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.org
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-…
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales_asks_Wikipedian_to_resign_%22his_po…
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Ex-Wikipedian_accuses_Pulitzer_winner_of_bad_jo…
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/Newslette…
[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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