The Official Wikizine Archive: 2009/09

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Year: 2009 Week: 37 Number: 118

Technical news

[Image renaming re-enabled] - Image renaming has been re-enabled for administrators on all Wikimedia projects.

[LocalisationUpdate deployment delayed] - The deployment of LocalisationUpdate, an extension meant to keep the localized messages as up to date as possible, was delayed after it killed the entire site. You don't have to be a tech to interpret the blog post graph as "bad news".

[Feature deployment updates] - Brion mentioned that the system administrators are starting to maintain a list of feature & extension deployments that they're rolling out in the very near future (and their status) on the Wikitech wiki.

[MakeSysop Removed] - MakeSysop, the old extension for managing user rights, has been disabled on Wikimedia sites.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20291

[CTO Job Opening] - back in issue #115 we reported that the current Chief Technical Officer position would be splitting into two, with Brion's position being changed to something with more of a MediaWiki software focus. The job opening for the new CTO position has been posted on the Foundationwiki.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Technical_Officer -- job opening
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- reminder about the details of the split

Request for help

[Strategic Planning CFP] - the Strategic Planning Team has released a call for participation. The CFP was distributed through a CentralNotice with a link to a letter from Jimmy Wales and Michael Snow, but there is also a blog post giving more details on the process.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/help-shape-the-future-of-wikimedia/

Foundation

[Jennifer Riggs leaves] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, announced on Thursday that Jennifer Riggs would be leaving the Wikimedia Foundation. Jennifer was the Chief Program Officer and, although she has made good contributions so far, she and Sue decided she wasn't the right fit for the job.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055215.html

[Wikimedia and OneWebDay] - September 22 was OneWebDay, a day that aims to highlight the critical importance of protecting the values and principles of an open, participatory web. In a blog post, Jay Walsh used the OneWebDay initiative to thank Wikimedia's huge volunteer force.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/wikimedia-and-onewebday/

[New volunteer position] - the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a local volunteer to help catalog customer service correspondence at the local office in San Francisco.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Volunteering:Customer_service_clerical_volunteer_(RPP)

Agenda

[Wikimedia Staff office hours] - after the success of the Strategic Planning "Office Hours", the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to hold its own as well. Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, will be online to answer questions in #wikimedia-office on freenode. The "office hours" will be between 15:30 and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30) on Friday, September 25, 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055246.html

[Wikis Take Manhattan] - the third Wikis Take Manhattan, a planned scavenger hunt and free content photography contest in New York City, will be held on Saturday, October 10, 2009.

Community

[Chapters reports] - Lodewijk Gelauff reminded the community about the chapters-reports mailing list and highlighted a few of the ones he thought were the most interesting.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055242.html

[European Heritage Days] - "European Heritage Days" are held in several European countries. On these days, many buildings notusually open to the public are open for visiting, as are the workshop of certain artisans. Some French Wikipedians found a way to take advantage of this by running a sitenotice mentioning the event and pointing out that the general public can help Wikipedia get more photos.

[Wirtualna Polska] - in our last issue we reported that there were a few problems with the local press when Orange Poland launched its branded Wikipedia mirror. The Polish Wikipedia community has written a statement that they hope will clear up the confusion.

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:O%C5%9Bwiadczenie_nt._Wikipedii_na_WP (pl)
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Wpedzich/O%C5%9Bwiadczenie -- English translation

[IRC: GC Review] - the new IRC Group Contacts have published a review of the last three months, highlighting what they've done, what they plan to do, and how you can help.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Noticeboard#3_month_review

[WMFR + Cultural institutions] - David Monniaux gave an update on what Wikimedia France has achieved with cultural institutions in France. He also highlighted some issues that they ran into.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/5147

Media

[Where Wikipedia Ends] - Time Magazine published an article questioning if Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. The article includes a few quotes from Wikimedia Foundation representatives.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492-1,00.html

[Jimmy Guest Blogs] - Jimmy Wales guest-blogged on the Huffington Post about what the mainstream media gets wrong about Wikipedia and why.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmy-wales/what-the-msm-gets-wrong-a_b_292809.html

[Small Businesses & Wikipedia?] - Small Business Search Marketing, a blog about small businesses, published an article about whether or not "small businesses" should have a Wikipedia article. The article actually mentions quite a few English Wikipedia policies too.

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/should-small-business-have-wikipedia-article/2311/

[German courts and wiki] - a German website attempts to teach its readers how to more accurately cite Wikipedia -- by using the permanent link to the article.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Wikipedia-korrekt-zitieren--/meldung/145444 (de)

[Wikipedia Falsified from Parliament] - the Swedish media reports that articles of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia have been falsified from computers placed in the Swedish parliament.

http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/International/nyhetssidor/artikel.asp?ProgramID=2054&format=1&artikel=3116556

[Strategic Planning] - the Harvard Business Blogs published a good post about Wikimedia's Strategic Planning Initiative.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/09/one_fine_winter_saturday_in.html

[Chinese trademark donation] - Hudong (a large Chinese encyclopedia) donated the Chinese trademark of Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Foundation.

http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20090922/CNTU04822092009-1.html

[Grass Is Greener on a Million Little Wikis] - a humorous article from Wired.com explains what the article "Grass" on the English Wikipedia would look like in different "language" Wikipedias (ranging from Limerick Wikipedia to "Even More Simple English" Wikipedia).

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/09/alt-text-million-little-wikipedias/

Stats

[hi.wp] - The Hindi Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.

[ca-wp] - The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.

http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval_de_Solsona

[cbk-zam] - The Zamboanga Chavacano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

[translatewiki.net hits one million] - Translatewiki, the website for translating the MediaWiki software, has reached a million translations. Congratulations to the Translatewiki staff and all of their translators!

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-size-is-good-cool-million-for.html

[Forget articles, it's editors] - Erik Zachte, the maintainer of Infodisiac (the Wikimedia statistics website), wrote a blog post about how we should stop focusing on the article count. Instead, we should be focusing on the number of editors the site has (and other aspects of community participation).

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/partipication-level-a-new-metric/

Other news

[WikiMarriage] - two Wikimedians got married this weekend: Arne Klempert (akl) and Delphine Ménard (notafish). Arne is currently a member of the Board of Trustees and Delphine is the former Chapters coordinator and current Treasurer of Wikimédia France. Congratulations to the new WikiNewlyweds!

[PediaPress: Job opening] - PediaPress, Wikimedia's partner in printing personal "Collections" of Wikipedia articles, is hiring. The job matches the predominant skills of Wikipedians and is specifically looking for "wikifriendly" people, you may want to apply.

http://blog.pediapress.com/2009/09/hiring-community-and-communications.html
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable -- background information about the partnership

[FR: GNU GPL Legal Win] - the GNU General Public License, a widely used free software license, has been held up by a French court. (They ruled in favor of the author of the content rather than a company who used it.)

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/09/big-win-for-gnu-gpl-in-france.html

Did you know ...

...that the Wikipedia Mobile interface provides anonymous statistics about its use? The stats page provides total traffic, average page serving speed, and more.
http://stats.m.wikipedia.org/

Quote

"I am not asking you to explain Wikipedia here, I'm asking for a vision!" - Femke Halsema

(The Chair of the Netherlands's Green Party interrupted the presentation of the new government budget to Parliament with that when the Prime Minister referred to the many committees that are going to search for potential budget cuts.)

Editor(s): Alex, Casey, Thanks to: Sue, Sage, Brianna, Leinad, Pharos, Dcljr, Hampton, Sj, Erik Z, Lodewijk, Rjd, Brion, Cary, Submarine, Philippe, Eugene, Gerard, Janson, Anders, Nihiltres, Frank, Amgine, David, 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]].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 and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Year: 2009 Week: 36 Number: 117

Technical news

[Software updates] - Brion is in the process of updating the Wikimedia sites with several weeks of new updates.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-September/045179.html

[Mobile survey] - the Wikipedia Mobile team is running a survey, hoping to get feedback on their progress so far and suggestions for future additions.

http://bit ly/LBXdK
http://m.wikipedia.org/

[Sever donations] - do you know of a non-profit that needs servers? The Wikimedia Foundation is donating 35 servers (over 3 years old) that aren't fast enough to run our sites anymore, but would probably work fine for smaller projects.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/server-donation-time-again/

[TIFF support] - the tech team is adding full TIFF support in the near future. This support will help MediaWiki render TIFF images (an image format widely used by museums and in scientific research) so that users can view them in their browsers.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/full-tiff-support-is-comming/

Foundation

[Board Minutes] - the minutes for the April and June Board meetings have now been published. You can view them on foundationwiki.

[Wikimedia IRC meeting] - the new three new Board members held an introductory meeting on IRC where they introduced themselves and answered questions. A full log is available on Meta and minutes are to come.

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, published her Report to the Board for the month of June.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/054904.html

[Foundation-l LSS] - The latest summary for foundation-l has been posted on Meta-Wiki, thanks to Phoebe. In addition, you can now also follow updates to the LLS on identi.ca, either from the site there or via RSS.

[Orange Poland] - the Orange partnership has expanded into Poland. Unfortunately, though, there were a few issues with local press during the launch (see the foundation-l post).

[Usability Beta Status] - Naoko Komura, Program Manager for the Usability Initiative, gave an update on the status of the usability updates (the "Try Beta" link). She also included statistics on how often they were enabled/kept enabled.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/14/usability-beta-status/ -- blog post

[Omidyar Grant] - the Wikipedia Signpost has an article further explaining the nature of the Omidyar Grant of US$2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-09-14/News_and_notes

[Job openings] - the Wikimedia Foundation has three job openings, as of press time, including a software developer, project manager, and development associate.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

[Transcom] - the translation committee has released another newsletter summarizing open requests.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-September/001004.html

Legal

[WMIT being sued] - Wikimedia Italia, the Italian chapter, has been sued for €20,000,000 over a possibly defamatory article. WMIT is in no way connected to the article or edits in question, but they still have to pay the legal fees and fight a court battle due to the Italian legal system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gianfranco/Wikimedia_Italia_sued_for_20,000,000_%E2%82%AC -- unofficial summary (en)
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Sabato_19,_a_Roma,_abbiamo_bisogno_di_te -- community notification (it)

Community

[University course about WP] - a university course solely devoted to Wikipedia has recently been started in Sweden.

http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_release_August_30,_2009

[Translatewiki.net update] - Gerard and Niko both published blog posts giving updates on Translatewiki, the site for translations of the MediaWiki software.

[Office Move] - the Wikimedia Foundation officially announced its upcoming office move (to be completed in mid-to-late October). It has also publicized the address, something the Foundation has shied away from in the past.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055204.html

[Improving Foundation-l] - Foundation-l, the mailing list intended to discuss Foundation issues, has started a request for comment. Do you know ways the mailing list could be improved or replaced?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l

[Restoration Discovery] - Durova, one of the people on Commons who works on restoring images, received a pleasant surprise. While restoring a photo, she discovered that there was actually human remains in picture. This discovery has been noted in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress even credited her in its bibliographic record.

http://durova.blogspot.com/2009/09/synergies.html

[WMBD Meeting] - Wikimedia Bangladesh (a planned local chapter) had a meeting on September 10

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh/Online_Meeting_2009-09-10

Media

[Biggest blunders] - CNN has assembled a list of "Wikipedia's Biggest Blunders".

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/09/06/wikipedia.biggest.blunders.cnn

[Wikipedia grows up] - the UK Telegraph wrote an article saying that Wikipedia and the Internet are growing up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6122514/Wikipedia-and-the-Internet-grow-up.html

[Strategic Planning] - the New York Times covered the new Strategic Planning Initiative and the other consultants that are helping professionalize the Foundation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=2

[Editing For Beginners] - the Australian Lifehacker wrote an article trying to teach beginners how to contribute to Wikipedia.

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/09/wikipedia-editing-for-beginners/

[Wikipedia reacts to outburst] - a reporter for the New York Times wrote a blog post describing the Wikipedia community's response to a US Representative shouting at the president during his speech.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/wikipedias-rapid-reaction-to-outburst-during-obama-speech/

Stats

[Commons reaches 5 mil] - just in time for its 5th birthday, the Wikimedia Commons has reached 5 million files. See the blog post and chapter press releases for more information.

[Wikistats Portal 2.0] - Erik Zachte, maintainer of Infodisiac (a set of Wikimedia statistics), wrote about a recent overhaul of the statistics portal.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/wikistats-portal-20/

[Wikipedia's Growth Animated] - all the Wikipedias grow at different rates and have started at different times. How can we compare them other than just by the numbers? Erik Z has updated an animation that shows this growth visually.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/wikipedias-growth-animated/

[vi.wp] - the Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.

http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-11

[th.wp] - the Thai Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.

[cs.ws] - the Czech Wikisource has reached 10,000 pages.

http://cs.wikisource.org/wiki/Ilias/Zp%C4%9Bv_p%C3%A1t%C3%BD

[bo.wp] - the Tibetan Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

http://tinyurl.com/bowp1k

Other news

[Semantic Web Problem] - TechCrunch wrote a humorous article centering the unfortunate results when robots try to get meaning from Wikipedia text.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/02/netbase-thinks-you-can-get-rid-of-jews-with-alcohol-and-salt/

Did you know ...

...the first public cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973 by Martin Cooper?

Quote

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Corrector(s): Rjd0060, Thanks to: Ainali, Mike, WikimediaMobile, infodisiac (Erik Z), Hampton, Mathias, Sj, Gerard, Durova, Austin, Sue, Marcin, Rand, Frieda, Tanvir, David, Phoebe, Naoko, Brion, Kat, Signpost, Mxn, and Daniel 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]]. 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 and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

GCS Step 1

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Year: 2009 Week: 37 Number: 118

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Year: 2009 Week: 36 Number: 117