GCS Step 1

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Wikizine - number: 40

Technical news
  • [Linksearch] - There is special page named [[Special:Linksearch]]. By entering there a domain name or part of a domain name you can see on wish page those external links are placed. Can be useful to clean up linkspam vandalism.
Request for help
Politics
  • [Election] - The registration of candidates for the board election is closed. There are about 20 candidates now, some have presented thyself near the end, some have withdrawn thyself. And some will probably be excluded because the have not confirmed there candidacy like requested. The actual voting is supposed to start on September first and will close on the 21th September. Wikizine has done an attempt to present to you the candidates with the extra editions. Also the Signpost has done a special effort. A sort of written interviews with the candidates who responded to there questions. If you are interested in this elections this is a must read.
Foundation
Community
  • [Beta] - The announced Beta Wikiversity is now live. This wiki is an incubator for Wikiversities in various new languages. And also a global platform aiming at coordinating Wikiversity projects in several languages. This coordination should deal with Wikiversity's mission and general guidelines of the project's scope. For example, about original research.
  • [Verifiability] is a policy on the English Wikipedia. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth." That means that what is written must be proven by sources, the fact that it is true is not enough. Not all Wikipedias have the same policies. Local wikis are looking for policy inspiration on other projects and sometimes the adopt policies form other wikis. Currently the Russian Wikipedia is holding a vote regarding the question to adopt also the policy of verifiability for there wikipedia. Verifiability has currently on the ru.wp with 53 votes more support then "no" with 32 votes.
  • [userboxes] - On userpages are sometimes loaded with boxes to inform about the most unexpeted topics. Those boxes can give controversy about them. One way of dealing with userboxes that some wikis are using is the "German solution". The Spanish comunity has decided to implement the German solution for the userboxes,
Media
Stats
  • [ku.wp] - The Kurdish Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles. This is the work of the 15 active users and mostly of only 5 very active users.
  • [tg.wp] - The Tajik Wikipedia has reached 500 articles. And that is mostly the work of only 3 very active users of a total of 9 active users.
  • [Wikizine] has now 500 subscribers by email.
Editorial remark: Thank you. Walter

Did you know ...

... how to enter directly a search query to the wiki?

You enter [alt]+F The result is that the cursor is blinking in the search box. Type what you look and press enter. But it can even more easy. If you add some code to you [[Special:Mypage/monobook.js]] then the cursor will always be waiting by default in the search box for your request.
Include;
// Park the the cursor allways in the search box - by [[w:en:User:Splarka]]
addOnloadHook(function() {document.getElementById('searchform').elements[0].focus(); return false;;});
IRC Quote
<Toazt> "Too few women on the internet?
<Toazt> There are lots of women on the internet,
<Toazt> only most of them are naked and in JPG-format."
Editor(s): Walter
No comments:

Monday, August 28, 2006

Wikizine - number: 40 Extra

Board Election 2006 candidates

Very soon you will have the opportunity to elect a new board member for the WMF. To help you to make an informed choice Wikizine presents to you a personal statement of several candidates. All candidates where invited to send there statement in. This offer has expired.

This publication is not an endorsement of Wikizine for these candidates.

Charles Matthews

I'm a candidate with experience and skills useful for the Wikimedia Board. I'm not a technical person, and have not been active on Wikimedia issues, preferring to focus on the English Wikipedia. (On en-WP I'm best known for writing about mathematics and poetry, and as as admin and Arbitrator. See User:Charles Matthews there for more.)

I come without any specific template for the WMF. For manifesto, I would say that we still have to match up some things. Implementing the best distance learning experiences, when we know that factual content is a Long Tail phenomenon (to speak modishly), means we have to be both collectively smart and better in the humanities. The aim is to become comprehensive, but also comprehensible and comprehending on a global scale. These are ambitious slogans.
Background: I had 10 post-doctoral years in academia (1978-1989), at the University of Cambridge, with years in France and the USA. After that I have been a voluntary worker in a number of contexts, including publicity work and raising sponsorship. I have written two books (one conventional, one with a Korean friend published online), and many articles. I have travelled, in East Asia, and recently in Uganda, where in June I gave a well-attended lecture on Wikipedia. I speak reasonable French, and some Russian. I'm a married parent.

The role of the Board: what other online extended community gets to hire its own support staff? The Board has stewardship of the most important piece of hypertext ever. Some intangibles, such as 'wiki culture' and 'motivational working atmosphere', matter as much as money. The scale of Wikimedia projects now means that straight management sometimes applies; but the biggest challenge remains the harnessing of those writing on the wikis to projects in the larger scheme. This means not losing sight of the old-school way of thinking.
In short, I have outside experience, communication skills, and a traditionalist wiki approach.

Discuss matters with me at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews/WMF_Board_Election_2006

Another version of this statement is on the formal candidacy page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/Charles_Matthews/En

Oscar van Dillen

Please read my candidate's statement at;
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/En#Oscar   from this i take an excerpt:

"whether we are constructing an ark of noah for human knowledge, or "just" boldly working at the gradual completion of the tower of babel still remains to be seen, but i strongly believe that such is in our own hands for a larger part than could "reasonably be expected". please let it be clear that it is for this very reason that i most emphatically believe in the importance of the wmf's mission, and have been devoting most of my free time for 2,5 years now to the consolidation and further development of its projects and communities. i will continue to do so, no matter the outcome of these elections."

for any further questions, my meta talk page;
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Oscar is available, thank you :-) --[[User:Oscar]] 12:34, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

The Other Candidates

There are also other candidates besides them ones who have presented themselves here to you with a personal statement. These candidates listed here did not responded to the offer to publish there statement.

Aaron Swartz
Daniel Arnold (Arnomane)
Carlos Rivera (Cerejota)
Bruce Andersen (Evrik)
Hadraj Said
Pat Gunn (Improv)
Kelly Martin
Alex Schenck (Linuxbeak)
Kathleen (Kat) Walsh (Mindspillage)
Nicholas Turnbull
Juan David Ruiz (Zuirdj)
No comments:

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Wikizine - number: 39 Extra BIS

Board Election 2006 candidates

Very soon you will have the opportunity to elect a new board member for the WMF. To help you to make an informed choice Wikizine presents to you a personal statement of several candidates. All candidates where invited to send there statement in. This offer expires on 2006-08-28, 21:00UTC.

This publication is not an endorsement of Wikizine for these candidates.

Arno Lagrange

I am running as a candidate for the board of trustees in order to defend linguistic equal rights. We must try to find a way that any person from any project, speaking any language, can participate in discussions and decisions. Unfortunately, important discussions/decisions all happen in American English, making those who are not good speakers of that language unable to take part. True multilingualism and perspective, provided by an international neutral auxillary language (it could be Esperanto) is absolutely necessary.

It might seem trivial that in my statement I treat only the language question and none other. But as long as this important problem is not solved correctly, it seems impossible for me to look further into any other subject. How does someone enter a debate on some important subject if, because of a language barrier, I, like a great many users, cannot understand well what it is about? There is certainly an effort to develop some amount of multilingualism on meta (such as, for example, this election) but obviously the majority of the debates on the pages of meta, by IRC or mailing lists (e.g. Foundation-l) proceed only in English.

I tried to become interested in certain questions but I am constantly overwhelmed by long English messages; they lack conciseness, a summary and even a summary in other languages. One can note that those used to the English language (whether native speakers or non-native English-speakers accustomed to using English every day) are totally unaware that they leave behind all those who do not use the language as well as themselves. They do not make any effort of conciseness, stuff important messages with unimportant chatter, slang or jargon, abbreviations (which one finds neither in the dictionary nor elsewhere). Consequently even with a pretty good level of English it is impossible to enter the debates when you do not have unlimited time.

Read more;
meta:Election_candidates_2006/ArnoLagrange/statement/En

Ross Hedvicek

I'm a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees. My platform is not to change anything drastically, but to improve the current situation. For example - I am aware of cases of blatant abuse of power on several language branches of Wikipedia in eastern Europe. I made the board aware of these cases. However, no action was taken by the board. This was not because they weren't aware of the problems but because of the language barrier preventing them from making reasonable decisions and possibly due to lack of familiarity with the history, realities and facts of life in that part of the world. I am more than qualified to rectify this situation.

My election slogan is: The crap has to stop - vote for me - it is your chance for change. I have a reputation to uphold!

[[User:Ross.Hedvicek]] 18:49, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Steve Dunlop (UninvitedCompany)

I'm a candidate for the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors. I believe that the board of directors should set up a decisionmaking structure rather than make individual decisions itself, and to that end I've advocated creating additional volunteer and paid positions within the Foundation with specific responsibilities.

I think that would be one means to allow interested people to become active in their particular areas of interest at the Foundation level. Another of my proposals is the designation of two Foundation contacts for each project. Especially for smaller projects, that would be a means to be sure that each project both has a voice and remains accountable to the overall goals of openness and NPOV.

I also support long-term independence for various languages as they become large enough to be self-sustaining. I've been involved at ENWP since March 2003, where I am a former member of the arbitration committee. I've participated at meta since before the inception of the Foundation, and am presently involved in the meta:OTRS mail handling system.

For more information about my candidacy, you can view my candidate statement
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/En#UninvitedCompany

or the discussion page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:UninvitedCompany

where I have been replying to questions about my candidacy.

[[User:UninvitedCompany]] 17:21, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
No comments:

Monday, August 21, 2006

Wikizine - number: 39

Technical news
  • [ExpandTemplates] - There is a new special page called "ExpandTemplates". With this you are able to copy a page from a Wiki without having to copy all the templates. In the first field you define the page you took the input from. So if you took it from the page named "Sesame Street" you fill that in and without {{}} arround it.
You can put the input of a template, or of a series of templates, or even the whole page, in the second field. If you wish to enter a whole page you can paste the source text or do it like this; {{:Sesame Street}}
The Special:ExpandTemplates will write the result you get in ordinary Wikitext as it looked like on that specific page, and you will be able to copy and paste that to whatever wiki you want. The only thing you have to do now, is uploading the images. If you move a page this way you loose off course the benefit of the templates that by changing the template you change all the pages where the template is used.
  • [Wiki down] - It has been a wile since the last total system down. And this time the servers where running perfectly. But there ip-addresses where temporary invalid due to external reasons. The wikis where down for less then three hours. See the article of EN Wikinews for more information.
Remark: when the WMF-systems are down the Wikizine.org website and email is still functional. Feel free to submit news about the situation or see of Wikizine has news about it. Due to the limited core staff of Wikizine this service can not be guaranteed.
Community
  • [ES.wikipedia] has decided in two polls to disallow the upload of files to the Spanish wiki and to do it exclusively in Commons.
  • [ES.wp BIS] - The fifth Wikiconcurso (Wikicontest) has just finished. This edition was about translating featured articles from en.wiki, de.wiki, fr.wiki, it.wiki, pt.wiki, pl.wiki, nl.wiki, sv.wiki and ja.wiki. The Spanish language Wikipedia translated about 88 articles. 17 of those will be proposed as "Articulo destacado" (outstanding articles) on the Spanish Wikipedia.
Agenda
  • [Italia] - On September 2nd, Italian Wikipedians are going to meet in Valentano, near Viterbo, and in the afternoon they will attend to the second Annual Meeting for Wikimedia Italia, the Italian Chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. The assembly is going to elect a new Board and the meeting is going also to approve the budgets and to to describe the strategies for achieving a better promotion to Wikimedia Projects in Italy.
Media
  • [it.wikipedia] -On Monday, August 14th, at 7:34 local time in the morning, one Wikipedian found himself on air on RAI1, the national TV station of Italy. The producers had also invited for the interview Enrico Cogno, a professor at the University of Perugia, and Federica Lanzellotto, a student from Rome. The subject of the interview was "Wikipedia: il sapere per tutti", with the aim of understanding how Wikipedia is getting more and more present in every day's life. It was only for 9 minutes and extremely early in the morning. But nevertheless it was National television and the Italian Community is very happy with it. The links to the video can you find on the page linked below.
Stats
  • [fr.wikt] - The French language Wiktionary has now already 200,000 definitions in its database.
Other news
  • [ERRATUM] - The webhoster and sponser of Wikizine is Memebot.com and not "memobot.com"
  • [WikiBritanica] - The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is now online in a wiki-form. Because the conversions form print to digital text is done by computer mistakes are made. On that wiki you can fix them. And also include some more recent information on a separate page. This is not a WMF-project.
Editoral

A murderer of a 10 year old murder is arrested. A minister-president says something in a interview about a very sensitive local topic. An ethnic group of people continuous to be exterminated while the world does not care.

What is considered important depends highly about your personal point of view shaped by who and where you are. In the virtual city of Wikimedia the important topic is the board election. Why is it important? It is only for one place on the board. And because of this is only to replace Angela's spot, it is only for the remaining term of Angela's original term of 2 years. And that means it will not even be for one year.

This election is important because the board is not so big. One voice can make a difference. And it is likely that this new board will have to make decisions about significant reforms of the organisation of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Now the candidates present there candidacy to the community. This election is not like a real election where you only can choice between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", like expressed so colorful in South Park. This are all people from our community. There are very good people between them who I know personally and are deeply committed to do good for the projects. You can not know everybody. Consider also the ones you do not know. This is not a "vote for your friends" contest and also not "vote for the candidate form you local wiki". Raise above that. Read there statements. Check there behavior in the history. Ask them questions. Know for who you are voting. This is not a sysop election.

I have send an offer to all candidates to write a few words to present themselves to the readers of Wikizine. This to lower the step for the candidates to reach the community. The first two candidates will say there piece in an extra Wikizine send out soon after this one. Readers of the website will find it below this edition. Depending on the number of candidates who requested inclusion in Wikizine a second extra edition can be send out this week.

Thanks for reading this,
Greetings,
Walter Vermeir
Did you know ...

... how to verify of a user who is contacting you off-wiki is really the user he claims to be?

You write (email, Jabber, IRC, etc.) or say (Skype, etc) to the user to write a specific phrase on the wiki like on his talk page.

You can also contact him or ask that user to send you an email by means of the "E-mail this user" function of the wiki. Look at the headers, the source of the message. It must contain "X-Mailer: MediaWiki mailer" and the name in the "From:" field is the username of that user on that wiki. This way can be falsified. Asking to edit is the most secure way.

IRC Quote

<frank> can you help me install GTA3?
<knightmare> first, shut down all programs you aren't using
frank has quit IRC. (Quit)
<knightmare> ...

Editor(s): Walter, Effeietsanders - Special thanks to: M7, Peter B.,Ecelan
Thanks for promoting Wikizine to the; Korean, Polish, Portuguese and Italian Wikipedia
No comments:

Wikizine - number:39 Extra

Board Election 2006 candidates

Erik Möller

The Wikimedia Foundation must meet many critical challenges in the coming years, including, but not limited to:
  • getting as many people as possible involved in important organizational tasks and making the Foundation transparent, open and accountable- accelerating technological innovation to make projects such as Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, Wikinews, and Wiktionary succeed in the same way Wikipedia has
  • finding new ways to systematically improve and label the quality of Wikipedia content, without destroying the principles that have enabled our fantastic growth and that make Wikipedia fun
  • developing a large network of partnerships with organizations and individuals who can help us in our ambitious goals, particularly with regard to building sustainable free knowledge communities in developing nations
  • responsibly and thoughtfully dealing with legal risks and conceiving a sound legal strategy that covers all projects, all chapters, and all languages.

After 5 years of contributions to Wikimedia on almost all levels, I believe I am ready to help to guide the organization to meet these challenges. I would like to gain your trust and your support in this coming election.

Please review my candidate presentation at

and tell me what you think on the associated discussion page.

Sincerely,

Erik Möller

Cimon Avaro

Hi. I have been editing wikipedia and the related projects for three years now. My focus has been always finding where I can do most good, even if it has meant sacrificing my own ego in the process. Attempting to find solutions in a forward thinking way; such as conceiving the cleanup process out of thin air, and making an honest go of steering the nascent mediation committee away from a bureaucratic model. (Cleanup turned out to be a phenomenal success, although it quickly surpassed all my planning through the miracle that is collaborative wikiway, the mediation committee less so, but that is how it goes).

My last real life job was about "herding cats" in a heavily geek-oriented environment (16-19 age group), as a librarian at a Sciences oriented "magnet" high-school. My modus operandi there was to meet the students at their own level, as far to being one of them as possible. Having established early on that I could not be provoked into over-reacting to their lively antics, I only had to raise my voice once (when a student juggled a switchblade in a dangerous fashion) and it was immediately effective, largely in part to not establishing myself as an authority figure to start with. Over here in Finland this model is called leading from the midst of the troops, rather than from the front, or the rear.

As you can read from my [[w:en:User:Cimon Avaro]] userpage, I have had a decades long interest in encyclopaedias and systematizing the worlds knowledge in general, and have witnessed the whole history of The Net, far from being a pure spectator; for instance participating in the founding of the first commercial ISP in Finland.

Although you can read much more about me on my candidacy page, I would like to end this short introduction by recapping what you will get, if you vote me in as trustee of the board of the WMF:
  • Someone who listens before he talks, talks before he acts and thinks before he either talks or acts.
  • Someone not beholden to authority, or intimidated by it, but realizing that the potential of collaboration can acheive developments that individual planning might not ever be able to conceive.
  • Someone who firmly believes that people will do what people will do, and the role of people in positions of responsibility in an organization such as ours is to apply the "art of the possible" rather than impose superficially ideal seeming constructs. Evolution, not "intelligent design" for WMF. Our part as trustees should be to fend off harm, not believe we can deliver some great boon. The great and wonderful things we acheive are in large part due to communities brewing "stone soup", each bringing to the pot what they can, and spicing up the broth.

Thank you. -- User:Cimon Avaro 02:07, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

P.S. Vote for who you like, but do vote. Read http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Election_candidates_2006/En
and make your own mind up.
No comments:

Friday, August 18, 2006

Wiki down!

The wikis are down! Wikis are up!

This post will be updated with news when there is news. Walter Friday 18 August 2006 - 17:53 UTC

  1. router problem - some parts of the world can see it, some can't. Estimated uptime: Don't ask - update 17:58 UTC
  2. Hosting company fucked up - 18:00 UTC
  3. (20:25:52) twincest: uh, it looks like this problem might be quite serious, so don't expect an ETA any time soon 18:30UTC
  4. (20:27:16) brion Cogent ate our IP space in Florida, heads to roll
  5. Kyle is manhandling the hosting company right now. The hosting company is manhandling Cogent. - 18:43 UTC
  6. Cogent cogent deleted ip block of wikimedia. They received an apparently improper DMCA takedown notice and deleted the ipblock of wikimedia. No ipadress = no website - 18:56UTC The ip-addresses Wikimedia was using where owned by Cogent. The where leased to the ISP of Wikimedia.
  7. 18:50 brion: we've been assigned new ip space, people are trying to figure out how to attach stuff to it
  8. 19:47 brion: new ips are being worked on now...
  9. All wikis seems to be up again - in read only mode!
  10. 19:59UTC - Wiki up. Service restored, write access enabled


    11. Posting from Brion about this on Wikitech-l;

    Article from EN Wikinews;

No comments:

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Wikizine - number: 38

Acknowledgement

Memebot.com, a small webhoster, supports Wikizine by granting a free account upgrade to match it bandwidth needs. The WMF provides Wikizine with a free mailing list.

Thank You.

Technical news
  • [CORRECTION] - in the previous edition of Wikizine about the single-user login it was reported that the email address needed to be confirmed. This is not correct. The fact of an email address is confirmed or not will make no difference regarding the migration to the single-user login. If you have different passwords for the same username on different wikis makes also no difference. If you have a different password and also a different email address you will need to login to confirm ownership.
  • [White list] - Our Wikis can be abused with spam-hyperlinks. One way of preventing the insertion of spam-hyperlinks is the meta:Spam blacklist. On that list are all the domains who have been used in spam-attacks or are not welcome for some reason on the projects listed. You can not save the page on the projects if one of these domains listed on that on that page are present. Now there is a local override for this global spam blacklist. You can find it on [[Mediawiki:Spam-whitelist]] on your local wiki. See how it is done on the English language Wikipedia for the correct formatting;
  • [Meta] - the wiki that is supposed to be the neutral public wiki for all projects and languages has now email notification on. This means that you can specify in your account preferences to receive an email when you talk page or a page on you watchlist is changed.
  • [Userbox] - some useful new userboxes on Meta; to indicate that you can translate from language X to language Y. If you put this on your userpage on Meta and something needs to be translated you can be found if needed.
  • [djvu] - Support for rendering inline thumbnail JPEGs from DjVu images is added.
Request for help
  • [Bylaws] - Anthere has asked community attention for and feedback about a draft version of new bylaws for the WMF. This a very serious thing. Speak now or remain silent later.
  • [The Wikistudy] project on EN Wikibooks is looking for college students who have completed Advanced Placement courses and exams to help out in writing textbooks that are directed towards specific AP syllabi and academic exams.
  • [Wikizine] is looking for typical wikimedia slang, abbreviations, special words and so for a new section to explain these words. ( report to Wikizine)
Policy
  • [Wikiversity] - more information about Wikiversity is announced;
Politics
Foundation
  • [Board Election] - A clarification is posted by the Election Officers regarding the numbers of seats vacant to the board in the current election. This election is only to replace Angela. One spot is free. Further expansion of the board is a possibility. But if and how the will be appointed is not yet know. That can be by a new second election of by direct appointment.
  • [Wikimania 2007] - First round for the selection of the host city is open!
  • [Board] - Tim Shell, WMF board member, will step down from the board by the end of the year. So as is announced on Wikimania. The current election has no relation with this.
  • [Staff] - The very recently hired person to help in the WMF office has quit. She will now be the very first ex-WMF employee. A person to replace here is already found and active.
Community
Awards
Media
  • [Wikimania press] - I you like to read about Wikimedia/Wikimania then check out the page with links to all the press coverage of Wikimania. On Wikimania it self there where about 50 journalist present. About 78 unique news articles where created, about 1500 news sources ran articles about Wikimania. And there where short spots on 5 TV stations, including 2 on FOX news which is a very important TV-station in the USA.
  • [Fashion&Style] - when articles are been written about people about nothing besides some trivial facts about that person and not about what the person actually is doing then the have reached a new level of famous hood. It seems that Jimbo has received this dubious honer now. Or was the author only looking for an excuse to praise a specific type of flashlight?
Stats
  • [Alexa] - since the early days of Wikipedia there was interest of how popular Wikipedia was. Early August 2003 Daniel Mayer created the page "Wikipedia.org is more popular than...". And writes "We are also neck and neck with sex.com! Soon Wikipedia will be more popular than sex!". Now, 3 years later Wikipedia is not only more popular than sex, but more popular than almost everything. Almost. Wikipedia has raised through the rankings month after month, year after year, going higher and higher. Now Wikipedia is (according to Alexa) the 17th most popular website of the internet. But the steep climb has stopped. Wikipedia now stays stable on its spot in the rankings. Possibly, even probably, shall Wikipedia raise some more. But the flight is over. We are the top. And at the top you can not go higher anymore.
  • [yi.wp] - The Yiddish Wikipedia is proud to announce that they hit the 2000 articles mark.
  • [nl.wikibooks] - The Dutch Wikibooks has reached 1,000 Wikibook modules. The Dutch Wikibooks recently won the Wikimania Award for best wikibook with their manual for MediaWiki
  • [Wikizine.org], the website, exists now for some weeks. From the end of June until now there where 1286 unique visitors. The total weekly average is 322 visitors. Most visitors come from the Italian Wikipedia, followed by the English and Dutch Wikipedia. 49% of the visitors is using Firefox and 17% Linux, 4% MacOS, 73% some version of MS Windows.
Other news
  • [Mywikibiz.com] - Part 2: This is a company that is selling the service to write an article for other company's and get those in the English language Wikipedia. Jimbo has blocked access to en.wp for mywikibiz. New articles for there clients will be written on the website of mywikibiz under GNU/FDL-licence. From there can people if the wish that copy them to Wikipedia.
Tales from Wikimania
  • [Must hear] - many people have given their very best to make Wikimania a success. There where many interesting presentations. Go to the archive page, download them and listen to them on you mp3/Ogg-player. If you do not know where to start, start with these tree;
Quotes from Wikimania

Andre Engels: "I think the reactions [to the Nature study] are interesting - Britannica takes three months to criticize you, and Wikipedia takes one week to fix all the errors"

Paul Kobasa: (One librarian describing Wikipedia to another librarian) "... And he had a wonderful phrase to describe people like him and me - he said we're like the scriptorium monks who are meeting [Johann] Gutenberg for the first time"

Paul Kobasa: "Someone asked me why, as an employee of Worldbook, I was going to Wikimania. And I said that we were jealous of all the press that Encyclopedia Britannica is getting"

A random radio journalist: "So this is like woodstock?"

Editor(s): Walter   - Corrector(s): NielsF
No comments:

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Wikizine - number: 37

Technical news
  • [Stable version] - the German language Wikipedia will soon (how soon is not known yet) enable a new function on there wiki to support "stable versions" as an experiment. This should increase the quality of the articles. And also make the wiki more open to edit because the visitor will see the version with the stable-status. So vandalism on the unstable version will not be a problem from the point of view of the visitor.
  • [MediaWiki] will also be developed by full-time employees of the private organizations Wikia.com (the company of Jimbo) and Socialtext.com. This should increase strongly the development of MediaWiki. A new component to MediaWiki is expected to make "wysiwyg"-editing possible. This means that you will have an editbox that looks like the compose window of Hotmail or Gmail with options the edit a page without to see all the sourcetext with all the code. There is hope that this will lower the barrier for new people to work on the projects.
  • [Update] about single-user login. The one login for all projects is coming soon. But will probably be delayed until after the board election. When there are several users with the the same username on different wikis the user with the most edits will keep his username, the others will need to pick a new one. To identify witch accounts belong to the same user there well looked of the have same *confirmed* email address. Read the excellent Signpost article for more information.
Request for help
  • [The Signpost] is bringing to its readers a weekly report about a Wikipedia in a "foreign language" written by users from that wiki. Wikizine includes those reports also one week later. The Signpost is looking for users from several wikipedias to present there project to the English Wikipedia audience. This is a great opportunity to show a large part of the Wikipedia-world, EN Wikipedia, how great to non-English versions also are. Contact users Kpjas or Carmelapple for this.
Foundation
  • [Wikiversity] - Jimbo announced on Wikimania the start of a new Wikimedia project; Wikiversity. A center for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. It will create and host a range of free content materials, multilingual materials, for all ages in all languages. It'll host scholarly projects and communities to support these materials, and foster research based in part on existing resources in Wikiversity and other wikimedia projects. It will launch in three languages, in a six-month beta, within a month.
  • [New board] - The WMF will create an advisory board by the end of the year. There function will be to help with partnerships, public relations, financing, technology, administration, international affairs, ... The people who will be on the advisory board, if the can be found, will be more academic people who are also like the wiki-style and the open contend movement.
  • [$100 laptop] - Jimbo announced on Wikimania that the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) association has chosen to load a snapshot of select Wikipedia articles onto the laptops it is developing. The idea is to make relative cheap laptop computers for schoolchildren for countrys where there are few computers available for children. These laptops are not yet in production. Use of Wikipedia in this way is a perfect fit whit the goal of the WMF to give every single person free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Because these laptops well able to connect to a network Jimbo hopes that by spreading those computers projects in new languages will be started or live will come in near dead wiki's.
  • [$] - Brad Patrick stated the there is no need for a fund drive soon. The Wikimedia Foundation has a financial reserve of about $500,000. There is a stable income of donations of about $30,000 every month. The WMF will make a special effort to attract money from grants.
Community
Media
Other news
  • [GFW] - The Great firewall of China has upgraded its block level for Wikipedia. The upgrade was noticed and reported as early as August 7, 2006 9:30 UTC. It seems that official Wikimedia proxies are blocked and that zh.wikipedia.org" has become a URL-level keyword for the great firewall of China. This upgrade coincided with a Beijing News (新京報) report on Wikipedia.
Stats

The English Wikipedia has reached 1,300,000 articles.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
http://mr.wikipedia.org/
The Min Nan Wiktionary has reached 2,000 articles.
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/
The Sundanese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
http://su.wikipedia.org/
The Lombard Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
http://lmo.wikipedia.org/

Quote from Hacking Day

Ward Cunningham: "The Wiki[pedia] community has grown Wiki[pedia] and has done everything almost perfectly"
Ivan Krstic: "I want a Brion Vibber action figure - when you squeeze it, it says 'it's totally broken'"
Brion Vibber: (Extolling the virtues of downtime) "If you are up all the time, then you forget simple things like how to reboot the servers"
Brion Vibber: "And we have a lot of testers on Wikipedia, so [Mediawiki] bugs get identified pretty quick"


Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao - Special thanks to: User dg on #cgiirc
Thanks for promoting Wikizine to the wikis; HU,RO and KO wikiquote,EN wikibooks
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Sunday, August 06, 2006

Wikimania 2006 Online

Wikimedia2006 is over. What left is are recordings who will probaly been added for several days to come. See on the archive page on the Wikimania wiki for these.

Updated: 2006-08-09 09:15 UTC-0


Wikimania program schedule - The Wikimaina2006-blog - Wikimania Signpost Series - IRC channels

See day 1 recordings - Day 2 recordings

Day 3 recordings

Selection of must see (= hear) presentations from Wikimania;

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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Wikizine - number: 36 Extra

Wikimania 2006 Online

It is now almost so far. The main Wikimedia event of the year; Wikimania 2006.
(View countdown until Wikimania )

From this Friday until Sunday in Cambrige, Massachusetts, USA Wikimedians from
all around the world will meet. And listen and give speeches or visit
workshops.

Many Wikimadians will be there. But for all the the other people who are not
there but interested in what is going on extended online information will be
available.

The main presentations will be broadcast online by audio and/or video
live-streams, live transcriptions of the talks and even live translations for
some languages.

Every presentation has its own page on the Wikimania-wiki with information about
it and links to all media when available. (pfd's, silde shows, audio/video,
transcripts)

These pages can you find on the general schedule page.

There will also an item especially for the online participants;

You can still enter nominations for the Wikimania Awards

Wikizine special

Wikizine will attempt to provide its own overview of Wikimania on the website
with the post;

This post will be frequently updated and expanded.

The idea is to provide on one page easy access to the audio, video and other
media that are needed for attending Wikimania online. And tools for making it
more easy to use like a clock with UTC/Wikimania local time, webbased Ogg
Vorbis-player, javachat ... So that you have everything you need to follow
Wikimania online with only one page to watch.

Volunteers for assisting Wikizine with the updating of this post "Wikimania 2006 Online" are highly welcome. To give you access you will need or get a blogger account. Contact Wikizine if interested.


Editor(s): Walter

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