Wikimedia-l August 2009

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

160 participants
115 discussions

[Foundation-l] Opt-out global sysop proposal
by NuclearWarfare 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

Many of the list regulars might remember the global sysop proposal that had been brought up around May and June 2009. The idea ultimately fizzled, because there was simply not enough support to actually have a global, non-opt out sysop group. Since then, a new proposal has been drawn up, which is currently running, that allows communities to opt-in to a global sysop wikiset, which would allow users in the global sysop usergroup to act as sysops only on those wikis. However, the issue with this is that no project has actually bothered to opt-in, so the process has been dead for the better part of a year. Meanwhile, the stewards have had to combat an increasing amount of vandalism on the small wikis, and even though global rollbackers can help some, blocking vandals and deleting nonsense pages ultimately becomes the job of just a few of the active stewards. The situation could be easily remedied if there were a global sysop group; there are a good number of trustworthy global rollbackers who would be excellent global sysops. I drew up a proposal to automatically opt-in "small wikis" (as defined within the below proposal) into a global sysop wikiset. Global sysops would have full administrator tools on those wikis, but would use them only in response to blatant vandalism. Please take a look at the third link and give your opinions about the proposal on the talk page. 2008 Proposal: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops_(2008_proposal) Current process (opt-in), inactive: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops Opt-out proposal: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops/opt-out_proposal ---- User:NuclearWarfare on all WMF wikis

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[Foundation-l] Proposal: foundation-announce-l
by Anthony 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

I propose the foundation-announce-l mailing list be set up with the following posting rules: 1) One post per person per thread. That includes the initiator of the thread. 2) Responses in a thread must be in response to the original message. No responding to responses. 4) A person may initiate a maximum of two threads per week. Exception for foundation staff, board members, list administrator(s), and with permission of the list administrator(s). Responses per week are unlimited subject to rules 1 and 2. 5) Posts generally do not go through a moderation queue. Anyone breaking the rules will be put on moderation or unsubscribed at the discretion of the list administrator(s).

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Re: [Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion
by Gregory Kohs 30 Aug '09

30 Aug '09

Thomas Dalton asked: "Has tech money been spent on other things previously? That is news to me." For your edification, Thomas, since at least you seem willing to listen, as opposed to some others here who simply "tut tut" at all the "trolling" and the "time wasting" any critics might have to offer: http://philanthropy.com/giveandtake/article/858/wikipedias-fund-raising-suc… Please make sure to read my comment there, which references this document: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Planned_Spending_Distribution_2007-2008 Which does not "square away" with this document, specifically Page 4: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/41/FY_2008_09_Annual_Pla… ...which says, "tech department underspending equalled 1.7m". Anthony's not exactly being fair, though, when he sort of suggests that the shortfall in Technology spending went instead to the Executive Director. As far as I can tell, it went into the bank, to be spent in the FOLLOWING YEARS on the Executive Director's need to expand staff to unprecedented levels. Pay attention, Thomas. I've discussed this issue in many places. On the Wikimedia-controlled places, I'm often censored or blocked, but there are plenty of other non-WMF venues where facts can be laid out for the curious to learn the truth: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Top_10_Reasons_Not_to_Donate_to_Wikipedia Greg

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[Foundation-l] Frequency of Seeing Bad Versions - now with traffic data
by Robert Rohde 29 Aug '09

29 Aug '09

Recently, I reported on a simple study of how likely one was to encounter recent vandalism in Wikipedia based on selecting articles at random and using revert behavior as a proxy for recent vandalism. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054171.html One of the key limitations of that work was that it was looking at articles selected at random from the pool of all existing page titles. That approach was of the most immediate interest to me, but it didn't directly address the likelihood of encountering vandalism based on the way that Wikipedia is actually used because the selection of articles that people choose to visit is highly non-random. I've now redone that analysis with a crude traffic based weighting. For traffic information I used the same data stream used by http://stats.grok.se. That data is recorded hourly. For simplicity I chose 20 hours at random from the last eight months and averaged those together to get a rough picture of the relative prominence of pages. I then chose a selection of 30000 articles at random with their probability of selection proportional to the traffic they received, and repeated the prior analysis previously described. (Note that this has the effect of treating the prominence of each page as a constant over time. In practice we know some pages rise to prominence while other fall down, but I am assuming the average pattern is still a good enough approximation to be useful.) >From this sample I found 5,955,236 revert events in 38,096,653 edits. This is an increase of 29 times in edit frequency and 58 times the number of revert events that were found from a uniform sampling of pages. I suspect it surprises no one that highly trafficked pages are edited more often and subject to more vandalism than the average page, though it might not have been obvious that the the ratio of reverts to normal edits is also increased over more obscure pages. As before, the revert time distribution has a very long tail, though as predicted the times are generally reduced when traffic weighting is applied. In the traffic weighted sample, the median time to revert is 3.4 minutes and the mean time is 2.2 hours (compared to 6.7 minutes and 18.2 hours with uniform weighting). Again, I think it is worth acknowledging that having a majority of reverts occur within only a few minutes is a strong testament to the efficiency and dedication with which new edits are usually reviewed by the community. We could be much worse off if most things weren't caught so quickly. Unfortunately, in comparing the current analysis to the previous one, the faster response time is essentially being overwhelmed by the much larger number of vandalism occurrences. The net result is that averaged over the whole history of Wikipedia a visitor would be expected to receive a recently degraded article version during about 1.1% of requests (compared to ~0.37% in the uniform weighting estimate). The last six months averaged a slightly higher 1.3% (1 in 80 requests). As before, most of the degraded content that people are likely to actually encounter is coming from the subset of things that get by the initial monitors and survive for a long time. Among edits that are eventually reverted the longest lasting 5% of bad content (those edits taking > 7.2 hours to revert) is responsible for 78% of the expected encounters with recently degraded material. One might speculate that such long-lived material is more likely to reflect subtle damage to a page rather than more obvious problems like page blanking. I did not try to investigate this. In my sample, the number of reverts being made to articles has declined ~40% since a peak in late 2006. However, the mean and median time to revert is little changed over the last two years. What little trend exists points in the direction of slightly slower responses. So to summarize, the results here are qualitatively similar to those found in the previous work. However with traffic weighting we find quantitative differences such that reverts occur much more often but take less time to be executed. The net effect of these competing factors is such that the bad content is more likely to be seen than suggested by the uniform weighting. -Robert Rohde

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[Foundation-l] Year: 2009 Week: 34-35 Number: 116
by Az1568 29 Aug '09

29 Aug '09

****************************************** __ __ _ _ _ _ / / /\ \ (_) | _(_)___(_)_ __ ___ \ \/ \/ / | |/ / |_ / | '_ \ / _ \ \ /\ /| | <| |/ /| | | | | __/ \/ \/ |_|_|\_\_/___|_|_| |_|\___| .org Year: 2009 Week: 34-35 Number: 116 ****************************************** An independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community ////////////////////////////////////////// === Technical news === [Tech Update] - Brion posted an update on the status of a few projects, before shipping off to Wikimania. http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update-pre-wikimania… [Commons: ImageAnnotator] - Wikimedia Commons added a new gadget: an Image Annotator, where users can place comments *onto* images (like flickr). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator [Bugs] - Trevor Parscal, of the Usability Project, gave an update on the Usability Beta by saying that more than 40,000 users have now participated in the process. http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/squashing-the-bugs/ [iPhone app released] - the Wikimedia Foundation released its own official iPhone/iPod application for Wikipedia, in addition to the regular mobile interface. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_lauches_official_iphone_app_… http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_iPhone_app http://m.wikipedia.org/ [SmartWikiSearch] - Smart Wiki Search, a "concept similarity" search, tries to make your Wikipedia search experience better by finding other Wikipedia pages that discuss the same or similar concepts to the one you searched for. http://www.smartwikisearch.com/ === Request for help === [Wikipedia Signpost RfC] - the Wikipedia Signpost, the English Wikipedia's newspaper, is looking for comments about what is their mission, purpose and where they should go from here. Feedback is appreciated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/About#Where_… [Multimedia Usability Meeting] - we previously reported on the upcoming Multimedia Usability Project by Wikimedia France, suggestions and feedback are being requested on Meta-Wiki. There is also a planning event to take place in October 2009. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Usability_Project_Meeting_October… [Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published her report to the board for May 2009. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054008.html [New "labs" sites] - two new "labs" sites have been created to test out the flagged revisions and reader feedback extensions. In general, "Wikimedia Labs" is the name given to sites created to test out new extensions before they are used on Wikimedia wikis. http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page http://readerfeedback.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [Hewlett Foundation grant] - the Wikimedia Foundation received a US$500,000 grant towards operational support from Hewlett Foundation. The grant's purpose is to allow the Foundation expand its work bringing free educational content to everyone on the planet. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Hewlett_Foundation_grant… [Omidyar Network Grant] - the Omidyar Network gave a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grant will support Wikimedia's key goals: to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia?s projects. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Omidyar_Network_Grant_Au… http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Omidyar_Network_Grant_Au… [New board members/officers] - at Wikimania, the Board of Trustees officially accepted the results of the election, welcoming Samuel Klein (Sj) and thanking Domas for his service. Kat Walsh has also taken the position of executive secretary. In addition to these community-selected board members, an "expertise" seat was filled with Matt Halprin. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054318.html http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/user:Mhalprin -- biography of Matt [Wikimania 2009] - Wikimania 2009, the international Wikimedia conference, ended this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even if you were not there, you can enjoy it too with twitter, flickr photos, and presentation videos. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23wikimania+OR+%23wikimania2009 -- twitter for #wikimania2009 or #wikimania http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wikimania2009/ -- flickr http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2009_presentations -- videos of the presentation [WikiExpedition 2009] - a summary (in English) of the recent Polish Wikimedian's "WikiExpedition" was published. http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja/Summary [mediawiki/ IRC cloaks now available] - the Group Contacts are now offering "mediawiki/" IRC cloaks for developers. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054120.html - mailing list post http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Cloaks -- IRC cloak explanation [GLAM-WIKI Recommendations] - now that the GLAM-WIKI conference is over, Liam Wyatt (the conference coordinator) has compiled a list of recommendations to "GLAM", to Wikimedia, and to the government. This list is based on the discussions and findings at the conference. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_Recommendations [Wikimedia UK blog/twitter] - Wikimedia UK, the British chapter, has started a blog and twitter account. http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2009/08/welcome/ http://twitter.com/wikimediauk [WMES: Planning Reboot] - Wikimedia España, the planned Spanish chapter, has had a planning reboot. Join the mailing list if you're interestd in creating a Spanish chapter. http://lists.wikimedia.org.ar/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-es [WMSE: Image donation] - Wikimedia Sweden has helped Regionarkivet (the municipal archive of the Gothenburg area in Sweden) upload some of its most prized images to the Wikimedia Comons. http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pressmeddelande_2009-08-19/en http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Regionarkivet [Chapcom membership update] - the Chapters committee (those charged with coordinating the chapters, especially with getting new chapters started) welcomes two new members. Milos Rancic and Lodewijk Gelauff replace the seats of Carlos Barcenilla and Michael Bimmler, who recently resigned. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee [Wikinews ArbCom] - Blood Red Sandman, Brian, Brian McNeil, Cirt, Cspurrier, and Tempodivalse were elected to the Arbitration Committee on the English Wikinews. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Arbitration_Committee/2009_elections [Wikimedia Belgium Meeting] - Wikimedia Belgium, the proposed Belgian chapter, had a coordination meeting on August 28. The English and French minutes are available. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediabe-l/2009-August/000006.html === Awards === [UK Wikipedia Loves Art - prizes] - Wikimedia UK's Wikipedia Loves Art project finally announced its winners. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediauk-l/2009-August/004565.html -- mailing list post http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2009/08/wikipedia-loves-art-prizes/ -- WMUK blog post === Media === [Generate PDFs from Wikipedia] - Lifehacker.com covered the ability to creates PDFs and Multi-Article Books using PediaPress, something that happened a while ago. http://lifehacker.com/5339852/generate-pdfs-and-multi+article-books-from-wi… http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/02/20/wiki-to-print-feature-activated-in-six… -- original WMF blog post [Tale of another Mangalore on Wikipedia] - some commentary on a local Wikipedia Academy in Mangalore, India. http://beta.thehindu.com/news/cities/Mangalore/article7437.ece http://beta.thehindu.com/news/cities/Mangalore/article6940.ece [Health Care and Wikipedia] - Columbia Journalism Review compliment's the English Wikipedia's coverage of the American "health care debates". http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/health_care_and_wikipedia.php [Wikimania 2009] - a pre-Wikimania article about Wikimania 2009 and the Wikimania idea. http://www.en.argentina.ar/_en/science-and-education/C954-wikimania-2009-in… [Wikinews: The unsung news source] - Wikinews got a favorable blog post that includes a Q&A and explanation of the project. http://perspective.cfezra.com/?p=105 [AP tries to rival WP?] - apparently the Associated Press is going to try to rival Wikipedia in the search results. The AP will hold back some content from member websites and hope that Google will rate it higher due to the increased number of links to that page. http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/how-the-associated-press-will-try-to-rival… [Wikiversity media coverage] - Wikiversity is in the news again, with a whole article devoted to it. According to the article, "Wikiversity" is to be a university for every Internet user. Some professors are smitten with it - others are skeptical. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/magazin/wissen/Wikiversity;art304,2876731 (de) [Inkblot Poster] - remember the controversy on the English Wikipedia because there were copies of the Rorschach inkblot tests in the article? Well, according to the New York Times, te doctor who helped publish the 10 inkblots is being investigated by his local doctors? organization after it received complaints that his actions were unprofessional. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/24inkblot.html === Stats === [enwp: 3m] - the English Wikipedia has reached 3,000,000 articles with the creation of "Beate Eriksen", a Norwegian actress. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/17/3000000/ [cswikt] - the Czech Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries. http://cs.wiktionary.org/ === Other news === [Growing Wikipedias] - Hausa Wikipedia, one of the African-language Wikipedias, was previously in danger of being closed but now it's growing very quickly. This comes at an interesting time, there have been recent foundation-l discussions about the process for closing projects. http://hausaonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/hausa-wikipedia-is-growing/ -- Hausa Wikipedia http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/175836 -- mailing list thread http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects -- current project closing process [Wikipedia Diver] - a new Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10315483-248.html [Enterprise Wikis] - a blog post gives 8 more reasons to use a wiki for you internal corporate site. http://www.ikiw.org/2009/08/21/8-things-you-can-do-with-an-enterprise-wiki/ [Citizendium founder ready to leave] - Larry Sanger, the founder of Citizendium (another encyclopedia created to rival Wikipedia) and one of the first contributors to Wikipedia, is ready to leave his project and move on. http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/08/citizendium-founder-ready-to-jump-ship/ ////////////////////////////////////////// Editor(s): Casey, Alex Corrector(s): MarkW Thanks to: Too many to name. Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org ////////////////////////////////////////// Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

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[Foundation-l] EN Wikizine - Year: 2009 Week: 34-35 Number: 116
by EN Wikizine 29 Aug '09

29 Aug '09

****************************************** __ __ _ _ _ _ / / /\ \ (_) | _(_)___(_)_ __ ___ \ \/ \/ / | |/ / |_ / | '_ \ / _ \ \ /\ /| | <| |/ /| | | | | __/ \/ \/ |_|_|\_\_/___|_|_| |_|\___| .org Year: 2009 Week: 34-35 Number: 116 ****************************************** An independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community ////////////////////////////////////////// === Technical news === [Tech Update] - Brion posted an update on the status of a few projects, before shipping off to Wikimania. http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update-pre-wikimania… [Commons: ImageAnnotator] - Wikimedia Commons added a new gadget: an Image Annotator, where users can place comments *onto* images (like flickr). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator [Bugs] - Trevor Parscal, of the Usability Project, gave an update on the Usability Beta by saying that more than 40,000 users have now participated in the process. http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/squashing-the-bugs/ [iPhone app released] - the Wikimedia Foundation released its own official iPhone/iPod application for Wikipedia, in addition to the regular mobile interface. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_lauches_official_iphone_app_… http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_iPhone_app http://m.wikipedia.org/ [SmartWikiSearch] - Smart Wiki Search, a "concept similarity" search, tries to make your Wikipedia search experience better by finding other Wikipedia pages that discuss the same or similar concepts to the one you searched for. http://www.smartwikisearch.com/ === Request for help === [Wikipedia Signpost RfC] - the Wikipedia Signpost, the English Wikipedia's newspaper, is looking for comments about what is their mission, purpose and where they should go from here. Feedback is appreciated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/About#Where_… [Multimedia Usability Meeting] - we previously reported on the upcoming Multimedia Usability Project by Wikimedia France, suggestions and feedback are being requested on Meta-Wiki. There is also a planning event to take place in October 2009. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Usability_Project_Meeting_October… === Proposals === === Policy === === Foundation === [Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published her report to the board for May 2009. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054008.html [New "labs" sites] - two new "labs" sites have been created to test out the flagged revisions and reader feedback extensions. In general, "Wikimedia Labs" is the name given to sites created to test out new extensions before they are used on Wikimedia wikis. http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page http://readerfeedback.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [Hewlett Foundation grant] - the Wikimedia Foundation received a US$500,000 grant towards operational support from Hewlett Foundation. The grant's purpose is to allow the Foundation expand its work bringing free educational content to everyone on the planet. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Hewlett_Foundation_grant… [Omidyar Network Grant] - the Omidyar Network gave a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grant will support Wikimedia's key goals: to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia?s projects. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Omidyar_Network_Grant_Au… http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Omidyar_Network_Grant_Au… [New board members/officers] - at Wikimania, the Board of Trustees officially accepted the results of the election, welcoming Samuel Klein (Sj) and thanking Domas for his service. Kat Walsh has also taken the position of executive secretary. In addition to these community-selected board members, an "expertise" seat was filled with Matt Halprin. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054318.html http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/user:Mhalprin -- biography of Matt === Legal === === Agenda === === Community === [Wikimania 2009] - Wikimania 2009, the international Wikimedia conference, ended this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even if you were not there, you can enjoy it too with twitter, flickr photos, and presentation videos. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23wikimania+OR+%23wikimania2009 -- twitter for #wikimania2009 or #wikimania http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wikimania2009/ -- flickr http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2009_presentations -- videos of the presentation [WikiExpedition 2009] - a summary (in English) of the recent Polish Wikimedian's "WikiExpedition" was published. http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja/Summary [mediawiki/ IRC cloaks now available] - the Group Contacts are now offering "mediawiki/" IRC cloaks for developers. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054120.html - mailing list post http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Cloaks -- IRC cloak explanation [GLAM-WIKI Recommendations] - now that the GLAM-WIKI conference is over, Liam Wyatt (the conference coordinator) has compiled a list of recommendations to "GLAM", to Wikimedia, and to the government. This list is based on the discussions and findings at the conference. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_Recommendations [Wikimedia UK blog/twitter] - Wikimedia UK, the British chapter, has started a blog and twitter account. http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2009/08/welcome/ http://twitter.com/wikimediauk [WMES: Planning Reboot] - Wikimedia España, the planned Spanish chapter, has had a planning reboot. Join the mailing list if you're interestd in creating a Spanish chapter. http://lists.wikimedia.org.ar/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-es [WMSE: Image donation] - Wikimedia Sweden has helped Regionarkivet (the municipal archive of the Gothenburg area in Sweden) upload some of its most prized images to the Wikimedia Comons. http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pressmeddelande_2009-08-19/en http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Regionarkivet [Chapcom membership update] - the Chapters committee (those charged with coordinating the chapters, especially with getting new chapters started) welcomes two new members. Milos Rancic and Lodewijk Gelauff replace the seats of Carlos Barcenilla and Michael Bimmler, who recently resigned. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee [Wikinews ArbCom] - Blood Red Sandman, Brian, Brian McNeil, Cirt, Cspurrier, and Tempodivalse were elected to the Arbitration Committee on the English Wikinews. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Arbitration_Committee/2009_elections [Wikimedia Belgium Meeting] - Wikimedia Belgium, the proposed Belgian chapter, had a coordination meeting on August 28. The English and French minutes are available. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediabe-l/2009-August/000006.html === Awards === [UK Wikipedia Loves Art - prizes] - Wikimedia UK's Wikipedia Loves Art project finally announced its winners. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediauk-l/2009-August/004565.html -- mailing list post http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2009/08/wikipedia-loves-art-prizes/ -- WMUK blog post === Media === [Generate PDFs from Wikipedia] - Lifehacker.com covered the ability to creates PDFs and Multi-Article Books using PediaPress, something that happened a while ago. http://lifehacker.com/5339852/generate-pdfs-and-multi+article-books-from-wi… http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/02/20/wiki-to-print-feature-activated-in-six… -- original WMF blog post [Tale of another Mangalore on Wikipedia] - some commentary on a local Wikipedia Academy in Mangalore, India. http://beta.thehindu.com/news/cities/Mangalore/article7437.ece http://beta.thehindu.com/news/cities/Mangalore/article6940.ece [Health Care and Wikipedia] - Columbia Journalism Review compliment's the English Wikipedia's coverage of the American "health care debates". http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/health_care_and_wikipedia.php [Wikimania 2009] - a pre-Wikimania article about Wikimania 2009 and the Wikimania idea. http://www.en.argentina.ar/_en/science-and-education/C954-wikimania-2009-in… [Wikinews: The unsung news source] - Wikinews got a favorable blog post that includes a Q&A and explanation of the project. http://perspective.cfezra.com/?p=105 [AP tries to rival WP?] - apparently the Associated Press is going to try to rival Wikipedia in the search results. The AP will hold back some content from member websites and hope that Google will rate it higher due to the increased number of links to that page. http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/how-the-associated-press-will-try-to-rival… [Wikiversity media coverage] - Wikiversity is in the news again, with a whole article devoted to it. According to the article, "Wikiversity" is to be a university for every Internet user. Some professors are smitten with it - others are skeptical. http://www.tagesspiegel.de/magazin/wissen/Wikiversity;art304,2876731 (de) [Inkblot Poster] - remember the controversy on the English Wikipedia because there were copies of the Rorschach inkblot tests in the article? Well, according to the New York Times, te doctor who helped publish the 10 inkblots is being investigated by his local doctors? organization after it received complaints that his actions were unprofessional. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/24inkblot.html === Stats === [enwp: 3m] - the English Wikipedia has reached 3,000,000 articles with the creation of "Beate Eriksen", a Norwegian actress. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/17/3000000/ [cswikt] - the Czech Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries. http://cs.wiktionary.org/ === Other news === [Growing Wikipedias] - Hausa Wikipedia, one of the African-language Wikipedias, was previously in danger of being closed but now it's growing very quickly. This comes at an interesting time, there have been recent foundation-l discussions about the process for closing projects. http://hausaonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/hausa-wikipedia-is-growing/ -- Hausa Wikipedia http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/175836 -- mailing list thread http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects -- current project closing process [Wikipedia Diver] - a new Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10315483-248.html [Enterprise Wikis] - a blog post gives 8 more reasons to use a wiki for you internal corporate site. http://www.ikiw.org/2009/08/21/8-things-you-can-do-with-an-enterprise-wiki/ [Citizendium founder ready to leave] - Larry Sanger, the founder of Citizendium (another encyclopedia created to rival Wikipedia) and one of the first contributors to Wikipedia, is ready to leave his project and move on. http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/08/citizendium-founder-ready-to-jump-ship/ === Was ist das? === === Did you know ... === === Quote === ////////////////////////////////////////// Editor(s): Casey, Alex Corrector(s): MarkW Thanks to: Too many to name. Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org ////////////////////////////////////////// Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe; mailto:request@wikizine.org?subject=unsubscribe

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[Foundation-l] building lucene-search-2 binary?
by Anon Sricharoenchai 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

Hi, Some question about lucene-search-2 binary, 1. Do I need apache's lucene library when building lucene-search-2 binary? Or it is already included in lucene-search-2 source tree? 2. Did lucene-search-2 in wikimedia (before migration to 2.1) use the same binary as found in sourceforge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/lucene-search/files/ ? 3. Which version of lucene library is used to build binary found in sourceforge and in wikimedia? Best regards, Anon.

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimania-l] Board Q&A session this afternoon, and IRC
by Casey Brown 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

2009/8/28 Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com>: > Is there a live transcript/audio/video of the board session planned? > It's a full-conference event (see bottom of <http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule>), so I'm pretty sure it will be broadcast through the streaming site: <http://stream.wikimedia.org.ar/>. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023

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[Foundation-l] Board Q&A session this afternoon, and IRC
by Samuel Klein 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

Hello, There is a Q&A session with the whole board scheduled for this afternoon at 3:45 EST, at the end of Wikimania: http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule It will run for an hour. If you have questions to ask but are not physically at the event, you can post questions in #wikimania on IRC. SJ PS - I'd like to see regular public IRC discussions and Q&As w/the Board. We are discussing having one primarily with the new Board members (Arne, Matt and myself) within the next few weeks.

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[Foundation-l] Raw data of 2009 Board election ballots
by Gregory Kohs 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

I wonder what takes so long to upload a small data file? http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Board_elections/2009/Votes&oldi… Let's see... August 25 minus August 12 equals nearly two weeks of delay (and subterfuge?)... It only took three days to post the ballots in 2008: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Board_elections/2008/Votes/en&o… What's different about 2009? I mean, other than the fact that the Wikivoices interview tape #45 of the Board candidates was mysteriously "lost", and that the WMF staff budget is about three times larger now than it was then. This must be the professionalism and efficiency we were expecting from all of the added money being thrown at the Foundation. -- Gregory Kohs

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Wikimedia-l August 2009