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.org
Year: 2009 Week: 26 Number: 109
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== 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.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Selects_EvoSwi…http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/22/evoswitch-helps-us-improve-project-acc…
[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-med…
=== 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 g?ówna") 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/Vandal…
-- 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-… -- 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-alte…
=== 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/19/us/AP-US-Internet-Background-Che…http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-June/101262.html
[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
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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
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.org
Year: 2009 Week: 29 Number: 108
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== 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-l… -- 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-NO…
-- 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.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Implementationhttp://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/100958http://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.translators
[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.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(projec…http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Communications_Intern
[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--… -- 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.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/39621http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Some_reflections_abo…
[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-wi… -- 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.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191474/Labour-councillor-David-Boo…http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/wikipedia-sentinel-quits-afte…
[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/…
(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/MarissaMayerFutureofJournalismTest…
=== 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-wik… -- 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/
******************************************
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.org
Year: 2009 Week: 23 Number: 107
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== 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
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/052123.htmlhttp://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/05/google-chrome-3-adds-html5.html
[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_t…
=== 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_bookmark… -- 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.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/enhttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-May/052070.html
=== 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-… -- 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_… -- 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 lexicon
and 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-st…
[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
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