I have written a new "State of the Wiki" report about the Wikinews project:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/State_of_the_Wiki
In this issue: new editions, growth across languages, translations,
papal veneration, contests, statistics, automation, original reporting,
Wikinews TV, Wikinews Radio, chat, licensing, RSS, content partnerships,
the French, and praise and criticism for Wikinews from blogs and
established media.
If you haven't paid attention to Wikinews in the last two months, if you
want to know what's going on in the different language editions, or if
you'd like to take a peek into our secret laboratories, I hope you'll
give this a read. It's quite long, but also the result of intensive
research, including an e-mail survey across the different editions and
interviews on IRC. It is hopefully structured in a way that will allow
you to skip the parts that don't interest you.
Enjoy,
Erik
Short update
For those who joined us less than a year ago, the next board elections will occur quite soon.
Last year, we had one technical organiser, Tim Starling; and two general organisers, Imran and Danny.
We currently have 5 candidates for organisation.
I am checking their profile and we will keep you informed as soon as possible of the outcome.
But basically, please consider applications closed :-)
Besides, Tim accepted to take care of technical duties regarding elections again (thanks !).
As Erik suggested, a second developer would be needed to serve as security adviser.
Please, we are looking for volunteers on technical side !
Ant
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Requests have recently been made to the Board asking for verification
that a user is sockpuppeting on one of the larger Wikipedias. At least
two of the developers felt this was a matter for the Board or for an
arbitration committee (although that Wikipedia doesn't have an
arbcom), and were therefore not happy to give out details about the IP
address of this user. Checking IPs is no longer a developer-only task
since a new feature allows sockpuppet checks.
[[Special:CheckUser]] allows a user with "checkuser" permissions to
find all the IP addresses used by a particular logged in user, and to
show all the contributions from a given IP address, including those
made by logged in users.
Currently the only people with the necessary permissions to use
CheckUser are Tim Starling (who wrote the code for this) and David
Gerard (who uses it on behalf of the English Wikipedia Arbitration
Committee).
This data is only stored for one week, so edits made prior to that
will not be shown via CheckUser. A log is kept of who has made which
queries with the tool. This log is available to those with the
checkuser permissions.
I would personally like to see this feature be made available to more
communities than just the English Wikipedia, but I am concerned about
potential misuse of it, and the violation of privacy for users who
have not been disruptive. I would appreciate any comments about this
feature, and answers to the questions below, either here or on on Meta
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CheckUser>.
Do you think this feature should be made more widely available?
If so, who should be given access to it?
Should it be limited to stewards, or to wikis with arbitration committees?
Does the privacy policy
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy> need be adjusted to
allow the use of this feature?
Angela.
--
Angela Beesley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela
I'll be very happy to give my help too!!
--- On Tue 04/26, < daniwo59(a)aol.com > wrote:
From: [mailto: daniwo59(a)aol.com]
To: foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 13:28:08 -0400
Subject: [Foundation-l] Board elections
I would be happy to help out with the Board Elections again. <br> <br>Danny<br>_______________________________________________<br>foundation-l mailing list<br>foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org<br>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l<br>
_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
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Cooooorrection, wikimediade-l(a)wikimedia.org
Testing it in case...
Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:24:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com>
Subject: Quarto and local chapters
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org>,
wikimedia-fr(a)wikimedia.org
Hello
I think it would be great if the german chapter could possibly inform us of their last activities in the past trimester, so that something can be written on Quarto about it.
Similarly, could the french chapter complete the current article, so as to include the last elections.
The way is here : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/3/En
Another additional question : I am confused about which list is the german association one ? Last time I sent a mail to the list I thought was, it was rejected.
Could a wikimedia-de(a)wikimedia.org redirection be set up so that list keep similar naming conventions ?
Thanks
Ant
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There has now been a vote, organized by Formulax, among Chinese language
Wikimedians on whether there should be a Chinese Wikinews.
The results are at:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E6%8A%95%E7%A5%A8/%E7%BB%B4%E5%9F%B…
In an amusing demonstration of the problems of voting, there were 13
votes opposed to the project, 13 votes in support, and 1 vote with
support only if compromises could be made about NPOV.
There was a larger vote earlier on whether this should be up to the
global community to decide, or to the Chinese community. That vote was
inconclusive, too, with opinions evenly split (50% want it to be a
global decision, 50% want it to be a local decision) and very strong
expressions of emotions on both sides.
We can continue voting until we get a nice result, but I think it would
be best now for the board to make a decision about this.
My recommendation is a compromise: the project should go ahead under
somewhat more rigid conditions (at least 10 support votes with at least
6 of them from Wikimedia regulars PLUS the process at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch ). We can deal
with problems of censorship as they arise.
Erik
Hi
Since we are talking about news... I realise one has not been announced.
Last saturday, a irl/irc meeting took place for the french chapter. It
was the opportunity to elect a new board (the first board was only
planned to last 6 months, roughly the time for setting up the chapter).
The members of the new chapter are
* Anthere
* Jastrow
* Meanos,
* notafish
* Ryo
* Sam Hocevar
* Shaihulud
* Soufron
* Yann
Ryo (Nicolas Weeger) stays president
Shaihulud (Camille Constant) stays treasurer
Jastrow (Marie-Lan Nguyen) is now the secretary
Note : the french board enjoys 3 ladies now.
I think this is a good board, balanced, with plenty of different
personalities, opinions and skills. So, I expect it will do a good work.
Anthere
JoiIto just told me we could be nominated for the Ars
Electronica digital community prize for Wikicommons.
Well, we were nominated but nobody had accepted the
nomination till today (last day), so we were on verge
of being rejected.
I just accepted the nomination on behalf of the
community.
As a reminder, we got this prize last year for
wikipedia community.
It is worth presenting wikicommmons, as the community
and the interaction between editors is significantly
different than on Wikipedia, in particular due to
multilingualism. Actually, Wikicommons might be the
ultimate type of digital community !
Now, we have about 24 hours to provide information
about wikicommons.
The good news is that Villy recently wrote a text
about wikicommons for Quarto. But he wrote it in
french. Part was translated, but need copyediting.
Other parts were not translated.
Please HELP fix the page till tomorrow and improve it
if you feel it necessary (add pictures, logos...).
This is both IMPORTANT AND URGENT.
I hope some of you can help.
Thanks a lot in advance.
Anthere
(and thanks to villy)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Anthere/wikicommons_overview
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This is a brief report from the FLOSS Conference in South Africa that
Erik and I attended this week. A more detailed version is on Meta at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005>;
so please read that one instead if you have time.
I was invited to give a presentation about the Wikimedia projects at
the international "Free/Libre and Open Source Software" (FLOSS) and
Free Knowledge workshop in Pretoria, South Africa. Erik was given the
opportunity to hold a workshop there about wiki technology. The byline
for the conference was "Knowledge for all, Education for all", so the
Wikimedia projects fitted in perfectly.
The first day was made up of formal presentations. A list of these is
on Meta. My talk was part of a "Digital Commons" panel. Much of the
second day was divided into two workshops, including Erik's. The theme
of Free Knowledge Communities was discussed on day 3, and there were
many areas in which Wikimedia projects could collaborate with existing
initiatives, and new ideas for using Wikimedia content:
* Spoken Wikipedia by cell phone. Many areas of Africa have high
cell phone coverage with access to SMS. Teemu Leinonen of the
University of Art and Design Helsinki is working on a project to allow
a user to send an SMS with the article title to a phone number. A few
seconds later, they get a call on their cell phone with a (usually
machine-generated) spoken version of the article they requested.
* Wikipedia in schools. Static HTML dumps on DVD, offline
applications that allow editing, and update feeds like rsync to
maintain offline copies, were all requested by people working on
getting Wikipedia into schools. Where people were interested in print
projects, they wanted to focus on printing out particular topics,
rather than having a copy of the entire encyclopedia.
* Wiktionary. There is a need for a repository of legal
terminology in the 11 official languages of South Africa since courts
often rely on untrained interpreters who need a reference guide for
dealing with unfamiliar terminology from any of the languages they
were not native speakers of.
* Wikibooks/Wikiversity/E-learning. With the price of textbooks
much higher in South Africa than in developed countriesfree textbooks
are of extreme importance, and Wikibooks could provide the content
needed for initiatives to deliver this. We discussed our existing and
potential future projects at length and talked to proponents of
various e-learning initiatives.
Again, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS%2C_South_Africa_2005
for details on any of these issues.
==Meetup==
On the evening of the third day, the first African meetup as held in
"Cafe 41". Four Wikipedians from South Africa participated: Laurens,
Alias, Renier Maritz and Andy Rabagliati. Renier's wife also joined
us, along with some people from the conference. We discussed ways to
promote the Afrikaans Wikipedia, methods to distribute Wikipedia to
Africa, localization of the interface, and possibilities for
e-learning.
==Future conferences==
Several upcoming conferences were mentioned as being of possible
interest to Wikimedia. Most notable of these are WSIS
(<http://www.itu.int/wsis/>;), which I believe Jimmy and Yann may be
attending, and the World Conference on Computers in Education
(<http://www.sbs.co.za/wcce2005/>;), for which no Wikimedia attendance
is currently planned.
Unfortunately, we did not see much of South Africa beyond the
conference centre. Nevertheless, the visit was very productive and led
to many new contacts and insights. We aim to follow up on the
discussions, and turn some of the ideas above into reality soon.
Angela.
--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela