Wikimedians. Volunteers are needed!

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

[BLP task force] - Cary Bass is in the process of launching a new task force on Biographies of Living People (as a result of the board resolution on the subject). The task force will be focusing on the English Wikipedia, but its recommendations and guidelines will probably be useful on other projects too. Volunteers are needed, see the blog post for more information.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-August/102667.html -- call for volunteers
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people -- resolution

Proposals

[Strategic Proposals (Call)] - the Strategic Planning team has sent out a call for proposals. They'd like to encourage people to put their ideas into proposals for what the Wikimedia movement should be doing over the next five years. What's more is that you can write it in the language of your choice.

Foundation

[Guidestar] - the Wikimedia Foundation has finally received a profile on GuideStar, one of the largest American databases for non-profits. Be sure to visit the profile and write a review!

http://tinyurl.com/wmfGuidestar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GuideStar -- article on the site

[Usability: Babaco] - the Usability team is preparing for its next release and has some new designs and ideas that need feedback from users, community members, and interested parties.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/29/the-abcs-of-usability/ -- blog post
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Babaco_Designs -- designs

[Transcom newsletter] - the Translation committee (the people whose job it is to coordinate translations of Wikimedia Foundation-related items) has released its newsletter, which is a summary of open requests. If you speak another language, please look and see if there's anywhere that you can help out!

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-July/000982.html

[LSS: foundation-l] - a new list summary of foundation-l posts between July 16-31 has been published. Phoebe has also posted a request for help, reminding others that she's not the only one who can do it and there are other lists that could be summarized too!

Legal

[EFF&NPG update] - Another update on the National Portrait Gallery legal issue, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, Fred von Lohmann, has posted a legal analysis of the situation.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/eff-defends-wikipedi

Agenda

[PL: pl.wp meeting] - the Polish Wikipedia is having its annual working meeting in Sopot, Poland from September 11-13.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GDJ_2009 (pl)

[SE: Book Fair] - Wikimedia Sweden will have a booth at the largest book fair in Scandinavia with 100,000+ attendees. The fair will be September 24-27, 2009.

http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Bok_och_Biblioteksmässan_2009 -- WMSE's page about the booth (sv)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothenburg_Book_Fair -- enwp article about the fair

[JP: Conference] - Wikimedia Conference Japan has opened up its official website and has finalized its details: November 22 at Tokyo University!

http://www.wcj2009.info/ (ja)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_Japan/en -- summary on Meta (en)

[BE: Fosdem] - FOSDEM, the FOSS conference, has announced the dates for its 2010 conference: February 6-7, 2010

http://www.fosdem.org/2010/

Community

[GLAM-WIKI] - GLAM-Wiki, Wikimedia Australia's conference for galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and how they can collaborate with Wikimedia, is being held this week (August 6-7) and a live "play-by-play" can be found via twitter.

https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23GLAM-WIKI -- twitter posts
http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/230/glam-wiki-day-one -- blog post summarizing day 1

[Simple Wikipedia] - this little known Wikipedia works since 2004 on a encyclopedia that is using fewer words and easier grammar then the English Wikipedia. The small community has managed to get again at the 54,000 articles mark, after falling down 2000 articles due to a quality cleanup. For those who find other Wikipedias has become to large to be happy there a small project like Simple could be attractive.

http://simple.wikipedia.org

[WMNL: Partnership] - just in time for GLAM-WIKI, Wikimedia Nederland officially announced a partnership with the Tropenmuseum (one of the largest museums in the Netherlands). This new partnership will bring over 2100 high quality images to the Wikimedia Commons!

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/05/wikimedia-netherlands-and-the-tropenmuseum-bring-2100-images-to-the-commons/ -- blog post and press release

[Wiki-Conference NY] - Archive.org is hosting a few videos of the proceedings at Wiki-Conference New York, so far Jimmy Wales's keynote and Cary Bass's OTRS presentation have been published but more will come soon.

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Wiki–Conference%20New%20York

[IRC Meeting] - a general IRC meeting was hosted by the Group Contacts. There was a high number of participants (~80 people) and a wide array of topics, from contacting the GCs and new cloak options to public logging and alternate channel management techniques.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Meetings/August_2009

[WMDE: Report from the Office] - the new Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland, Pavel Richter, has published his first "Report from the Office" on the WMDE blog. He shares his new priorities and introduces himself.

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/07/31/1-bericht-aus-der-geschaftsstelle-juli-2009/ (de)

Media

[GLAM-Wiki] - As described above in the "Community" section, GLAM-WIKI is being held this week and it has been covered by a few media outlets.

[Judges & Strippers] - Wiktionary was quoted when defining a lap dance in a legal case!

[Anecdote] - there's a nice, thoughtful blog post from a paleontologist/geoscientist and his experiences with contributing to Wikipedia.

http://triassiccritters.blogspot.com/2009/08/contributing-to-wikipedia-as.html

[Experts obliged?] - experts and people who find errors in Wikipedia are obliged to correct them, a blog post says. "Whether you like it or not, Wikipedia is the source that people go to for information."

http://blog.k1v1n.com/2009/08/if-tree-falls-in-forest-part-1.html

[We're NC-17] - Apple has rated us NC-17! Wikipanion, an iPhone/Pod application giving access to Wikipedia (nicely formatted with extra features), featured a warning when downloading: "Rated 17+ for the following: Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes".

http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/covering-your-click/ -- blog post about this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC-17 -- in case you have no idea what we're talking about

Stats

[comScore: down to #5] - Facebook is now the 4th largest site in the world and has pushed the Wikimedia Foundation down to the 5th largest web property. Wikipedia is still far above an beyond the most popular non commercial website. By the way; the ranking of Wikizine is 50% up to become the 2,983,528th most popular site :) (Source:Alexa)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/04/facebook-is-now-the-fourth-largest-site-in-the-world/

[African Wikipedias] - Swahili Wikipedia "has raced ahead with great momentum" and surpassed Afrikaans as the largest African Wikipedia by number of articles. There's also stats about the other African Wikipedias and sister projects.

http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=614 -- blog post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa -- African languages

[Wikipedias] - the Spanish Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles, the Lithuanian Wikipedia has reached 90,000, and the Latin Wikipedia reached 30,000 articles with the addition of "Magninovilla".
[EN Wikinews] - Not really a direct goal of Wikinews to have many "articles" but nevertheless the English language Wikinews has surpassed 15,000 news stories.

http://en.wikinews.org

Other news

[wikiHow&MediaWiki] - wikiHow showcased an interesting article (on its twitter feed) about how to make a MediaWiki skin, worth a read if you're ever in the need for a new skin. :-)

https://twitter.com/wikiHow/status/3111069632

[Mobile Feedback] - the Mobile Wikipedia site requested feedback from its users and got a few interesting results, you might get a laugh out of them!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/amusing-mobile-feedback/

[Correction: WMUK&Schools] - we previously reported that the new WMUK schools project was about revisiting its "Wikipedia Version for Schools" project. This is actually a new initiative, one focused on going into schools and teaching the staff and students how to effectively use and contribute to Wikipedia.

http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Schools_project

[Wiktionary users] - Dvortygirl posted an interesting blog post about the type of users who are attracted to writing a dictionary. She found that most of the people in the #wiktionary IRC channel all shared similar characteristics to her (and a Dutch Wiktionary visitor), more information in the blog post.

http://dvortygirl.blogspot.com/2009/08/wiktionary-type.html

Quote

"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all." - Rita Mae Brown

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Walter , Thanks to: Cary, David, Brianna, Phoebe, Bryan, Steve, Brion, Sage, Hampton, Signpost, Naoko, Bark, ErikZ, Jay, wikihow, Mecredis, Liam, Jessica, Pavel, Leinad, Mile K., Dvortygirl, St-Lemur , 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 nearly 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 and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 31 Number: 113

2009-07-30T22:10:00.001Z

Technical news

[arwp: New namespace] - the Arabic Wikipedia Community has agreed to create a new namespace called "Supplement". It will contain most of date pages (days, months, years, decades, etc.), disambiguation pages and lists to give the exactly number of encyclopedic articles. There are about 6000 pages that will be moved to the new namespace. It may be possible that your community would like to apply the same idea.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19357 -- bug report
http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project:Supplement -- guideline of namespace

[Commons: Off-site archive] - A off site archive for Commons and the XML snapshots will be added. Thanks are due to eBart consulting and User:Milosh for proving a backup server and storage array at their colocation facility in Europe. This server will store archives of our publicly available data of Wikimedia Commons and the XML snapshots.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/were-adding-an-off-site-archive-for-commons-and-the-xml-snapshots/ -- techblog post

[Passwords plz] - Watchlistr.com was an outside site that asked for Wikimedia passwords in order aggregate user watchlists across all projects for them. Although in this case it did not have a malicious intent, use of external sites asking for passwords place in risk the accounts used. Users are asked not to share their user password with any external site. Not even toolserver tools are allowed to request your password for any service. The site has now been shut down, and further analysis revealed that it had important vulnerabilities. Magnus Manske has created an alternative tool for people to use if they liked this feature.

http://www.watchlistr.com/
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044238.html -- initial thread
http://magnusmanske.de/MetaWatchlist/ -- alternative proposed by Magnus

[TS: Multi-maintainer tools] - the toolserver is pushing multi-maintainer tools and will be actively discouraging single maintainer ones. They want to encourage collaboration amongst toolserver users and make tools last even when one of the users disappears

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.toolserver/1515

[SVN account requests] - there's a new process for requesting SVN accounts to the MediaWiki source code. Brion announced that he'll be going through the queue every week, so if you have request throw them up on MediaWiki wiki. ;-)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/44683 -- mailing list post
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_access_requests -- requests

Proposals

[Geonotice + Wikinews/Commons?] - Sage Ross recently proposed something interesting: using an opt-in geonotice (notice that displays based on the location of your IP) to show local reporting or photographing opportunities. Hopefully this will help with one of the great frustrations that inhibit original reporting.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044367.html

Foundation

[Board elections: Voting] - the Foundation's Board elections has finally entered into the voting phase (voting is open until August 10) and translation is continuing. Visit the Meta pages for election information (including a "Questions" page), the Wikipedia Signpost also has interviews with the candidates.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009#voters -- voter requirements
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Translation -- translation page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-27/Board_elections#Candidate_interviews -- signpost interviews

[More donation buttons] - the second round of donation button designs has been posted, feedback is appreciated to determine which designs we'll end up using!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade

[Audit Committee] - the new members of the 2009-2010 Audit Committee have been announced.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053280.html -- foundation-l post

[wm2009: Registration] - Media Registration for Wikimania 2009 has opened. For regular registration, there is a new update: it is also possible to extend your stay past the Wikimania dates, but you need to contact the hotel directly.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration#Accommodations -- extending stay options
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimania_2009_Media_Registration -- media registration

[Strategy: "Office Hours" & Wiki] - the Strategic Planning team has announced their "office hours" which are teams that they will be on the channel to answer questions and participate in discussions, everyone's invited! The team has also "soft-launched" their wiki (most of its content is also available for translation).

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Office_Hours
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/40527 -- soft-launch post

[TS donation] - the Wikimedia Foundation has awarded a US$40,000 grant to the Toolserver toward improving the toolserver's reliability. With that money they will buy three database servers, so they can keep two copies of each wiki database instead of just one. This should greatly improve the availability of up to date data in the wiki databases.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2009-July/002278.html -- announcement
http://journal.toolserver.org/entry/2009/07/29/wikimedia-foundation-grants-40000-to-the-toolserver/ -- blog post
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_DE/Improve_toolserver_reliability -- original grant application

[Active ombudsmen?] - there was a discussion on the DE Wikipedia (and then foundation-l) about whether or not the Ombudsmen commission (the group that hears privacy violations) is actually fulfilling its mission actively.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/40241

Community

[NY Wiki-Conference] - the first New York City Wiki-Conference was a success with more than 100 people attending. The Signpost has a write-up about the event and there was also a twitter "report" with the tag #nywikiconference.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nywikiconference -- twitter feed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-27/Wiki-Conference -- signpost update

[Institutions editing] - the Tropenmuseum, a Dutch museum, was preparing to upload images to the Dutch Wikipedia until it's account was blocked due to its name. Erik Möller (User:Eloquence, Deputy Director WMF) suggested on Commons-l that this is something we want to avoid -- "these institutions are helping expand our content, we should Assume Good Faith and let our first impressions be friendly and professional".

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/07/tropenmuseum-is-blocked.html -- Gerard's blog post on the museum
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/5006 -- Erik's commons-l post

[WMUK: Schools project ML] - Wikimedia UK has started a new mailing list for its schools project, dedicated to creating a Wikipedia version with selected articles for schools. Interested parties are welcome to subscribe.

http://wikimedia.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/schools-project-l_wikimedia.org.uk

Media

[Wikipedia flawed, but that's okay] - Wikipedia is a flawed and incomplete testament to the essential fallibility of human nature. An interesting blog post from the BBC about Wikipedia being okay. ;-)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/07/wikipedia.shtml

[Mobile Wikipedia tips] - Wikipedia Expert Tips: How to Keep the Facts at Your Fingertips. The article talks about different ways to serve Wikipedia content, from tweaking the skin to a random article screensaver to mobile phone versions.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/168655/wikipedia_expert_tips_how_to_keep_the_facts_at_your_fingertips.html

[NIH] - a few more media outlets have covered the National Institutes of Health Academy with article titles ranging from "Should you trust health advice from the web?" to "NIH Gets Schooled on Wikipedia".

[CK-12 Foundation] - Jimmy Wales joined the Advisory Board of the CK-12 Foundation, a Silicon Valley non-profit organization with a mission to provide online up-to-date and standards-aligned textbook content to K-12 students around the world.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/jimmy-wales-joins-advisory-board-of-ck-12-foundation,897842.shtml

[NPG] - the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has sided with the National Portrait Gallery *against* Wikipedia, as the NPG incident continues.

[Jimmy on CNN Money] - Jimbo did a piece on "CNN Money" where he talked about Wikipedia's non-profit status and it's usability and stategic planning projects.

http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2009/07/28/n_co_wikipedia_wales.cnnmoney/

[Rorschach censors] - the New York Times covers the Rorschach controversy: whether or not we should include the ink blot tests in our articles (for "ethical reasons").

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/technology/internet/29inkblot.html

[WP has poor photos?] - the NY Times ran an article a few weeks ago called: "Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It's a Desert for Photos" which pointed out that Wikipedia has some trouble with good quality pictures in its articles (especially ones of celebrities). This caused a bit of controversy on the mailing lists, with image contributors complaining that the Foundation didn't steer the article in the right direction -- highlighting good works instead of bad ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html -- article
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053282.html -- mailing list thread

Stats

[50k] - the Galician and Nynorsk (Norwegian) Wikipedias have both reached 50,000 articles.

[mhr.wp] - the Meadow Mari Wikipedia is less than a month old and already has over 500 articles (almost 600)!

http://mhr.wikipedia.org/

Other news

[Facebook] - the Wikipedia fan page on Facebook, managed by Cary Bass (Bastique) Volunteer Coordinator WMF, now has a URL. If you use Facebook, make sure to add yourself as a fan.

[Wikipedia Art] - some awesome posters/t-shirts from last year have resurfaced, they display people with a common theme: "I [edit] Wikipedia". They show ordinary people surrounded by words that display their editing interest depending upon their personality.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeeperez/sets/72157604803121347/

[Attracting newbies?] - David Gerard pointed out an interesting article with tips about attracting newbies and making them effective. Although the author is talking about software development, it definitely could relate to our projects.

http://denise.dreamwidth.org/23600.html

Did you know ...

... parody is the highest form of flattery?

[Bigipedia] - BBC Radio launched a "broadwebcasting" show parodying the internet by mocking pop-ups, search boxes and other aspects of online activity. Produced and directed by Pozzitive, the four-part series is called 'Bigipedia' and has taken its inspiration from Wikipedia. If you can appreciate British humor, check it out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lpr29/Bigipedia_Episode_1/ -- first episode (30 min)

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Platonides , Thanks to: OsamaK, Rand, Stu, Sage, Daniel Kinzler, Skenmy, Frederic, Brion, Jay, Philippe, David, River, Roan, Galio, Cary, Signpost, Gerard , 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: 30 Number: 112

2009-07-19T22:39:00.001Z

Technical news

[Media server problems] - there were some media load problems on all the sites, which caused "extreme slowness or temporary inaccessibility". The sysadmins took advantage of this downtime to redo the way we access media files internally which will help reduce the impact on the rest of the site when load problems on the file servers occur, and also spreads out the load among multiple servers to improve things even more. They had to shut off all uploads for a while to get this done!

[Wikipedia Weekly interviews the Usability Team] - Wikipedia Weekly, a podcast for and by Wikimedians, interviewed the Usability team.

[MediaWiki:Sharedupload change] - MediaWiki:Sharedupload became MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here. Admins in other projects should rename the first one to the second in order to customize messages for images from Commons. (That's the text shown when a Commons image is shown on another project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doorknob_buddhist_temple_detail_amk.jpg )

Request for help

[Translation of the week] -- the Translation of the Week needs help! If you speak another language and would like to translate "History of pizza" into your language, TOTW is for you. ;-)

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

Foundation

[Board elections] - the candidate deadline for the elections to the Board of Trustees has been extended to July 27 due to some technical issuets for which the CentralNotice had to be turned off. The questioning of the candidates has also begun and translation is ongoing.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates -- candidates
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates/Questions -- questions
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Translation -- translation

[New "Strategic Planning" Staff] - the Foundation announced that they filled two positions for their Strategic Planning project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053165.html -- project manager
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053168.html -- facilitator

[National Portrait Gallery] - the English National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London (UK) has threatened to sue a U.S. citizen, Derrick Coetzee. The legal letter followed claims that he had breached the Gallery's copyright in several thousand photographs of works of art uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, a free online media repository. More information in the extremely detailed Wikinews article. *Update*: The WMF and NPG have entered into good-faith negotiations, according to Erik Moeller.

[Academy: NIH] - the Wikimedia Foundation announced and had its first Wikipedia Academy (outreach event to teach people to become contributors) in the United States this week.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/NIH_and_WMF_announce_first_WP_Academy_July_2009 -- press release
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nihwiki -- twitter coverage from the event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academy/NIH_2009 -- project writeup

[Advisory Board changes] - Angela, chair of the Advisory Board, has updated the "Advisory Board" page to show that 8 members have left, bringing the current total to 15 advisory board members.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/?diff=39660

[Fundraising 2008: Post-Mortem] - Rand Montoya, the Foundation's Head of Community Giving, has posed a post-mortem (basically "what went wrong, what went right and what can we do better?") on the 2008 Fundraising Drive.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2008#Post_Mortem_for_the_2008_Annual_Fundraiser

Community

[Board elections: Inspiration] - some Wikimedians suggested that it might be better if prospective candidates knew *why* they should run for board member; what's it really like to be one? Stu West (appointed member, treasurer) responded and explained why serving on the Board is rewarding.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053211.html

[wm2009: schedule & flu] - the Wikimania 2009 team posted two updates this week where they created a draft schedule for the conference on their wiki and posted a message about swine flu concerns to a few mailing lists.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule -- schedule on wiki
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimania-l/2009-July/001433.html -- mailing list post (swine flu)

[Open Source Schools] - Wikimedia UK's secretary is presenting a piece on the subject of "using Wikipedia in schools" at the Open Source Schools "un"conference in Nottingham (UK) next Monday 20th July. If you're in the area, it sounds like it'll be interesting! (Conference admission is 55 pounds.)

http://opensourceschools.org.uk/node/11659 -- presentation
http://www.ncsl.org.uk/lcc-map.pdf -- venue

[Spotlight] - Many projects must have there projects to improve the quality if an article. The English Wikipedia has there project "Spotlight". It not a new thing, the started end of 2006. But the news is that it has lost it {{historical}} - label. The spot is again on!

http://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/Wikipedia:Spotlight

Media

[Rorschach Test Censorship] - English Wikipedians had an interesting argument about whether or not to include the Rorschach ink blot tests in the article on the subject. No, it's not because of licensing, the files are in the public domain. It's actually about ethics, people are worried it will ruin the validity of the tests. The Wikipedia discussion was picked up by blogs/news outlets.

[WikiWars Conference] - the first conference to be held in Bangalore (India), called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics, practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories about Wikipedia

http://cis-india.org/research/conferences/wikiwars

[NPG Coverage] - the user who was threatened with legal action by the National Portrait Gallery is keeping a list of media coverage.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dcoetzee/NPG_legal_threat/Coverage

[WLA/NL] - The Dutch Wiki loves art initiative by Wikimedia Nederland ended and gained a total of 5447 photos of art objects from 45 museums photographed by no less than 292 enthusiastic volunteers. In a few weeks the pictures will become available on Commons, but the pictures can already be viewed on flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/wikilovesart/

Stats

[en.wp] - Erik Zachte, Wikimedia status guru and owner of infodisiac.com, has published new wikistats data for the English Wikipedia for the first time since October 2006. This also allows publication of much wanted totals for all wikipedias combined, and trend forecasts.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/07/new-statistics-for-the-english-wikipedia/ -- blog post #1
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/07/new-statistics-for-the-english-wikipedia-2/ -- blog post #2 (in-depth technical post)
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm -- new tables (click "charts" on the upper right to see pictures too)

[sv.wp biographies] - LA2 posted some research on the breakdown of articles on the Swedish Wikipedia. The Wikipedians found out that 26.6% of articles are biographies and that the overall ratio of biographies is 1 woman to 4 men (but that ratio gets worse as you go back in time).

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044149.html -- mailing list post
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA2-gender-age.png -- gender vs. age graph

Other news

[New Book] - a new freely licensed book has been launched about wikis in the workplace.

http://WikiWhileYouWork.com

[LSS: foundation-l] - two new list summaries for the foundation-l posts have been posted, covering the second half of June and the first half of July.

Did you know ...

... that there is an easy solution to Wikipedia's vandalism problems?

According to one humorous website, "ALL WE NEED TO DO is direct our vandalism entirely to the article about chickens. Imagine a Wikipedia free of vandalism!"
http://www.everytopicintheuniverseexceptchickens.com/

Note: that is a humorous website. It does not mean you are allowed to ... with Wikipdia's chickens.

Quote

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." - Thomas H. Huxley

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Walter , Thanks to: Sue, Anoop, Patricio, Galio, Effe, Brianmc, Signpost, Andrew Turvey, Angela, Sage Ross, Philippe, Phoebe, Chzz, MarkW 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: 2009 Week: 28 Number: 111

2009-07-09T21:18:00.001Z

Proposals

[Logo Wiktionary] - End of 2006 a winner of a new logo selection process was declared for Wiktionary. Some Wiktionary accepted and used the new logo, others did not. (like the English Wiktionary). In any case once more a new logo selection process is in motion on Meta for Wiktionary.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary/logo -- "we have a winner (2006)"
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary/logo/refresh -- new logo Wiktionary 2009

Foundation

[Board elections] - the Wikimedia Foundation Board is holding its community elections again, this time for 3 board seats (the next regular election will be in two years). Candidates are being accepted until July 20. Help is needed with translating many pages for the election. (including the CentralNotice displayed all over Wikimedia's sites)!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates/en -- candidates
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Translation -- translation

[Annual Plan] - the Foundation has published its 2009-2010 Annual Plan and a set of Questions & Answers to go along with it.

[wm2009: Registration] - registration for Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires is now open! If you register before July 30, it's US$15 cheaper. (= US$45)

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

[Orange] - In April the Wikimedia Foundation announced a partnership with the telecommunications company "Orange". The Spanish Wikipedia is now being showcased on the Spanish Orange site.

http://wikipedia.orange.es
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Orange_and_Wikimedia_announce_partnership_April_2009 -- original press release

[New chapters] - the Board recently approved three new Wikimedia chapters: Wikimedia Danmark (Denmark), Wikimedia Portugal, and Wikimedia Ukraine. This brings the total number of chapters to 24.

Agenda

[fossevents] - a new site (run by the same people who run IRC network Wikimedia uses, Freenode) just opened up that showcases FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Events around the world, big and small. Be sure to add your upcoming Wikimedia events and look for others that interest you!

http://fossevents.org

Community

[New Wikipedia] - The founding of "Wikipedia", the large Western language Wikipedias, may seem to lay in the distant past, new Wikipedia's are still founded. The Mari Wikipedia is the newest family member

[GLAM] - in the lead up to GLAM-WIKI (August 6-7), Wikimedia Australia is holding an editors' challenge (like a friendly competition) with the overall theme of "Australian GLAM" (GLAM stands for "Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums"). The idea is to pick your own editing theme and submit it, along with the edits you make related to it. Prizes will be awarded for the most extensive, creative, impressive, novel, broad, deep, etc. edits.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia/GLAM_challenge -- GLAM challenge
http://glam.wikimedia.org.au/ -- GLAM wiki

[WMDE: ED/Vision] - we previously noted that Wikimedia Deutschland was looking for a new Executive Director; they've finally found one after a year! The new director is Pavel Richter (w:de:User:Schreibvieh) and he was the unanimous choice of both the search committee and the board. Sebastian, chair of WMDE's board and the current director, also published a blog post describing the newly defined vision for Wikimedia's first and largest chapter.

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/07/02/neuer-geschaftsfuhrer/ -- blog announcing ED (German)
http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/07/06/eine-vision-fur-wikimedia-deutschland/ -- blog discussing vision (German)

[ENWP: 3 million?] - What will the 3 millionth article on the English Wikipedia be? A few community members are making guesses on what article that will be, be sure to add your guess too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Three-millionth_topic_pool

[India: Meetup] - everyone seems to be linking to a report on the third Bangalore, India meetup. The meetup seems like it was pretty successful and the agenda included a large number of topics, these are discussed in the meetup report.

http://tinucherian.blogspot.com/2009/07/indian-wikipedians-meet-in-bangalore09.html

[Wikinews] - the English Wikinews is doing good. It has an active community, does exclusive interviews, is indexed by Google News and now the have almost 15000 news story's written. But not all Wikinews editions are so. On Meta is there now a proposal to close down the dutch language Wikinews due to a structural lack of activity.

Media

[WP: Accurate enough] - everyone always has something to say about us, at least this time it's a favorable article from the Kansas City Examiner.

http://www.examiner.com/x-13637-Kansas-City-Social-Media-Examiner~y2009m7d7-Wikipedia-accurate-enough-for-me

[Wiki Goes to War] - the U.S. Army is creating MediaWiki-based sites for seven of their 550 manuals. There will be a 90 day experiment, where troops can edit manuals, and leave comments.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htcbtsp/articles/20090702.aspx

[Egocentric introverts] - a study by Israeli psychology researchers say that their study shows Wikipedians are egocentric, disagreeable, socially awkward and closed to new ideas. Australian Wikipedia have "hit out" at this report.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/wikipedians-are-a-bunch-of-egocentric-introverts-study-20090708-dcnk.html

[Sued Over Wikipedia] - a county commissioner and political consultant have filed a defamation lawsuit in Ingham County Circuit Court against three men for allegedly editing false and defamatory information into a biographical entry on Wikipedia.

http://michiganmessenger.com/22336/grebner-files-libel-suit-over-wikipedia-edits

Stats

[MJ] - another analysis of the Michael Jackson+Wikipedia problems was made by Erik Zachte, Wikimedia's statistics analyst, with graphs and comparisons between different Wikipedia language versions.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/07/michael-jackson/

[Commons Uploads] - Ilmari Karonen has been collecting image statistics for a while now (how many bytes we have per file type) and now he has graphs illustrating the changes too.

[Going for he 8th place] - the Spanish and Portugees Wikipedia are very, very close in the number of articles and are so competing for the honour of being the 8th largest Wikipedia..

http://pt.wikipedia.org -- 491 671 artigos
http://es.wikipedia.org -- 491.663 artículos

Other news

[Image Search] - this should make searching for images to upload to Commons a lot easier: Google adds Creative Commons Selection to Advanced Options.

[Serious reading] - a doctoral thesis, by Jos ́ Felipe Ortega Soto, that analize quantitatively the evolution of the top ten Wikipedias. An their problems (in English, 228 pages).

http://libresoft.es/Members/jfelipe/thesis-wkp-quantanalysis -- pdf download

Did you know ...

... what a "sock puppet" is?

No??? - Strange, are you sure that you are a Wikimedian? - In any case, you can look it up now. No, not (only) in "the dictionary the anyone can edit", but also in the more traditional "Merriam Webster's 2009 dictionary of English". It says it is "a word to describe a false account used for deceptive purposes".

http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/newwords09.htm
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sock_puppet

Quote

There is a world market for maybe five computers – Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943

Editor(s): Casey, Walter , Corrector(s): Alex , Thanks to: Veronique, Sebastian, Kul, DarkoNeko, Ziko, Mathias, David, Gnangarra, the Wikipedia Signpost (Erik Zachte), Steve Bennett, Brion, Peter, Cary, Crazy Lover , 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: 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