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Year: 2007 Week: 08 Number: 62

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An independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community

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=== Technical news ===

[Captcha] - The system that means you need to enter a word displayed as an image as a anti-spam protection measure is now active on all wikis. It used to be active only on the smaller projects. This can cause problems for users from communities who are not used to Latin characters. The words displayed are two English words which together form one non-existing word. This makes it difficult for people who do not know English to read the words. If the word is unclear refresh the page then you get a new word. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/30108

[Special page] - The page [[Special:Protectedpages]] does now works. It is updated live. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Protectedpages

[Image swap bot] - Commons, the wiki that more and more WMF-wikis are using for their images and other media, is working on expanding their service. This with a bot that comes to your local wiki and replaces the image used on a page by another image (or video). This is so that when on Commons a media file is renamed or changed to another version, the projects using the older version will be updated automatically. The people operating this bot are requesting feedback about it. The bot is not operating yet. Commons already provides the "CommonsTicker" service that informs local wikis about changes to files in use on that wiki on commons. And also the "CommonsDelinker" which removes the broken links to deleted files on the wikis that were using that file. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14717.com

=== Request for help ===

[Offline Wiki] - Everybody can freely download a dump of the database and run there own local copy of there favorite Wikimedia project. But if only want to have your own local copy for reading Wikipedia (or Wikiboosk, etc) then setting up a complete local installation of MediaWiki is not very easy, fast and computer resource friendly solution.

Stian Haklev has written a fairly easy to use offline wikiserver for locally running a copy of a wiki. It makes use of the html-download dump of the projects. The advantage compared with just extracting the html-dump and browse the files is that you do not need to extract the dump to read them. That makes a big difference. For example; when a html-dump of a small wiki is 3,1 mb. Then when you extract that you have 46,8mb. That is a lot more but what is 50mb in the world of today? But when you download the dump of the German language Wikipedia of 1,5gb then I makes a big difference. The current version is 0.2 , it works but slow on large dumps. Windows, Mac, Linux. The developer is asking for people who would like to test it and provide feedback and would welcome developers to join his project to make it better and faster. Contact; <shaklev AT gmail DOT com> http://houshuang.org/blog/2007/02/16/wikipedia-offline-server-02/

=== Community ===

[Image-l] - Wikimedia Commons now provides the service of a "Picture of the day" by email. Subscribers receive daily an email with a hyperlink to a selected image. The email itself does not contain the image. http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-image-l

=== Media ===

[Yes, Wikipedia is Big] - In US, half of Wikipedia traffic comes from Google. This is now one of the Wikipedia-story's in the media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-02-19/Google_... http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7006520355

[No, Wikipedia wil not get banded] - A other story currently floating around is that Wikipedia will be banded from many schools and libraries in America because of a proposal of law by USA senator Ted Stevens. The proposal would ban "commercial social networking websites and chat rooms". Besides the fact this is only a proposal the current version does not affect Wikipedia because Wikipedia is not commercial but a non-profit. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-49 -- "Son of DOPA" see section 203 http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/4598 -- article with very misleading title

=== Stats ===

[csb.wp] - The Kashubian Wikipedia has passed 1,000 articles. The are only about 50,000 speakers of this language so 1000 articles is very nice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_language http://csb.wikipedia.org/

[Yo! (again)] - In Wikizine 57 was announced that the Yoruba Wikipedia had 500 articles. Now the are proud to announce the have 1000 articles. Yoruba is a language of Nigeria. The are now at the 127th place of largest Wikipedia's. http://tinyurl.com/2z53ok

=== Other news ===

[WikipediaWeekly] - Episode 11, the first one of 2007, of the Wikipedia news podcast is out. http://wikipediaweekly.com/2007/02/19/episode-11/

== Did you know ... ==

... what the difference is between {{foobar}} and {{:foobar}}?

No? Good. The explanation will follow. But first the basics. There is the "template" namespace. That can be a page like [[Template:Welcome]]. On your home wiki "template" can be localized and be something else. If you wish to put a template on a page you would use {{Welcome}}. But you can do the same also for non-templates. We take the article [[Zeus]] as an example. If you put on some page {{Zeus}} then the article Zeus will be displayed on that page like a template.

Now the difference between {{Zeus}} and {{:Zeus}} is: If you use {{Zeus}} and the page [[Template:Zeus]] exists then the content of that page will be used. But if it does not exist then the page in the main namespace will be used. If you use {{:Zeus}} then always the content of the article [[Zeus]] will be used, even if a page [[Template:Zeus]] exists. Instead of pointing to an article you can also use any other namespace like {{:Wikipedia:Foobar}}

=== Quote ===

"It's easy to characterize Stevens as little more than a buffoon. He's certainly a buffoon, but he's a dangerous one." -- Preston Gralla about Ted "tubes" Stevens and "Son of DOPA"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ted_Stevens

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