The Official Wikizine Archive: Year: 2007 Week: 15 Number: 67

Technical news

[Bot aid] - Meta has a new page listing people who are willing to help you get a bot running for your local wiki. This service is especially intended for users from wikis that are too small to have local users knowledgeable about operating a bot.

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

[Classic] - Pay attention when receiving emails that seem to have been sent by Wikipedia coming from addresses like support@wikipedia.org, service@wikipedia.org, administrator@wikipedia.org and similar. The name of Wikipedia is also used by spammers to give the impression that their message has been sent by a trusted party. This is a very classic practice, but some users on your wiki may not know of it. If you are not sure whether it is a real email, check the headers.

Request for help

[We want to hear from you] - The Wikimedia Foundation is currently seeking testimonials of individuals that have benefited from using one of our numerous open information projects. Do you know of a school that has benefited from our free educational resources? Do you know someone who learned a second language using Wikiversity? Whatever your positive story, we want to hear from you. Please email your stories to press@wikimedia.org.

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

Foundation

[Governance model] - Anthere (board chair) suggests a change in the Foundation's governance model to one referenced as the "policy governance model".

[Wikimania reminder] - Submissions for Wikimania presentations are open, as is registration to attend. You can still apply for scholarships to attend; the deadline has been extended to April 15.

[Board elections] - Problems with the board election last year are likely to produce changes for handling next board election. The next board elections are scheduled for June 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-04-09/Election_leaks

[New group] - The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for volunteers to contribute to forming a Communications Projects Group, which will act on specialized communications requests such as researching press lists, analyzing media coverage, and other tasks not presently covered by the Communications committee. This committee will be made up of translators, wiki liaisons and consultants from a variety of countries, including graphic artists. We are looking for volunteers who are willing to make CPGroup their first priority.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communication_Projects_Group/announcement

Community

[Wikipedia 0.5] - A selection of articles from the English-language Wikipedia is now available on CD-ROM. The CD, which can be ordered for 13.90$US or downloaded for free, contains 1964 articles and is the first real offline version of the English-language Wikipedia. This edition, version 0.5, is a test run for editions that are expected to follow which will contain more articles. It was produced by the Wikimedia Foundation and LinterWeb, a French company, that did development and the distribution. The German-language Wikipedia has had a CD-ROM edition since November 2004.

[RSS Commons] - You can stay up-to-date with the Wikimedia Commons picture of the day in several ways. There is a mailing list that sends you the URL, or a stable URL for the current picture so that you can put the "Picture of the Day" on your own website or use it to update the wallpaper of your desktop. Now there is also a RSS feed.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/COM:POTD

[Australian Meetup] - There will be "breakfast wikimeets" with Jimmy Wales in Adelaide (2007-04-23), Perth (2007-04-24), and Melbourne (2007-04-27).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup#Scheduled_Meetups

Stats

[Vandalism studies] - On the English Wikipedia, there is a WikiProject to study vandalism to Wikipedia. The members of the project have published the results of their first study, which analyzed a randomly sampled pool of 100 articles. Some conclusions:

Within this pool, there were 668 edits during the months of November 2004, 2005, and 2006.
Of those 668 edits, 31 (or 4.64%) were vandalism.
In a given month, almost exactly 5% of edits are vandalism and 97% of that vandalism is by anonymous editors.
The vast majority of the vandalism is of the easily discovered kind.
Roughly 25% of vandalism reverting is done by anonymous editors and roughly 75% is done by registered Wikipedians.
The mean time for the reversion of vandalism is 758.35 minutes (12.63 hours), a figure that may have been distorted by some extreme values, since the median time is 14 minutes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Vandalism_studies

[Update] - The list of articles with the most links from other wikis has been updated. [[w:en:India]] is still the article with the most interwiki links: 185. For some reason, this figure has dropped by 48 since last November, when there were 233. [[ w:en:True Jesus Church]] has risen from the 161st to the 180th place. There is also a listing of articles that have a high number of interwiki links but do not link to one of the larger Wikipedias. With this link you can find out whether there really doesn't exist an article in your language about that topic, or get inspiration for writing a new article.

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

[Poll] - a company called "Rasmussen Reports" held a telephone poll about Wikipedia in the United States. According to their statement, 46% of adults believe Wikipedia is at least somewhat reliable; only 16% disagree while 38% are not sure.

http://rasmussenreports.com/2007/March/Wikipedia.htm

[pr.wp] - The Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 250,000 articles.

http://pt.wikipedia.org

Other news

[Editor sponserd] - The LINGUIST List has collected funds to pay a "Graduate Assistant" to work half-time on improving linguistics-related articles on the English-language Wikipedia for one semester.

[Donation] - There is no fund drive now, but this does not mean that donations have stopped. The Wikimedia Foundation has received a donation of 100,000$US (€74482) from Stephen Luczo, Chairman of the Board of Seagate Technology. Seagate is known for producing computer hard drives.

Did you know...

...that there is a "Nostalgia" Wikipedia?

Nostalgia is not a real Wikipedia, but a copy of an early version of the English-language Wikipedia as it was on December 20th, 2001. This Wikipedia can give you the look and feel of how Wikipedia was at nearly one year old. Although Nostalgia uses MediaWiki, that software did not existed then. In 2001, Wikipedia used UseMod. Archive.org lets you see how Wikipedia really looked by the end of 2001. In the "Preferences" on modern wikis, "Nostalgia" is still available as a skin. If you activate that, you can give the current Wikipedia the look of 2001 (but it is not the same).

http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage

http://web.archive.org/web/20011217182637/http://www.wikipedia.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=nostalgia

Quote

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
-- Leonard H. Courtney, attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain

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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) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

The Official Wikizine Archive

GCS Step 1

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 15 Number: 67

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The Official Wikizine Archive