GCS Step 1

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Year: 2008 Week: 52 Number: 103

Technical news
  • [Hosting move] - the servers located in Amsterdam, Europe, are on the move to a new data center. At the old data center where around 40 servers located mostly for caching pages and images requested by European users. According to an unconfirmed source has Kennisnet ended its sponsoring of this cluster. Since May 2005 has Kennisnet paid all expenses for the cluster in Amsterdam.
  • [404] -If you follow a link to a page that doesn't exist (to the actual page, not including the edit pages), the servers now give a 404 (not found error code) where before they gave the 200 (ok) error code. This may help some automated programs, is more inline with what you are "supposed" to do, but most people will not notice as the page returned is still the same.
  • [MediaWiki messages] - revision-info, revision-info-current, cannotdelete, redirectedfrom, historywarning and difference messages now use Wiki text rather than raw HTML markup. Some wikis will need to fix their customized messages.
Proposals
  • [Licence discussion] - the new version of the GNU Free Documentation License contains a section that gives the projects now using the GNU Free Documentation License the option to change the licence of those projects. The option to migrate to an other license expires on August 1, 2009.  Discussion about this is requested.
Foundation
Legal
  • [Wikimedia NL wins] -  Wikimedia Nederland wins a preliminary injunction. Not a big surprise because the wrong Wikimedia was sued, but nevertheless good news.
Community
  • [Photo-print service] - a partnership has been established between the French language Wikipedia community and a photo printer service. it is now possible to order a print of an image on the wiki with the menu "Get a poster of this image".  For every order is 1,5 EUR donated to Wikimedia. At present a 1000 EUR is donated this way. You see only the option if the site language is French. So logout or change your setting.
  • [Everyone Bureaucrat] - the community of the Italian Wikiquote has decided that all sysops also will be a bureaucrat. On IT Wikiquote are only 6 sysops, so now also 6 bureaucrats. That have found inspiration from the Spanish language Wikipedia. There are nearly all sysops also bureaucrats, all 126.                                                                                                                              How to become a bureaucrat differs strongly from wiki to wiki. For example; on the English language Wikipedia you need to be elected in a extremely difficult bureaucratic process. And on the Dutch language Wikipedia all sysops active for at least one year can become bureaucrat by simple request.
  • [EN Wikinews] - the main page is decorated for the holidays. It has a tree , menorah, Kwanzaas and snowman.  This unusual. Normally the do not do this, but (strangely) no one complained. 
  • [New planet] - At the location "planet.wikimedia.org" are several language based websites who collect the posts of many different blogs with postings who are supposed to be related to WMF-projects. For example Wikizine is also listed there on the English language version. There is now a new planet; the "North Germanic languages". Normally it is for one language only but because the amount of posts would be to few the languages Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and  Faroese form one planet.
Awards
Media
Stats
Other news
Donation comments
"Find a clean way to make profitable enough to survive for we count on you but you can't really count on us, we don't have money!..." --  Anonymous

"When I first started working with computers in the '70s, I dreamed of an electronic library with all the information anyone needed on a portable device. You're making that happen. Thank you." -- Harvey Platter

"Une modeste contribution ainsi qu'un grand MERCI... continuez..." --  Mathieu TARTARE

"DONATION, BUT I DISLIKE JIMBO"

Number of subscribers: 725 , Unique Visitors website last week: 103 , Editor(s): Bawolff, Walter, Casey , Corrector(s): none , Thanks to: Plyd, Nemo_bis, Ainali , 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

Monday, December 08, 2008

Year: 2008 Week: 50 Number: 102

Technical news
  • [Wiki rename] - the first letters of the url of our projects indicate the language of that project. For some of them those will change to other ones. Effected languages are; Aromanian, Low German, Moldovan and Belarusian.  Redirects will be created.
  • [WikimediaNotifier] - A system has setup to create a message on Meta that then is copied automatically to all the wikis. The purpose is to improve the internal distribution of important news to the community. The messages are posted in namespace of the bot [[user:WikimediaNotifier]] but wikis can request to post them somewhere else like in there village pump if the wish it so.
  • [MediaWiki extension Testing] - Many of the extensions written for MediaWiki are used outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. Installing is not always easy because they do not come with a guarantee that they will work.  ExtentionTesting provides a testing environment where these extensions can be tested against the stable releases of MediaWiki. This way it is easier and more predictable to use extensions with the MediaWiki software.
  • [Interwiki map] - the interwiki map is updated. The means that the many changes done to it are now live. For example you can now link to an OTRS-ticket with the interwiki [[Ticket:]]. The old prefix [[OTRS:]] was broken and no support was found to repair it.
  • [Turnkey MediaWiki] - A Ubuntu-based distro created for one purpose; running MediaWiki. Ideal to try out MediaWiki on your own computer.
Request for help
  • [Web Designer/geek] - Wikizine.org seeks the help of a volunteer who can realize an idea the involves building a website that is intended to besides being useful also create revenue to support Wikizine.org Contact [[user:Walter]]
Foundation
Legal
  • [Wikimedia Deutschland] - The German chapter Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. are hosting a website (www.wikipedia.de), where the German wikipedia can be searched. A German court enacted a temporary restraining order that this website must not link to the German wikipedia (de.wikipedia.org). The reason is a lawsuit between Wikimedia Deutschland and Lutz Heilmann, a member of the German Parliament (Bundestag), about some statements in the article about him. He also sued three Wikipedia users because of their work on this article. The restraining order was abolished after 2.5 days. Because of the news coverage the donations for the Wikimedia Deutschland was increasing signifcant.
  • [European Copyright] - A working group of the Dutch Wikimedia, German Wikimedia, Hungarian and Italian Wikimedia Chapter has issued a reaction on the EU Green paper Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.
  • [WM Netherlands] - a request for an preliminary injunction is issued by Bob Sijthoff against the Dutch Chapter to obtain the identity of particular user and the removal a specific article. The position of WM Netherlands is that the are not legally or technical capable of doing that. Ruling is expected by the 10th of December.
Agenda
Community
Media
  • [Censor] - British internet service providers have been blocking a Wikipedia article and so also causing problems for there users to edit Wikipedia. The blocked article was flagged as child-pornographic in nature. Interestedly also Chinese media are reporting the blocking of Wikipedia in the UK.
  • [Winkler Prins] - in the Dutch language is the Winkler Prins, founded in 1870, the last surviving encyclopedia. Winkler Prins announced that there 10th edition will no longer be published in paper from. Reasons are lack of interest in a encyclopedia on paper and huge work to get the information that can fill 50 book down to 26 books. The 10th edition be published online subscription based.
Stats
Other news
Quote
"Fair use is not a right. [..] Fair use is only a... ...legal defensible position" ~ A Fair(y) Use Tale!

http://dotsub.com/view/4918f3c8-8f04-4aa1-b300-39048dca6822

Number of subscribers: 725 , Unique Visitors website last week: 110 , Editor(s): Walter, Anonymous , Thanks to: Angela, Ellywa, GerardM , Especially thanks to: Sannse , 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