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Year: 2007 Week: 22 Number: 72

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

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=== Technical news ===

[Autoblockedtext] - If you block a user you have the option to also block the ip address that this user is using. This appears in the blocklog as a number like "#47980". There is now a special message to be displayed to users who try to edit when the are blocked because of a hidden autoblock. The text of the page [[MediaWiki:Autoblockedtext]] is send to that user. The only way to know what the ip address is that is blocked is if the blocked user can give the block ID. This number is included in the default message so the blocked user needs to include this in his communication. A sysop can then look in the blocklist for that ID and unblock it.

[image border] - There is a new display instruction for images. The new one is "border". The result is a very small gray border. The idea is that some images because of there colors flow over in the background of a page when used. By putting a small border around it the border between the image and the page is more clear. Usage: [[Image:Filename|border|100px|right]] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images -- Example, see MediaWiki logo

[Special] - There is a new special page that gives a list of all articles that have no interwiki links. It is a stored lists that is only updated some times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Withoutinterwiki

[404] - The Esperanto Wikipedia, one of the older Wikipedias, has lost, possibly definitive, an old file from there early days. Due to changes of url's and systems for uploading files the path to the file is broken. To prevent this from happening it is best to look on your wiki to links to old files. The are using absolute url's using the wikipedia.com-domain. If the are not inside the current local or commons upload system then save them and re-upload them or put them somewhere safe. At least if you want to keep the early history of your wiki. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/31770

[Wap] - A special gateway to Wikipedia for mobile devices is created under the Wikipedia-flag, a wap-portal. It exists in a few languages including German, Spanish and English and is fairly buggy. There is a good alternative: wapedia.mobi http://de.wap.wikipedia.org http://es.wap.wikipedia.org http://en.wap.wikipedia.org http://wapedia.mobi

=== Foundation ===

[Wikimedia IT] - Wikimedia Italia is working on an agreement to obtain part of the image archive of Società Geografica Italiana. SGI is one of the most important and respected geographical institutes of the world. Founded in 1867, the Society owns thousands of precious historic volumes, maps and a huge archive of photos related to colonialism and the XX century's explorations. On Friday May 18, some members of it.wiki met Franco Salvatori, president of Società Geografica Italiana. The meeting resulted in an exclusive interview for IT Wikinews. http://it.wikinews.org/wiki/La_Societ%C3%A0_della_Geografia

[Legal] - The German Wikimedia chapter was sued by a powerful German lobby/public relations organisation. This because of a negative comment by an anonymous user on a archived talk page about them that did not amused them. The sued the German WMF chapter because in there opinion Wikimedia DE has control over the German language Wikipedia. The lost and also the appeal. http://www.wikimedia.de/2007/05/wikimedia-gegen-insm/ http://www.golem.de/0705/52486.html http://www.onlinepc.ch/index.cfm?page=104029&artikel_id=13889

=== Community ===

[RIP] - Norwegian Wikimedian, journalist, and author Tron Øgrim [[w:no:User:Togrim]] passed away last week. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-28/Wikiped...

[Wikisource News] - Presents the news from Wikisource from January to May 2007. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:News/2007-05-01/Wikisource_report -- (en)

[Wikiopen] The Hakka Wikipedia, a spoken variation of the Chinese language spoken predominantly in southern China by the Hakka ethnic group has been created. http://hak.wikipedia.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_language

[Wikiclose] The Old English Wikisource has been closed. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Old... http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10059

=== Awards ===

[IT Wikipedia] - was granted one of the nine Special Prizes of the Grand Prix di Pubblicità Italia (Advertising Grand Prix of Italy) for "succeeding in exploiting the Internet potential at its best, directly involving users for a widespread growth of culture". Wikimedia Italia board member Ivan Vighetto attended the gala, and received the prize, a plaque. The event had great resonance on Italian media. http://www.pubblicitaitalia.it/news.asp?id_news=41827 -- (it)

=== Media ===

[Club of Rome] - Anthere at the Club of Rome http://euforic.blogspot.com/2007/05/behind-screens-at-wikipedia.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome

[Audio & video] - Good audio interview with Jimmy Wales and David Weinberger. And Jimmy also made an appearance as a guest in the American satirical television program "The Colbert Report". http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/wikipedia_is_ju.html -- Audio interview, 22min http://www.newscloud.com/read/Jimmy_Wales_The_Colbert_Report -- video fragment, turn brain off before watching http://blog.valuewiki.com/2007/05/29/more-stephen-colbert-wiki-pranks/

=== Stats ===

[NL.wp & IT.wp] - The Dutch language Wikipedia has passed the 300,000 article mark almost exactly one year after the 200,000 mark. The NL Wikipedia is the 7th largest Wikipedia. With only 22 million speakers the Dutch language Wikipedia is compared with the larger Wikipedias versus there number of speakers extremely large. Also the Italian language Wikipedia has now 300,000 articles. With 60 to 120 million speakers the are one step higher then the Dutch at the 6th place. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

[FR.wp] - The French Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles.

[The Wiki top 50] - An attempt to make a top 50 of the most popular wiki on the the internet according Alexa.com and Google PageRank. Number one we know but on the second place is a surprize, we have "Adobe labs wiki" as the second most popular wiki. http://www.advolcano.com/blog/?p=11 http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

=== Other news ===

[Clean School WP] - This week a website went live with a "2007 Wikipedia selection for schools". Created by SOS Children, a charity focust on orphan and abandoned children, is aimed at British school children following the National Curriculum, and consists of all of the English Wikipedia's Good and Featured Articles, excluding content SOS Children deemed 'adult'. The site uses the Wikipedia logo, with permission. The content of there website is also available as a CD-rom or DVD that can be downloaded for free from there website. http://schools-wikipedia.org/

[The perfect logo] - The Wikipedia logo appears to be very "Wikipedia" in the meaning that there are mistakes on it. Some of the characters on the globe are reported to be incorrect. Editing the logo seems to be from a technical and possibly also from a legal (trademark) POV difficult. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ambuj.Saxena/Wikipedia-logo

[Wikizine] - The last weeks the domain wikizine.org has been down several times for longer periodes of time. This is a direct result of the hoster of Wikizine.org being down. When this is noticed the DNS-settings of the domain is changed to a back-up hoster to be able to provide minimal service. Because of possible slow updating of DNS-servers it can take a long time before Wikizine resolves at your location.

Users of the public DNS service of opendns.com will be one of the first to resolve Wikizine if it is online. The hoster reported to have find the source of the problems. Hopefully Wikizine will stay online now.

In the last weeks users of several communities have contacted Wikizine to setup a translated edition of Wikizine. Wikizine does now also exist in German, Spanish and Indonesian. And for the readers who read this as a translation, there is also an English version :-)

For now and in principle the translations will contain exactly the same content as EN Wikizine. Possibly and hopefully these editions will become eventually more then only a translation but also include there own original content directed directly to there local language community. The homepage at wikizine.org provides easy access to the different editions and subscription possibility.

As always the assistance of the readers for all levels and all languages versions of Wikizine to Wikizine is very welcome.

http://www.opendns.com http://www.wikizine.org

=== Weird ... ===

And now music .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Song/The_RfA_Candidate%27s_Song http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2a/Candidate%27s_song_take_2.ogg

=== Quote ===

Encyclopedias are now suffering obsolescence (*), evolving from traditional publishing to a new form - I don't know what this form is [...] but we sure have a new horizon in front of us, related to the very bases of encyclopedicism, and '''you are the reality that matters now from this point of view'''. [...] Encyclopedia is not dead: its spirit is not dead, the Enlightenment spirit is not dead. -- F. Salvatori, SGI (La Società della Geografia)

(*) the state, process, or condition of being or becoming obsolete

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