Year: 2009 Week: 26 Number: 109

Technical news

• [New "Green" Data Centers] - The Foundation announced a new "in-kind" sponsorship (valued at over €300,000) by "green" (environmentally friendly) Data Center EvoSwitch.  EvoSwitch will be Wikimedia's new Internet HUB for Europe.  Not only does this provide us with a long-term solution for delivering faster and better traffic in Europe and beyond, it also means that Wikimedia servers are taking advantage of cutting edge green power technology provided by Evoswitch.
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Selects_EvoSwitch_June_2009
• http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/22/evoswitch-helps-us-improve-project-access-in-europe-and-beyond/
• [Public repositories for dumps] - A new public repository has been created to host WikiXRay database dumps, containing info extracted from public Wikipedia dbdumps.  The image is hosted by RedIRIS (in short, the Spanish equivalent of Kennisnet in Netherlands).  These new dumps are aimed to save time and effort to other researchers, since they won't need to parse the complete XML dumps to extract all relevant activity metadata.  As of press time, only some of the biggest Wikipedias are available.  However, in the following days the full set of available languages will be ready for downloading.
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2009-June/000825.html -- mailing list post
• http://sunsite.rediris.es/mirror/WKP_research/ -- respository
• [Chinese search improved] - the search function for the Chinese and Japanese wiki's are improved due to to a better support of the language structure.
• http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/06/chinese-language-search-fixes-for-mediawiki/
  

Request for help

• [Spread the word!] - We are very happy with your readership, but the subscriber numbers are not really growing anymore.  Wikizine could use some more readers. Maybe are there users on your wiki who do not know about Wikizine? Talk about Wikizine, put a Wikizine banner on your user page or on a community page if approved. Thanks.
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/banners
  

Foundation

• [Wikimania] - last year the were missing but now the are back; the hacking days. Those who love to work on MediaWiki & extensions, bot scripts, toolserver stuff, etc.can amuse themselves at Wikimania.
• http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Days
  

Legal

• [Plagiarism?] - There's a report that some parts of Chris Anderson's book "Free" were copied from various Wikipedia articles without attribution.  This news has been picked up by a few gossip blogs, but has not been confirmed as accurate.
• http://www.vqronline.org/blog/2009/06/23/chris-anderson-free/
  

Agenda

• [SF: Mozilla] - Mozilla Labs is holding their monthly meetup at Mozilla's new HQ in Mountain View Thursday (6/25) night.  The topic should be of interest to local SF Wikimedians (some members from the WMF office are going too).  Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, will talk about the "Open Social Web" initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. He will be discussing the social web, the underlying protocols that make it possible, and the potential role for the browser to play in this world.
• https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/06/mozilla-labs-meetup-thursday-625/
• [WMAT] - Wikimedia Österreich (the Austrian chapter of the Foundation) will be holding its second Annual General Assembly on 26 June 2009 at 19:00 at the AKH-Hörsaal Medical Center in Vienna.  If you live in Austria, please attend!
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/vereinat-l/2009-June/000049.html (German)
  

Community

• [Wikimedium #2] - Wikimedia Deutschland released its second "newspaper" aimed at (potential) sponsors, partners, friends and fans of Wikimedia, The new edition includes issues 'around the world' (from other Chapters), information about the recent conferences in Berlin (developers, board, and chapter meets), explanation of the Wikipedia structure, and a lot more.  The next edition is planned for September.  It's definitely worth reading if you know German!
• http://wikimedia.de/fileadmin/wiki/images/Downloads/Wikimedium_2009-02.pdf
• [New DVD (for Linux)] - Wikimedia CH (in collaboration with openZIM) has released a new edition of the German Wikipedia DVD on LinuxTag 2009. The DVD contains more than 900,000 German Wikipedia articles and a full text search index for phrasal search. The openZIM project develops a file format called "ZIM" to store hypertexts like Wikipedia, or other websites, with search indexes and images in the most efficient way. The data is highly compressed; the Wikipedia articles only take up 1.4 GB on the DVD.  A new edition of the Wikipedia DVD, in Spanish, is also planned for the Wikimania conference from August 26th to 28th of 2009 in Buenos Aires.
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediach-l/2009-June/001259.html (German)
• http://openzim.org/2009-06-23_Wikipedia_DVD -- press release (multiple languages)
• [Weather bot] - There's a new bot for the Serbian Wikinews that posts and updates weather information for Serbia.  It is planned to increase this to the whole world and all Wikinewses, but help from bot operators is needed.  This has brought up questions on how best to incorporate it into the sites (with OpenStreetMaps? a new weather.wikizine.org?).
• http://tinyurl.com/wn-weather -- example of weather on sr.wikinews
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-June/001535.html -- mailing list post
• [PLWP New Main Page] - The Polish Wikipedia is trying to design a new main page ("Strona główna") and is trying to solicit opinions and ideas on what the new one should look like.
• http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GDJ/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna/Debata (Polish)
• [Vandalism survival] - A new study on Wikipedia attempts to determine the distribution of the length of time that vandalism remains on the English-language Wikipedia. This distribution is also known as the survival function for vandalism. The two primary results from this study are: (a) the median time to correction is down to four minutes, and (b) some subtle forms of vandalism still persist for months and even years.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-06-22/Vandalism -- study was published in the Signpost
  

Media

• [Interview] - Lichtenstein's "Vaterland" did an interview with German Wikipedia user "Dodo von de Bergen" where "dvdb" talked about his activities within Wikipedia.
• http://www.vaterland.li/page/epaper/pdf_download.cfm?seite=09_mapc_01_2009-06-05 -- article (German)
• [Video Upgrade] - Technology Review (a publication by MIT) gave an update about some future changes to how Wikipedia will handle searching, editing, and embedding video clips (and other media).  This article combined a large number of "mini-updates" that Michael Dale has been giving the community about his work on MediaWiki's video handling (per a grant with Kaltura).
• http://beta.technologyreview.com/web/22900/page1/ -- article
• http://tinyurl.com/kaltura-pr -- press release
• http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/06/dotsub.html -- multi language subtitles for video
• [Wikisource] - An info/law blog published an interesting post about using Wikisource as an alternative open access repository for legal studies.  It turns out the author is actually an admin on Wikisource who works on expanding the texts too!
• http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2009/06/19/using-wikisource-as-an-alternative-open-access-repository-for-legal-scholarship/
  

Stats

• [Wikt OC] - The Occitan Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
• http://oc.wiktionary.org
• [WP Ru] - The Russian Wikipedia has reached 400,000 articles
• http://ru.wikipedia.org
• [Wp an] - The Aragonese Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles
• http://an.wikipedia.org/wiki/
• [Wp csb] - The Kashubian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles
• http://csb.wikipedia.org/
  

Other news

• [Give us your passwords] - Not exactly related to Wikimedia projects, but a US city tried to request that government job applicants turn over their user names and passwords to Internet social networking and Web groups.  A flood of criticism has prompted a Montana city to drop this request, but it still started an interesting (albeit offtopic!) discussion on the Wikimedia mailing lists.
• http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/06/19/us/AP-US-Internet-Background-Checks.html
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-June/101262.html
• [Berkman files now in Ogg] - The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (a research center at Harvard University) has released its audio and video files in Ogg (and licensed under CC-BY).
• http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5444
  

Did you know ...

.... that some articles can make you feel stupid?

One of the articles on Wikipedia is about 1 car and 2 goats. And the probability of these goats and car to be behind a particular door.

If you have no problem to be disillusioned ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Quote

There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
--- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, almost all versions

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