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.org
Anno Domini MMVIII Week I Number LXXXIX
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Technical news ===
[Page protection] - It is now possible to protect unborn articles and
deleted pages, with the normal protection levels: only sysops or
semi-protection. Also, auto-expire of the protection is available. To
protect a non-existent page (as sysop), you only need to request the
page and hit the "protect" button.
[Title blacklist] - A new extension is live on the wikis. The Title
Blacklist extension allows wiki administrators to block the creation,
movement and upload of pages whose title matches any among a list of
regular expressions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Titleblacklist
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Title_Blacklist
[Special:Userrights] - Bureaucrats now have access to the special page
"Userrights". At this time this page is listed in the special pages
overview, but not yet in the sysops section. Manually enter
"Special:Userrights" in the location bar of your browser or in the
search box of Wikipedia to request this page. In the current form this
does not give extra rights to bureaucrats. The new special page only
combines the functionality of "MakeSysop" and "Makebot".
=== Request for help ===
[Fundraising] - The Fundraising website's layout and usability have
been enhanced. However, this also implies that new translations are
required.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/en - The English version of
the new donations page
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Cbrown1023/Donate - More
information about the translation request
=== Policy ===
[Stewards] - A rewrite of the steward policy is in progress. Comments
are welcome on the talk page. A vote is expected around the 15th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Rewriting/Stewards_policy
=== Foundation ===
[Fundraiser] - Now at the very end of the fundraiser, a modest
matching donation of $50,000 has been made by an anonymous donor. The
current total balance is $ 1.43 million.
=== Community ===
[Image service] - A project on the English Wikipedia provides a really
quick and easy way to add an image to a person's biography article in
various language Wikipedias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BOTijo/Images_for_biographies
[Wikimania dates] - The dates for Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria have
been changed after a request by a group of people. The conference now
covers Thursday-Friday-Saturday, and is held 17 - 19 July 2008. This
way, the conference will fall into a single week, so that people have
to take less days off from their work to attend.
http://www.wikimania.org - The Wikimania website
[Photo submission] - Many Wikipedia articles about a person don't
feature a photograph yet. A new project on the English language
Wikipedia has started to ask people whose articles have no pictures to
submit one. A request for people to submit their images by email,
together with usage permission, has been included on the contact page
of the English Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us/Photo_submission
[Stewards] - The confirmation of the "old" stewards has been
concluded. Four stewards did not make it, all due to inactivity:
Ausir, Romihaitza, Snowdog and Suisui.
=== Media ===
[Video] - Sue Gardner and Erik Moeller gave a presentation at
Stanford's Open Source Lab about Wikimedia and the Wikiversity
project, and shot a video of it.
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Stanford_Open_Source_Lab
http://blip.tv/file/551254
=== Stats ===
[Stats for all] - On the English language Wikipedia, an extensive
statistical overview of all the Wikipedias is included. In this
overview, you can see for example that the Volapuk Wikipedia (the 15th
largest) has grown by a stunning 18634% in 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics
[WP numbers] - The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles and
the French Wikipedia has reached 600,000 articles.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_News -- more on this subject
=== Other news ===
[Reminder] - Soon, it will be the most important holiday of the year:
Wikipedia Day. On January 15, Wikipedia will be 8 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_day
=== Did you know ... ===
... you can add a extra link to the upper right menu?
By including the code below on your [[User:Your_Name/monobook.js]]
page you get an extra link between "My talk" and "My preferences". You
can define the page it points to, and the name of the link, yourself.
It can be used, for example, to easily access a page where you collect
links to pages or websites you find useful.
The code:
/*Personal links*/
addOnloadHook(function() {
addPortletLink('p-personal','/wiki/User:Your_Name/Link_Target','Link_Name','pt-links','Link
title','!',
document.getElementById('pt-preferences'));
});
Note: change "Your_Name" to your account name; change "Link_Target" to
the page you want to link to; change "Link_Name" to the link name that
is to be shown. The shortcut key for this link is alt-shift-!.
=== Quotes ===
"An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A
pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves." -- Bill Vaughan
"It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets." -- William
Thomas
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art27040.asp -- More New Year quotes
//////////////////////////////////////////
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Unique Visitors website last week: 157
Editor(s): Walter, Effeietsanders
Corrector(s): Oliphaunt
Thanks to: Adrian M. H., pfctdayelise
Contact: reply or
http://report.wikizine.org
Website:
http://www.wikizine.org
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