[Announce-l] Wikizine - number: 21

Mon Apr 10 13:52:41 UTC 2006

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                                    .org
Year: 2006  Week: 15  Number: 21

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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community

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=== Technical news ===

[Outage] Wikimedia was down from 19:19 UTC on 9th April to around 01:30
UTC on 10th April. The explanation we have at this time is that one of the
800A circuit breakers between the generators/UPS and our servers failed at
our Florida co-location facilities causing obvious problems. Staff at the
datacenter struggled to resume service as soon as possible, and are now
investigating the reason said breaker failed.
Wikimedia sites were unavailable for just over six hours.

Several servers came up with bad clocks. Brion has corrected the times in
the 'revision' database entries for the entries edited from these servers
so 'history' and 'contribs' will be correct, but you might see some edits
listed in your watchlist etc 8 hours earlier than their actual times.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22810/
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22827/

[Parser functions] Tim Starling created a MediaWiki extension supporting
parser functions, along with four new functions: if, ifeq, expr, and rand.
 These can replace inefficient templates such as {{{qif}}} and
{{{switch}}} from the English Wikipedia.  Parser functions such as
LOCALURL have existed for a while; but including them in an extension has
only been possible since MediaWiki 1.6, released last week.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ed_Poor/subtract&action=edit
 -- example of inefficient template
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES
-- MediaWiki 1.6

[Move to Commons] Magnus Manske has made a online tool to make it more
easy to mo move files from a local wiki to commons
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27061/
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php

[SpamWar-IV] The coming of the Redirects - new way of link spamming
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22799

=== Request for help ===

[Wikimania] Needs volunteers and translators.  Spanish, French, and
Chinese translators are especially welcome.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Meetings#General_volunteer_meeting
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6795/

[en.wikinews] Needs more people to help out with the daily audio recording
of the news. If you'd like to help contact User:Mrmiscellanious
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Mrmiscellanious
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews

=== New project proposals ===

[List of proposals] User:Robert_Harrison is working on a new version of
the new project proposals page on Meta
http://tinyurl.com/z5ek3

=== Foundation ===

[PR] Schwartz Communications, a public relations firm, provides on a
voluntary basis there services to the Wikimedia organization. The are from
now on included to the Communications committee as advisors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartz_Communications
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee

=== Community ===

[EN.wikinews] is now offering a podcast of their daily news briefs on a
daily basis and actively promoting it.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AudioWikinewsNewsBriefs

[EN.wp CD] User:BozMo produces a CD with 2006 articles and 8500 images for
use in UK schools to benefit the group 'SOS Children' from the English
Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BozMo/2006_Wikipedia_CD_Selection
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/education-cd.htm

=== Media ===

[no print] the print edition of German Wikipedia is postponed due to lack
of support from the community.
http://tinyurl.com/lhpmn - google translation

[AlistApart.com] Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters - about
registered and anonymous users and Wikipedia
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/identitymatters

=== Stats ===

[The TOP] The classic traffic ranking is from Alexa where Wikipedia has
the 18the place of all websites of the internet. But there are also
others. According to "Hitwise" Wikipedia is on the 38th place, just after
CNN.com That seems impressive but that is still only 0,17 % market share.
When limited to "Education websites" Wikipedia is the clearly the number
one. Also according Hitwise the visitors of Wikipedia are 47,2 female and
52,8 male and users of all ages are using Wikipedia.

According to the statistics of "comScore" Wikipedia is on the 28th place
and rising. All those reports are nice to know but it is important to
realize that the give an strong English / American POV of the use of the
internet.
http://tinyurl.com/g6uog  -- Hitwise data and demographics (USA) for
Wikipedia, March 2006 (doc file)
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?id=783 -- February 2006 'top 50'
list (WP: #28)

[KW.wp] The Cornish Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. According to EN
Wikipedia there are around 3500 speakers of this language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language
http://kw.wikipedia.org

[jp.wp] The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
http://jp.wikipedia.org

=== Did you know ...  ===

... that you *can* switch of your computer, go outside in the real world,
leave your phone, iPod and PDA at home, go to a forest of a park and watch
to the movement of the leaves in the wind and the breaking of the sunlight
in those leaves and enjoy its fantastic resolution?

=== MediaZilla-IRC Quotes ===

"And so, we don't need a business model, we're just doing it." [Jimmy
Wales, early 21st century]

Sweater: optional piece of clothing applied to child when its mother feels
cold.
"The life is too short, and Wikipedia too slow ..." - Anon
"George Bush is a good president. No really. Please stop laughing."

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Number of subscribers: 362
Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao, Sj
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
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