GCS Step 1

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 16 Number: 68

Technical news
Request for help
New project proposals
Foundation
Community
  • [DVD]  - A DVD version of the Polish language Wikipedia is expected to be available in shops all over Poland by the end of April. It will contain 239 000 articles and 59 000 pictures. Because of the use of java it can be used on all operating systems. The articles included in the DVD-version where partially checked by 13 paid Wikipedia contributors who were supported by around 20 volunteers.
  • [Anslagstavlan] - The Swedish Wikipedia has started when a Wikipedia Signpost inspired local news channel.
Media
Stats
  • [Wikinews] - All the edits on all language Wikinews projects combined reach over a million.
  • [Wikipedia] - All Wikipedias together have reached 7 million articles.
  • [io.wp] - The Ido Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles. According to the English Wikpedia there are about  2500 speakers of Ido so this very impressive.
Other news
Did you know ...
... that your assistance to Wikizine would be very useful?

This newsletter is started by [[meta:user:Walter ]]. Until now Wikizine is nearly completely created by only this user, week after week. There is only assistance in copyediting. That is useful work and improves the quality of the newsletter but does not make a newsletter. It becomes harder and harder to make every week a new Wikizine alone and keep an acceptable level of quality. Assistance in the form of new core editor who is capable and willing to construct Wikizine on a long time basis is important to the continuing of Wikizine in its current form.

Wikizine can offer to a core staff volunteer access to the (limited) hosting facilities of Wikizine for personal use for so far those are not in conflict with the needs of Wikizine.

Helping out by writing "Did you know" or "Was ist das?" items of reporting news from your home wiki, helping out with the very fragile German translation project (also one person now) of Wikizine would also be helpful. But a core staff member is what is really needed.

Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org
Quote

 
"Wikipedia enables anybody to access information which was once the preserve of those who could afford the subscription to Enyclopedia Britannica and were prepared to navigate its maze of indexes and content pages." -- Alan Johnson, Education Secretary of the United Kingdom

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/publicservices/story/0,,2053911,00.html

Number of subscribers: 638 , Unique Visitors website last week: 358 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: bawolff , 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, April 11, 2007

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.
  • [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.
Foundation
Community
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.
  • [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.
  • [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.
  • [pr.wp] - The Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 250,000 articles.
Other news
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).
 
Quote

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



Number of subscribers: 640 , Unique Visitors website last week: 319 ,  Editors: Walter
Correctors: Oliphaunt, Pathoschild , Thanks to: JoeSmack, Ajvol:., Thewinchester , 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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