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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 08 Number: 62
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Technical news ===
[Captcha] - The system that means you need to enter a word displayed as an image
as a anti-spam protection measure is now active on all wikis. It used to be
active only on the smaller projects. This can cause problems for users from
communities who are not used to Latin characters. The words displayed are two
English words which together form one non-existing word. This makes it
difficult for people who do not know English to read the words. If the word is
unclear refresh the page then you get a new word.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/30108
[Special page] - The page [[Special:Protectedpages]] does now works. It is
updated live.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Protectedpages
[Image swap bot] - Commons, the wiki that more and more WMF-wikis are using for
their images and other media, is working on expanding their service. This with
a bot that comes to your local wiki and replaces the image used on a page by
another image (or video). This is so that when on Commons a media file is
renamed or changed to another version, the projects using the older version
will be updated automatically. The people operating this bot are requesting
feedback about it. The bot is not operating yet.
Commons already provides the "CommonsTicker" service that informs local wikis
about changes to files in use on that wiki on commons. And also the
"CommonsDelinker" which removes the broken links to deleted files on the wikis
that were using that file.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14717.com
=== Request for help ===
[Offline Wiki] - Everybody can freely download a dump of the database and run
there own local copy of there favorite Wikimedia project. But if only want to
have your own local copy for reading Wikipedia (or Wikiboosk, etc) then setting
up a complete local installation of MediaWiki is not very easy, fast and
computer resource friendly solution.
Stian Haklev has written a fairly easy to use offline wikiserver for locally
running a copy of a wiki. It makes use of the html-download dump of the
projects. The advantage compared with just extracting the html-dump and browse
the files is that you do not need to extract the dump to read them. That makes
a big difference. For example; when a html-dump of a small wiki is 3,1 mb. Then
when you extract that you have 46,8mb. That is a lot more but what is 50mb in
the world of today? But when you download the dump of the German language
Wikipedia of 1,5gb then I makes a big difference. The current version is 0.2 ,
it works but slow on large dumps. Windows, Mac, Linux. The developer is asking
for people who would like to test it and provide feedback and would welcome
developers to join his project to make it better and faster. Contact; <shaklev
AT gmail DOT com>
http://houshuang.org/blog/2007/02/16/wikipedia-offline-server-02/
=== Community ===
[Image-l] - Wikimedia Commons now provides the service of a "Picture of the
day" by email. Subscribers receive daily an email with a hyperlink to a
selected image. The email itself does not contain the image.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/daily-image-l
=== Media ===
[Yes, Wikipedia is Big] - In US, half of Wikipedia traffic comes from Google.
This is now one of the Wikipedia-story's in the media.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-02-19/Google…
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7006520355
[No, Wikipedia wil not get banded] - A other story currently floating around is
that Wikipedia will be banded from many schools and libraries in America
because of a proposal of law by USA senator Ted Stevens. The proposal would ban
"commercial social networking websites and chat rooms". Besides the fact this
is only a proposal the current version does not affect Wikipedia because
Wikipedia is not commercial but a non-profit.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-49 -- "Son of DOPA" see
section 203
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/4598 -- article with very misleading
title
=== Stats ===
[csb.wp] - The Kashubian Wikipedia has passed 1,000 articles. The are only about
50,000 speakers of this language so 1000 articles is very nice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_language
http://csb.wikipedia.org/
[Yo! (again)] - In Wikizine 57 was announced that the Yoruba Wikipedia had 500
articles. Now the are proud to announce the have 1000 articles. Yoruba is a
language of Nigeria. The are now at the 127th place of largest Wikipedia's.
http://tinyurl.com/2z53ok
=== Other news ===
[WikipediaWeekly] - Episode 11, the first one of 2007, of the Wikipedia news
podcast is out.
http://wikipediaweekly.com/2007/02/19/episode-11/
== Did you know ... ==
... what the difference is between {{foobar}} and {{:foobar}}?
No? Good. The explanation will follow. But first the basics. There is the
"template" namespace. That can be a page like [[Template:Welcome]]. On your
home wiki "template" can be localized and be something else. If you wish to put
a template on a page you would use {{Welcome}}. But you can do the same also
for non-templates. We take the article [[Zeus]] as an example. If you put on
some page {{Zeus}} then the article Zeus will be displayed on that page like a
template.
Now the difference between {{Zeus}} and {{:Zeus}} is:
If you use {{Zeus}} and the page [[Template:Zeus]] exists then the content of
that page will be used. But if it does not exist then the page in the main
namespace will be used.
If you use {{:Zeus}} then always the content of the article [[Zeus]] will be
used, even if a page [[Template:Zeus]] exists.
Instead of pointing to an article you can also use any other namespace like
{{:Wikipedia:Foobar}}
=== Quote ===
"It's easy to characterize Stevens as little more than a buffoon. He's
certainly
a buffoon, but he's a dangerous one." -- Preston Gralla about Ted
"tubes"
Stevens and "Son of DOPA"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ted_Stevens
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