GCS Step 1

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Wikizine - number: 54

Technical news
  • [(+338)] - New anti-vandalism function is included to the recent changes. When an edit is made it now shows up in the RC how many characters are removed or added. This function is also added to the IRC-stream of the recent changes. To use is conect to irc.wikimedia.org with a IRC-client and go to #xx.wikiproject = so FR Wikibooks is #fr.wikibooks
  • [Site notice] - registered users have now the option to hide the site notice messages. It works with a cookie. The cookie expires after one month. To view the the site notice again or delete the cookie "dismissSiteNotice" or a sysop must give the site notice a new ID-number. This can be set in MediaWiki:Sitenotice_id a number other then the current ID-number. Ad one digit or use a random number. Translate MediaWiki:Sitenotice_close for the "close" link.
Reminder; if the site notice shown to the anonymous users must be the same as for the registered users then you can keep MediaWiki:Anonnotice empty. Then MediaWiki:Sitenotice will also be used for anonymous visitors.

  • [Oversight] - this is an technical function that can be used to censor the history of an article. The difference with a normal dentition is that there is no undo like for the deletion function. When used, it is also no longer visible for sysops.. It is actually a function to hide things that also the sysops are not supposed to see anymore. Using this function to hide an edit is more user friendly if you are a sysop; you can hide a specific version without deleting and restoring the article like you must do as an sysop to hide a version. It is in use on the English Wikipedia. It is now technically possible for a steward to grant "oversight" status to any user on any WMF-project. Discussion is now in process about who can be trusted with this function.
Foundation
Community
Media
  • [Zeitgeist] - According to Google's year-end 2006 Zeitgeist, Wikipedia was the sixth most popular search term. Other common queries included several social networking sites.
  • [Wikipedia=Wikia?] - Wikia announced recently that the are going to give free hosting away and also the profit of the ads on those websites. No problem. But in a fair amount of articles in the press it was presented as if Wikia was the commercial part of Wikipedia. And, besides incorrect, headlines like "Wikipedia offers free web hosting" are not good message when holding a fund raiser. A fair amount of articles have been corrected after there publication. This type of articles is also been confirmed published in the Dutch and French press.
Stats
Other news
  • [Name change] - It was started as "The Ultimate Wiktionary", later is was renamed to "WiktionaryZ" and now it is OmegaWiki. OmegaWiki is a collaborative project to produce a free, multilingual resource in every language, with lexicological, terminological and thesaurus information. OmegaWiki is also the first implementation of the Wikidata technology. Wikidata brings relational data to MediaWiki. OmegaWiki is not a Wikimedia foundation project. But the Stichting Open Progress, the foundation running OmegaWiki, and the WMF are working together.
Did you know ...

... that not only facts in articles can be false but also pictures or video?

The truth is out there, possibly. The lie is out there certainly. Never ever was it so easy as today to change photographs or video-recordings. Or make totally fabricated material. The fact that it comes comes from a reputable source is not a guarantee that is not fake.

Last week the Belgian public television of the French community interrupted the normal evening programs for a special news bulletin. The normal journalists in the normal setting reported the news that the parliament of the Northern part of Belgium just had unilaterally declared its independence, that the King had fleet the country and picked lines on the border between North and South where in place. This with live reports and interviews with politicians. It was all totally and completely false. Most viewers (89%) believed what the television was reporting. Some other news agencies distributed the "news" the Belgium has ceased to exist to the world.

Luckily elaborate deception is not the rule. Or can you notice directly that there is something wrong with this picture ...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ysQzXT_lBWo

Quote

ST. PETERSBURG -- -Rumors that Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales might be moving to Silicon Valley from his home here prompted two reactions from Tampa Bay business leaders.

1. "We can't let this happen."
2. "We didn't even know he lived here."

http://tinyurl.com/yysv8v
Number of subscribers: 572, Unique Visitors website last week: 387 , Editor(s): Gary Kirk, Walter , Sources: Omegawiki

Update 2006-12-22: spelling corrections. Thanks to Siebrand

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