I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
because there are many books who are used in more than
one article, some in dozens or even more.
Currently, a book reference is done this way:
<ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'',
[[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695,
page 22</ref>
with a central bibliography, it would be like this;
<book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>
and the book database would fill in the details in the
page displayed to the viewer.
I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN, because
it can be seen more clearly in the text, when reading the
wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially older
books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and some
which have many different editions with different ISBNs.
There is still the problem with two books with the same title,
in which case we need to add the author, too, for disambiguation,
but I think this problem is less on the kind of books we use for
reference. Shorter titles are used especially for fiction.
There could be some benefits for having a central bibliography,
other than not having to copy-paste the publishing house/ISBN,
like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.
Hi all,
There is much activity on the "unofficial" bids for Wikimania 2007,
which is great, but none of the bids are "official" yet.
It would grandly help if those who *really* intend to present their
bid to the jury moved their city bid to the "official list" so that we
know which bids are being pursued.
For the first round, remember that we are aware that this is a *work
in progress* and will need fine tuning, so do not be afraid to put up
an official unfinished bid.
I remind you all that the deadline is September 10th to make an
official bid. No bid will be accepted as official after this date. For
those of you who have hidden bids (I know there are some out there),
please *do* make those public as soon as possible (ie. today would be
great), it is very annoying both for the jury and the other
participants to see a bid springing out of nowhere at the last minute
and you are keeping potential helpers out by hiding your bid in a
corner.
Again, making a bid official does not prevent you from working on it,
and bids will not be considered as "finished" until the very final
deadline of September 24th, we know that it takes some time to get
final approvals and fine tune things and deals.
Thank you and happy bidding!
Delphine
PS. Dear translators, thank you for translating this for the relevant
local lists.
--
~notafish
Some interesting demographic data for main space edits to our largest
Wikipedia projects may be found at
http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.
My thanks to Greg Maxwell for his invaluable assistance generating this data.
Some observations
* NL and BE are language sluts.
* ptwiki gets quite a bit more edits from BR than from PT, although
almost 75% of edits from PT are to ptwiki.
* MX has a depressingly low participation in eswiki.
Not reported in the data on the page, but possibly of interest: US
accounts for 27.61% of edits to the projects sampled, followed by DE
at 10.01% and GB at 8.15%.
Kelly
Hi all.
You may or may not know that the English Wikipedia offers a mailing
list which sends out an email each day with the daily front-page
featured article (or at least the introduction of it and a link).
Recently, I dealt with an email at OTRS asking if we offered this in
any other languages (specifically Japanese); I didn't think so, but
said I'd check.
Does anyone know of other language editions which do this?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
Hi, navigation box on main page of the fiu-vro wikipedia is translated to Võro (in system messages) and has been in Võro all the
time after it. Now it appears in English. Why? Could somebody repair it, please?
fiu-vro user Võrok
The election season is a great excuse for people to be writing essays
about the projects. This isn't limited to those running in the
elections (though I wish more of the candidates would write actively
about their thoughts and ideas).
Aaron Swartz has started a series of such essays. The latest one
suggests something I have long suspected, that the huge body of new
and anonymous contributors, who often make the first serious stab at
an article or provide a needed injection of expertise, are as
important to the 'pedias development (if not more so) than the core of
dedicated editors.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/wikiroadshttp://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Is anyone else writing long essays these days? Where are they kept,
and how categorized?
++SJ
Britannica has an article on Wikipedia
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9433599> (maybe they've had it for
a while, I can't remember finding anything when I looked a few months ago).
-Ruud
In a message dated 9/4/2006 7:49:40 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
dgerard(a)gmail.com writes:
It'll be amusing when US contributors are a minority on en:, they'll
find out how UK contributors sometimes feel ;-p
The real problem is the possibility of English-as-a-second-language speakers
(or third or fourth language) becoming a majority of users on en.wiki and
the impact that this would have on the basic quality of writing. It has already
becoming an issue in some areas of content related to India, where the prose
requires inordinate cleanup just to make it legible.
To be clear, I am *not* saying that these contributions should be
discouraged--only that they come at some cost.
Danny
(who has already spent some time adding spaces after punctuation)