Django is a web development platform written in Python. Now there is a
book about it, published but also released online under the GFDL:
http://www.djangobook.com/
On Amazon it's called "The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development
Done Right" and costs $30.
The website you read it on seems pretty sweet. Yay for links. It seems
like there is a good amount of code examples, but no screenshots that
I could spot (in a quick glance around).
cheers,
Brianna
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/
FYI - please forward :-)
WIKIS GO PRINTABLE
New open source technology will bring content from Wikipedia,
WikiEducator, and other wikis to the world of paper.
DECEMBER 13, 2007 - ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA: The Wikimedia Foundation
today announced a partnership that will make it possible to obtain
high quality print and word processor copies of articles from
Wikipedia and other wiki educational resources. The development of the
underlying open source software is supported by the Open Society
Institute (www.soros.org) and the Commonwealth of Learning
(www.col.org), and led by PediaPress.com, a start-up company based in
Germany.
"This technology is of key strategic importance to the cause of free
education world-wide," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the
Wikimedia Foundation. "It will make it possible to use and remix wiki
content for a variety of purposes, both in the developing and the
developed world, in areas with connectivity and without."
Deployment of the technology will happen in three stages. The first
stage, launched today, is a public beta test running on
WikiEducator.org of functionality for remixing collections of wiki
pages and downloading them in the PDF format. WikiEducator is a
project hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning and uses the same wiki
technology as Wikipedia.
"These tools have the potential to transform and improve the way we
author and share distance education materials, textbooks and other
learning resources -- I'm thrilled that the WikiEducator will be the
first online community to implement them," said Wayne Mackintosh,
Ph.D., an education specialist for the Commonwealth of Learning and
founder of the WikiEducator project.
The second stage, planned for early 2008, will be the deployment of
the technology on the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation,
including Wikipedia. At this point, users will also be given the
option to order printed copies of wiki content directly from
PediaPress.com. "The integration into Wikipedia will be a milestone
for print-on-demand technology. Users will literally be empowered to
print their own encyclopedias", according to Heiko Hees, product
manager at PediaPress.com.
The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the
OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats.
"Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom.
By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for
educators to customize and remix content before printing and
distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.
This work is funded through a US$40,000 grant by the Open Society
Institute.
The technology developed through this cooperation will be available
under an open source license, free for anyone to use for any purpose.
It ties into the MediaWiki platform, the open source technology that
runs Wikipedia. As a result, thousands of wiki platforms around the
world will have the option of providing the same services to their
users.
CONTACTS
For more information, please contact Sandra Ordonez at (727) 231-0101,
or email her at: sordonez AT wikimedia DOT org
ABOUT THE WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION
The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization
dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of
free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these
wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It operates some of
the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world,
including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most-visited websites. The
Foundation was created in 2003 by Jimmy Wales, the founder of
Wikipedia.
ABOUT THE COMMONWEALTH OF LEARNING
COL is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads
of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open
learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.
ABOUT THE OPEN SOCIETY INSTITUTE
The Open Society Institute (OSI), a private operating and grantmaking
foundation, aims to shape public policy to promote democratic
governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform. On a
local level, OSI implements a range of initiatives to support the rule
of law, education, public health, and independent media. At the same
time, OSI works to build alliances across borders and continents on
issues such as combating corruption and rights abuses.
ABOUT PEDIAPRESS
PediaPress is a startup creating technology and services that make it
easy to derive printed books from wiki content. The company is located
in Mainz, Germany and has entered a long term partnership with the
Wikimedia Foundation.
Yesterday, I started a proposal to create a new Wikibooks project to
help provide a place for people to work on multilingual textbooks,
textbooks undergoing translations, and to write books in languages which
do not yet have a project (maybe because there too small or not enough
interest has been generated yet). I also hope this project if started
can be a place where people from all Wikibooks projects can communicate
with each other and work together.
Whether it gets started depends on people's interested in contributing
to such a project. If your interested in contributing to such a project
or even if you think this is a bad idea, please contribute to the
current discussion going on at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikibooks_Multili…
and explain your reasons for being in favor or against this project. You
can also begin to contribute to the test project for it at
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wb/mul by beginning any translations
you'd like to do, multilingual books you'd like to begin or creating
books in languages that don't have a project yet.
-- darklama @enwikibooks
Wikinews has wikinewsie.org, and wikipedians have wikipedian.org, so I
was thinking maybe it's high-time we had a wikibookian.org for the
members of wikibooks. It would be a site where established
wikibookians (of course, there would be a need to define
"established") could have a variety of services offered:
*Blog hosting (especially blogs about wikibooks, books,
writing/editing/authoring, education, etc)
*Email aliasing (username(a)wikibookian.org)
*Posts of news and announcements
*Ability to host personal information, including images, which are not
freely-licensed
*Embedded IRC client with access to #Wikibooks, #cvn-wb-en, and #en.wikibooks
*Applets and other tools specific to wikibooks (similar to the
toolserver, but primarily for wikibooks)
There are lots of things that we could do with such a domain for the
benefit of our members. I've taken the liberty of reserving the domain
name wikibookian.org to help protect it from squatters. What do people
think of this?
--Andrew Whitworth
Following is great news from the Wikizine email that is sent out. For anyone
who has not heard, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which controls the
GFDL, the license that Wikibooks, Wikipedia, and the other Wikimedia
projects use, is considering an update to make the license compatible with a
Creative Commons license. This will help make the materials that we create
on Wikibooks more usable from a practical, licensing viewpoint.
This is totally unexpected and exciting for me and could not be better news
(just last week I sent out an email complaining about how great, but
difficult it would be for for something like this to happen).
I feel like God answered my prayer!
Amen.
Karl "Carlos" Benjamin W.
Year: 2007 Week: 48 Number: 85 Extra
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Policy ===
Most projects of the Wikimedia family, like Wikipedia, Wikibooks,
Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikispecies and Wikiversity, are using the GNU
Free Documentation License.
The GNU Free Documentation License was originally chosen because that
was the available license when the first project, Wikipedia, started.
The GNU FDL is not the most practical licence to use mainly because it
is not designed for what the WMF projects are using it for.
An alternative for the GNU Free Documentation License are the Creative
Commons licenses. Currently the GNU FDL is not compatible with the the
Creative Commons licenses.
The WMF published a resolution declaring that to make them compatible
the Wikimedia Foundation has been working with the Free Software
Foundation and Creative Commons on a solution. The have come to
proposal that would make it possible for the WMF project to migrate to
the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) licence.
The resolution states;
"The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be
modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass
collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
Upon the announcement of that re-licensing, the Foundation will
initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a
final decision on re-licensing."
So the WMF is asking formally to change the GNU FDL to make a
migration possible and after that there will be a discussion and a
vote about it.
If the projects would migrate to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license
then that means that you are free to share it and to change the work
but you need to give credit to the makers of the work and share the
work under the same or compatible license.
The reason to change to license is that a main objective of the
projects is to create content that can be reused freely by others. The
Creative Commons license would make that more easy to do then the
current GNU Free Documentation License
Jimmy Wales made the announcement of the (possible) move to the
Creative Commons license on a iCommons party in San Francisco. In his
speech Jimmy said;
"What I'm happy to announce tonight is that just yesterday the
Wikimedia Foundation board voted to approve a deal between the FSF and
CC and Wikimedia. We're going to change the GFDL in such a way that
Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike license.
So this is not as some people speculated on facebook my 58 birthday
party … this is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia."
This transcript comes from a blogposting with the title "Breaking
news: Wikipedia switches to Creative Commons!".
This not exactly correct. The WMF is on the track of switching but
first the GNU FDL needs to changed officially and the by the board
announced discussions and community vote needs to be taking place.
So the actual move can still be a wile, like single user login or
flagged revisions, if it ever comes.
Discussion about this has started on Foundation-l.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update -- the
resolution
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/22428 --
Foundation-l discussion
http://blog.jamendo.com/index.php/2007/12/01/breaking-news-wikipedia-switch…
speech Jimmy +
transcript
//////////////////////////////////////////
Editor(s): Walter
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://www.wikizine.org
//////////////////////////////////////////
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and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
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