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Year: 2006 Week: 44 Number: 48

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

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=== Technical news ===

[Reminder Spam] - Users who have an easy username, like "Walter", frequently get a password reminder. Probably from someone trying to make an account with that name. But there are also weirdos who are using this function to spam users with reminders. There are users who receive hundreds of that type of emails a day.

To stop this type of abuse the password reminder function now has limits. There is a limit of one password reminder per user per 24-hour period, and 5 password reminders per IP per hour. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/27534/...

[Accesskeys change] - the function of the accesskeys and tooltips will be moved soon out of the Monobook.js and and implement them server-side. This may affect personal scripts that implement custom accesskeys. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/27592/...

[wikipedia.be] - has been offline form Friday until Sunday evening. This domain is only used for redirecting traffic to a country-portal and limited services. Indications suggest that the bill for this domain was not paid. This domain was also offline some time in 2004 for the same reason when the fee for two years was not paid.

=== Request for help ===

[Wikizine] requests more feedback form the readers about news from there home-wikis, especially the non-English language communities. http://report.wikizine.org

[Wikimania2007] - Request for cooperation from the technical people for setting up the Wikimania 2007 Hacking Days http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/27576/...

=== Foundation ===

[WMF-board change] - The board decided to change the positions of the board members. For now on and for one year at most is this the configuration of the board; Anthere (Florence Devouard), chair of the board of trustees. Tim Shell (who announced to step down from the board) is Vice-chair, Eloquence (Erik Möller) Executive secretary, Michael Davis is the Treasurer. Jimbo remains board member and has the title of Founder and "Chairman Emeritus". Despite his new title it is not expected that Jimbo will retire.

In an interview on "Wikipedia Weekly" Jimbo said that it seems likely that the board will decide in November to expand the board and this to probably 9 members. That means 5 new members. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11426/focus=11426 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11430/focus=11430 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/emeritus

[Report from Frankfurt] - the members of the board & officer and also representaives of the different chapters has come togther in Frankfurt. This to discuss the futhere of the Wikimedia Foundation. meta:user:Oscar, chair of Wikipedia Nederland has written a report about it. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Report_from_Frankfurt_-_October_2006 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11402/focus=11402 - comments on Foundation-l http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11451/focus=11451 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11446/focus=11446

[Sep11] - The "In Memoriam" sep11-wiki, recently closed, has been cleand-up and moved outside the Wikimedia Foundation umberella. http://www.sep11memories.org/ http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/11464/focus=11464

=== Community ===

[Mosaic] - the people on Commons are working on a Wikimedia logo made from many different pictures on commons, a mosaic. The to commemorate the one millionth uploaded file at Wikimedia Commons. The are now around 60,000 files away from that. The fun thing is that the mosaic is live. You can click on the tiny images to so them in large. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_logo_mosaic

[Success] - "Wikipedia Weekly", the new project for providing Wikipedia-related news in the form of an audio recording, has taken a good start. In less then 2 weeks are already 3 editions published. Wikipedia Weekly includes interviews with Wikimedia celebrities like Notafish (episode 2) and Jimbo (episode 3). According to w:en:user:Tawker episode II and III has been downloaded arround 120 times each until now. http://www.wikipediaweekly.com/

[Summary] - From this weekend the mailing list summary of foundation-l that was started at the beginning of this month will be expanded to cover the wikipedia-l list too. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/28627/focus...

=== Media ===

[Radio] - Interview of Jimbo on the National Public Radio of the USA program "Talk of the Nation", serious radio program, about Jimbo's idea about buying copyrighted works and set it free. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6387888

[Not found] - A piece by an student who discovers you can not find everything in Wikipedia http://www.statepress.com/issues/2006/10/26/opinions/698470

[Telegraph.co.uk] - Very long article in the "The Daily Telegraph", a very popular British newspaper. This article also appeared in the printed edition on several pages and illustrations. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/28/ftwiki28.xml

=== Stats ===

[W$k$ped$a dot com] - Very recently Google, Inc. bought the very popular video website "YouTube.com". Google paid 1.65 thousand million US dollars for this website. YouTube has a lower traffic ranking than Wikipedia and has very high operatioals costs because of the video storage and needed bandwidth. That can make you think what Wikipedia would be worth if it was commercial. Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, President and Founder of Mojo Supreme and knowledgeable of the online advertisement business has made an post on his blog about that. Going from non-profit to for profit would hurt the page ranking and traffic of Wikipedia and the number of editors but, according Mr. Karbasfrooshan assumptions, still be a very profitable move.

Nevertheless Mr. Karbasfrooshan writes in a follow-up post that ads for now on Wikipedia are not a good idea. He concludes with the words; "Right now, methinks that Wikipedia is doing fine, and it has a business model: its fundraising efforts." http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=626 - Part I http://www.watchmojo.com/web/blog/?p=637 - Part II http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/10/larrying_wikipe.php - related other blog posting

[Wikimedia.org] is now the 499th most-visited website on the Internet according to Alexa.

[Wikipedia.org] - ComScore published new numbers of the traffic of the most popular worldwide websites for the month of September. Again has Wikipedia grown. 12% since August. Wikipedia is according these stats now the 6th most popular website on the internet. That is very good news. Only 5 places to go and there is not need anymore for this type of "news". http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1049

=== Did you know ... ===

... that there is an easy way to get on IRC from anywhere?

The chat network of Freenode is used by mostly all projects and wikis for talking and running different tools like for anti-vandalism. To make use of this system you need an IRC-client. There are many clients available. Two free clients, from the many that exist, that can be used are Gaim and ChatZilla. But you need to install these on your computer. If you can not do that for what ever reason, your are someone else his computer or your work/school has blocked IRC-access then the IRC-service of Wikizine can be useful. chat.wikizine.org provides webbased access to selected Wikimedia related channels. On request more channels can be added. http://chat.wikizine.org http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/16/

=== Ferengi Rules of Acquisition ===

"Anything worth doing is worth doing for money." Rule 13 "Faith moves mountains... of inventory." - Rule 104 "Let others keep their reputation. You keep their latinum." - Rule 189

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Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Wikizine.org is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. Publisher:[[meta:user:Walter]]