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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 52 Number: 88
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[No pictures?] - If users complain that the can not see any pictures
on the wiki the it can be the "upload.wikimedia.org" it being blocked
by adblock software. Possibly in an attempt to hide the fundraiser
banner.
=== Foundation ===
[Board resignations] - Michael Davis, Board member since the founding
of the WMF, has resigned as announced per December 1, 2007. Erik
Möller, elected Community representative since summer 2006 and
re-elected in July, also resigned in december. Anthere, Board Chair,
announced an appointment for Erik's seat soon, awaiting elections, and
in time also an appointment for Michaels seat.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23094
[Board expansion] - A lot of Board-related news nowadays, as Anthere
also announced that the Board will be expanded to 11 members. The time
schedule is not totally clear yet. Anthere also announced that she is
considering to reduce her work for the Wikimedia Foundation, after
four years of Board membership, of which 1,5 years as chair and if
elected join the board of Wikimedia France instead of chair of the WMF.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_expansion_december_2007http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23444
[Deputy Director] - Erik Moeller will become WMF's Deputy Director,
which was announced after Erik's resignation from the Board. On
Foundation-l the point was raised that for this newly created function
no public announcement was made for people to submit there candidacy
for this function. Also the move from the unpaid position as board
member to a new, paid, function raised questions. Sue Gardner,
Executive Director WMF and new boss of Erik, clarified the choice and
procedure. Key aspects were that Erik - because of his professional
background, community background and technical knowledge of the
technical side of WMF operations - is a very useful addition to the
WMF staff who have no WMF community background. The WMF is still
looking for people for some functions for the San Francisco office.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23208 --
Announcement by Sue Gardner
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23275 --
clarification by Sue Gardner
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23227 --
reservations about it
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings -- functions still open
[Fundraiser] - The fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation has been
extended until January 3, 2008. It was scheduled to end on december
22, 2007, but extended to be able to cover the holidays as well. This
is to benefited from the people in the USA who look at the last days
of the year for a good cause to donated to get a tax deduction. The
fundraiser started October 22, and is now already the longest
fundraiser ever. The current balance is around 1.25 million US dollar.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23368
=== Community ===
[Wikinews in Israel]] - Wikinews' David Shankbone wrote his first
report to his sponsored trip to Israel.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Israel_Journal:_The_Holy_Land_has_an_image_prob…
-- David Shankbone's first report
[Stewards] - New stewards have been appointed by the Board after the
2007 elections. The new stewards are: .anaconda, Andre Engels,
Dungodung, Jusjih, Lar, Millosh, Spacebirdy, Thogo, Wpedzich, Zirland,
DerHexer, Nick1915. Now that the new stewards have been appointed, the
Steward reconfirmations discussions can start. All stated objections
during the elections are being taken into account by all the stewards,
which will decide which of the stewards will be reconfirmed. Datrio
and Fantasy are already destewarded, as they did not want to stand for
reconfirmation.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23420 -
Announcement by Anthere
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/confirm -- Steward confirmation
=== Awards ===
[Web of the Year] - The Japanese Wikipedia won for the second time in
a row the "Web of the Year"-award, the most famous internet award in
Japan, organized by Yahoo-related groups and companies.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/23372http://woy2007.sbcr.jp/ -- website of the award, in Japanese.
=== Media ===
[Knol] - Media are still finding out that Google launched Knol, and
almost every article about this is reporting about the damage it may
do to Wikipedia. Nice thing to note is that (almost) no media consider
damage to traditional encyclopediae like Brittannica.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol -- If you missed lastWikizine
[COO] - The story about Wikimedia's Chief Operations Officer is
spreading now also to the more main stream media.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,317887,00.html
[Bet] - Weblogs vs. The New York Times; Wikipedia wins.
http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3302/long-bet-winner-weblogs-vs-new…
[US senate BIS] - Of the statement by Jimmy Wales before the US
senate, see Wikizine 87, is also a video. It is a video of 2 hours.
Jimmy does his thing at time index 00:34:25.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odvr4w2gMJYhttp://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/ -- tool to download the
video (282mb)
=== Stats ===
[New projects] - The Language subcommittee has conditionally approved
37 new language projects. Among them three new Wikiquotes, five
Wikinewses, one Wikisource, seven Wikiversities, eleven Wiktionaries
and ten Wikipedia's. This means that these projects can move on to the
Wikimedia Incubator project, and can get their own environment if they
succeed to establish the community and project.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
[Lombard Wikipedia] - The Lombard Wikipedia has currently only just
over 23000 articles, although that were over 117000 a few weeks ago.
This is the result of a massive cleanup of robot generated articles.
http://lmo.wikipedia.org
[DE Wikibooks] - The German Wikibooks has now its 10,000th page in the
main article namespace and reached so far a major milestone. We have
now 569 Books, 40 of them are ready and numerous have their own
printversion.
http://de.wikibooks.org
=== Other news ===
[Citizendium license] -- Larry Sanger announced that Citizendium will
use CC-BY-SA as a license. This means that Citizendium is freely
licensed as well, and if the GFDL and CC-BY-SA licenses become
exchangable in the future, Citizendium content could be used within
the Wikimedia projects.
http://tinyurl.com/2gby6p - The official announcement on Citizendium
[Amazon Kindle & wp] - As reported in Wikizine 85 Amazon (webshop) is
selling an ebook reader (kindle) that also provides access to
Wikipedia. Cali Lewis of Geekbrief.Tv explains more about how this
actually works. The device has a key "search" that can be used to
search a dictionary, the English language Wikipedia and the internet.
By means of a web browser function also the other languages editions,
Wikibooks, Wikinews and Wikisource can be read. Wireless access is
free of charge but it only works in the USA.
http://www.dearcali.com/wikipedia-on-the-kindle/ -- text explication
by Cali about the Kindle and Wikipedia
http://www.geekbrief.tv/gbtv-0277-dearcalicom -- Video version; time
index 3:15 for Wikipedia item
[Wikizine review] - In 2007 EN Wikizine presented 33 editions (extra
editions excluded) to our readers. The readership by means of email
increased by 18% this year. The number of unique visitors to the
website is going steadily downhill since the the seconded quarter of
2007. New language editions of Wikizine where launched this year.
There is now a Wikizine in the German, Spanish and Indonesian
language. The continuing publication of these new editions has been
troublesome and there readership, with the strong exception of the
Indonesian edition, highly disappointing despite the effort put in
those editions. EN Wikizine suffered also troubles and it came close
to termination of this project. The last months the effort of only a
few people sufficiently supported this project and provided the
necessary energy to continue Wikizine in to 2008 and hopeful well
beyond. Thanks for reading Wikizine people, and that is all for 2007.
http://www.wikizine.org
=== Did you know ... ===
... that you can expand your knowledge by subscribing to an email list?
You can subscribe to the Wikipedia-Daily-Article-List, and receive
every day an extract of the enwikipedia article of the day in your
maibox!
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-article-l - subscribe
=== Quote ===
"Taking the risk of offending some people; Marry Christmas everyone
and a not to bad new year!" -- user:Walter in the "Quote" section of
Wikizine 88
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 703
Unique Visitors website last week: 173
Editor(s): Effeietsanders, Walter
Special thanks to: Cali Lewis of Geekbrief.tv
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.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikizine is a weekly publication as long as there is noteworthy news
(and time)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 51 Number: 87
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[Printing] - As we all probably know, the layout for printing Wiki
pages is not the best. The Wikimedia Foundation announced a
cooperation with the Open Society Institute and the Commonwealth of
Learning to make an extension that will enable nice printing options.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable
[AMS-IX] - The Wikimedia Foundation received a Gigabit internet
connection at no cost from Amsterdam Internet Exchange (one of the
largest internet hubs world wide), for the "good of the internet".
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/AMS-IX
=== Request for help ===
[Greenspun] - The Philip Greenspun Illustration Project, coordinated
by Brianna Laugher (meta:user:Pfctdayelise), is now accepting requests
for image proposals to run in the project. If you really really want
an animation to be created, you can request it there, and there will
be a small amount of money available for the creator to stimulate the
creation. It is likely that the first round of this creation process
will start at the begin of January.
Our internal media collages of WikipediaWeekly have an interview with
Brianna about this.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun_illustration_projecthttp://wikipediaweekly.org/2007/12/14/episode-38-interview-wbrianna-laugher/
=== Foundation ===
[Wikinews] - Wikimedia Serbia has made a formal agreement with the
Serbian news agency "Beta news" for using there news articles in
Serbian and English on Wikinews.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wikinews/773http://www.beta.co.yu/
[Wikimania 2009] - The formal start for the submissions for candidate
cities to host Wikimania 2009 is open now until 15th of February.
Reminder; for 2008 Wikimania is in Alexandria, Egypt.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2009
[Wikimania 2008] - The first public planning meeting was held on IRC
with many topics being discussed for 2 hours on Thurs Dec 13. Next
meeting was planned for Saturday 22nd Dec, 1500 (UTC).
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planning/Meetings/20071213
[Staff] - The Wikimedia Foundation hired it's first new staff for the
relocation to San Francisco. Sue Gardner announced that Erica Ortega
will be the new Office Manager and Cheryl Steffen will be the Personal
Assistant for the Executive Directive.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/22805
[SR Wikimedia] - A translation and adaptation to local law of the
Creative Commons license in Serbian is presented. This is done with
the collaboration of Wikimedia Serbia.
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7911
[Felon?] - According to the blog "The Register" the former Chief
Operating Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation was a multiple convicted
felon. Concerns have been raised that the story told in the "The
Register" is inaccurate. Mike Godwin, the WMF legal consul, posted on
Foundation-l that the WMF can not give comments about this because of
legal restrictions. Mike Godwin did say that "the Foundation has
retained an independent firm that conducts criminal background checks,
consistent with state and federal law in the USA." Jimmy Wales also
promised that if it would turned out that money has been stolen he
will compensated it from personal funds. Jimmy promised that so that
people could feel comfortable about it, not that he expects there will
be a problem.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/13/wikimedia_coo_convicted_felon/
-- The Register
http://tinyurl.com/2hvor8 -- Wikinews report
[Chapters] -- The Wikimedia Foundation has officially approved two new
chapters: Wikimedia Sweden and Wikimedia Argentina.
=== Media ===
[Abuse] - Since the WikiScanner came up, the media are all the time
stunned by the fact that people, but also companies and governments
are actually editing Wikipedia, also on spots where they maybe should
not. However, the media are *still* reporting on numerous new found
governments and companies, such as recently the BBC and the US
Military. Although the bare facts might be boring to Wikimedians, it
is funny to see how media are still reporting this.
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article3255702.ece
[Signpost] - Wales’ comments on citing Wikipedia produce BBC correction
http://tinyurl.com/yvc82n
[Extra! Extra!] - News paper headline reads "U.S. military command
hacks Wikipedia". Translation; kindergarten level normal vandalisme on
article.
http://tinyurl.com/yr6br5
[Family reads also] - Articles about living people are also read by
direct family of these famous people. Jeff Tweedy, musician, says in
an interview that his son founded out things about the past of his
father by means of Wikipedia.
http://pages.citebite.com/w9q8c2xwcqu
=== Stats ===
[q:fr]- The French Wikiquote has reached 5,000 quotes. This project
was deleted in April 2006 (see Wikizine 19 Extra) and only restarted
one year ago in December 2006.
http://fr.wikiquote.org/
[Wiktionary 2nd in the World!] - At least according to Alexa.com for
the category of English language dictionaries.
http://tinyurl.com/2kon7y
[Daily Image] - Commons started in February with the service of
sending out the link to the Picture of the Day. There are now already
over 1000 people using this service.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-image-l
=== Other news ===
[Knol] - Google announced a new project, Knols. It will contain pages
with encyclopedic-like information, written by individuals, which will
appear at the top rank of Google. The writers will receive a share in
the advertisements. The big question is not: What license will Google
require? It is likely that this will raise a conflict of interest, now
Google is both publisher of information and search engine. Currently
content from the WMF projects is very highly listed in most search
requests. As a result very large amounts of traffic comes from Google
to the WMF projects.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/22897
[US senate] - Jimmy Wales has testified in the US senate about the
positive use wikis for the government can have. This is in relation of
an effort to make US government websites and databases more searchable.
http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_7689792http://hsgac.senate.gov/_files/121107Wales.pdf -- the statement of
Jimmy Wales before the US senate
=== Did you know ... ===
... that Wikinews has a weekly quiz about the current events of last week?
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:QUIZ
Wikinews is using the MediaWiki extension "Quiz" for this function.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Quiz
=== Quote ===
"It's not the size of your tools that matter, but how you use them."
-- Cary Bass on IRC
"Then I asked if he was surprised that Google did it; "I am surprised
it took them so long. :)" -- Responds of Jimmy Wales in regard of the
Google Knol project.
http://battellemedia.com/archives/004152.php
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 703
Unique Visitors website last week: 195
Editor(s): Walter, Effeietsanders
Corrector(s): Londenp
Thanks to: Connel
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.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikizine is a weekly publication as long as there is noteworthy news
(and time)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 50 Number: 86
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[Inspector Gadget] - Our wikis support the function that you can put
in a subpage of your useraccount your own javascript. That is usually
/monobook.js This way you can change the behavior of the wiki or
include specific functionality. In the years several users have
written there own javascript modification. But to use them you need to
tinker a bit, create that subpage, copy the code and so. Not exactly
userfriendly for the no so technical Wikimadians. Now there is the
"Gadget" function. When this function is active on your wiki you have
a nice menu in the "Preferences" section to enable or disable the
extra javascript functionality. And that is all you need to do.
This function is active on the English and French Wikipedia and
commons. Go there and see how it works. To get this function also
active on you wiki; 1) discus it on your wiki and get censuses 2) make
a bugzilla ticket about it and wait 3) after a couple of weeks start
annoying people about it in #wikimedia-tech
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gadgets
[Move page] - The function to move a page (to change the title) is
one that all logged in users have. On some wikis the restriction is
active that user who have a newly created account are not permitted to
move a page similar to semi-protection restrictions. There is now a
proposal, that seems to have clear support, to restrict page movement
by default on all wikis to non-new user accounts. Wikis can opt-out.
http://tinyurl.com/3avdfd
=== Foundation ===
[World Economic Forum] -- The Wikimedia Foundation is invited to the
World Economic Forum 2008 as Technology Pioneer out of a record number
of applications and nominees. The World Economic Forum (WEF) is a
Geneva-based foundation whose annual meeting is attended by top
business leaders, national political leaders and selected
intellectuals and journalists. As such is this a valuable opportunity
for the WMF to make contacts.
http://tinyurl.com/276asx - Wikinews Report
[Stewards] - the nomination election for stewards is nearing the end.
Your opinion can be given up to 16th December. At present there are 18
candidates for steward.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2007
[Fundraiser update] - the end of the current fundraiser, 22 December,
is coming near. At present about $ 1.1 million is donated. That is
more compared with the previous fundraiser of end 2006. But far below
the budget of 2008.
In an interview with the Wikipedia Signpost the Executive Director of
the WMF Sue Gardner says;"Yes, the online fundraiser will not cover
our operating costs - nor did we expect it to. And that's okay. We
have a couple of major donations coming in within the next few weeks:
they’ve been committed to, and will arrive in the bank before the new
year."
The bot posting the live donations feed in #wikimedia-donations is
down does not seem to come back anymore.
http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/22
=== Community ===
[I did not do it] - The main page of the English Wikipedia was briefly
deleted, 2 minutes or less, by an admin account. The user involved was
blocked after one minute and desysoped 5 minutes after the deletion of
the main page. After explanation by the user that it was his sister
who used his account the block was lifted. Moral of the story; logout
when you leave your computer alone, especially when you are a sysop or
higher.
[How Wikipedia works] - Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates and
Samuel Klein are writing a book on how Wikipedia works, and hope to
publish it (GFDL) early 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/35h72j Phoebes announcement on Foundation-l
[Arbcom DE] -- The German Wikipedia voted to keep the arbitration
committee (Schiedsgericht) and elected three new members.
http://tinyurl.com/2p48th - The voting page to keep the arbitration committee.
=== Awards ===
[Puerto Rico] -- The Puerto Rica Senate has honoured Wikipedian Marine
69-71 (Antonio Santiago) in an official resolution for "his dedication
to the cause of helping spread information about distinguished Puerto
Ricans through new media, and in particular, those who have served
with distinction in the military". Santiago is not only active on
Wikipedia, but also in other media.
http://tinyurl.com/2jgpda - The original (Spanish) resolution - see page 4
http://tinyurl.com/3dyhwq - Userpage of Marine 69-71
=== Media ===
[Interview Sue Gardner] - The Signpost has an interview with the new
Executive Director of the WMF, Sue Gardner. Her appointment as such,
she was already managing consultant, has been reported earlier.
http://tinyurl.com/2z7eqz
[Wikinews] -- Wikinews reporter and Wikimedia volunteer David
Shankbone has been invited by the Israeli government to join a (by
them financed) tour through the country, together with other
journalists. This is a nice recognition of Wikinews!
http://tinyurl.com/37dq22 - A blog about this news
[DEwiki rocks!] -- Stern Magazine (A German big Magazine) compared the
German language Wikipedia with Brockhaus, the traditional German
encyclopedia, on 50 articles. Stern concluded that Wikipedia was quite
better then Brockhaus both on Current Events and Correctness.
Brockhaus is considered to be better on readability. Although 50
articles is not fully representative, it is a great signal, and worth
a compliment for the German Wikipedia's editors.
http://whygive.wikimedia.org/2007/12/07/can-you-trust-wikipedia/ --
with image Cover of stern + 350 comments
[Nazi] - A German politician has filed charges against the German
Wikipedia because he finds that there are to many Nazi symbols used
in Wikipedia on the articles. In Germany it is illegal to display Nazi
symbols except for educational or artistic reasons. After a talk with
Wikimedia Deutschland the politician dropped the charges. The number
of illustration in the German language article about the Hitler-Jugend
is strongly reduced.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/wikipedia_germany_charges/http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSL0616923220071206http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSL0731501920071207
[Let's run a Wikipedia story] - One of several recent Wikipedia
storeys that made it around the globe was that of "The Secret Mailing
List Of The Evil Elite Administrators Of Wikipedia". Ironically the
"discovered" mailing list is actually a self assistance list for
victims of cyberstalking on Wikipedia. This news started by an article
of The Register.co.uk with user Durova in the spotlight. User Durova
stated that she was not contacted by the register to give here POV.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/04/0333252http://tinyurl.com/aykjm -- English Wikipedia Village pump about this
[Onion?] - A story that reads more as a report from "The Onion.com".
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=3973925http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/UnNews:Main_Page -- more weird stories
=== Stats ===
[7th] - The online research institute Muliscope announced its yearly
list of the top 20 most popular websites in the Netherlands. The Dutch
language Wikipedia is up from the 10th place in 2006 to the 7th in 2007.
http://www.multiscope.nl/top-20-sites-van-2007.html
[Growth] -- In 1.5 years Wikimedia went from 10,000 to 50,000 HTTP
requests per second (peak)! Also Wikimedia handles a 30Tb of data
volume per day.
http://tinyurl.com/yh7t7j - Graph of HTTP requests
http://tinyurl.com/yqtkoh - Help from the Operator with the pocket calculator
=== Other news ===
[Cape Town Declaration] - Advisory Board member Melissa Hagemann
reported that a preview of the Cape Town Declaration is now available.
The Cape Town Declaration is about Open Education.
http://tinyurl.com/yt887x
[Wiki too free?] -- Katina Schubert, vice chair of Germany's radical
left-wing party "Die Linke", claims "to have reported Wikipedia to the
police for the use of Nazi insignia". Display of such is generally
forbidden by law, but perfectly legal for documentation or educational
purposes. The party website declares the charge aims to "introduce
political and ethical standards" in order to get rid of what they
consider extreme right-wing viewpoints. The issue has caused a lot of
press, almost exclusively in support of Wikipedia, and even Schubert's
own party criticises her for the action. She has now openly admitted
that this was not a stroke of genius.
http://tinyurl.com/2me5bv -- Reuters news
[Paper, now in full-colour] - electronic paper is the technology that
currently gives the best hope to give truly everybody cheap access to
the content of the projects. The currently still expensive devices
that support black and withe displaying are in production. Fuji Xerox
presented a prototype of full-colour electronic paper.
http://tinyurl.com/ynlrmn
[Theora Support] - Our projects use for video the format Ogg Theora.
But besides the WMF-projects use of Ogg Theora is not used by main
stream websites. And so are most computers not able to play it. The
Mozilla foundation and Opera are planning to include playback support
of Ogg Theora build in their browsers. This can result in increased
use of Ogg Theora and make the use of video content of our projects
easier for the readers.
http://tinyurl.com/3csgb7
=== Did you know ... ===
... that Wikinews does not show up on Google News? Wikinews does not
fit one of Google's criteria, that it can't that easily be edited? :)
EN Wikinews has because of that a blog where the news is posted and
that is included by Google News. Unfortunately that blog is updated
infrequently.
http://wikinewsreports.blogspot.com/
=== Quote ===
"When you start accusing everyone of being in on a conspiracy, you
shouldn't be surprised if they decide to confirm your paranoia by
banding together against you." — w:en:user:khaosworks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CABAL
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 695
Unique Visitors website last week: 208
Editor(s): Effeietsanders, Walter, Wikifitz
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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.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikizine is a weekly publication as long as there is noteworthy news
(and time)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 48 Number: 85 Extra
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Policy ===
Most projects of the Wikimedia family, like Wikipedia, Wikibooks,
Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikispecies and Wikiversity, are using the GNU
Free Documentation License.
The GNU Free Documentation License was originally chosen because that
was the available license when the first project, Wikipedia, started.
The GNU FDL is not the most practical licence to use mainly because it
is not designed for what the WMF projects are using it for.
An alternative for the GNU Free Documentation License are the Creative
Commons licenses. Currently the GNU FDL is not compatible with the the
Creative Commons licenses.
The WMF published a resolution declaring that to make them compatible
the Wikimedia Foundation has been working with the Free Software
Foundation and Creative Commons on a solution. The have come to
proposal that would make it possible for the WMF project to migrate to
the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) licence.
The resolution states;
"The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be
modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass
collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
Upon the announcement of that re-licensing, the Foundation will
initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a
final decision on re-licensing."
So the WMF is asking formally to change the GNU FDL to make a
migration possible and after that there will be a discussion and a
vote about it.
If the projects would migrate to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license
then that means that you are free to share it and to change the work
but you need to give credit to the makers of the work and share the
work under the same or compatible license.
The reason to change to license is that a main objective of the
projects is to create content that can be reused freely by others. The
Creative Commons license would make that more easy to do then the
current GNU Free Documentation License
Jimmy Wales made the announcement of the (possible) move to the
Creative Commons license on a iCommons party in San Francisco. In his
speech Jimmy said;
"What I’m happy to announce tonight is that just yesterday the
Wikimedia Foundation board voted to approve a deal between the FSF and
CC and Wikimedia. We’re going to change the GFDL in such a way that
Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike license.
So this is not as some people speculated on facebook my 58 birthday
party … this is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia."
This transcript comes from a blogposting with the title "Breaking
news: Wikipedia switches to Creative Commons!".
This not exactly correct. The WMF is on the track of switching but
first the GNU FDL needs to changed officially and the by the board
announced discussions and community vote needs to be taking place.
So the actual move can still be a wile, like single user login or
flagged revisions, if it ever comes.
Discussion about this has started on Foundation-l.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update -- the
resolution
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/22428 --
Foundation-l discussion
http://blog.jamendo.com/index.php/2007/12/01/breaking-news-wikipedia-switch… -- speech Jimmy +
transcript
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Editor(s): Walter
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://www.wikizine.org
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