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.org
Year: 2006 Week:07 Number:13
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
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=== Technical news ===
[wikidown] due to reasons still under investigation the Wikimedia projects where mostly
down during Monday 13 february. Best guess now is due physical hard disk failure. Emails
send to Wikimedia (OTRS) and the lists should be saved and arriving soon.
Many of the issues have been sorted but there are still some on-going problems, as such no
wikipedia or wikimedia project should be considered as stable for the moment. Please see
sources listed here for more and better news.
http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Status
http://www.thewritingpot.com/wikistatus/
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_log
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/21992
[Anon!] There is a new field to give a warning to anonymous users that their ip-address
will be exposed if the edit. It appears above the edit box. Default is English if you have
not translated it.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning
[Larousse] (2003-2006) - the oldest Wikimedia server still in service has gone offline.
Larouse came to serve Wikipedia in may 2003 as the second server ever that Wikipedia
acquired. Larouse started to work as THE webserver of Wikipedia with its companion Pliny,
the long gone first server, acting as the database server. In his later life cycle
Laurouse was used for various light tasks, including nagios, DNS, some IRC services and
web serving for
kohl.wikimedia.org. Larouse expired at the age of 2 and 10 months, without
warranty, because of hardisk failure at the Wikimedia hosting facility in Tampa, Florida.
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Larousse
[No Tinyurl] On Meta there is a global blacklist of domains. Url's of domains listed
there can not be posted on any Wikimedia wiki. This is an anti-spam function of Wikimedia.
The widely used domain "tinyurl.com" is now added to the blacklist.
Tinyurl.com
is a free redirect service to make a very long url very short. This service has been
abused by spammers to link sites already on the blacklist. But it is also used by
Wikimedians to point to a specific page or revision. Below the item you find a tinyurl to
the discussion page about this. Wikizine is constructed on Meta so this short url could
not be saved in this form on Meta. To compare you find the long tinyurl target also
included.
http://tinyurl.com/exp3t
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Homepages_of_URL_hiders_…
[Robots.txt] the page "Articles for deletion" and similar of the EN Wikipedia
are added to Wikipedia's Robots.txt file. This will prevent them from being indexed by
search engines like google.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4776 - request for adding AFD & co to
robots.txt
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4787 - feature request to make a wikitag to
specify this for a specific page
=== Request for help ===
[Grants] Wikimedia Germany has been offered to participate in the Google Grants
International-Programm. We can kindly use Google AdWords to promote Wikimedia sites.Final
deadline for suggestions is February 14th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_Grants
http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden
=== Legal ===
[TRON] Judgement in the TRON case; Wikipedia wins in the name controversy - wikimedia.de
points again to
de.wikipedia.org - Tron's parents said they would appeal the ruling.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,400028,00.html
=== Foundation ===
[Meeting 2006-02-05] A open Wikimedia meeting was held and also a follow-up meeting. The
full log of the open Wikimedia meetings is online.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Board_meeting%2C_February_5%2C_2006
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings
=== Community ===
[Questions for Jimbo] the English language Wikipedia approaching one million articles. The
Wikipedia Signpost is organizing a interview with Jimbo about this and is accepting
questions for him now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-06/From_t…
=== Media ===
[The Cartoons] - also on Wikipedia EN are those a hot topic. The article about it is
created on 27th January. The article is already edited about 4500 times in that time. Even
more impressive is the discussion page of that article. Notice too the long archive
section. You can print a book with all those talk files. And because we live now in the
year 5 A.W. (after Wikipedia) somebody has actually done that and made some sort of book
of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-06/Cartoo…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controv…
http://i-newswire.com/pr56324.html
http://www.baghdadmuseum.org/
=== Stats ===
[Alexa] Wikipedia has risen into top 25 most popular sites on the web according to Alexa
Internet.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.wikipedia.…
=== Other news ===
[WikiPubs] New project proposal; a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and
reliable world-wide pub guide.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6155
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipubs
http://wikipubs.org/index.php/Wikipubs
=== Did you know ... ===
... that the website "copyscape.com" is ideal to see if newly created articles
aren't copies?
http://copyscape.com/
=== Computer quotes ===
My computer goes down on me more often than my girlfriend. -- Robert Paul
The only way to make your PC go faster is to throw it out a window.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can
swim. -- Edsgar Dijkstra
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. -- Thomas Watson
How many Visual Basic programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? They don't know
how. They have C++ programmers to change their lightbulbs. They make wonderfully decorated
light switches, though.
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 298
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of validity.
Wikizine.org is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Publisher:[[meta:user:Walter]]