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Year: 2007 Week: 02 Number: 57

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

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=== Technical news ===

[Mailing lists] - The Wikimedia mailing lists were moved to a server in the Kennisnet cluster in Amsterdam. For users, this means that all the posting email addresses have changed to the format "<name_of_list>@lists.wikimedia.org". The old posting address formats "@wikipedia.org", "@wikimedia.org" or "@mail.wikimedia.org" should still work as a redirect.

Using the new posting address is recommended. If you are using messages rules to organize your email, they will need to be updated. A benefit of the move is that a system failure in the Florida cluster will not disable the mailing lists (if you send the posting to the new posting address). Another benefit is that mailing lists can be created without system administrator intervention, which will make it much quicker to create them from now on. http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo

[Backup] - Wikimedia Deutschland bought a RAID system with a capacity of 12 terabytes. It arrived in Amsterdam this week, and will be used to make a back-up of the project's data. [source: Arne] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13505/focus=13505

[OTRS] - The software used for answering the emails send to the Wikimedia foundation and projects is updated. This is important because the like everybody the received a lot of spam and now it is mush easier and faster to remove spams. Now can the volunteers working on the emails spend more time working on the emails instead of sorting out the real question between the spam. If you like to help with answering emails contact the queue contact person or for starting a new queue contact a OTRS-admin. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS

=== Request for help ===

[Wikimania2007] - The people organizing Wikimania this year ask to let them know if you are coming to Wikimania this year in Taipei, Taiwan. This is only to have some idea about how many people they can expect; there is no commitment by putting yourself on the list. Even if you are not sure you will go, you are asked to let them know. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13498/focus=13498 http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees

=== Foundation ===

[Fundraising] - Anthere announced good and bad news about the fundraising this year. The good news is that the current fundraiser is the most successful ever in our young history. Unfortunately, it was not successful enough to do everything that was planned; certain things will have to wait. This fundraiser also had Wikimedia's first matching donations over, but there will be no more matching donations this year. The protest of certain members of the community played a role in that decision, but the Chair writes that it was only a factor. The fundraiser will end next week on Wikipedia day, the 6th anniversary of the founding of the very first Wikipedia. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13524/focus=13524 http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day

[Big donors] - The bulk of the money comes from small donations from many people. In the past the average donation was around 22$US, But there is also small group of big donors. The largest donor this year was the 'anonymous friend' matching donation that raised the counter by 286,800$US. The big donations are done by private persons, a few companies, and other foundations. http://tinyurl.com/yenwpl -- list of large donations

=== Community ===

[OpenWikimeet] - The Wikimedia Board will have an open meeting this Friday on the 12th of January in Rotterdam, Netherlands at the Golden Tulip Hotel (near the Erasmus Bridge). http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13585/focus=13585

=== Media ===

[Plagiarism] - Plagiarism is not appreciated, in real life like on wiki. A three-year newsroom employee resigned Tuesday after being caught plagiarizing from the English-language Wikipedia. http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA010307.02A.richter.132c15...

[BBC 5] - Jimmy Wales was interviewed on BBC 5 radio. http://tinyurl.com/y98jlq -- direct link to mp3 audio, 25 minutes http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2007/01/jimmy_wales_int....

=== Stats ===

[EN Wikinews RSS] - The English-language Wikinews provides a RSS-feed of their news articles. According to statistics from Feedburner, the service used for the feed, it is very popular. At the start of December it had just over 5,000 daily subscribers. That increased to 20,000 by December 12 and reached 36,000 on December 20. It has dropped slightly since then, with now just over 30,000 subscribers reading the latest news from Wikinews every day—At least according to the statistics. In any case, many people seem to read the news from the English-language Wikinews. http://en.wikinews.org/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/WikinewsLatestNews

[YO!] - The Yoruba Wikipedia has reached 500 articles. That may not look very impressive, but it is. This wiki is one of many that was created a long time ago, in 2002, but for many years there was very little activity. Yoruba is a language of Nigeria; although they do have Internet access in Nigera, working on their wiki is not popular. The increased activity on this wiki is mostly the work of one user, [[w:yo:User:Loadewole]], who has written most of the articles in a few weeks. They are a native from Nigeria working at a local university. One person can make the difference between the failure or success of a wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaYO.htm -- the evolution of this wiki

[Catalan Wikipedia] - They reached 50,000 articles on the 4th of January 2007. The Catalan Wikipedia is a very old Wikipedia, being the 3th Wikipedia created after the English and German wikis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Wikipedia

[Romanian Wikipedia] - They reached 50,000 on the 5th of January 2007. The milestone article was about "[[w:ro:Peºtera Urºilor]]", a cave in Romania, written by [[w:ro:Utilizator:Roamata]]. Unfortunately, on the 7th they fell back to 49978 articles. Something wikis should remember when announcing a milestone: do not delete so many articles that you drop under the milestone, because that looks very strange when you send out a press release and the media looks at your wiki. http://ro.wikipedia.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Wikipedia

=== Other news ===

[Clarification] - Regarding the last weeks item about Esperanza and the sentence "The English Wikipedia's infamous Esperanza organisation has been restructured ...". Despite the clearly negative meaning given by the dictionary, it was not intended in that meaning. The use of 'infamous' was intended in the sense that it had a lot of impact and was well-known, not that it caused any trouble. The word "infamous" will no longer used in Wikizine. My apologies on behalf of Wikizine. Walter, Editor-In-Chief.

=== Fund drive quotes ===

"Thank you for expanding our knowledge." -- naoyuki takayanagi "I like watching Wikipedia." -- KAZUHIRO MIMURA "No wikipedia, No life" -- Takuya Fujino "Macht weiter so" -- David Völker "May the Wikipedia be with you!" -- Anonymous "Let's keep wikipedia advertising-free" -- Zauder Castro "Merci Wikipedia. Continuons a se partager les informations!" -- Anonymous ('Thank you Wikipedia. Let's continue sharing information!')

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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 published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html