Year: 2007 Week: 21 Number: 71

Technical news

• [SyntaxHighlight] - This is a function that is now live on all wikis. Its function is to display text, more programming code, in colors like it is custom for editors used by programmers to make the code more readable.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/31108
• http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi  -- See here how it works
• [Wikiclosed] - The Kanuri Wikipedia, language spoken mostly in Northern Nigeria, has been closed. The Low Saxon Wikiquote has also been closed.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Kanuri_Wikipedia
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closure_of_Low_Saxon_Wikiquote
• [Wikiopen] - An Italian Wikiversity has been created.
• http://it.wikiversity.org/

Request for help

• [Brand survey] -  Erik Moeller (board) drafted a survey on Wikimedia's brands: their perception, use,
  protection, and various potential reorganization options.  Edits/feedback on the current survey questions are welcome.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/17159
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_brand_survey

Foundation

• [New Hire] - The WMF has hired Vishal Pattel as part-time business developer for the WMF. Mr. Pattel was already working as an intern for the WMF. To see what he will be doing and all the comments about it visit
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/17174  -- Announcement by Anthere (Chair WMF) - there are more postings then in this thread because it was broken several times.

Awards

• [Czech Wikipedia] - The Czech edition of Wikipedia has won the "Czech Open Source 2007" award in the reader's vote in the category "Project" and it has also been declared the overall winner of the contest as the subject with the biggest total number of reader's votes without regard for category.
  The award has been organized by Root.cz, a popular Czech news server oriented on Linux and free software in general.
• http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/30117
• [Intelligent Award]  - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikia, Inc. founder and Angela Beesley were named as the 2007 Intelligent Community Visionaries of the Year by the Intelligent Community Forum.
• http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/associations/5315/files/2007_VisionaryAward_4-23-07.pdf
• http://tinyurl.com/28rfcs

Community

• [en.wikinews] – Original reporting with prominent New Zealand blogger, David Farrar, opens doors for an exclusive interview with the Leader of the New Zealand Opposition, John Key.
• http://gpollard.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/another-exclusive-interview-for-wikinews/  

Media

• [Jimmy] - Good quality video recording of a presentation done by Jimmy Wales about Wikipedia and Wikia in Bayreuth, Germany.  If you like to know what Jimmy is doing while travelling around the world, this is good video to see. It is also informative about Wikia. This is a long video.(01:17, 943mb, fast download). If you have no time, download it now and view it later. It is not a waste of time.
• http://cms-sprachlabor.split.uni-bamberg.de/av/2007/dgpuk/Wales.avi
• ["Left Wikipedia"] - Wikipedia is 'politically slanted' by the left, who are 'in control'.
• http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/5/13/212015.shtml?s=lh

Stats

• [Paper] - Two studies about EN Wikipedia; "Visualizing the Overlap between the 100 Most Visited Pages on Wikipedia" and "What is Popular on Wikipedia and Why?"
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-14/Academic_journal_coverage
• http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/spoerri/index.html
• http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/wilkinson/index.html
• [en.wikibooks] - The English Wikibooks has exceeded 75,000 total pages and 25,000 non-stub book modules.
• http://en.wikibooks.org/
• [ca.wp] - The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
• http://ca.wikipedia.org
• [ci.wp] - The Vietnamese Wikipedia is edited for the 600,000th time as Trungda makes changes to the article on "Mạc Ngọc Liễn", a figure from the Mạc Dynasty of northern Vietnam.
• http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BA%A1c_Ng%E1%BB%8Dc_Li%E1%BB%85n
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BA%A1c_Dynasty

Other news

• {{spoiler}} Jesus dies … False ending! He comes back! {{endspoiler}}
• http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/05/17/snape-kills-dumbledore/  -- A blog posing about the template culture in Wikipedia, worthy to read.

Did you know ...

... we have a project in our family called "Wikispecies"?

Wikispecies is a Wikimedia project intended to be a directory of species. There are currently about a dozen active editors and over 60,000 listings. It is similar to Commons in that it is multilingual. They are working on the fine line between being a framework of species with links to information in all of the various Wikipedias, and containing that information there. Searching is always challenging when working in multiple languages. Wikispecies hopes to utilize wikidata when it becomes available to serve up the data. Check it out at http://species.wikimedia.org/ .
 

Quote

"Simplicity is not an end in art but we arrive at simplicity in spite of ourselves." - Constantin Brancusi.

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