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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 12 Number: 65
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Technical news ===
[Hope] - "Stable versions", a function in the wiki so that the readers can see
some form of approved version of an article, that was announced to go live very
soon almost a year ago, is not forgotten. A developer is hired to work on that
function.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/30700
Notice: people who read the Wikipedia Signpost and Wikizine will notice that the
Signpost reports much more technical news in their B.R.I.O.N section than
Wikizine, and mostly also a lot earlier than Wikizine. There are two reasons
for this. Some changes are considered too trivial or technically obscure so
that it is not likely that there is a benefit in informing the target audience
of Wikizine about it. Also many of the changes listed in the Signpost are not
(yet) live on the Wikimedia websites but only present in the code. In general
Wikizine chooses to report only technical changes when they are live on the
projects. Major technical changes that are known in advance will be reported
before they are live. But those are rare and even more almost never known in
advance enough to report it.
=== Foundation ===
[New hire] - The Wikimedia Foundation has hired [[meta:User:Bastique]] for the
position of " Volunteer Coordinator".
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/15190
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bastique
[Exit] - Danny Wool, Grants Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation in the
Florida office, from September 2005 has left Wikimedia. Danny has also resigned
from all his functions on EN Wikipedia, Meta and as steward.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Former_staff
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Danny
=== Community ===
[South Asia] - Interview with two users about the Bengali and Indonesian
Wikipedia's
http://wikipediaweekly.com/2007/03/14/wikipedia-weekly-15/
[Abuse] - On the Dutch language Wikipedia it was noticed that a user had placed
a link "Donate to Wikipedia" inside an article pointing to a PayPal donation
form to donate to a stranger. The page [[Special:Linksearch]] can be of use to
find this type of fraud. Also because some companies give money to people who
bring to them new customers some users try to add to some links a referrer - a
special code so that they can gain profit from the traffic that comes from
Wikipedia.
[Sinbad] - Vandalism on the article [[w:en:Sinbad (actor)]] declaring this
person deceased has been used to start a hoax sent by email linking to that
article, even making it to the mainstream media. The problem is that when the
link used to point to the article is a permalink, a link pointing to a specific
revision, people only see the old version and may not be aware that the most
current version is different form version the are reading. The specific
revision can be deleted by a sysop by deleting the article and restoring it
selectively. Or by a user with oversight rights.
What also can help is to make it more clear to the reader that the page the are
seeing is an old version. Edit your local page [[MediaWiki:Revision-info]] to
modify the text displayed on the top of an old revision.
http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10520/1103/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Revision-info -- discussion on EN
about how the notice must look like
=== Media ===
[Andrew Lih] - Pod/Vod-cast interview with Andrew Lih, maybe more know to some
as Fuzheado. Andrew Lih is a writing a book about Wikipedia, has blog about
Wikipedia and is a core member of the WikipediaWeekly podcast.
http://www.calacanis.com/2007/03/20/calacaniscast-18-beta/
http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/
[.gov] - The Wikipedia Factor in U.S. Intelligence; Wikipedia used in U.S.
Government intelligence reports.
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2007/03/the_wikipedia_factor_in_us_int.html
=== Stats ===
[cy.wp] - The Welsh Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles with the article
[[w:cy:Livorno]]
http://cy.wikipedia.org
[el.wp] - The Greek Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
http://el.wikipedia.org
[tr.wikt] - The Turkish Wiktionary has reached 120,000 entries.
http://tr.wiktionary.org
=== Other news ===
[Wiki] - It is now offical. "Wiki" is a word - it must be so because it is now
in the Oxford English Dictionary.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2362781.ece
=== Did you know ... ===
... you can add advanced editor functions to the edit-box?
[[w:en:User:Cacycle]] has written in javascript a full-featured in-browser text
editor called "wikiEd" that adds enhanced text processing functions to
MediaWiki edit pages. wikEd is a complete rich-text pseudo-WYSIWYG editor and
comes with many MediaWiki-specific features. Currently it only works with
FireFox or other Mozilla browsers. But User:Cacycle is trying to make it also
work for IE 7.0 and would welcome help with it.
Its functionality is extensive, taking you time to get to know before passing
judgment about it and reading the manual is recommended. WikiEd is also
available in other languages besides English or you can translate it. To
install it you only need to include some code to your monobook.js
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cacycle/wikEd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cacycle/wikEd_international
=== Ferengi Rules of Acquisition ===
"A woman wearing clothes is like a man in the kitchen." Rule 4
"Females and finances don't mix." - Rule 94
"Wives serve, brothers inherit." - Rule 139
"A wife is a luxury... a smart accountant a necessity." - Rule 255
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Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
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