GCS Step 1

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Year: 2008 Week: 13 Number: 93

Technical news
Single User Login
 
  • SUL. Single User Login. Bug 57. Unified login. One login for all wikis. The mythical uberlogin has migrated to The Real World.

    The migration function is enabled currently for sysops only. The options to migrate can be found on the first page of the account preferences page on the projects were you're a sysop. From there you can follow the instructions to claim all you accounts on all wikis that have the same username. After the migration you can log on all these wikis with the same password.

    For the migration to work you need to have the same email address or password on all your user accounts. You can claim the rest of the accounts with your name by providing their password.

    The current sysop-only migration is to collect information for the general user migration later. Sysops who have problems are strongly encouraged to report them so that they can be fixed before SUL is rolled out generally.

    By migrating now (if you can) you have the advantage that you can use that username to log in to all WMF wikis as long as there is not a local user account with your name that is not yours.

    Please note that not everhings works yet when you migrate. For example renaming an account can not be done (for now at least). Inform you before you do it.
  • [Upload auto-confirmed] - upload of files on all Wikimedia sites except Commons is now restricted to auto-confirmed users. That are user accounts older then 4 days.
  • [Search changed] - the technical side of the search function of the wikis has changed. As a result some wikis who have used javascript to include external search engines may experience glitches requiring an update of the local code.
Request for help
Foundation
Community
Awards
  • [IT Wikipedia] - The Italian Wikipedia has won the a category award of "PremioWWW-Il sole 24 ore" a competition organized by the most important business newspaper in Italy (Il Sole 24 ore). The winners were selected by jury from the shortlist composed by the 5 sites that obtained the highest score through a popular vote.  This is the second time that it.wiki wins "PremioWWW-Il sole 24 ore". Last time was two years ago.
Stats
Other news
Did you know ...
... Microsoft also uses MediaWiki ?

Microsoft researcher Steve Ickman said while Microsoft SharePoint is great, MediaWiki has valuable features not found  in SharePoint - particularly the ability to archive.
Quote
"Do not leave your children unattended. All unattended children will be eaten." -- Friendly advice from vulture in movie "Ice age 2"

Number of subscribers: 712 , Unique Visitors website last week: 132 , Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): 2 who do not wish to take credit for it , Thanks to: Nick , 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. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]], and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular 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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Friday, March 07, 2008

Year: 2008 Week: 10 Number: 92

Technical news
  • [__HIDDENCAT__] - there is a new magic word __HIDDENCAT__ When used on a "Category:Foobar"-page it is not listed among the other categories at the bottom of an article in the category.
  • [New dump!] - There is a new database dump of the English language Wikipedia. The full dump of EN Wikipedia, all articles, full history is 130gb (compressed).
  • [New Skin] - When you go to your "preferences" you have the option "skin" where you can select what the interface will look like. The default skin is Monobook. There are several others to choice from but besides "classic" they are not very usable. But now is there a new good looking and usable skin: "Modern". Check it out.
  • [RC on IRC] - Recent changes of the projects are posted on IRC by means of a Wikimedia IRC-server. By request access to this service has been added to the Wikizine IRC gateway for a selection of projects.
Request for help
Foundation
Media
Stats
  • [WikiWoordenboek] - the Dutch language Wiktionary passed the 30,000 page milestone.
  • [Counts] - The Wikimedia Commons has reached 2,500,000 media files.
  • [Again new stats] - A site that is using the squid logs to generate Wikipedia article traffic statistics. You can get the stats for a specific article or get a list of the most popular pages. There can you learn that for some reason "Canine reproduction" is very popular.
  • [Wikipedia is 2nd in the world!] - at least in the "2008 Web Globalization Report Card". The number of languages supported is a big factor in this ranking.
Other news
  • [Dirty dishes] - Bad week for Jimmy Wales. His personal life is getting media coverage. It is reported that Jimmy had a brief relationship with Rachel Marsden, a conservative blogger who works in the media industry. The relationship broke off and Rachel Marsden provided private communications between herself and Jimmy to a gossip site, which published them.  Jimmy published a statement about it on his blog.

    And at the same time Danny Wool, ex WMF staff member, published a blog posting where he writes about his time at the Wikimedia Foundation and requests for reimbursement of expenses by Jimmy, among other things.
  • [Encyclopedia of Life] - the EOL has gone live with more than one million species pages that are mostly minimal articles. Only 25 articles are like the EOL wishes the articles to be, articles containing rich media with extensive information.
  • [About Wikipedia] - author John Broughton wrote the book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" . A guide to editing Wikipedia. ISBN 0596515162
  • [CNN goes (a bit) Wikinews] - CNN, an American news network, has started a website where everyone can submit news and pictures. As it looks now every article has only one author and people can post comments about it. So it is more a blog than a wiki.
  • [Wikileaks] - An attempt to bring down Wikileaks has failed. There was a DOS-attack, a fire at their web hosting facility and the release of lawyers who obtained a court order to remove the domain "wikileaks.org" from DNS. Wikileaks did remain online by means of other domains and by entering the ip-address. The court order was later revoked. Wikileaks.org is again online.
  • [Wikirace] - Wikirace.org is game where you compete with other people to try get from one "start-article" to try to reach the "end-article" in as few steps as possible.
Message to the readers
  • Wikizine is there to inform you, readers, about the news related to the Wikimedia projects or what seem relevant to inform you about.
    It has been increasingly more difficult to get a new edition ready for distribution the last half year. At present the publication rate is below the necessary frequency necessary to inform our readers in a timely manner about the relevant news.
    Because of this I recommend, as editor, that the readers of Wikizine read the Wikipedia Signpost as their primary internal news source to keep informed.  -- meta:user:Walter , Editor of Wikizine
Did you know ...
... there is dedicated program to browse Wikipedia visually?

The program is called indywiki. (And no, it has nothing to do with Indymedia.) Basically it is a GUI that displays Wikipedia content in a different way then your browser. Focus is on the visual aspect. You search for a entry, you get a selection of pictures related to that article. By clicking on an image you can browse Wikipedia. Also is there a text box that displays text sections of the article, a list of sections of the article and a list of external links. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Indywiki is young software and the main developer is looking for assistance with this project.  The developer is looking for a python developer to work on features and people who can work on the GUI to make it better looking.

http://indywiki.sourceforge.net/ -- website
http://indywiki.sourceforge.net/indywiki_fosdem.pdf -- presentation of Indywiki
Contact indywiki: <mgogoulos AT gmail DOT com> 
Quote
"[..] And for the encyclopedia, it turned out
that a volunteer model was able to do quite a reasonable job." --  Bill Gates reffering to Wikipedia
Number of subscribers: 714 , Visitors website last week: 170 Editor(s): Walter , Thanks to: Annabel, Effeietsanders , 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. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikizine is a irregular 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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