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Year: 2007 Week: 10 Number: 63

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

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=== Technical news ===

[IRC bots] - All operators of Wikimedia IRC bots are requested by IRC group contact and freenode staff member m:User:Xyrael to read this posting, and respond to him via e-mail. The post was submitted to multiple lists and it is requested that it be distributed to all IRC bot operators: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/30428 http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Group_Contacts

=== Request for help ===

[Wikimania] There is an open call for submissions for the the Wikimedia event of the year, Wikimania 2007, which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan on 3-5 August. The following are requested: presentations (10–30 minute talks), workshops (30–120 minute sessions with more involvement of the audience), Birds-of-a-Feather (45-60 minutes of informal group discussion on a particular topic), panels (groups of 2-5 speakers to discuss a specific subject), posters (printed presentations or visual displays that can stand on their own), and artistic artifacts (plays, competitions, comedy, visualizations, or other representations of some aspect of the projects). http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Particpation

=== Foundation ===

[WMF update] - Board member Anthere has posted an unofficial announcement about how the Wikipedia Foundation is doing. The Foundation is looking for people with certain qualifications: a professional fundraising person, a professional in international employment, and a brand strategist. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14960

[Draft] - Board member Erik Moeller requests comments on a draft licensing policy resolution, intended to guide projects on copyright issues. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14730

[Job offer] - The WMF has a (paid) job offer as Volunteer Coordinator. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14870

=== Community ===

[ :-( ] - w:en:User:Essjay , a (now former) heavily involved and high ranking Wikimedia member, has become the center of media attention and internal discussion. Extensive reports what is going own can be found by the hyperlinks below. The essence of the case is; User Essjay has presented himself on Wikipedia as a professor of theology. And now it has come out that this is not true. Essjay has resigned form all his functions and has left the project. The story is reported in the general mass media, including television. Also the non-English media is reporting about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-03-05/Essjay http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2007/03/05/essjay-departure-questions-remain-f... http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales_asks_Wikipedian_to_resign_%22his_pos... http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Ex-Wikipedian_accuses_Pulitzer_winner_of_bad_jou... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_scandal http://wikipediaweekly.com/podpress_trac/web/27/0/WW12-32kbps.mp3 -- Audio; WikipediaWeekly 12 http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/03/01/wikipedia-firmly-supports-your-right-... http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/01/1313251 http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/03/233224 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/06/wwiki106.xml

Related posts on WikiEN-l; http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/64370 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/64486 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/64548 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/64725

[The Babylonian] - The translation subcommittee has published its second newsletter with news about translations-related news and requests for help. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees/Trans/Newsletter...

[NL Arbcom] - The Dutch language Wikipedia has elected its own Arbitration Committee. For the 7 positions are 7 users elected in a close call because only 7 members has enough votes to be considered. The normal term will be one year but because this was the first election now 4 members are elected for one year and 3 for six months.

=== Awards ===

[Picture of the Year] - The Wikimedia Commons has chosen the 2006 picture of the year: a photograph of the [[w:en:Aurora Borealis]] taken by Senior Airman Joshua Strang of the United States Air Force. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2006

=== Other news ===

[Law] - In Belgium has a court made some interesting rulings. A editor of a story on the Belgium edition of Indymedia was sued by the company that was written about for libel. The court ruled that a private person writing for a community news site must be treated the same way as a professional journalist. In this case this mean that case must come for a jury. In a other case, also in Belgium, a court destroyed part a law about the protection of sources used by journalists. The judges ruled that it is illegal to make a difference between professional journalists and bloggers by giving only professional journalists protection of source. "Protection of sources is an essential part of the freedom of speech and of the freedom of the press." http://zdnet.be/news.cfm?id=65592 http://lvb.net/item/2909

[A new pedia] - A new wiki-based encyclopedia project is started; Conservapedia. It is a encyclopedia project written from a fundamentalistic Christian American point of view. It is intended as a serious project. Probably this project will be more competition for uncyclopedia then Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia http://www.conservapedia.com

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

... how you can protect an unborn article?

If you are a sysop, you may have noticed that sometimes an article you deleted has a long history of creation and deletion. Often these pages have weird title that will likely not become a valid article, or it is deleted after consensus that it does not belong on the project.

It is possible to make it impossible to recreate. Create a new page to list such pages, such as [[Project:Protected unborn articles]]. On that page you transclude all the pages that you want to block the creation of. For example, to prevent the creation of the article "Example", you would add "{{:Example}}" to the page. Then protect the page with the list (in this example, [[Project:Protected unborn articles]]) with 'cascading protection' enabled.

The result is that the inexistent articles are protected and can only be created by a sysop. Any sysop can edit the list (here, [[Project:Protected unborn articles]]) to add or remove entries; there is no need to re-protect it every time it is edited.

=== Quote ===

"Uveigil as lok at mennet, homennet thorpar ey wat marta ok etin." "How clear a river may be, upstream always will something disgusting float in your direction." -- Marbak proverb

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