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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 05 Number: 59
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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[Contact form] - Thanks to JeLuf there is now a contact form. This form makes it
easier for visitors of the various projects to send a message to the email team
of the Wikimedia Projects. Currently there is a live form for the Dutch and
English language email team. Other teams can also get the form for their
language. Contact JeLuF for that at #wikimedia-tech
http://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/webform.pl?Language=en -- yes it works, grow up
and do not test it
=== Request for help ===
[Open question] - What would the ideal wiki software be like? Discuss at
[[meta:MediaWiki Ideal]].
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Ideal
=== Foundation ===
[Advisory Board] - Announced in june 2006, the Wikimedia Advisory Board has
finally been created. Anthere presented the members of the new board. It
consists of 18 people for now. The members were asked to join. See the list on
[[wikimedia:Advisory Board]]. The all have an impressive and relevant
curriculum vitae. Picking out a few for this article would not be fair.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14066http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
[New hire] - The Wikimedia Foundation has hired a new full-time employee,
Carolyn Doran, to work as Chief Operations Officer (COO). Carolyn was already
working for the WMF but only part-time via an interim agency. The Chief
Operations Officer (COO) is responsible for the overall administration and
business operations of the Wikimedia Project. Areas of responsibility include
administration, personnel and fiscal management.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14063 -- Announcement by
Anthere, Chair WMF
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14064 -- (must read!)
long clarification about the difference between the COO, CEO and board
[Other] - The board appointed Jan-Bart de Vreede, WMF board member, as
Vice-Chair of the WMF-board. Anthere is and remains the Chair. The board also
approved a gift policy.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Gift_Policies
=== Community ===
[Pic of the Year] - Commons is holding a "Best picture of the year 2006"
election. Every day the Wikimedia Commons showcases a "Picture of the Day" on
their main page, the best from over one million files. In round one users can
choose from all the pictures of the day over the last year. And in round two
the community will vote for the best of them all. If you would like to vote but
you are not active on commons you can use your seniority on your home-wiki as
well. And if you do not vote, bookmark that page and view the photos later.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2006
=== Awards ===
[Honour] - The "Forum of Young Global Leaders" has published there yearly lists
of people up to 40 years old whom they describe as "the top 250 young leaders
from around the world for their professional accomplishments, their commitment
to society and their potential to contribute to shaping the future of the
world." - The conection with Wikimedia is that Jimmy Wales is one of these
250.
http://www.younggloballeaders.org/What_s_new/World_Economic_Forum_Announces…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_of_Young_Global_Leaders
=== Media ===
[Podshow] - Jimmy Wales on the rusiriusradio.com podcast. Long interview with
Jimmy starts at index 07:45
http://www.rusiriusradio.com/2007/01/22/show-92-wikipedia-man-jimmy-wales/
[WikiLaw] - In the USA, there are Wikipedia entries that are frequently being
used by judges in their legal rulings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29wikipedia.html
=== Stats ===
[hu.wikibooks] - The Hungarian Wikibooks has reached over 2000 book modules.
http://hu.wikibooks.org
[Lurkers] - Wikia has done some research on their wikis concerning what % of the
traffic is coming from logged in users and people who were not logged in. For
the Wikia wikis, 90% of all visitors are people who visit the wiki but rarely
participate... (in other words, people who are lurking). For Wikia, there are
great differences between the wikis. Some have almost no logged in users
active, on others almost all users are logged in. Read Angela's post about it
and discover some of very special wikis the have at Wikia.
http://wikiangela.com/blog/participation-inequality/
[Influential] - Brandchannel published its annual list of the most influential
brands. Of the global top 5, Wikipedia takes 4th place in the category, "Which
brand had the most impact on our lives in 2006?" This is according the 3,625
people that answered that question. And while Wikipedia may be 4th place
globally, it is only in the USA and Canada that Wikipedia seems to rank high.
Everywhere else Wikipedia ranks below the 10th place.
YouTube, Wikipedia storm into 2006 brand ranking
http://news.com.com/2100-1047_3-6153686.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandchannel
=== Other news ===
[Help for Wikimania] - Wikia, Inc is donating 50% of the work time of Wikia
staff member KJ for the next six months to work on Wikimania 2007. She will be
one of the main organizers and will focus heavily on sponsorship for
Wikimania.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/14051http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User:KaurJmeb - Kj's userpage
=== Did you know ... ===
... that what you see is not always what the visitor sees?
When you are working on the wikis, you are most likely doing that as a
registered user. And there is a good chance you have selected the option in you
preferences "Disable page caching". But when a normal visitor views a wiki,
they normally see a cached version of that page. A cache is a copy of the page,
and this is done because it is much less stressful for the servers then
creating a new page from the wiki-text every single time. The result is that it
is quite likely when viewing a recently updated page that an anonymous visitor
will not see the updated version of that page immediately. By default, cached
versions of a page expire after one week.
When a topic is popular in the media and you are working on that article's
topic, what often happens is that visitors will not be able to see your
changes. This is a shame.
Another problem involves the number of articles tally. Due to page caching, this
number is also often out of date. So for example, news of a Wiki's 10,000th
post may be going around and people may be celebrating and visiting that Wiki,
but the number of posts they see will be less than the actual number, making it
appear to be below the mark that they're celebrating.
To fix this you can manually flush the cache. To do this, click on "edit". This
url should end with "action=edit". Change that to "action=purge" and reload.
This will clear the cache and the new version will be shown to visitors.
=== Fund drive quotes ===
"I don't know anything anymore, but that's all right. Wikipedia knows and
remembers everything for me!" -- David Stattler
"As a university student, wikipedia has been an invaluable tool in furthering my
education. I can't tell you how many times I used wiki for help or
clarification with difficult concepts. Thank you Wiki" -- Anonymous
"College life is a bitch, Wikipedia makes it a bitch worth putting up with" --
Dyne Li
"I am a Google Employee, and on behalf of everyone here we are all proud of what
the Internet has become, and needless to say Wikipedia has played a very large
role. Long live Wikipedia, and its users!" -- Anonymous
"I have no comment at this time." -- Anonymous
"I've probably learned more from Wikipedia that from Columbia University (Which
I attend)" -- Haralampos Psaradellis
"In a world of increasingly sealed off knowledge, Wikipedia provides charitable
enlightenment." -- Anonymous
"Eine der besten Ideen in der Geschichte der Menschheit!" -- Stephan Lindner
"This is for my girls who play on Wikipedia alllll day at work!" -- Elizabeth
McClellan
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 600
Unique Visitors website last week: 368
Editor(s): Walter
Corrector(s): Lantoka
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://en.wikizine.org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to,
correct grammar and spelling.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 04 Number: 58
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[Auto unproteced] - When protecting a page, it is now possible to specify an
expiration date for the protection. So for example, with the new feature, you
can semi-protect a page for 5 days, and after those 5 days the protection will
be automatically lifted. The box to fill in the expiring time is a simple text
box, so you can use the same notations that are used when blocking a user. For
example, all of the following should work fine: 10 min, 10 hours, 10 days, or a
specific date and or time like 2007-01-25 22:45. For the last option, you may
need to convert your local time to the local Wiki's time. To localize:
MediaWiki:Protectexpiry.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/29338…
[protect all] - Sysops can now select the option "Cascading protection" when
protecting a page. The result is that everything on that page is protected,
including templates, templates used inside those templates, and images. The
only thing that is not protected are images not hosted locally, but on the
Wikimedia Commons.
To localize: MediaWiki:Protect-cascade, MediaWiki:Protect-cascadeon,
MediaWiki:Cascadeprotected, MediaWiki:Cascadeprotectedwarning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-01-15/Cascad…
[Special:Protectedpages] - There is a new special page,
"Special:Protectedpages". This page, which is only periodically updated, shows
all protected pages on your wiki. This page also indicates if the page is
fullly protected or semi-protected. You can find it in the normal list of
special pages. At the time of this writing, those lists are still empty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Protectedpages
[rel="nofollow"] - At Jimbo Wales' directive, all external links in the main
(article) namespace of the English language Wikipedia are now coded "nofollow".
This should help cut spamming of EN Wikipedia. External links on this wiki
will no longer help to boost the Google PageRank or perceived importance of
those sites in other search engines.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-January/061137.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs#rel.3D.22nofollow.22http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/22/1840214
[perma link?] - Due to changes to the mailing list system and the archive, it is
possible that a link to a specific posting in a list archive may be pointing to
a different posting. So just like a page on the wiki, a link to a mailing list
archive can change. This change does not effect the archive of gmane.org. If
you wish to refer to a specific posting you should also include the Message-ID
of the post. You can find that in the headers of every email and give a unique
reference tag for that message.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/28993
[Wikidown] - Most non-English wikis recently went down for two and a half hours
due to a full hard drive on the master database server. A few edits were lost,
but the problem appears to be fixed now.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/29243…
=== Request for help ===
[Sitenotice update] - Request from Erik Möller to all wikis: "the "Thank you"
notice can be removed now from
all wikis. Where any donation messages have been in place before the fundraiser,
they should be restored." To do this, update the following:
MediaWiki:Sitenotice (registered users and anonymous if "anonnotice" is empty)
MediaWiki:Anonnotice (anonymous users)
Some wikis are using the anonnotice to run a permanent discreet notice for
anonymous users, like EN Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Anonnotice
=== Foundation ===
[New hire] - Anthere announced the addition of Sandra Ordonez as Communications
Manager to the Wikimedia Foundation office staff. Her role will include press
relations, written and oral communications, and various other assignments.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13966/focus=13966
[Fundraiser] - The Fundraiser officially ended, with an announcement by WMF
chair Anthere marking this. On Wikipedia day, 15th January--the project's sixth
birthday--the total money raised reached over $1 million USD.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13796/focus=13796http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13872/focus=13872http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thanks_all_contributors
=== Community ===
[Year in review] - The Signpost has written a review about 2006 from the (EN)
Wikipedia POV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-01-08/2006_i…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-01-15/2006_i…
=== Awards ===
[Bravo TR.wp] - The Turkish Wikipedia won the Golden Spider - 2006 Best Content
Prize. The Golden Spider award is a nationwide, famous and reputable web award
organization in Turkey.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13662/focus=13662
=== Media ===
[Wikiasari] - Recently Wikia's new search website project appeared in the news.
CNET has a video interview item about it starring Jimmy Wales and, according to
CNET, Gil Penchina in the role of CEO of Wikimedia. In real life Gil Penchina
is CEO of Wikia, Inc.
http://news.com.com/1606-2-6150975.htmlhttp://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia
[mainstream] - Wikipedia becomes more and more mainstream. Wikipedia has been
used in an commercial advertisement, a popular video clip (White & Nerdy, Weird
Al), an American comedy series (30 Rock), and the popular thriller series
"Prison Break".
http://humannetwork.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Pagehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkKuZk1f1ZI
=== Other news ===
[EO stamps] - Israel has issued a postage stamp commemorating Esperanto for 120
years, using text from the Esperanto language Wikipedia.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/29105/focu…
=== Corrections Wikizine 57 ===
[Fundraising] - Corporations matching donations is only over for the current
fundraiser, not for this year.
[Romanian Wikipedia] - They reached 50,000 on the 5th of January 2007. The
number of articles did not fall back below the 50,000 articles after that date.
Because of a cache problem it appeared to be a lower number of articles.
=== Did you know ... ===
... that it is not always easy for others to understand your name on Wiki?
Most if not all human cultures use identifiers to distinguish the different
members of their community. The most common identifier is the name of the
person. There exists many incompatible naming systems. This can result in
errors and miscommunication when converting foreign names names to your own
naming system. It is important to be aware of the existence of those
differences.
The most basic setup is the first name. Most people have also a family name.
People can also have more than one "first name"; middle names. Also the family
name can consist of several parts. How these are all used is what can be
confusing.
Because it can be "first-name family-name" or "family-name first-name" it can be
difficult to tell which is the first name and which is the family name. The
best way to make this clear is write the family name in capital letters to
indicate the difference.
Because names can appear strange for you, or unisexsual or it in some cultures
it is custom to write only the first letter of your first name(s), so you can
have a name like "J.H.Janssens", it can be that it is not clear what your sex
is based on your name. To solve this problem, it is best to include a clue as
to your sex in your username, or on your user page, so that people know how to
address you.
=== Fund drive quotes ===
"Danke Wikipedia, hast mir schon viel geholfen." -- Gunther Hebein
"Vielen Dank für all eure Projekte." -- Alexander Forst-Rakoczy
"Danke für den Fisch :)" -- Anonym
"I wish you all good luck. You are the future" -- Shams Khassenov
"Thank you all for all your hard work, it's very much appreciated!" -- Patrik
Adolfsson
"Wikimedia projects are true examples of Humanity and Civilization at its best.
May it continue to change lives as it has changed mine." -- Claudio Martins
"Open access to knowledge is a fundamental human right." -- Kyoko Oka
"Um mundo feito por todos para todos - Paz, amor e liberdade" -- Mauro Costa
Couceiro
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 580
Unique Visitors website last week: 344
Editor(s): Walter, Gary Kirk
Corrector(s): Gary Kirk, Lantoka
Thanks to: Anthere
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://en.wikizine.org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to,
correct grammar and spelling.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
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.org
Year: 2007 Week: 02 Number: 57
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[Mailing lists] - The Wikimedia mailing lists were moved to a server in the
Kennisnet cluster in Amsterdam. For users, this means that all the posting
email addresses have changed to the format
"<name_of_list>@lists.wikimedia.org". The old posting address formats
"@wikipedia.org", "@wikimedia.org" or "@mail.wikimedia.org" should still work
as a redirect.
Using the new posting address is recommended. If you are using messages rules to
organize your email, they will need to be updated. A benefit of the move is
that a system failure in the Florida cluster will not disable the mailing lists
(if you send the posting to the new posting address). Another benefit is that
mailing lists can be created without system administrator intervention, which
will make it much quicker to create them from now on.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo
[Backup] - Wikimedia Deutschland bought a RAID system with a capacity of 12
terabytes. It arrived in Amsterdam this week, and will be used to make a
back-up of the project's data. [source: Arne]
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13505/focus=13505
[OTRS] - The software used for answering the emails send to the Wikimedia
foundation and projects is updated. This is important because the like
everybody the received a lot of spam and now it is mush easier and faster to
remove spams. Now can the volunteers working on the emails spend more time
working on the emails instead of sorting out the real question between the
spam. If you like to help with answering emails contact the queue contact
person or for starting a new queue contact a OTRS-admin.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS
=== Request for help ===
[Wikimania2007] - The people organizing Wikimania this year ask to let them know
if you are coming to Wikimania this year in Taipei, Taiwan. This is only to
have some idea about how many people they can expect; there is no commitment by
putting yourself on the list. Even if you are not sure you will go, you are
asked to let them know.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13498/focus=13498http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attendees
=== Foundation ===
[Fundraising] - Anthere announced good and bad news about the fundraising this
year. The good news is that the current fundraiser is the most successful ever
in our young history. Unfortunately, it was not successful enough to do
everything that was planned; certain things will have to wait. This fundraiser
also had Wikimedia's first matching donations over, but there will be no more
matching donations this year. The protest of certain members of the community
played a role in that decision, but the Chair writes that it was only a factor.
The fundraiser will end next week on Wikipedia day, the 6th anniversary of the
founding of the very first Wikipedia.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13524/focus=13524http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day
[Big donors] - The bulk of the money comes from small donations from many
people. In the past the average donation was around 22$US, But there is also
small group of big donors. The largest donor this year was the 'anonymous
friend' matching donation that raised the counter by 286,800$US. The big
donations are done by private persons, a few companies, and other foundations.
http://tinyurl.com/yenwpl -- list of large donations
=== Community ===
[OpenWikimeet] - The Wikimedia Board will have an open meeting this Friday on
the 12th of January in Rotterdam, Netherlands at the Golden Tulip Hotel (near
the Erasmus Bridge).
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13585/focus=13585
=== Media ===
[Plagiarism] - Plagiarism is not appreciated, in real life like on wiki. A
three-year newsroom employee resigned Tuesday after being caught plagiarizing
from the English-language Wikipedia.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA010307.02A.richter.132c1…
[BBC 5] - Jimmy Wales was interviewed on BBC 5 radio.
http://tinyurl.com/y98jlq -- direct link to mp3 audio, 25 minutes
http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2007/01/jimmy_wales_int…
=== Stats ===
[EN Wikinews RSS] - The English-language Wikinews provides a RSS-feed of their
news articles. According to statistics from Feedburner, the service used for
the feed, it is very popular. At the start of December it had just over 5,000
daily subscribers. That increased to 20,000 by December 12 and reached 36,000
on December 20. It has dropped slightly since then, with now just over 30,000
subscribers reading the latest news from Wikinews every dayAt least according
to the statistics. In any case, many people seem to read the news from the
English-language Wikinews.
http://en.wikinews.org/http://feeds.feedburner.com/WikinewsLatestNews
[YO!] - The Yoruba Wikipedia has reached 500 articles. That may not look very
impressive, but it is. This wiki is one of many that was created a long time
ago, in 2002, but for many years there was very little activity. Yoruba is a
language of Nigeria; although they do have Internet access in Nigera, working
on their wiki is not popular. The increased activity on this wiki is mostly the
work of one user, [[w:yo:User:Loadewole]], who has written most of the articles
in a few weeks. They are a native from Nigeria working at a local university.
One person can make the difference between the failure or success of a wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_languagehttp://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaYO.htm -- the evolution of this
wiki
[Catalan Wikipedia] - They reached 50,000 articles on the 4th of January 2007.
The Catalan Wikipedia is a very old Wikipedia, being the 3th Wikipedia created
after the English and German wikis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Wikipedia
[Romanian Wikipedia] - They reached 50,000 on the 5th of January 2007. The
milestone article was about "[[w:ro:Peºtera Urºilor]]", a cave in Romania,
written by [[w:ro:Utilizator:Roamata]]. Unfortunately, on the 7th they fell
back to 49978 articles. Something wikis should remember when announcing a
milestone: do not delete so many articles that you drop under the milestone,
because that looks very strange when you send out a press release and the media
looks at your wiki.
http://ro.wikipedia.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Wikipedia
=== Other news ===
[Clarification] - Regarding the last weeks item about Esperanza and the
sentence "The English Wikipedia's infamous Esperanza organisation has been
restructured ...". Despite the clearly negative meaning given by the
dictionary, it was not intended in that meaning. The use of 'infamous' was
intended in the sense that it had a lot of impact and was well-known, not that
it caused any trouble. The word "infamous" will no longer used in Wikizine. My
apologies on behalf of Wikizine. Walter, Editor-In-Chief.
=== Fund drive quotes ===
"Thank you for expanding our knowledge." -- naoyuki takayanagi
"I like watching Wikipedia." -- KAZUHIRO MIMURA
"No wikipedia, No life" -- Takuya Fujino
"Macht weiter so" -- David Völker
"May the Wikipedia be with you!" -- Anonymous
"Let's keep wikipedia advertising-free" -- Zauder Castro
"Merci Wikipedia. Continuons a se partager les informations!" -- Anonymous
('Thank you Wikipedia. Let's continue sharing information!')
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 580
Unique Visitors website last week: 326
Editor(s): Walter, Pathoschild
Corrector(s): Pathoschild
Thanks to: Romihaitza, CE, Dan100
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://en.wikizine.org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to,
correct grammar and spelling.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
******************************************
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.org
Anno Domini MMVII Week I Number LVI
******************************************
An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community
//////////////////////////////////////////
=== Technical news ===
[For bureaucrats] - When you rename a user, you now have the option to directly
move all the pages in their user space to the new name. For localization,
translate MediaWiki:Renameusermove.
=== Fundraising ===
The fundraiser has been active for two and a half weeks, and the counter is now
around 850 000 US$. That is 644 232.227 Euro, 433 850.551 British pound,
101.184 million Japanese yen, and 6.637 million Chinese yuan. Although this is
an absolute success compared to earlier fundraisers, the immense popularity of
the Wikimedia Foundation's projects and the poor revenue from other sources
mean that even more is still needed.
The amount donated has been boosted by matching donations by an anonymous donor
and Virgin Unite (a corporate charity branch). The Virgin Unite matching
donation was controversial because a Virgin Unite logo was temporarily placed
at the top of every page on all wikis. Some users in the community regarded the
logo as the first step to allowing advertisement on Foundation projects.
A long and ongoing discussion was started about this on the Foundation mailing
list. Some Wikimedians were very critical about the board's decision to make
the arrangement with Virgin, but there was also strong support for the
decision. Many people argued that something needs to be done to get enough
money, and that matching donation is a good way to do it so that the
Foundation's primary mission can continue.
Despite the opposition, the instruction to add the Virgin Unite logo to the site
notices was generally carried out. The Dutch language Wikipedia was the most
controversial of the top ten Wikipedias, where there was an edit war about the
site notice involving several sysops; eventually the logo stayed up. On the
Italian language Wikipedia, a sysop removed the notice because of disagreement,
but there was no edit war. The Norwegian Wikipedia has been very active in
editing there site notice but somehow the never came at the idea to include the
Virgin matching notice on there wikipedia. All the other top ten Wikipedias
used the Virgin logo without conflict.
At least one other matching donation action will follow some time in the near
future, but will not include a logo. The name of sponsor is still not released;
however, users who had a problem with the Virgin Unite notice will probably not
be amused by this one either.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_FAQ -- the FAQ also about
matching donations
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13050/focus=13050 -- new
site notice now ready
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13079/focus=13079 --
Advertisement #1
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13093/focus=13093 --
Advertisement #2
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13104/focus=13104 -- This
is
not an Advertisement
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13122/focus=13122 --
Beyond "ad" or "not ad"
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13157/focus=13157 --
alternatives
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13177/focus=13177 -- Is
the Wikimedia Foundation a "Game"?
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13191/focus=13191 -- Be
bold!
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13203/focus=13203 --
Attempt at a compromise
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/01/03/1311248.shtml -- The Debate Over
Advertising on WIkipedia
=== Request for help ===
[Footer update] - David Gerard of the communications committee has requested
that the footer on all wikis be modified to make it clear that the Wikimedia
Foundation is a charity, not a for-profit company. The page to edit this is
MediaWiki:Copyright.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13360/focus=13360
=== Community ===
[Year in review] - It is customary at the end of the year to look back at the
past year, and also to give prizes to deserving people. This happened on the
Romanian Wikipedia, where some sysops formed a jury and gave honorary prizes to
the users who were present for the whole year in the project and were the best
in their field of work. This was the second time they did that.
http://tinyurl.com/yypkzj
[Esperanza] - The English Wikipedia's infamous Esperanza organisation has been
restructured after a controversial request for deletion. It has now been made
historical, but many of its programs remain active as separate projects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:MFD/EAhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:EA - the historical page.
[Wiki-New-Year] - Every Wikipedia has its own particularity. The English love
templates, the German love quality, the Dutch love to discuss. The Romanians
find excuses to give prizes. A new year also means that changes come into
effect, like political, legal or monetary changes. The Romanian Wikipedia has
made a to-do list and volunteers to make a change for the new year. The first
user to make one of the updates in 2007 and the first new registered user gets
a prize.
If your project does not have such an initiative make sure that Bulgaria and
Romania are now EU member states, Slovenia is using the Euro, and that the
Secretary General of the United nations is Ban Ki-moon.
http://tinyurl.com/y2ux8b
=== Media ===
[nl.wp] - The Dutch language Wikipedia reached 250,000 recently and the local
press was interested. Most newspapers have included an article about it. And so
far as know all positive. There was also coverage about it in the national
television news journal of the Netherlands and the Flemish community of
Belgium.
http://tinyurl.com/y5qouu -- deep link to file -- VRT-news (Flemish) with
[[meta:user:Walter]]
http://tinyurl.com/v7x68 -- RTL 4-news (Netherlands) with [[meta:user:Oscar]]
(WMF-board) and [[meta:user:Effeietsanders]]
[Qatar] - A oil emirate where the citizens need to think hard to grasp the
concept of "taxes" made the news thanks to Wikipedia. And this with titles like
"Wikipedia Bans Qatar Net Users". What happened was the on EN Wikipedia after
again getting some vandalism from a specific ip address that ip was blocked for
one month for anonymous users, account creation not allowed. The problem was
that this one ip address was the external ip of *all* internet users of Qatar.
After about 20 hours some realized that this was not a normal ip address and
account creation was again allowed. Later the block was totally lifted. So the
people of Qatar have again total editing freedom on Wikipedia. At least so long
the state censor of Qatar does not block Wikipedia them self.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/01/1248251http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/01/wikipedia-bans-qatar/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:82.148.97.69
=== Stats ===
[A lot] - 100,000,000 on the English Wikipedia. ...no, that is not yet the
number of articles. It is the number of edits until now on the English language
Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury - recommended related
reading material
[WikiWoordenboek] - The Dutch language Wiktionary has passed the mark of 25,000
entries.
http://www.wikiwoordenboek.org
=== Other news ===
[Wikizine down] - currently the website of Wikizine is down. The reason is very
simple; the host wikizine is using is down. No news how long it will take. The
email distribution system of Wikizine and the website are totally separated. So
one of both should always be available.
=== Was ist das? ===
GCF: the great chinese firewall
NP: No Problem
NOP: Not Our Problem
SUL: Single User Login
BTW: By The Way (*not* near the road)
AFAIK: As Far As I Know
=== Quote ===
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access
to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."-- Jimmy Wales,
July 2004
"As for what it doesn't say:
It does not say, "Imagine an advertising-free world."
It does not say "where every single person who speaks a English or a
European language ..."
It does not say "share freely unless the unfree content is better."
It does not say "free knowledge and links to where to find out more/buy it."
It does not say "That's what we did.""
-- Dannyisme
"It doesnt say "let's thank our sponsers with more ads" either" -- Teun Spaans
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/13350/focus=13350
//////////////////////////////////////////
Number of subscribers: 573
Unique Visitors website this week: 334
Editor(s): Walter, Xyrael
Corrector(s): Gary Kirk, Pathoschild
Thanks to: Romihaitza, Daveydweeb, Annabel
Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://en.wikizine.org
//////////////////////////////////////////
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy,
validity and especially but not limited to,
correct grammar and spelling.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]],
and is not a publication of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html