GCS Step 1

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 13 Number: 66

Policy
Editorial note: spreading the news accords all projects and languages is the objective of Wikizine. Please bring this new policy under the attention of your home-wiki community and help to close the language barrier by translating or at least report the essence of the new policy.
Technical news
Request for help
  • [EN Wikinews] - There is interest by some users of EN Wikinews to try to make a video news bulletin. The problem is that there is need for people who know how to do that. People who are interested to help can say so in the "Water cooler".
  • [Wikimentary]  - In Wikizine 64 there was an item about a project to make a documentary about Wikipedia. But there is also another unrelated project for making a documentary. This is a project of Rory O'Connor, a documentary maker and journalist. This documentary is supposed to be focused on wiki technology including Wikipedia. Video recordings have been made at the previous Wikimanias.  This project is now seeking financial support to complete a film. To contact the people working on this; <roc AT globalvision DOT org>
Foundation
Community
Stats
  • [EO.wp]  - The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles with Biblioteko de Aleksandrio (Library of Alexandra). The Esperanto Wikipedia is one of the older Wikipedia's and now the 11th largest Wikipedia out of +/- 240.
  • [Wikibooks] - The Russian Wikibooks and the Chinese Wikibooks has reached 500 book modules.
Other news
Was ist das?

OTOH: On The Other Hand
Stroopwafels: plural form of stroopwafel
Shills and Astroturfing:  A type of sockpuppet created by the manufacturer of a product or the author of a book for the sole purpose of recommending the product/book by posing as an enthusiastic consumer or reader. A single such sock puppet is a shill; creating large numbers of them to fake a "grass-roots" upswelling of support is known as astroturfing. (Source: [[ w:en:Sockpuppet (Internet)]])

Linus Torvalds quotes

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." (1991)
"If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." (1996)
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code." (2000)
"They are smoking crack." (2003) Source: eWeek interview. Notes: said about SCO
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." (2003)

"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's _my_ choice, dammit." (October 26, 2004)  rms = Richard Stallman

Number of subscribers: 625 , Unique Visitors website last week: 341 ,  Editor(s): Walter ,  Corrector(s): Zhaladshar , Thanks to: Yukichi, bawolff, Chuck Smith  , 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)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
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Wednesday, March 21, 2007

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.
  • 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
Community
  • [South Asia] - Interview with two users about the Bengali and Indonesian Wikipedia's
  • [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. 
Media
Stats
Other news
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)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 11 Number: 64

Technical news
Foundation
  • [Wikimania 2007] - Registration is open for Wikimania 2007, which will be held from 3-5 August in Taipei, Taiwan. A 3-day ticket costs 40$US. You can also register for the Hacking Days and "Citizen Journalism Unconference". Registration for sleeping arrangements are also open; the fee is 20$US if you register now, and the number of beds is limited. The Wikimedia Foundation is also offering some scholarships for Wikimania.
Community
  • [Usurpation] - 'Usurpation' is a new Wikipedia jargon term whose real meaning is to seize something by force. It is used on the English Wikipedia to refer to the process of changing the username of an inactive user so that the username becomes available for registration or can be assigned to another user. This is not a new function; it has existed for as long as renaming users was possible. However, it may not have been very well known until now.
  • [Torrent] - The "Picture of the Year 2006 archive" containing the best photographs that Wikimedia Commons has to offer from the year 2006 are now available as a torrent download (321 pictures, 526MB).
  • [Bias] - A company active in selling worthless college degrees was not happy about the article about their business. They have published a job offer for a watchdog to follow the article and remove negative content about them. Although it is not uncommon for a company to edit their own article in this way, offering a paid job as a professional bias-pusher is new.
Media
Stats
Other news
  • [MediaWiki book] - A new book by Mizanur Rahman about MediaWiki will soon be released. It is a technical book for MediaWiki administrators. If you pre-order, you get a discount and free shipping (for some reason, it is cheaper when you use US dollars as currency).
  • [Doc] - A real documentary about Wikipedia is in production. The people involved have already made a documentary about craigslist.org, a popular website in the United States, and a movie about graffiti in San Francisco. The producers are accepting donations to pay for the production. Donors of at least $50 are included in the credits in the movie on DVD when it is ready. The documentary is scheduled to be released in 2008. Their website contains preview video clips.
  • [Stella Artois] - An advertisement bureau working for InBev, the world's largest brewery company, has used Wikipedia in their online campaign for their beer brand "Stella Artois" for the Belgian market. They replaced the text of the article about "Stella Artois" in the French- and Dutch-language Wikipedia with their own fictional history of the beer. Their version is permalinked on the official website of Stella Artois as "proof" for the fictional history used in a publicity campaign.
Did you know ...
... that it is possible for non-sysop to semi-protect a page?

This method is based on last week's "did you know" about protecting unborn articles (see link below). If you "transclude" pages you would like to protect (including them as templates) on a page that is semi-protected with the 'cascading protection' option enabled, they will be automatically protected from edits by non-sysops.

Because the semi-protected page can be edited by almost all users, most editors can protected pages.

For example, make a page like [[Wikipedia:Non-sysop protected pages]], with semi-protection and cascading protection. An editor adds the "Foobar" article with '{{:Foobar}}'. The article [[Foobar]] is now fully protected (not only semi-protected, as would be expected).

When this system is used, the semi-protected page (in the example, [[Wikipedia:Non-sysop protected pages]]) will become very large if many pages are included in it.

This type of protection is not listed in the block logs, and this behaviour may change in the future. Although it is probably not a good idea to use this system, at least now you know that it is possible.

http://en.wikizine.org/2007/03/year-2007-week-10-number-63.html -- last week's "did you know"
Quote

 
Some people put a lot of work into their lawn, as if a patch of green grass was the most important thing in the world. As if they thought that as long as the lawn out front was green and mowed and beautiful, it wouldn't matter at all what was going on inside of the house. -- Character Allie Keys / science fiction miniserie "Taken"

Number of subscribers: 626 , Visitors website last week: 318, editors: Walter, Gary Kirk
Corrector: Pathoschild Contact: reply or http://report.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) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

2 comments:

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 10 Number: 63

Technical news
Request for help
  • [Wikimania] - There is an open call for submissions for the the Wikimedia event of the year, Wikimania 2007, which will be held in Taipei, Taiwan on 3-5 August. The following are requested: presentations (10–30 minute talks), workshops (30–120 minute sessions with more involvement of the audience), Birds-of-a-Feather (45-60 minutes of informal group discussion on a particular topic), panels (groups of 2-5 speakers to discuss a specific subject), posters (printed presentations or visual displays that can stand on their own), and artistic artifacts (plays, competitions, comedy, visualizations, or other representations of some aspect of the projects).
Foundation
 Community
Awards
Other news
  • [Law] - In Belgium has a court made some interesting rulings. A editor of a story on the Belgium edition of Indymedia was sued by the company that was written about for libel. The court ruled that a private person writing for a community news site must be treated the same way as a professional journalist. In this case this mean that case must come for a jury.               In a other case, also in Belgium, a court destroyed part a law about the protection of sources used by journalists. The judges ruled that it is illegal to make a difference between professional journalists and bloggers by giving only professional journalists protection of source. "Protection of sources is an essential part of the freedom of speech and of the freedom of the press."
  • [A new pedia] - A new wiki-based encyclopedia project is started; Conservapedia. It is a encyclopedia project written from a fundamentalistic Christian American point of view. It is intended as a serious project. Probably this project will be more competition for uncyclopedia then Wikipedia.
Did you know ...

... how you can protect an unborn article?

If you are a sysop, you may have noticed that sometimes an article you deleted has a long history of creation and deletion. Often these pages have weird title that will likely not become a valid article, or it is deleted after consensus that it does not belong on the project.

It is possible to make it impossible to recreate. Create a new page to list such pages, such as [[Project:Protected unborn articles]]. On that page you transclude all the pages that you want to block the creation of. For example, to prevent the creation of the article "Example", you would add "{{:Example}}" to the page. Then protect the page with the list (in this example, [[Project:Protected unborn articles]]) with 'cascading protection' enabled.

The result is that the inexistent articles are protected and can only be created by a sysop. Any sysop can edit the list (here, [[Project:Protected unborn articles]]) to add or remove entries; there is no need to re-protect it every time it is edited.

Quote

"Uveigil as lok at mennet, homennet thorpar ey wat marta ok etin."
"How clear a river may be, upstream always will something disgusting float in your direction." -- Marbak proverb

Number of subscribers: 636 , Unique Visitors website last week: 321 , Editor(s): Walter, Xyrael , Corrector(s): Pathoschild
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
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