GCS Step 1

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Wikizine - number: 48

Technical news
  • [Reminder Spam] - Users who have an easy username, like "Walter", frequently get a password reminder. Probably from someone trying to make an account with that name. But there are also weirdos who are using this function to spam users with reminders. There are users who receive hundreds of that type of emails a day.

    To stop this type of abuse the password reminder function now has limits. There is a limit of one password reminder per user per 24-hour period, and 5 password reminders per IP per hour.
  • [Accesskeys change] - the function of the accesskeys and tooltips will be moved soon out of the Monobook.js and and implement them
    server-side.  This may affect personal scripts that implement custom accesskeys.
  • [wikipedia.be] - has been offline form Friday until Sunday evening. This domain is only used for redirecting traffic to a country-portal and limited services. Indications suggest that the bill for this domain was not paid. This domain was also offline some time in 2004 for the same reason when the fee for two years was not paid. 
Request for help
Foundation
Community
  • [Mosaic] - the people on Commons are working on a Wikimedia logo made from many different pictures on commons, a mosaic. The to commemorate the one millionth uploaded file at Wikimedia Commons. The are now around 60,000 files away from that. The fun thing is that the mosaic is live. You can click on the tiny images to so them in large.
  • [Success] - "Wikipedia Weekly", the new project for providing Wikipedia-related news in the form of an audio recording, has taken a good start. In less then 2 weeks are already 3 editions published. Wikipedia Weekly includes interviews with Wikimedia celebrities like Notafish (episode 2) and Jimbo (episode 3). According to w:en:user:Tawker episode II and III has been downloaded arround 120 times each until now.
  • [Summary] - From this weekend the mailing list summary of foundation-l that was started at the beginning of this month will be expanded to cover the wikipedia-l list too.
Media
Stats
  • [W$k$ped$a dot com] - Very recently  Google, Inc. bought the very popular video website " YouTube.com". Google paid 1.65 thousand million US dollars for this website. YouTube has a lower traffic ranking than Wikipedia and has very high operatioals costs because of the video storage and needed bandwidth. That can make you think what Wikipedia would be worth if it was commercial. Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, President and Founder of Mojo Supreme and knowledgeable of the online advertisement business has made an post on his blog about that. Going from non-profit to for profit would hurt the page ranking and traffic of Wikipedia and the number of editors but, according Mr. Karbasfrooshan assumptions, still be a very profitable move.

    Nevertheless Mr. Karbasfrooshan writes in a follow-up post that ads for now on Wikipedia are not a good idea. He concludes with the words; "Right now, methinks that Wikipedia is doing fine, and it has a business model: its fundraising efforts."
  • [Wikimedia.org ] is now the 499th most-visited website on the Internet according to Alexa.
  • [Wikipedia.org] - ComScore published new numbers of the traffic of the most popular worldwide websites for the month of September. Again has Wikipedia grown. 12% since August. Wikipedia is according these stats now the 6th most popular website on the internet. That is very good news. Only 5 places to go and there is not need anymore for this type of "news".
Did you know ...
... that there is an easy way to get on IRC from anywhere?

The chat network of Freenode is used by mostly all projects and wikis for talking and running different tools like for anti-vandalism. To make use of this system you need an IRC-client. There are many clients available. Two free clients, from the many that exist, that can be used are Gaim and ChatZilla.  But you need to install these on your computer. If you can not do that for what ever reason, your are someone else his computer or your work/school has blocked IRC-access then the IRC-service of Wikizine can be useful. chat.wikizine.org provides webbased access to selected Wikimedia related channels. On request more channels can be added.
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition

"Anything worth doing is worth doing for money." Rule 13
"Faith moves mountains... of inventory." - Rule 104
"Let others keep their reputation. You keep their latinum." - Rule 189


Editor: Walter, Xyrael - Corrector(s): Gary Kirk 
4 comments:

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Wikizine - number: 47

Technical news
Foundation
Community
Media
Stats
[Conlang] - The total number of articles in planned language (or "conlang") Wikipedias and net encyclopedias has passed 80,000. There are at present 7 active Wikipedias on the main list: Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Novial, Volapük, Lojban and Interlingue]], with 79,665 articles. In addition, the Meta page notes the Wiki lexicon of Lingua Franca Nova with 573 articles, and the two former Wikipedias of Toki Pona and Klingon, with 301 articles. This gives a total of 80,539, slightly below 1.5% of all Wikipedia articles. The 7 active Wikipedias have 3,445 registered users.

The largest is the Esperanto language Wikipedia; the have reached 60,000 articles.
http://eo.wikipedia.org

Other news
  • [Wikipedia 0101] - Librarian John Hubbard has created an extended Flash presentation about what Wikipedia is, or at least the English language Wikipedia, how it works and topics. Very nicely done. You need Flash 8 or above to make it work. For Linux there is a link to Flash 9 Beta, very easy to install. Read the read-me.
Was ist das?
IMHO: In My Humble/Honest Opinion
IMO: In My Opinion
IMNSHO: In My Not So Humble Opinion.
IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer
IRC Quote
<by> Is there anyway I can tell the world I'm an idiot?
<Seven7> Of course, just type your name, where you live and your confession
<by> Kk
<by> I am Mark Duval of Belgium, and I am an idiot
<by> ?
<by> Now what?
<Seven7> Don't worry. It's done
Editor(s): Walter - Corrector(s): Gary Kirk - Contains text from: David Monniaux
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Wikizine - number: 46

Technical news
  • [AntiSpoof] - there is a new check when creating a new account live to prevent the creation of new accounts who look like existing users. For example if there is a user named "Ellen" the creation of the account "E11en" is not allowed.
  • [Math skills are needed] to make a new account on some of the smaller projects. To protected wikis from bots making accounts or inserting spam a captcha system is active on the smaller wikis. To save a page of make an account you need to answer a problem like 48-10=? . This is because there are problems in loading the images displaying the letters of the classic captcha-system. The math version is only temporally until the problem with the loading of the images is fixt. 
  • [Default block settings] - the default option when a sysop blocks a user to block logged in user by default seems to make a good change to be changed to not blocking logged in users by default when blocking an ipadress. To override the default options see Wikizine number 34
 Policy
Politics
Foundation
Community
  • [Wikisource]
     - the WMF project for source texts - is doing good. Or at least the German language version. The German Wikimedia chapter has found some money to pay the digitization of some very old books and documents. The scans are from a very good quality and presented in such a way that the are very accessible. The digital version of a 16th-century handwritten mathematical schoolbook is uploaded to Commons as a DjVu-file. Commons is able to present those files in such a way that is very user friendly and fast to browse inside the book. DE Wikisource is also working on transcribing the scans to writing that is readable for the public.
  • [New Internal Media] - The internal news reporting community is growing. We have the Wikipedia Signpost; Wikipedia news in a more or less newspaper style, we have Wikizine; (very) sort items and url's for more reading. And now there is also the newbie; the "WikipediaWeekly" is  bringing news about Wikipedia in an audio-recoding form.
    w:en:User:Fuzheado and w:en:User:Tawker are the hosts of the pilot edition. The bring the news and background information about news and events related to Wikipedia in a very relaxed style. More like a radio talk show then a classic news bulletin. WikipediaWeekly will attempt to bring on a weekly basis a new audio-recording. The recoding is currently now available as Ogg Vorbis and Mp3, it is listed on iTunes and there is a webbased player on there website.  
A previous project to bring Wikipedia news in audio form, Signpost Audio, lasted only 3 editions. People interested in making this new project a success can go to the IRC channel
#wikipediaweekly and see how you can help out.

Media
Stats
Other news

  • [Service notice] - the url of website of Wikizine has changed to en.wikizine.org This is to make it more easy to launch posible other languages versions of Wikizine in the futhere. Currently has Wikizine barely the resources to support one language version so other versions must not be exspected soon.
Did you know ...

... you can move around the tab pages of some programs?

Programs that let you open windows in the same frame but in different tabs are popular. Mostly know is FireFox but also programs like the instant messaging  program Gaim is using that. Try it. Click on the tab, keep it selected and try to move it.


Quote

"We congratulate those in charge of Wikipedia, especially Jimmy Wales, who could have chosen to censor their own site to get official blessing. Instead they stuck to their principles and spurned self-censorship. Their determination has paid off inasmuch as Beijing has partially reversed its decision. It is an example that other Internet giants could follow." -- Reporters Without Borders

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15374

Editor(s): Walter
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Sunday, October 08, 2006

Wikizine - number: 45

Technical news
  • [CategoryTree] - On the category-pages there is now a function added that lets users browse through the lower category levels from the higher category. There is an option to "expand" the category. This makes it much more easy to navigate and find the category you are looking for without the need to actually request the different layers of the category. This function works only if javascript is enabled. If not, the "+" symbol appears but does not work. Those users can still use the categories the traditional way.
Besides the implementation of this function on the category pages,  there is also a new special page [[Special:CategoryTree]] that provides this functionaly. To localize the messages for this, modify the MediaWiki-pages starting with "Categorytree".
Stats

Editor(s): Walter
1 comment:

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Wikizine - number: 44

Technical news
  • [Portal] - Wikibooks has now also its own real portal. It used to point to a page on the wiki to act as portal. The portal is in Wikipedia-style.
Policy
  • [vanity/vandalism] - Our CEO posted a strong statement about corporate vanity/vandalism-articles. Corporates created non-encyclopedic articles and when the are removed that call the office of the WMF to complain about it. That advice of Brad is to be firm and remove that type of articles and block the users.
Politics
Community
Media
  • [Copyvio] - The french news agency "Agence France Presse" has used text from the article about the Amish from the DE Wikipedia in a news report. So far no problem. What is a problem is that the have not given any attribution to Wikipedia like is required by the GFDL-licence. When contacted by Wikipedian Mathias Schindler the AFP office confirmed that the text was from Wikipedia and stated that this was against "AFP policy" because "wikipedia is not a citable source". They refuse to retract or amend the story with proper attribution for Wikipedia and the license. AFP sued Google News in 2005 because in AFP's point of view, Google was violating their copyright with there "google news" service.
Stats
Other news
  • [+20] - A new batch of 20 new Wikipedias has been created.
    Wu (wuu:), Mazandarani (mzn:),Newar / Nepal Bhasa (new:), Lak (lbe:), Emilian-Romagnol / Sammarinese (eml:), Buryat (Russia) (bxr:), Upper Sorbian (hsb:),Novial (nov:),Pangasinan (pag:),Bavarian (bar:), Bishnupriya Manipuri (bpy:), Zazaki (diq:), Zealandic (zea:), Tarantino (roa-tara:), Zamboanga Chavacano (cbk-zam:), Classical Chinese (zh-classical:), Old Church Slavonic (cu:), Siberian/Nort Russian (ru-sib:), Gilaki (glk:), Min Dong (cdo:
Was ist das?
POV: Point of View, the way how things are according the person who writes it
NPOV: Neutral point of view, core value of the WMF-projects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
Quote

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little
consequence. The only consequence is what we do. - John Ruskin http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ruskin



Editor(s): Walter Contains text from: Mathias Schindler
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