GCS Step 1

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 31 Number: 78

Foundation
  • [Wikimania 2007] - In a few days the Wikimedia event of the year will start: Wikimania. From 3 Augusts until 5 Augusts in Taiwan. For so as possible Wikizine will attempt to provide reports about Wikimania during the event. Extra editions are probable but the blog that used to post Wikizine in English will be updated frequently during the days.  Wikizine is at present one person who is not at Wikimania. So all coverage will be limited to availability to online access to the event. Attempts will be made to create audio recordings of some of the presentations from the audio live-stream if present and to put those online very soon. Contributions from people who are there are very welcome.
On en.Wikizine.org can be found now;
  • [Wikipedia Academy] - Wikimedia Deutschland is organising the second Wikipedia Academy to be held in Mainz on August 24th and 25th, 2007.  The conference will focus on the humanities in Wikipedia, aiming for a dialogue between researchers and Wikipedians. The Wikipedia Academy will be sponsored by the German Ministry for Education and Research. The conference will be opened by Doris Ahnen, Minister of Education, Research, Youth und Culture in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, and Elke Lütjen-Drecoll, President of the Academy of Sciences and Literature. A price, the "Johann Heinrich Zedler Medal" will be awarded. Wikimedia Deutschland and the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature award this prize for an outstanding encyclopedia article in the area of the humanities. The Zedler Medal comes with 3,000 Euro and is sponsored by the German scientific journal "Gehirn&Geist". The selection jury consists of seven renowned scientists.
  • [Correction of Wikizine 77 Extra] - regarding the results of the board election; Michael Snow has the 5th place (and not the 6th), Danny Wool has the 6th place (and not the 7th) 
  • [Request for comments] - the community is invited to provide feedback about the proceedings of the recent board election.
Technical news
Request for help
Community
  • [Natinalistic Wikipedia?] - The topic was raised on the mailing list Wikipedia-l that the Armenian Wikipedia was using a Wikipedia logo with colors of the Armenian flag. Anthere (WMF chair) said about that "Whilst I am supportive of temporary (as in "24 hours") fun logo for special events, setting up a permanent derivative logo is really wrong, in particular when it refers to a nation.".  The Armenian Wikipedia has changed the logo back to the normal one.
  • [Wikigame] - The first computer game in the Piedmontese language is created,  a clone of Colonization.  For this BetaWiki, the wiki used for the localization of MediaWiki was used. Piedmontese is a small language spoken in a part of Italy and has its own Wikipedia.
Media
Stats
  • [Wikipedia] - Can Teenagers Write An Encyclopedia?
<quote>
Google has changed its search algorithm in late 2005-early 2006. I have been monitoring 154 keywords on Google since 1999. Of these, the number one (#1) search result in 128 keywords is now a Wikipedia article. More than a quarter (38 out of 128) of these "articles" are what the Wikipedia calls "stubs" (one or two sentences to be expanded by Wikipedians in the future). Between 7 and 10 of the articles that made it to the much-coveted number one spot are ... empty pages, placeholders, yet to be written! (These results were obtained in early 2007).
</quote>
Other news
Quote
"But even with all of its flaws and failures, America is still a democracy, and Americans still enjoy certain basic freedoms that are unknown to the average Chinese. In our panic over economic questions, we've forgotten that many, if not most, Chinese citizens are still living in desperate conditions under a repressive government. Jimmy Wales hasn't forgotten that. May the founders and executives at Google, Yahoo and others learn from his example." -- From "Free wikis for China" by Caille Millner

Number of subscribers: 678 , Unique Visitors website last week: 195 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: the Signpost, Sabine , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.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  

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 28 Number: 77 Extra

Board election

The results of the board election are published. The 3 elected candidates to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation are;

  1. Erik Möller [[ w:en:user:Eloquence ]]  (renewal)  with 1671 votes
  2. Kathleen Walsh [[w:en:user:Mindspillage ]]  (renewal) with 1427 votes
  3. Frieda Brioschi  [[w:it:Utente:Frieda]]  (new board member) with 1254 votes
The are appointed immediately to the board. There term will run until the board election of 2009.

Board member Oscar van Dillen is not reelected and his term is now expired. Oscar came at the 4th place in the election after Frieda with 1234 votes.

At the 6th place we have Michael Snow (Signpost) with 1229 votes and 7th Danny Wool [[w:en:user:Danny]] with 1217 votes.

Editor(s): Walter , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.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 

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Year: 2007 Week: 28 Number: 77

Technical news
  • [Spam-blacklist] - For a long time is there on meta the spam blacklist. That list is used to make it impossible to save a page the contains the domains the are listed on the blacklist. More recent but also since a long time the local wikis have a local white-list to overrule the global blacklist on Meta. Now there is also a local blacklist. So if you want to block a domain it can be blocked by requesting to include it on the global list on meta or you can put it on your local list so it is only blocked on your wiki.
    • [[MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist]]
    • [[MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist]]
  • [New special page] - There is new special page and it is even a useful new special page. [[Special:DeletedContributions]].  By means of this page a sysop can very easy get a list of all the deleted contributions of any user. 
  • [Ugly bug] - One of the fundamentals of concept of the wiki-software is that you can see in the history who has edited what and when. Tuesday there was a bug in the system of the wikis that resulted in random edits being saved to an other specific article on that wiki. On the dutch Wikipedia the edits ended up in the article about Albert Speer. This bug is fixed now. The result is that users could have done a normal edit from there point of view edit but when you look the edit is saved and logged in an totally other article. So it could look like you have vandalized that article when reviewing the history.
Request for help
  • [Wikizine] - The English edition of Wikizine is looking for a core editor, the German version for a translator. Please only respond if serious.
    • http:/report.wikizine.org
  • [Wikimedia Canada] - The people attempting to found a Canadian chapter are looking for people to help out, especially with the legal stuff.
Foundation
Community
Media
Stats
  • [Vote stats] - Gregory Maxwell  has made some graphs to help to understand the impact of the Board elections across projects. That graphs are very clear: the board is elected by the English Wikipedia. Only when you put all the non-EN Wikipedia votes together and besides the votes from the EN Wikipedia the number of votes comes in the neighbourhood of the number of EN Wikipedia votes. Many users have not voted. Depending of the project between 2,5% and 20% of the possible voters have voted. Not only the voters where not very enthusiastic about these elections. From the 15 candidates only 5 accepted the invitation of Wikizine to present them self to the communitity.
  • [nds.wp] - The Low Saxon Wikipedia now has reached 10,000 articles with the article on Erskine Caldwell
Other news
  • [Wiki Maps] - Openstreetmaps.org is a community project to make free maps of the world. These are made by a community of volunteers. The collect the information needed to make the maps from volunteers who import data from GPS-units that then is used as the raw data for making the maps and drawing the roads. There are places where the streets are present in great detail but in general there maps are still largely empty. The company Automotive Navigation Data has decided to release there street database of the Netherlands under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. This will mean the there will become a free streetmap available of the Netherlands on Openstreetmaps.org when the data is processed.
  • [Special offer] - Wikizine will provide mailing list hosting service on request to its readers for Wikimedia related activities. This most explicitly is not indented to replace the mailing list  hosting service of the WMF. This service is intented as a supplementary service when a WMF list is not practical or possible. This is in situations you need very quickly a list for some small temporary project or as an temporary mailing list while waiting for the creation of the official WMF list.  Creation is subject to approval by the editor of Wikizine.
Did you know ...

... What WikiGroaning is?

It is the art of comparing the level of two things nerdyness based off Wikipedia results.

Quote

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. -- Mike Godwin"

Number of subscribers: 671 , Unique Visitors website last week: 294 , Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Slomox, NielsF, 555 , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.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