Year: 2007 Week: 12 Number: 65

Technical news

• [Hope] - "Stable versions", a function in the wiki so that the readers can see some form of approved version of an article, that was announced to go live very soon almost a year ago, is not forgotten. A developer is hired to work on that function.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/30700
• Notice: people who read the Wikipedia Signpost and Wikizine will notice that the Signpost reports much more technical news in their B.R.I.O.N section than Wikizine, and mostly also a lot earlier than Wikizine.  There are two reasons for this. Some changes are considered too trivial or technically obscure so that it is not likely that there is a benefit in informing the target audience of Wikizine about it. Also many of the changes listed in the Signpost are not (yet) live on the Wikimedia websites but only present in the code. In general Wikizine chooses to report only technical changes when they are live on the projects. Major technical changes that are known in advance will be reported before they are live. But those are rare and even more almost never known in advance enough to report it.
  

Foundation

• [New hire] - The Wikimedia Foundation has hired [[ meta:User:Bastique]]  for the position of " Volunteer Coordinator".
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/15190
• [Exit] - Danny Wool, Grants Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation in the Florida office, from September 2005 has left Wikimedia. Danny has also resigned from all his functions on EN Wikipedia, Meta and as steward.
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Former_staff
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Danny
  

Community

• [South Asia] - Interview with two users about the Bengali and Indonesian Wikipedia's
• http://wikipediaweekly.com/2007/03/14/wikipedia-weekly-15/
• [Abuse] - On the Dutch language Wikipedia it was noticed that a user had placed a link "Donate to Wikipedia" inside an article pointing to a PayPal donation form to donate to a stranger. The page [[Special:Linksearch]] can be of use to find this type of fraud. Also because some companies give money to people who bring to them new customers some users try to add to some links a referrer - a special code so that they can gain profit from the traffic that comes from Wikipedia. 
• [Sinbad] - Vandalism on the article [[w:en:Sinbad (actor)]]  declaring this person deceased has been used to start a hoax sent by email linking to that article, even making it to the mainstream media. The problem is that when the link used to point to the article is a permalink, a link pointing to a specific revision, people only see the old version and may not be aware that the most current version is different form version the are reading. The specific revision can be deleted by a sysop by deleting the article and restoring it selectively. Or by a user with oversight rights. What also can help is to make it more clear to the reader that the page the are seeing is an old version. Edit your local page [[MediaWiki:Revision-info]] to modify the text displayed on the top of an old revision. 
• http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10520/1103/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Revision-info -- discussion on EN about how the notice must look like
  

Media

• [Andrew Lih] - Pod/Vod-cast interview with Andrew Lih, maybe more know to some as Fuzheado.  Andrew Lih is a writing a book about Wikipedia, has blog about Wikipedia and is a core member of the WikipediaWeekly podcast.
• http://www.calacanis.com/2007/03/20/calacaniscast-18-beta/
• http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/
• [.gov] - The Wikipedia Factor in U.S. Intelligence; Wikipedia used in U.S. Government intelligence reports.
• http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2007/03/the_wikipedia_factor_in_us_int.html
  

Stats

• [cy.wp] - The Welsh Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles with the article [[w:cy:Livorno]]
• http://cy.wikipedia.org
• [el.wp] - The Greek Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.  
• http://el.wikipedia.org
• [tr.wikt] - The Turkish Wiktionary has reached 120,000 entries. 
• http://tr.wiktionary.org
  

Other news

• [Wiki] - It is now offical. "Wiki" is a word - it must be so because it is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.
• http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article2362781.ece
  

Did you know ...

... you can add advanced editor functions to the edit-box?

[[w:en:User:Cacycle]] has written in javascript a full-featured in-browser text editor called "wikiEd" that adds enhanced text processing functions to MediaWiki edit pages. wikEd is a complete rich-text pseudo-WYSIWYG editor and comes with many MediaWiki-specific features. Currently it only works with FireFox or other Mozilla browsers. But User:Cacycle is trying to make it also work for IE 7.0 and would welcome help with it.

Its functionality is extensive, taking you time to get to know before passing judgment about it and reading the manual is recommended. WikiEd is also available in other languages besides English or you can translate it. To install it you only need to include some code to your monobook.js

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cacycle/wikEd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cacycle/wikEd_international

Ferengi Rules of Acquisition

"A woman wearing clothes is like a man in the kitchen." Rule 4
"Females and finances don't mix." - Rule 94
"Wives serve, brothers inherit." - Rule 139
"A wife is a luxury... a smart accountant a necessity." - Rule 255

Number of subscribers: 630, Unique Visitors website last week: 377 , Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): Gary Kirk
Thanks to: Cacycle , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://en.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a weekly publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time)
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