en.Wikizine.org

Year: 2008 Week: 40 Number: 100

2008-10-02T14:05:00.001Z

Technical news

[Global blocking] - Stewards are now able to block an IP address or range from editing on all Wikimedia projects (except Meta). This option is intended to be used with restraint and for a short time frame.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_blocking

[Robots.txt] - this is file that exists to control what pages are allowed to be indexed by a search engine. Basically you can use it to keep stuff out of Google. A recent added magic word __NOINDEX__ gives the same result on a specific page. Until now only the developers could edit the robots.txt for all WMF-projects. But now it there a new MediaWiki-page to control that. There is a central part of the Robots.txt that is not in local control. But on the page [[MediaWiki:Robots.txt]] you specify wiki-specific instructions for the spiders of the search engines.
[Global bot] - it is now possible for bots to get a global bot status.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bot_policy#Global_bots

[New tools] - Several users have created external tools for analyzing the history of articles. Statistics, a history search function, page view diagrams.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/09/09/more-story-in-wp-history/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Histlegend -- example of how to include the tools to the history function

[Flood flag] - only at Meta, but it can be requested for other wikis also, is the now the flag "flood". It is actually exactly the same as the "bot flag" only is it named "Flood". The idea is that when a sysop wishes to do many similar, repetitive and non-controversial changes then that user can ask for the "flood"-flag on a bureaucrat. The result is like with a bot that the edits are hidden by default.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Flood_flag

Policy

[New logo] - Meta, the neutral ground wiki for all Wikimedia Foundation projects and wikis, has a new logo. This was decided after a one week running poll. It used before the WMF-logo and the now changed to a different one but in the same general style.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel/Metawiki_logo_poll

[use of global groups] - the function of global groups is used to give certain groups certain levels of global rights. For example WMF office staff and systems administrators have been given certain global rights.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_global_permissions

[Delete Wikiquote] - a proposal to close the Wikiquote project was closed without consensus. The argument to delete Wikiquote was that some see it as one giant copyright violation and not compatible with WMF goals.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metapub/On_disbanding_Wikiquote

Foundation

[Board] - user Frieda of the Italian Wikipedia has resigned from the board of the WMF. The board does not know when she will be replaced for now.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/32774

[Wikimedia Nederland] - On November first will Wikimedia NL hold there 4th conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Early registrations are open.

http://www.wikimediaconferentie.nl/

Community

[Books] - It was announced this week that three books were published relating to Wikipedia. Lennart Guldbrandsson from Wikimedia Sverige wrote a book in Swedish titled "Så fungerar Wikipedia", which translates to "How Wikipedia works". Wikimedia Sweden also has its first WikiReader available (about Swedish Birds).

Also, a few English Wikipedians wrote their own book "How Wikipedia Works" (same title, different book then the Swedish) and they were published around the same time. This book was written by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. Wikizine is mentioned in it on page 345 in chapter 12.
Earlier in 2008 was also published the book the book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual". (ISBN 0596515162)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/32914 for Swedish books
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/95320 for English book
http://nostarch.com/wikipedia.htm -- How Wikipedia Works (free chapter download & order info)

[EO Wikipedia] - the Esperanto Wikipedia is proud of there new main page design. From a text only layout in 2001 has it grown in several steps to the current modern look that was elected out of 7 proposals.

http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%88efpa%C4%9Do/Nova_aspekto

[source:"Wikinews"] - Wikinews is now partially listed on google news (due to flagged revs). The are still working on meeting google's requirement of unique numbers in URLs, so so far only lead articles have been listed. Before this only mirrors of Wikinews where listed.

http://tinyurl.com/3prv5u -- view all Wikinews story's in Google News

[RU wiki] - On October 18 and 19 Moscow will play host to the second international Russian-language Wiki-conference related to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, as well as other Wikimedia projects. Registrations are open.

http://tinyurl.com/4y6ll4

Media

[Sweden] - Recently the former national telephone company of Sweden (and still the biggest telephone company in Sweden) ran a commercial for their mobile internet. The commercial ran like this: three men sit in a outside oak hot tub. One of them tell the others about how a former king planted oaks in Sweden. The others say: "Well, you know a lot." Another goes out of the water, is gone for a few moments, comes back and gives a comprehensive description of oaks, including their Latin name, while the others are more and more impressed. Then we cut to a sign that says: "Wikipedia in your mobile phone."

http://media.resume.se/resPlayer.aspx?type=1&id=1250

[Report about wp &win prize] - Wired.com won a $10,000 award for their reporting about Wikipedia and the Wikipedia-scanner

http://www.journalism.co.uk/14/articles/532334.php

[Jimmy] - A classic item once more; interview of Jimmy Wales on TV, Canadian this time.

http://tinyurl.com/3h8ppr

Stats

[No interest?] - after the unblocking of the Chinese language Wikipedia in China the statistics do not indicate a special increase of traffic.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/09/pretty-much-none-whatsoever/

[ES Wikipedia] - reached 400.000 articles on Saturday, September 22. The Spanish language Wikipedia is the 9th of 256 largest Wikipedias.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

[Special:Statistics] - the statistics page of the wikis now also lists the number of active users of last 30 days. What a lot more meaningful is then the number of user accounts created. For EN Wikipedia is it 153,000 active users.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

[If the editors where paid ...] - how much would it have cost? A lot.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/10/quantifying-volunteer-contribution/

[Bangla Wikisource] - has reached 1,000 pages milestone on 25th September, 2008.

http://bn.wikisource.org/

[EN wikinews] - The English language Wikinews has recieved its 700 000th edit. First edit was Tim uploading the draft version of our logo. The 700,000th edit was by 207.108.15.1 commenting about how connecting strongly religious people with "extremists" (aka the type who blow things up is a bad thing)

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WC#700.2C000_edits
http://tinyurl.com/5yf4n9 -- this is how a 700,000th edit looks like

Other news

[Delitionpedia] - Where do articles go to when the get deleted?" - The go to Deletionpedia.

[Wikizine] - the good news; Wikizine ID - the Indonesian language version of Wikizine is back after its formal closure in April 2008. This thanks to the effort of [[meta:user:REX]]. The bad news; DE Wikizine - the German language version of Wikizine is now formally closed because of lack of support.

http://id.wikizine.org -- reborn
http://de.wikizine.org -- closed

[Wikisage] - Wikisage, a "second generation wiki encyclopedia", is founded by Guido den Broeder. The active users have most a Dutch language Wikipedia background. The difference is that users can also write essays, so a personal POV. And some users can become labeled as an "expert" and be in charge of certain articles. Basically the expert voice gets more important than on Wikipedia. The project exists in Dutch and English but the Dutch version is stronger on this moment.

http://www.wikisage.org/

[Interwiki sync] - A page on Meta is created to discus interwiki synchronization problems.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization

[681 hits for wikipedia] - to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Google the have put online a dump of google from January 2001. Wikipedia was founded on January 15, 2001. In this google there are 681 hits for "wikipedia", now it is 251 million.

http://www.google.com/search2001/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia
http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/ -- one of least know WMF-sites ; EN Wikipedia edition December 2001

Was ist das?

Well, if you not know it you look it up .. and there is a very handy FF extension to do so in Wiktionary.

Users of FireFox can install the WikiLook exstension. When installed you just press shift and point to a word in a text. And you get in a small overlay screen the dictionary description of it and a link to look it up in Wikipedia. English language editions only. But due the multi-language nature of Wiktionary the extension remains useful also for non-English language users.

http://wikilook.mozdev.org/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7675

Quote

"If a man speaks in a forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/If_a_man_speaks_in_a_forest_and_there_is_no_woman_around_to_hear_him_is_he_still_wrong

Number of subscribers: 715 , Editor(s): Walter, Hannibal, Cbrown, bawolff , Thanks to: Platonides, Londenp, Bellayet, Arno Lagrange, Lvova , 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]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. 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

Year: 2008 Week: 37 Number: 99

2008-09-10T10:14:00.001Z

Technical news

[API] - Brion has disabled the old BotQuery interface and enabled the MediaWiki's machine-readable query 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-INAICTA_2008 -- 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.

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://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.

[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.

[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

Number of subscribers: 715 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Effeietsanders, Tawker, REX , 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]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
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

Year: 2008 Week: 33 Number: 98

2008-08-12T12:56:00.001Z

Technical news

[New and useful] - it is now possible to insert the magic word __NOINDEX__ into a page. The result of this is that when a search engine spider comes by, it gets the instruction not to index that page. This way, it should for example be possible to keep certain pages out of the search results of google. This only works on pages that are not in the content namespace; for example, on Wikipedia it will not work in an article like [[Michael Shmerkin]].
Note that anyone who can edit a page can insert this magic word in a page. There is also a magic word __INDEX__ now. Its use is not clear.

[Double redirect] - a long-standing problem is the creation of double redirects when a page is moved. The user then needs to click on a redirect link to continue. There is now a "double redirect fixer". It works at the MediaWiki level but it behaves like a bot. Sometime after the move is done, the wiki will check if there is a double redirect. If so, it will be fixed automatically. By default, the correction will be done by [[User:Redirect fixer]]. Those edits do not appear in recent changes.
The name of this "user" can be specified by the setting [[MediaWiki:double-redirect-fixer]]. If for some reason you wish the system to not get involved in a double redirect you can insert the magic word __STATICREDIRECT__ .

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-July/038751.html

[Wikisets] - Not so long ago, a new functionality was activated to create "global user groups". These groups can be given certain rights (like "grant and revoke bot flags"); when users are enrolled, they have the rights of that group on all Wikimedia wikis.
The problem is that those rights are valid either everywhere or nowhere, and not all communities agree with external users having special rights on their wiki.
To solve this problem, the "wiki sets" option has been created. This makes it possible to have "global groups" that are not global. Certain wikis can opt out, or a global group can be made opt-in.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Steward_handbook#wikisets

[New mail] - Almost (*) all wikis now offer an user the option to receive an e-mail when their talk page has been changed.
(*) exceptions are enwiki, eswiki, frwiki, plwiki, jawiki, ptwiki, ruwiki, zhwiki, itwiki and dewiki.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15031

[Download wikipedia] - You are free to download the database dump of wikis, but for most users this is not very useful. As an alternative, you can also download a static HTML dump: a huge collection of HTML files that gives you a local copy of the Wikipedia of your choice. This makes it very easy to bring Wikipedia to places where there is no internet or where it is prohibitively expensive.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/07/03/new-wikipedia-downloads-available

[Ogg support in Firefox] - The fairly popular internet browser Mozilla Firefox now supports the Ogg Vorbis and Theora media formats in its experimental version 3.1. It is considered normal that a webbrower is able to display images by itself; however, for video or audio an external program or a plugin is required. The Wikimedia Foundation projects use Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis for their video and audio recordings. However, besides Wikimedia, these formats are very rarely used by websites for end users.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/31/1752206

Request for help

[Illustration Project] - In November 2007 it was announced (wikizine 84) that a donation was received of US $ 20,000 for creating and improving illustrations. The "Philip Greenspun illustration project (PGIP)". It has taken some time to organize but now round 1 is open. Requests for illustrations can now be submitted. People who make a good illustration that is requested can get paid for it. US$ 40 or 15 US$ will be paid. Organizer is [[commons:User:Pfctdayelise]]

Proposals

[Flood flag] - A proposal has been made for a new sysop function called the "flood flag", that would allow users to hide batches of repetitive edits from recent changes, like a bot flag does.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flood_flag

Foundation

[Job offers] - Wikimedia is offering several technical jobs; at least a few of the new employees are to work in the San Francisco office, but remote development and system administration is also possible.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/39257

[WMF budget] - The financial plan for the next fiscal year of the WMF has been presented. The WMF plans to spend almost 6 million US dollars and have an income of 7,33 million US dollars. This is a big increase compared to the budget of 2007/2008. The hiring of several new staff members, especially for technical functions, has been budgeted. An extensive "FAQ" on the budget is available.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/07/01/wikimedia-foundation-2008-2009-annual-plan/

Community

[EN Wikinews] - has started to use the flagged revisions system on the wiki. The community is working to integrate this function into the publishing procedures.
[Move Main Page] - Traditionally, the main page of a Wikimedia project is in the content namespace. This is because the main page was the first page created of every wiki. And for most wikis, that was before namespaces existed. Some wikis have moved their main pages to another name space. For example, the German Wikipedia uses the "Wikipedia:" namespace and the Swedish Wikipedia uses the "Portal:" namespace. The English language Wikipedia is now also discussing a move.

http://tinyurl.com/6dvldz

Media

[Hebrew Wikipedia] - an Israeli newspaper published extensively about Wikipedia. Some fragments have been translated in English. It tells the Wikipedia story from the Hebrew Wikipedia point of view.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1005293.html

Stats

[布拉沃] - The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles. Due to the Olympics, the Chinese wikipedia is mostly unblocked in China for now.

http://zh.wikipedia.org

Other news

[Wikimania 2008] - More videos of Wikimania 2008 have become available. An overview can be found on a special Wikizine posting and the Kaltura site. WikipediaWeekly also has some new Wikimania-related postings.

[Wikipedia.org] - The poll discussing which Wikipedias are to be listed on the central space of the portal Wikipedia.org is now closed. The result is a very simple criterion: a ranking by most visitors, without any further specifications or exceptions. These rankings are to be obtained from Alexa.com.
The portal has been updated according the new system. As a result of this the Dutch language Wikipedia has been replaced by the Chinese Wikipedia. According to Alexa, 1% of all traffic to wikipedia.org is to the Chinese Wikipedia.
Alexa gets those statistics by monitoring the internet usage of people who have installed the (English language) Alexa toolbar.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Wikipedias/poll

Did you know ...

... that the definition of a "community member" can differ strongly between wikis?

... that the Hebrew-language Wikipedia only gives users the right to vote if they have made at least 100 edits in the last 90 days?

... that the idea for using this system is to make it more difficult for users with sock puppets to control votes?

Quote

'It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be 'Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.' —Philip Greenspun

Number of subscribers: 714 , Unique Visitors website last week: 76 , Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): Oliphaunt , Thanks to: Yonatan, adambro, pfctdayelise
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]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. 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

Special post: url's to the Wikimania 2008 streams

2008-07-26T13:38:00.024Z

The video recordings of Wikimania 2008 are online at the Biblotheca Alexandrina webcast section But these do not work if you are not using Windows it looks like.

To make it more esay to watch them Wikizine provides you with the direct links to the files. Try several players if needed. It seems to work mostly with VLC. But for some I needed Mplayer to get it working.

The "Kalura" videos are copys of the Biblotheca Alexandrina webcast streams. So there are not better but the are maybe more easy te view.

Overview of all Kaltura videos can be found at the Kalutra website at the Wikimania2008 section.

Opening Ceremony
Ahmed Darwish, Florence Devouard, Hoda Baraka, Ismail Serageldin
Thursday July 17, 2008

View by streaming

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-3.wmv

Download the video;

http://www.badongo.com/vid/816416 this is wiki-17-3.wmv
note: this video breaks down in the middle of the speech of Florence , sorry, it is the best I can do

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Wikimedia Foundation Board Panel
Domas Mituzas, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Jimmy Wales, Kat Walsh, Michael Snow
Thursday July 17, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-7.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Content creation strategies for emerging countries
Jürgen Galler
Thursday July 17, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-4.wmv

Kultura;

Kaltura

Keeping the Media accountable
Rhonda Shearer
Thursday July 17, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-6.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

New Paradigms For New Tomorrows
Ismail Serageldin
Thursday July 17, 2008

Vieuw by streaming;

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-17-1.wmv

View by downloading;

http://www.badongo.com/vid/817019

Kaltura:

Kaltura

Recent Developments in Search Technology
Usama Fayyad
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-2.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Wikimedia and libraries
Jakob Voss, Phoebe Ayers, Sohair Wastawy, Tim Spalding
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-5.wmv

kaltura;

Kaltura

Free Knowledge & Wikimedia Projects
Oliveir Hugot
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-4.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Open culture and the Internet in the Middle East
Ahmed Tantawy
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-1.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

LibraryThing and Social Cataloging
Tim Spalding
Friday July 18, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-18-3.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Diplopedia: Wiki Culture in the U.S. Department of State
Eric M. Johnson
Saturday July 19, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-19-1.wmv

Kaltura

Kaltura

Communication issues : Musings of a Dinosaur

Florence Devouard
Saturday July 19, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-19-2.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Closing Ceremony
Florence Devouard, Ismail Serageldin, Jimmy Wales, Michael Snow, Noha Adly, Sue Gardner
Saturday July 19, 2008

mms://webcast.bibalex.org/WebCast/wiki-19-3.wmv

Kaltura;

Kaltura

Year: 2008 Week: 30 Number: 97

2008-07-24T21:59:00.001Z

Notice from the editor: this edition does not includes all relevant news for the time frame between the previous Wikizine and this one. I decided that getting something out is more important then more delays. Walter

Foundation

[New board chair] - The board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation has a new chair. All board members where in favour to appoint Michael Snow for the job. Michael, who is a board member since February 2008, is best known as the founder of the Wikipedia Signpost. The former chair, Anthere (Florence Devouard), was Chair since October 2006 and board member since 2004. She is now not longer a WMF board member. Anthere has joined the WMF Advisory board.

[Board election] - [[meta:user:Wing]] (Ting Chen) is elected as a community board member to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. His term will expire in July 2009. 3019 valid votes where registered.

[New hires] - The WMF has hired 5 new staff members; Erik Zachte (Tech stats guy), Sara Crouse (Head of Partnerships and Foundation Relations), Rebecca Handler (Major Gifts Officer), Rand Montoya (Head of Community Giving), and Frank Schulenburg (public outreach coordinator). Erik Zachte starts in September as a part-time contractor. Erik is a Wikipedian from the Dutch language Wikipedia but is mostly know for his volunteer work in creating detailed statistics for the Wikimedia projects. As a contractor for the WMF Erik will also work on this.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31508 -- Erik Zachte
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31661 -- Sara Crouse
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31367 -- Rebecca Handler / Rand Montoya
http://stats.wikimedia.org/ -- the stats of the WMF by Erik Zachte
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Current_staff -- overview staff

Technical news

[SUL] - Bureaucrats can now rename a user to a name that is already migrated to the Single User Login. This at least when if the global account and the local account have the same email address or password.
[Video on wiki] - Kaltura, Inc is sponsoring Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project, to work in the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco beginning in August. Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31756

[ERATA] - the item "Restrict upload", section "Proposals", in Wikizine 96 was not correct. Restricting uploads to auto confirmed users only is not a proposal but is live on all wikis ... except those wikis who have requested to disable this function explicitly.

Request for help

[Wikizine] - assistance would be useful (understatement)

http://report.wikizine.org

Proposals

[Front door] - Just like most people have a very hard time to understand that a domain of a website can end with something else then .com have visitors the urge to put "www" before everything. The means the url "www.wikipedia.org" is an important page and the front door for many visitors of Wikipedia. 10 Wikipedias have currently the honour to be listed very prominently around the wikipedia-globe, the Wikipedias who have the most articles. When a Wikipedia breaks the 100,000 articles milestone the also like to move up and get a spot around the globe. But space is limited. This a long standing source of discussion.

A poll is currently opened to find a solution. Users can indicate there support for different ways to present the Wikipedia-options to the visitors. The poll is open until July 31, 2008 at 23:59 UTC.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Wikipedias/poll

Community

[Wikimania 2008] - For this year is it over. WikipediaWeekly provides audio reporting about Wikimania.The 2009 Wikimania conference will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

http://wikipediaweekly.org/ -- podcasts 52 / 57
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2008_Alexandria -- some
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gallery pictures from Wikimania 2008
http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Wikimania_Sessions -- If you are very lucky you can find some video recordings there
http://tinyurl.com/6l4gwr -- Bibliotheca Alexandrina Webcast
http://linuxawy.org/node/28 -- how to get those streams working
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2008/07/wikimania-alexandria.html -- Impression by GerardM, who was there
http://tinyurl.com/6fu5hy -- and also one from User:Pfctdayelise

[Most read] - The English Wikinews has a new page that displays the top 20 of the most read articles of the last hour. This is not done by MediaWiki but by means of the Domas's wikistats.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Popular_articles

[The Other Side] - Once was it a mystery and cause to speculation how the dark side of the Moon would look like. Now the question is raised; how does the other side of the Wikipedia globe looks like?

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/31763

Other news

[Knol] - Google has gone live with their project to create user written information articles. It is not like Wikipedia in the sense that an article is owned by an author, at least as default. When you start a new "knol" you can also allow everyone to edit if logged in. That author can write about what he wishes to write, even when there is already an article about that topic. Other people can give a rating (stars) and give comments. Authors received a part of the earnings of the advertisements displayed on there articles if the switch the advertisements on. The default license is "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0". It is currently not clear of the GFDL-licence that Wikipedia is using is compatible. But you can also pick a licence that does not allow commercial use or you can disallow all use elsewhere. So knol be very open or very restrictive depending on what you chose as author of a knol.

http://knol.google.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PYO-fN_VgU -- Jimmy Wales gives his idea about Knol & Wikipedia

[China] - The Chinese language Wikipedia is now, months after the unblocking of the other languages editions, also unblocked. At least in some parts of China. It is expected the will be blocked again as soon as the Olympic fire is extinguished.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chinese_Wikipedia_unblocked_by_government

Quote

Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.

from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Mozilla

Number of subscribers: 710 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Platonides, bawolff , 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]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. 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

Notification of delay of EN Wikizine

2008-07-15T14:47:00.001Z

Dear reader of Wikizine in English,

The next edition of Wikizine is delayed. At this time it is still the
intention to provide you with this edition.

If you would like to help out with the creation of EN Wikizine please
contact me at <walter@wikizine.org>

Greetings,

Walter
--
Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community

Year: 2008 Week: 25 Number: 96

2008-06-16T23:36:00.001Z

Technical news

[Upload] - When you upload an image that is already online with another name you get a warning about it. It works by calculating the hash of the file and compares it with the already online files.
[Move] - sysops have now the option to rename all sub-pages in one move when moving the parent page.
[Global user groups] - a WMF-global user group can now be created that has a much or as little user rights as desired. Users can then be added to that group. Global user members then have the user rights assigned to that group on all wikis. Currently this function is only used to give stewards administrative rights on all wikis.

Proposals

[Global sysops] - there is a proposal and a poll about the possibility of creating a "Global sysops user group". That is creating users who are sysop on all wikis. The idea is to make it more easy to maintain the many small wikis. Users who would be "global sysop" would be only allowed to use there rights on small wiki where there is no local community or one that not yet take care of there own wiki. The opposition against this idea does not like that "Global sysops" would also have the technical sysops rights on large wikis, like the English Wikipedia, despite it would not be allowed to use it.

[Restrict upload] - there is a proposal to restrict upload rights of new users on all wikis except commons to autoconfirmed users. That are users who have an account that it at least 5 days old. The idea is that this will prevent the upload of a lot of problems.

http://tinyurl.com/56z4fs

[Interwiki] - a proposal to introduce the Interlanguage Extension on Wikimedia projects to change the system of the language interwiki links.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_newer_look_at_the_interwiki_link

Policy

[Draft] - Mike Godwin has drafted a new version of the privacy policy. Feedback and input is requested.

Foundation

[Board elections] - the election for one position on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation is open. There are 15 candidates. You can vote until 23:59 21 June 2008 (UTC). Note that the voting system has changed. Read the manual. The result are expected to be announced on or around 26 June 2008.

[Enquête] - In July 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with UNU-Merit, plans to launch the first general survey of Wikimedia readers and contributors. Attempts are made to make it available in as many languages as possible. Translation assistance is requested.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/06/06/help-translate-our-first-survey-of-readers-and-contributors/

[Lawsuit Germany] - a German publishing company sued Wikimedia Deutschland over their article in the German Wikipedia. This because there was critical information in the article. The court ruled that it was legal to include to critical information and rejected the claim that Wikimedia Deutschland was legally responsible for the article in question. The publishing company intents to appeal the decision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-05-26/News_and_notes

Media

[Live; dead on wiki] - Wikipedia vs Associated Press.

http://blog.syracuse.com/newstracker/2008/06/wikipedia_vs_ap.html

Stats

[Voters stats] - parcial statistics of the voter turnout indicate that few actually vote. The Hebrew Wikipedia has most users who use the voting right. Most in numbers is the English language Wikipedia.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/30693

[Bla-bla] - Wikipedia NL has more spoken articles (735) then EN Wikipedia (728).

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_en_Ernie -- example (press play button)

Other news

[Britannica] - a new website run by the Encyclopaedia Britannica will be a bit like wikipedia. EN hopes to created a community of people who work on their encyclopedia under thiee real name and revise articles and write articles. The EB Staff keeps editorial control. Submissions will need to be approved to be included in the article.

Offtopic request for help

[Vote for Oscar!] - this is an experiment. This to see what, if any, the responds is. You are requested to vote for Oscar, a Belgian cat (you can see that because of the beer bottle) in a competition of Whiskas.

go to the vote page (link below)
enter your name ("Voornaam" and "Naam") and email.
ignore the check box (check if you like to get Dutch catfood emails) and the lower input options
click on the purple "Breng je stem uit" button.
You get an email from "makeyourcatastar@whiskas.be" - click on the purple button "Ik bevestig mijn stem!" to confirm your vote
done

Oscar says; "burp" (= thank you)

http://tinyurl.com/6eubno

Quote

"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." -- Bruce Graham

Number of subscribers: 710 Unique Visitors website last week: 154 Number of votes for Oscar: 21 Editor(s): Walter
Thanks to: Spacebirdy, Nathan 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]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. 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

Year: 2008 Week: 22 Tech flash

2008-05-27T22:01:00.001Z

Single User Login (SUL), the system that you have one user account for all Wikimedia Foundation wikis is now live for all users. Until now it was only for sysops.

Please read first the documentation before about it before using it. Stewards can undo the merge of an account be try to avoid the need for it. If you wish to unsurp an account on some wiki do that before you merge your account.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MergeAccount
#wikimedia-tech
#wikimedia-stewards

http://chat.wikizine.org

Editor(s): Walter 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]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. 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

Year: 2008 Week: 21 Number: 95

2008-05-21T22:35:00.001Z

Technical news

[Sighted revisions] - a system to hide edits made by certain groups of users from visitors as long as the edit is not approved by a user who has the user rights to approve the edit - This is now active on the German language Wikipedia. "Surveyor" is the title of a user who has approval rights.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-05-12/Sighted_revisions

[Special:GlobalUsers] - on this special page you can see who has a global account. Works on all wikis, not only Meta.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalUsers

Request for discussion

[Wikibooks logo] - For the last 2 years Wikibooks is in the process of selecting a new logo for Wikibooks and Wikijunior. Community involvement and feedback, discussion is requested to move things forward.

Foundation

[Board election] - one seat on the Board of Trustees is open for election. Candidates can submit their candidacy until 22 May.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008

[Board restructuring] - the WMF board of trustees will increase from the current 8 to 10. The board will be comprised of: 3 elected community members, 2 members selected by the chapters, 1 board-appointed 'community founder' seat and 4 "specific expertise" seats (also Board-appointed).

[Exit Anthere] - Florence Devouard, Chair of the WMF board of trustees, will not seek reelection for a seed in the board. As a result after the conclusion of the current board election Anthere will not longer be a member of the board and chair of the board. Anthere is a board member since June 2004.
[WMF bylaws] - the WMF passed a resolution to update the bylaws.

http://tinyurl.com/66krxt

[Wikimania 2008] - registration is open. The price is $45 until 30th of May. After that it is $60.

http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration

[MS MediaPlayer needed] - Based on the current information users who wish to view parts of Wikimania 2008 online will need to get access to a Windows system with MS MediaPlayer to be able to view the video content.

http://webcast.bibalex.org/home/home.aspx

[Wikimania security] - a FAQ is posted regarding security concerns regarding Wikimania. Also an "Egypt Country Profile prepared by Clayton Associates" that can be useful reading for all who go to Wikimania is online

Media

[Good reading] - Article about Wikipedia and Britannica

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080516/0916211136.shtml

[OMG! WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDEREN??!!] - Some people are concerned about pictures of (parts of) people without clothes that can be found in Wikipedia.

Stats

[MediaWiki stats] - some stats of several wikis, also non WMF wikis, who use MediaWiki.

http://s23.org/wikistats/

Other news

[Google Translate] - the translation function of Google is expanded with many new languages (and even identifies the language for you!). This can be useful to solve the babel problem when you try to communicate on a projects whose language you do not know.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-translate-becomes-best-online.html

[Wikibook2pdf] - online tool to create a pdf-book of a wikibook book.

http://blogpaper.com/mediawiki2pdf

Did you know ...

... that a pencil sharpener 'is a device for sharpening a pencil's point by shaving the end of the pencil'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil_sharpener

This was the first "Did you know" of the English language Wikipedia, posted on February 22, 2004.

Quote

"My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel." -- Saudi Arabian saying

Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): Philippe, Cbrown , Thanks to: mutante, Mike_lifeguard , 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]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
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