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Year: 2006 Week:09 Number: 15
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Technical news ===
[capitalize] All Wiktionary editions have been converted to no longer
automatically capitalize entry titles. This change came without prior
discussion in the affected communities.
[Vandal Fighter] A tool for watching "recent changes" and reverting
edits. User Henna has taken over the job of maintaining and improving
the Vandal Fighter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Henna/VFhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CryptoDerk/CDVF
[Wiktionary] German Wiktionary enables sysop patrolling. This is a
option so that certain users can mark an edit as "checked". It can be
useful for vandal fighting. The user right to mar an edits as checked
can be given to all users or to sysops only. To request to get this
option active on your wiki get clear consensus on your wiki and make a
BugZilla ticket about it. And then be patience. The request for the
enabling of this function for Meta is waiting for some time now.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Patrolled_edithttp://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4747
[Thumb] Brion started a process of forcing old rendered png, jpeg and
SCG thumbnails to regenerate. This
will gradually replace old rendered images over the next couple days as
several issues have been fixed recently.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22176
=== Request for help ===
[Wikimania] Volunteers needed for the Wikimania Program Team
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/26630
=== Foundation ===
[interview] Signpost interviewed Jimbo Wales, asking him questions that
our readers have submitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-20/Jimbo_…http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/21/0658223
=== Community ===
[1000000th] article on the English language Wikipedia will be written
very soon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Millionth_topic_pool
[Wikibooks] has been cited as an authoritative source of information.
Who would have thought that was possible?
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/columnItem/0,294698,sid14_gci1165662,0…
[proposal] A new project proposal for a genealogy wiki currently at
Rodovid.orghttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rodovid.org
=== Media ===
[Chinese WP] February 20, Washington Post about Chinese Wikipedia
Series, and a letter appealing for an unblock for zh.wikipedia
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR200602190…http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/19/AR200602190…http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/18/AR200602180…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-20/China_…
=== Other news ===
[INSPIRE] new EU directive can put more intellectual property rights on
geographic data in the European union. Wikimedia projects are using data
like this.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6310http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/INSPIRE
[Multilingual] A first draft sorts out which features a future
Multilingual MediaWiki should have.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki
=== Editorial ===
Dear readers,
First I would like to thank you all 300 readers of Wikizine. Knowing
that there are actually people reading this, and I suppose find it
useful, makes it all worth while.
I would like to ask for your assistance for Wikizine. Wikizine exist for
reporting news for the Wikimedia community about the Wikimedia
community. And Wikizine needs your help, the Wikimedia community.
There are three points about with I ask your cooperation;
1th
Report news from your home-wiki or from your personal experience when
using the wiki. Most news can be found on public mailing lists and
specific pages on the main wikis. But frequently I, Walter, find
interesting global-wikimedia news in the village pump of my home-wiki,
WikipediaNL. Or discover by pure luck changes to the behavior of the
software.
If I can find interesting things on my local wiki I suspect that on many
other wikis are also interesting things to find. News that not can be
found on other places. Please share your local news when you think it
is interesting for the global Wikimedia community or when you discover a
modification to the software.
2th
There seems to be still many users who do not know of the existence of
Wikizine. Inform on your wiki the users about Wikizine. Many will not
care about news from the Wikimedia world and only be interested in
working on there articles. But those who are interested should be
informed about it. I think especially about your sysops.
You can put a "Wikizine-banner" on your user page or, if there is no
objection by your community, on some highly visible page like the
"village pump".
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/banners
3th
One of the main problems for informing many users in the Wikimedia
community is the languages barrier. The glue for the communication
between the projects is English. Wikizine is written in something that
is supposed to be English. You, the reader of Wikizine, understand
English. But that is not enough.
It is my hope that you, user of your project, editor, sysop or
ambassador, act as a gateway for the news that you read in Wikizine for
your wiki. Inform your local community about the news in your own
language. If you do that then Wikizine has succeed in his mission.
Thanks for your attention,
Walter Vermeir
Editor-in-chief Wikizine
=== Quote ===
Stan Marsh "I am sorry that I killed your mom but the squirrel told me
that she was evil."
Mountain lion cub "You got tricked by a squirrel? Jee, you are not to
smart, are you mister?"
>From "[[w:en:South Park]]"
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 310
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of validity.
Wikizine.org is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Publisher:[[meta:user:Walter]]
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.org
Year: 2006 Week:07 Number:13
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Technical news ===
[wikidown] due to reasons still under investigation the Wikimedia projects where mostly down during Monday 13 february. Best guess now is due physical hard disk failure. Emails send to Wikimedia (OTRS) and the lists should be saved and arriving soon.
Many of the issues have been sorted but there are still some on-going problems, as such no wikipedia or wikimedia project should be considered as stable for the moment. Please see sources listed here for more and better news.
http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Statushttp://www.thewritingpot.com/wikistatus/https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_loghttp://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/21992
[Anon!] There is a new field to give a warning to anonymous users that their ip-address will be exposed if the edit. It appears above the edit box. Default is English if you have not translated it.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning
[Larousse] (2003-2006) - the oldest Wikimedia server still in service has gone offline. Larouse came to serve Wikipedia in may 2003 as the second server ever that Wikipedia acquired. Larouse started to work as THE webserver of Wikipedia with its companion Pliny, the long gone first server, acting as the database server. In his later life cycle Laurouse was used for various light tasks, including nagios, DNS, some IRC services and web serving for kohl.wikimedia.org. Larouse expired at the age of 2 and 10 months, without warranty, because of hardisk failure at the Wikimedia hosting facility in Tampa, Florida.
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Larousse
[No Tinyurl] On Meta there is a global blacklist of domains. Url's of domains listed there can not be posted on any Wikimedia wiki. This is an anti-spam function of Wikimedia. The widely used domain "tinyurl.com" is now added to the blacklist. Tinyurl.com is a free redirect service to make a very long url very short. This service has been abused by spammers to link sites already on the blacklist. But it is also used by Wikimedians to point to a specific page or revision. Below the item you find a tinyurl to the discussion page about this. Wikizine is constructed on Meta so this short url could not be saved in this form on Meta. To compare you find the long tinyurl target also included.
http://tinyurl.com/exp3thttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Homepages_of_URL_hiders_…
[Robots.txt] the page "Articles for deletion" and similar of the EN Wikipedia are added to Wikipedia's Robots.txt file. This will prevent them from being indexed by search engines like google.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4776 - request for adding AFD & co to robots.txt
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4787 - feature request to make a wikitag to specify this for a specific page
=== Request for help ===
[Grants] Wikimedia Germany has been offered to participate in the Google Grants
International-Programm. We can kindly use Google AdWords to promote Wikimedia sites.Final deadline for suggestions is February 14th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_Grantshttp://www.wikimedia.de/spenden
=== Legal ===
[TRON] Judgement in the TRON case; Wikipedia wins in the name controversy - wikimedia.de points again to de.wikipedia.org - Tron's parents said they would appeal the ruling.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,400028,00.html
=== Foundation ===
[Meeting 2006-02-05] A open Wikimedia meeting was held and also a follow-up meeting. The full log of the open Wikimedia meetings is online.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Board_meeting%2C_February_5%2C_2006http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings
=== Community ===
[Questions for Jimbo] the English language Wikipedia approaching one million articles. The Wikipedia Signpost is organizing a interview with Jimbo about this and is accepting questions for him now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-06/From_t…
=== Media ===
[The Cartoons] - also on Wikipedia EN are those a hot topic. The article about it is created on 27th January. The article is already edited about 4500 times in that time. Even more impressive is the discussion page of that article. Notice too the long archive section. You can print a book with all those talk files. And because we live now in the year 5 A.W. (after Wikipedia) somebody has actually done that and made some sort of book of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-06/Cartoo…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controv…http://i-newswire.com/pr56324.htmlhttp://www.baghdadmuseum.org/
=== Stats ===
[Alexa] Wikipedia has risen into top 25 most popular sites on the web according to Alexa Internet.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.wikipedia.org
=== Other news ===
[WikiPubs] New project proposal; a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide pub guide.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6155http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipubshttp://wikipubs.org/index.php/Wikipubs
=== Did you know ... ===
... that the website "copyscape.com" is ideal to see if newly created articles aren't copies?
http://copyscape.com/
=== Computer quotes ===
My computer goes down on me more often than my girlfriend. -- Robert Paul
The only way to make your PC go faster is to throw it out a window.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. -- Edsgar Dijkstra
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. -- Thomas Watson
How many Visual Basic programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? They don't know how. They have C++ programmers to change their lightbulbs. They make wonderfully decorated light switches, though.
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 298
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of validity.
Wikizine.org is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Publisher:[[meta:user:Walter]]
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.org
Year: 2006 Week:06 Number: 12
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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Notice: Wikizine is sent early to able to inform you about the open
Wikimedia meeting in time.
=== Technical news ===
[passwd] It used to be possible to use a blank password on wiki
accounts. Not anymore. There were even sysop accounts with no password.
Users with an account with no password and no email address have no
access anymore to there account. Brion is working on a solution for that.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/26502
[Dump] The full dump of last week is still running. The dump of ja, ko,
ms, and th are on the Korean cluster.
http://download.wikimedia.orghttp://download-yaseo.wikimedia.org/
=== Request for help ===
[Logo] Wikisource wiki is looking for a new logo. Logo submissions are
welcome until February 14, 2006
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:New_Wikisource_logo
=== Foundation ===
[OpenMeeting] Sunday February 5, 21.00 UTC is there a open Wikimedia
meeting on IRC. The #wikimedia-meeting channel is accessible on the web
via http://irc.wikicities.com/meeting/ for anyone who can not access IRC.
The meeting is to discuss the new committees organization of the
Wikimedia Foundation. The committee organizers are reqested to attend.
Anyone else with an interest in Foundation matters is very welcome.
Please inform your home-wiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetingshttp://irc.wikicities.com/meeting/irc://chat.freenode.net/wikimedia-meeting
=== Community ===
[Award] Japanese Wikipedia has been awarded the 11th AMD Award, Digital
Contents of the Year'05, Best Writer prize by Association of Media In
Digital
http://amd.or.jp/
[Nominaton] User Amarant, the, so far as is known, very first user of
the dutch language Wikipedia is been nominated for the Vosko award, for
being the founder of WikipediaNL. The price is 10,000 EURO and a piece
of art made from silver.
http://www.voskotrofee.nl/aanmelden.html
[GNU/FDL -> CC] German Wikipedia considers making unregistered users
dual license their edits under the Creative Commons Attribution Share
Alike License.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Creative_Commons-Migr…http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikide-l/2006-January/016116.html
=== Special report ===
[de-sysop] A de-sysopping on the dutch language Wikipedia somehow became
international "news". As promised last week, now a full report about it.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/2006-06/Special_report
=== Media ===
[wikipedia.de] Floricic vs. Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. - update
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/38682http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/38776
Letter to the parents of Tron
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Brief_an_die_Eltern_von_Tronhttp://216.239.39.104/translate_c?&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…
=== Other news ===
[Podcast] nice podcast about Wikipedia
http://bicyclemark.org/blog/2006/01/bm99-behind-wikipedia/
=== Did you know ... ===
... that you can not trust Commons for not deleting your pictures?
The idea of Commons is good. With alone +200 Wikipedias it is not a good
use of resources to upload one picture 200 times on every project in its
own database. If you upload a picture on Commons it can be used on all
projects directly. And we build a great database of free media to be
used for everybody. So far the theory.
On Commons the admins decided to delete all flags, even those with valid
licence information, to replace them with version in svg (scalable
vector graphics). Result: missing images on many projects. Images can be
replaced by a "better version" so the image on the projects is suddenly
different. Or the better version is uploaded with a different name and
the old one is deleted.
Commons has its own rules for deletion, and of course also there, most
users act responsible. But the procedure is far from perfect. Files can
be deleted when files are still in use on the projects. The waiting
period before deletion is only 7 days. The uploader should be informed
about the nomination but even if he is still active on the projects
there is a good change he will not visit Commons in those seven days.
And the main problem is there is no way to restore a deleted file like
sysops can do with textual pages.
Commons is great but keep always copies of your files and do not delete
files on your local wiki because they are on commons. You may need them
one day.
Example about how commons works;
http://tinyurl.com/7vzkr
=== MediaZilla-IRC Quotes ===
- [Brion Vibber] "A captcha of course is that annoying little thing that
makes you type in a word or code to continue, to prove that you're
probably not an abusive bot. (Or a blind person. Whoops!)"
- [Raul654] "come on, isn't anyone here an admin on meta? [BillyH] I
think Raul654 is."
- [anon] "We have to believe in free will. We have no choice."
- [Kate-] "(Jimbo)'s in hospital with total amnesia." [brion] "I started
a *what* on the internet??"
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Number of subscribers:286
Editor(s): Walter, Oscar
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of validity.
Wikizine.org is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Publisher:[[meta:user:Walter]]