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.org
Year: 2008 Week: 37 Number: 99
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Technical news ===
[API] - Brion has disabled the old BotQuery interface and enabled the
MediaWiki's machine-readable query API.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.api/668
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API
=== Foundation ===
[Job offer] - The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Chief Program Officer.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Program_Officer
=== Community ===
[AR wp] - small groups of Wikipedians in Egypt organize a "regional
Wikipedia Day" to try to boost the low number of articles in there wiki
compared to the languages population. Despite some disappointments about
3500 new articles where written and 10,000 edits on other articles in one
day.
http://dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=16154
[ID wp] - The Indonesian Wikipedia community officially met with the
Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of the Republic of
Indonesia who organized an event like Wikipedia Academy: a seminar and
workshop titled "Contributing to Wikipedia" for the public and for
organizations. This event was held on 8 August 2008 at Jakarta, Indonesia,
within the bigger event Indonesia ICT Award 2008.
http://www.inaicta.web.id/2008/07/22/menulis-di-wikipedia-untuk-umum/ --
Announcement on official website of Indonesia ICT Award 2008
http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lokakarya_Wikipedia_bahasa_Indonesia…
-- Page at Indonesian Wikipedia
[Wikisource] - Ever wondered what the people at Wikisource are actually
doing? Here below you can find the results of the latest efforts of EN
Wikisource. Two books who are scanned, uploaded to the wiki and then text
of the images are written over and proofread. Who likes to help can
currently proofread a cookbook.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Wind_in_the_Willows_(1913).djvu<http…
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Equitation.djvu
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Proofread_of_the_Month
=== Awards ===
[Quadriga] - Wikipedia is one of the recipients of the Quadriga, a German
award. Jimmy Wales will in Berlin on October 3, Germany's national
holiday, to accept the award.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadriga_(award)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
http://tinyurl.com/5nx89h -- WMF-blog posting
=== Media ===
[Amazon goes wiki] - One of the uses of Wikipedia is to look up
information about a music band. Amazon has started a website to compete
with Wikipedia for that aspect of content. At
soundunwound.com users can
look up music related information and edit the content. The well known
"edit" button is present. But you need to login and all edits need to be
approved by Amazon staff.
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/09/amazon-takes-on.html
http://www.soundunwound.com/
[Sarah Palin] - A story has appeared around the EN Wikipedia article of a
US Vice-president candidate. A new user who worked at the article before
it was known publicly that the candidate was candidate attracted
attention.
http://tinyurl.com/5jk3wz
[The Power] - a spider of google gets confused about the data of an
article its discovers and lists by mistake an old article as new in google
news. Result; the stock prize of an airline crashes because the article
announced the bankruptcy of the airline. In this story are the Wikimedia
projects not involved. But it shows clearly to potential effect of
incorrect information in a highly visual used source of information, like
the WMF are also.
http://searchengineland.com/080909-081840.php
=== Stats ===
[Golden wikipedia] - Just How Powerful Is Wikipedia?
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/09/04/just-how-powerful-is-wikipedia/
[EN wp] - The English Wikipedia has reached 2,500,000 articles. Allegedly,
the 2.5 millionth article was Joe Connor.
[Small poll] - when asked to 200 college students; "90% of students have
used Wikipedia to complete an assignment, 73% of students have been
explicitly told by their professor not to use Wikipedia."
http://tinyurl.com/6gql6j
=== Other news ===
[Court ruling] - The US appeals court ruled that Wikipedia is not highly
accurate. No, seriously, this is not a story form UnNews.
The case was that the "Department of Homeland Security" (Big Brother USA),
had used information from Wikipedia to decide to reject a request from a
refugee to receive protection inside the USA.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/03/court-rules-wikipedia
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/UnNews:Main_Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer -- the POV
regarding its authoritative status
[Medical wiki] - A new wiki is preparing to launch end of 2008 to provide
medical information. It is a project in co-operation with several
universities. People who have a medical degree can request to become an
editor. Other people can only suggest changes. Content will be released
under the GNU/FDL.
http://www.medpedia.com
[Google News Archive] - Google is working on a project to digitize on a
large scale old printed news archives. This will make it possible to
search in to articles who until only existed in box in some seller up to a
century or more ago. This could be very useful to fix some "[citation
needed]" needs. There is already an option to search old news present.
Some of the results point to archives that are not free to access. But
that are not google archives.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10035172-93.html
http://news.google.com/archivesearch
[GNU] - If you work on Wikipedia, or most of the other projects, you have
heard of GNU. The content of our projects is mostly under the GNU/FDL
licence. MediaWiki, the website, uses the GNU/GPL-licence. And the servers
are using the GNU/Linux operating system. Just like the Wikimedia projects
stands GNU-philosophy for openness of information. And now is it the 25th
birthday of GNU.
http://www.gnu.org/fry/happy-birthday-to-gnu.html
=== Quote ===
"There are many ways to commit career suicide. Wiki is just a new
one." (Eric Johnson, Wikimania 2008)
http://tinyurl.com/6kfnfn
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Editor(s): Walter
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