Wikizine

Year: 2012 Week: 53 Number: 133

2012-12-29T20:16:00.000Z

Technical news

[Wikidata] - the new sister-project Wikidata is growing fast. By year's end the will get up to 2 million records. In the works is now the interwiki language information, later on infoboxes and lists will follow. At present the data of Wikidata is not yet used on any of the projects. The plans are to switch over the Hungarian language Wikipedia over to Wikidata for the use of there interwiki language links on January 14th 2013.

What will that actually mean in practice? - When this function is enabled on a wiki the interwiki language links will be augmented with sitelinks injected in the Wikipedia article. It is unclear what will happen in the future for sitelinks in non-wikipedia articles. At least if there are sitelinks available at Wikidata about that topic. The current local language links must be removed otherwise they will override the Wikidata sitelinks. You will be able to edit these sitelinks on the local wiki with JavaScript. Changes made on the Wikidata sitelinks that effect a local Wikipedia will propagate to them, and also show up in the recent changes of that wiki. If for some reason a local wiki does not want that the injected interwiki language links show up on a specific page the parser function {{Noexternallanglinks}} can be used. When this function is active the net result is that the interwiki links will show up as usual if set, but the maintenance of sitelinks in the Wikipedia-projects will go away.

http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction -- overview of Wikidata

[Visual Editor (Alpha!)] – The wikisoftware that the projects are using – MediaWiki – has come far from the basic wiki it started with. But when you click on the "edit" button is still looks very the same, at least on not to complicated pages. Since very long there is talk about getting on the Wiki a so called WYSIWYG editor, like MS Word. Maybe not a function for everybody but it could get the less technical minded people on the wiki. At he English language Wikipedia – and only there – an early version of a Visual Editor that does that can be switched on in the users preferences. If you go to your "Preferences" screen and click into the "Editing" section, it will have an option labeled "Enable Visual Editor". Please be careful, it is still buggy and you are not allowed to use it on the sandbox page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor

[Mobile WP] – the version of the website for use on phones is getting more functionality. As a logged in user you can edit pages if you enable the "beta" options. And if you enable the "Here be dragons mode" you can upload an image if you use a "webkit browser" like Google Chrome.

[Translate] – Translation of MediaWiki and documentation, policies, newsletters and any sort of page on our multilingual wikis is powered and made easy for thousands of translators by the Translate extension, born on translatewiki.net. A translation memory feature was recently enabled on all Wikimedia wikis after a long work. The translation interface is now being rebuilt to meet translators' needs: test it and give feedback!

Offer

[Wikizine.org] – this domain name is available to be used for a new project. If you have an idea for what this domain name can be useful for contact user:Walter

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Walter

Proposals

[Wikimania 2013] – The – already – 9th Wikimania will be in Hong Kong next year. It will be from 7 to 11 August 2013. The call for participation is open now! So, if you an idea for doing some sort of presentation at Wikimania then it is now the time to enter you proposal.

http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions

Policy

[Uploads] - It is proposed to start a new RfC to approve a new Local uploads policy. Local uploads need a big policy and template infrastructure; most wikis don't and can't have it, and at least a hundred wikis are currently breaking the WMF licensing policy. Additionally, only Commons has the UploadWizard. It's proposed to make uploads more effective and legal by switching them to Commons-only by default, so that only the wikis which have an EDP will keep or get local uploads.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Local_uploads_policy

Foundation

[WikiVoyage] – "the free, worldwide travel guide that anyone can edit." will be joining the Wikimedia Foundation family officially on Wikipedia Day, January 15th 2013. The have there origin at Wikitravel.org, also a project with the same mission. The German language Wikitravel split off in 2006 and became Wikivoyage. The Wikimedia Foundation Wikivoyage will be the "fork" Wikivoyage in German and Italian and the content and most of the userbase of Wikitravel's remaining language editions. This results in the following languages that are supported in the new WMF-project; English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian and Swedish. The interwiki link to link to Wikivoyage is "voy:". Example; the link for the page about "Bolivia" on the Dutch language Wikivoyage is voy:nl:Bolivia

[WMF annual audit 2011-2012] – The annual audit of the Wikimedia Foundation, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012 and the corresponding FAQ have been posted on the financial reports page of the Wikimedia Foundation web site. The report shows that from a financial POV it goes very well with the WMF. Cash increased from $12 million to $21.8 million. Investment in technology has gone up by $2.6 million and net assets increased by $10.7 million. Expenses for the fiscal year increased from $17.9 million to $29.3 million. The total assets of the WMF are now over $ 37 million.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports

[Chapters comm. vacancy] – The "Affiliations Committee" – formerly known as Chapters Committee – is searching for 6 new members. Deadline for candidacies is January 12th. Inform yourself very well in advance; there is actual work involved with it.

[Fundraiser] – The last fundraiser – already the 9th – was once again a great success. The Wikimedia Foundation received 25 million US-dollar in donations from 1,2 million individuals. 25 million dollar is exactly the goal the WMF did set at the start of the campaign. This campaign did only run on the flagship wiki, the English language Wikipedia. The other languages and projects will get a fund drive presented on there wiki in April 2013.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/27/wikimedia-foundation-raises-25-million-in-record-time-during-2012-fundraiser/

[WMF annual plan 2012-2013] – is published. It is fairly extensive and summarizing it in 3 sentences does not does it justice. Anyhow; focus will be in getting more people to edit and to keep the current editors. This by making it more easy for potential editors to do it, like the VisalEditor. The WMF also will continue to push to get access to Wikpedia by means of mobile data networks in developing country's free of charge. That is the "Wikipedia Zero" program.

Community

[Commons contest] – Commons will start again with there yearly "Picture of the Year" contest, the 7th edition. Round one will start the day after Wikipedia Day.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2012/Introduction

[Wikipedia almost 12-years old] – Currently we are in the middle of the Christmas & new-year holidays. But once again the most important holiday of the calender is coming up; Wikipedia Day. On January 15th 2012 Wikipedia turned eleven years old. So it comes at no surprise that Wikipedia will now turn twelve. And do not forget, at January 25th there is also of course "Magnus Manske Day". Wikipedia day is the day the first Wikipedia – the English one – started. Magnus Manske Day celebrates the launch of the Phase II wikisoftware; a Wikipedia specific wiki, a very early version of MediaWiki.

[Project proposal] – Wikifocus; "to describe everything related to Wiki technology (wikis and their members, wiki softwares and their capabilities)." The proposal to add this project to the WMF family is open for discussion at Meta. Interesting about this is that there is already a small active Russian group of 20 users running a Russian independent Wikifocus wiki. Communication between these Russian speakers and English language users at Meta seems to be problematic.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiFocus -- join in and maybe help out with the Babel problems
http://wikifocus.org/ -- active wiki in Russian

[Wikizine] – At the end of 2005 a news newsletter was started. The intention with it was to inform the community of all the projects across all languages about what was going on. To break the language barriers. For this a network of volunteers across the projects and languages was envisioned to make of Wikizine an information exchange hub. The years up to 2008 where the most successful years of Wikizine. There was a weekly publication rate and frequently extra editions. Wikizine existed also in German, Spanish and Indonesian. But it could not truly deliver the universal projects news as was intended. Wikizine was not able to attract and maintain the necessary people to make that happen. Due to the staff shortage quality could not be guaranteed. And from 2009 on also not the publication rate. It became more monthly then weekly. The other language editions where closed. The publication of Wikizine became an exception. Since 2010 Wikizine is virtually a dead newsletter. In August-September 2011 it suddenly came back to life under the direction of a new editor-in-chief with many different Wikizine versions. The new editor disappeared and so also the revival. And Wikizine continued in zombie mode until now. Wikizine 133, this edition, will be the final Wikizine. Thank you. Walter (talk)

http://wikizine.blogspot.com -- Notice; new location for the blog, the domain name "wikizine.org" will not longer be supported

[Wiktionary] – is one of these projects of our WMF family that gets less space in the sun then others, the dictionary project. But it is more then a dictionary. It is a community building the absolute, the final dictionary. Offering translations from all languages to all languages is only a small part of its mission. There are around 150 active Wiktionary languages editions but the contain words in many more languages. Wiktionary has at least some words in 1029 different languages out of the over 6900 that exist.

And Wiktionary has just celebrated its 10th anniversary as a project on December 12th. The full report and scope of the celebrations can be found at the link below. Media coverage of these celebrations could not be found unfortunately.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Wiktionary_Day

[Wiktionary logos] – 56 Wiktionaries who never had one got a localised logo enabled, thanks to the work by Casey Brown, Odder and many translators. More work is coming for dozens of Wikipedias and other projects without a localised logo; everyone can help.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2012-December/002193.html

Media

[Jimmy Wales & Kazahkstan] – In August the WMF awarded by means of Jimmy Wales the first ever "Global Wikipedian of the Year" award to Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, a Wikipedian from Kazakhstan who founded a non-profit organization WikiBilim. With help of this organization the Kazakh Wikipedia grew from 7000 articles to 70,000 in 3 months time. (currently the are over 200,000 articles). Concerns are now raised that this Wikipedia of year is actually a government puppet of the dictatorial government of Kazakhstan. This because of the previous functions in the government service, especially in the propaganda department. And because the WikiBilim organization is funded with the money of state oil.

Jimmy Wales responded with; "The Wikimedia Foundation has zero collaboration with the government of Kazakhstan. Wikibilim is a totally independent organization. And it is absolutely wrong to say that I am "helping the Kazakh regime whitewash its image." I am a firm and strong critic. At the same time, I'm excited by the work of volunteers, and I believe—very strongly—that an open and independent Wikipedia will be the death knell for tyranny in places like Kazakhstan."

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/05/class-assignment-inspired-wikipedian-of-the-year-to-grow-kazakh-wikipedia/ -- "Wikipedian of the Year"
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/wikipedia-kazakhstan-dictatorship/ -- WikiBilm, the WP of the year and the Kazakh dictatorship
http://tinyurl.com/cm5pdwm --- talk page of Jimmy Wales about this , it contains an extensive responds of Jimmy about this

[Why did you donate] – the question is raised "Are People Who Donate to Wikipedia Just Better People in General?"
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/wikipedia-donors-better-people.html

[Wikitube] – no, there is not (yet) a project Wikitube. But the WMF does have an account at Youtube. You can find some video's about how to edit. And also videos of users who explain what Wikipedia mean form them in there live. Those are interesting to watch because it gives a face behind the recent changes.

http://www.youtube.com/user/WikimediaFoundation

Stats

Wikimedia Commons has reached 15,000,000 files, 73 days after reaching 14,000,000.
The Low German/Low Saxon Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles
The Tamil Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
The Romanian Wikibooks has reached 500 book modules.
[Wikiquote books and booklovers] - The Italian Wikiquote continues its expansion on the main booklovers social network of Italy: its group on aNobii has 1300+ members (one of the biggest groups). ISBNs of quoted books were extracted from it, en, fr.quote and experimentally added. The Italian has about 4500 ISBNs and 10 thousands books identified in total, English and French about 2500 ISBNs. Italian seems to quote all the books that English does, plus many more; a third of fr.quote's books are quoted also on en and it.

http://www.anobii.com/groups/0105f4f6d9a205e8a9/ -- IT Wikiquote at a social network for booklovers
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikiquote-l/2012-December/000146.html

Other news

[New Gopher server] – At this new Gopher-hole you can find a list of Wikipedia articles created last month/week/day with most users contributing to article within the same period. Updated hourly.

gopher://gopher.conus.info/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/overbiteff/ -- add support for Gopher to FireFox

[WMF shop] – since a while there is WMF webshop. You can buy a T-shirt and other clothing, stickers and pins and quality bags. Shipment is from the US but the are offering a flat fee of $10 for the shipping costs to all destinations. Nevertheless if you only wanted to buy a key-chain it gets very expensive. When a local wikimeet is coming up you could do a group order and divide the costs that way.

http://shop.wikimedia.org/

Did you know ...

... that the edits of experts make an article harder to read?

"The reason is clear, they say: articles on difficult topics are written by experts who sacrifice readability for accuracy – and that is compounded as other experts weigh in with further accuracy-obsessed edits that remove "simplifications, generalisations or intuitive explanations" that might have served to aid readability."

http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/12/study-the-expert-editors-of-wikipedia-make-it-harder-to-read/

Quote

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

-- Last message of the dolphins to the people of Earth before leaving it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_Long,_and_Thanks_for_All_the_Fish



Editor(s): Walter, Nemo - Thanks to: Amgine, Jeblad, hoo  Sources-Attributions:Jeblad,Lydia Pintscher   Website: http://wikizine.blogspot.com  Gopher: is down and probably will not come back  Contact: [[meta:user:Walter]]  
Happy new-year, good fortune and health in MMXIII    
Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and   especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling.  Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly  inspired or directly copied from other sources.   Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".  Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].  Content is available under Creative Commons   Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Year: 2012 Week: 4 Number: 132

2012-01-17T20:29:00.000Z

The EN Wikipedia goes offline for 24 hours

The community of the English language Wikipedia has decided to "blackout" the English Wikipedia for 24 hours. A sort of strike thus. The blackout goes in to effect from 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18. The blackout is a protest against the proposed law of the United States of America "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA).

The protest is there because the proposed law could harm the operation of community driven website like Wikipedia.
The decision of the Community of the English language Wikipedia is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. This in the first time the English Wikipedia - the oldest and most popular of all Wikipedias - does something like this. The Italian language Wikipedia did this a couple of months ago.
Other language Wikipedias have indicated to show support by displaying a banner but not also go "dark". Also non-Wikimedia websites will take part but not all by going dark. Google will put a link on there homepage about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOPA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/16/wikipedias-community-calls-for-anti-sopa-blackout-january-18/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-01-16/Special_report
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-01-16/News_and_notes
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/58755
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech
http://www.sopastrike.com/ -- websites that join the strike
```
Editor(s): Walter - Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and 
especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly
inspired or directly copied from other sources.  Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons 
Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
```

Anno Domini MMXII Week II Number CXXXI

2012-01-07T18:02:00.000Z

Foundation

[Terms Of Use] - On websites the "Terms of Use" are what most of us frequently indicate to agree with but never reed. Also Wikipedia has a "Terms of Use". A "Terms of use" for Wikipedia came only to existence years after its founding and remained very basic. Until now. In original Wikimedia style a new Terms Of use have been written by the community at Meta. It is more extensive then the current but it remains, for a "Terms of Use", relative short and very readable. The WMF board still needs to approve it before it can replaces the current "Terms of Use".
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/31/terms-of-use/
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use -- New "Terms of Use" (final community draft)

[The Annual Fundraiser] - Despite the economic problems of the world - the Wikimedia Foundation did it again. The goal is every year higher but the donations follow. The WMF has raised the new record amount of 20 million US dollar in the fundraiser that just now ended. The miracle of the WMF business model to just ask for money keeps working. But even a miracle needs some help. Last year the WMF spend 1,8 USD $ on fundraising. The operating budget of the WMF will increase in spending in 2011-12 compared with 2010-11 with $9.8 million. 28.3 million USD will be the current budget. The gap between the raised amount and the budget is closed by several grants and continuous donations. 44% of the budget will go to running the actual web-infrastructure. 24% will go to management, finance and administration. A tiny fraction smaller, 23% of the budget, is under the label "Other programs". The Community department and the Global Development department falls under that slice. The rest are fundraising costs. Best read the annual plan if you wish to know more.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/02/wikimedia-fundraiser-concludes-with-record-breaking-donations/
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2011-2012_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers

[Grant of $3.6 Million] - The Stanton Foundation -, a long term funder of the WMF, donated $3.6 million USD (2,61 Million EUR) to the Wikimedia Foundation. This is the largest grant ever received by the WMF.
http://tinyurl.com/3qv5grb

Technical news

[https] - It was already possible to login to the projects by means of a secure connection but that was by means of a "https://secure.wikimedia.org" -type of link. Now the usable links work. Just add the "s" to the protocol. This works on all Wikimedia wikis. Using https is not yet the default option when you login. If you wish to use it you need to enter it manually.
https://en.wikipedia.org

[Article Feedback] - A new article feedback system is in testing at EN Wikipedia. A previous version used a star-system the the reader could give to articles. The new one uses a different approach. It does not asks to give points but the give real textual reader feedback. More like a very easy comment function like on blogs and news sites. Only are the comments not posted. Currently the collected data is only for testing and not public. The idea is that editors will be able to assess the feedback in the future. The test runs on limited number of articles on EN Wikipedia.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/a-new-way-to-contribute-to-wikipedia/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_%28operating_system%29 -- example article with the new feedback function

Movement

[Al Jazeera] - The media company Al Jazeera, mostly know for its television stations, is releasing a large part of the pictures and video's the make under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0). This is very, very great news. Wikinews and Wikipedia now have access to recent quality material for there articles about topics that would be nearly impossible otherwise.
http://cc.aljazeera.net/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aljazeeraenglish/sets/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_Al_Jazeera

Media

[Wikipedia Vs. Britannica] - It is not original but always interesting to read; compare the articles of Wikipedia with those of Britannica and other classic sources by academics. The reaserch is published in the peer-reviewed medical journal "Psychological Medicine". To read the actual article you can "buy" the article for $45 or "rent" it for $5,99. Luckily the Singpost is not so silly.
http://tinyurl.com/6mzosac -- free read

Events and meetups

[Wikipedia Day] - next week, Sunday, it will be once more Wikipedia Day; the founding day of Wikipedia. The 15th of January Wikipedia will be become 11-years old. Several community's will hold a wiki-meetup in honour or Wikipedia Day in India, Mexico, United Kingdom, United States .... see link and check your local community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day#Wikipedia_Day_2012

Other news

[Illustrators] - An art and design school in Barcelona and the Catalan foundation "Friends of Wikipedia" have made a partnership in which 6 illustration students are doing their final degree creating images that will be incorporated under free licenses to Wikimedia Commons to illustrate some Wikipedia articles.
http://theglamwikiexperience.blogspot.com/2012/01/emerging-illustrators-internship.html

[Wikiriffs] - "Every week or so I go to Wikipedia, click Random Article, and write a song about whatever comes up."
https://www.youtube.com/user/WikiRiffs

Wikizine

[?] - between mid August and the end of September there was a short but strong burst of Wikizines in different new editions, new emerging concepts for Wikizine. This was under the direction of the new lead editor of Wikizine User Milos. Unfortunately it was a short candle that burned out very fast. This Wikizine is once more a "Classic edition". No more "News", "Talk" of "Opinion" editions. It is constructed once more by User:Walter. Realistically speaking Wikizine is dead since long. This edition and possible future editions are the product just of plain stubbornness to continue more or less despite any objective reason to do so. In that spirit I also wish to point out that Wikizine is still also online at Gopher-space. The wikizine.org domain is just renewed for two years so in any case that will remain online for the near future. Happy new year! -- User:Walter

Request for help

[WikiLovesMonuments] - The photo contest. Edition 2010 was only in the Netherlands. Edition 2011 was in many European country's and very successful. Will the edition of 2012 be a truly global event? Would you be interested in organizing a Wiki Loves Monuments in 2012 in your country? Would you like to know more? See the links below and join the mailing list.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012 -- first steps for the 2012 edition
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011_winners - see the winners of 2011
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/ -- main website of WLM
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments -- join the mailing list

[Babel] - The Babel extension is a system to indicate what languages you speak and at what level. Your invited to check of in your language everything is (correctly) translated.
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2012/01/ask-and-it-will-be-given.html

Did you know ...

... that it very easy to get a QRcode for any Wikipedia article?

A QR code a square barcode that is used to point to online resources that people can lookup with there mobile device. The website QRpedia.org makes it very easy make a code for any Wikipedia article. The code is language independent. When used it will return to the user the Wikipedia article about that topic in the language of the user based on the language settings of the mobile device. This system is used in several museums to provide multi-language extra information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QRpedia
http://qrpedia.org/

Quote

"jimmy_wales; I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us. 23 Dec Twitter."

Our Chairman Emeritus takes a political standpoint against a new US law that could threat online freedom of speech.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act#Companies_and_organizations

Editor(s): Walter

Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and 
especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling.
Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly
inspired or directly copied from other sources. 
Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].
Content is available under Creative Commons 
Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Wikizine News - Year: 2011 Week: 40 Number: 130

2011-09-29T07:52:00.000Z

Movement

[30 September] - The last day of the project Wiki Loves Monuments for this year is September 30th. So if you still have pictures of monuments, it is not yet to late to share them on Commons and maybe win a prize. Currently there are already more then 125,000 new pictures added to commons in this one month of Wikimedia Loves Monuments. Yes - 125,000 - that is correct. And ... one country is Done - Andorra has now 100% of the monuments photographed!
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011

[Image filter] - Discussion about ethical problems with image filter implementation on Wikisource started by John Vanderberg, one of the most active Wikisource editors and the chair of Wikimedia Australia.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Image_filter_on_Wikisource

Technical news

[Automatic photo orientation] - Brion Vibber informs us about automatic photo orientation in MediaWiki 1.18. At least if the orientation information is available in the EXIF-information.
http://leuksman.com/log/2011/09/23/automatic-photo-orientation-in-mediawiki-1-18/

[New look on statistics] - Erik Zachte created a new new look for Wikimedia statistics. Interpretation of data in editorial of this week's Opinion edition.
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2011/09/summary-reports-for-all-wikimedia-wikis/

[Wikimedia India conference] - India Hackathon 2011 will be held during Wikimedia India conference (18-20 November).
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/25/india-hackathon-2011/

Foundation

[Google Summer of Code] - Sumana Harihareswara, WMF's Volunteer Development Coordinator, published a report on Wikimedia-related projects from the Google Summer of Code.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/22/gsoc-students-reach-project-milestones/
http://code.google.com/soc/

[Jon Harald Søby becomes Community Fellow] - Jon’s fellowship will run until February 2012. His project priorities include recruiting and coordinating more translators for more languages, building pages and processes that make it easier for new volunteers to get started, and improving systems for producing high-quality translations.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/27/announcing-community-fellow-jon-harald-soby/
https://sugar.corp.wikimedia.org/translators/translators.php?referrer=wikizine -- Sign up to be a translator

Jimmy Wales

[London startup competition] - Jimmy is leading the jury for a new startup funding event kicking off in London this December.
http://thenextweb.com/uk/2011/09/22/wikipedia-co-founder-jimmy-wales-heads-up-new-london-startup-competition/

[On Wikipedia and Facebook] - Jimmy on Wikipedia and Facebook for The Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/26/wikipedia-jimmy-wales_n_982243.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/27/wales_no_outing_wikipedia_on_facebook/

[Why 'like' button isn't enough?] - Jimmy thinks that the 'like' button isn't enough.
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/fast-chat-jimmy-wales-135257

Chapters

[Wikimedia India] - Wikimedia India opened blog.
http://wikimedia.in/?p=26

[Wikimedia Germany] - Wikimedia Germany published the book "Alles über Wikipedia – und die Menschen hinter der größten Enzyklopädie der Welt", which is the first ever book in the catalogue of a traditional German publisher that is published under a free license.
http://wikimedia.de/wiki/Wikipedia_Buch
http://philippebeaudette.com/great-news-from-wikimedia-deutschland/

[Wikimedia Poland] - Wikimedia Poland celebrated 10 years of the Polish Wikipedia. The Polish media covered the event.
http://www.poland.pl/news/article,Polish_Wikipedia_is_10_Years_Old,id,461162.htm
http://www.thenews.pl/1/12/Artykul/55748,Polish-Wikipedia-marks-10th-anniversary

[Wiki Loves Monuments] - Wiki Loves Monuments officially ends on 30 September, although there will be some events after the official end.
http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/wiki-loves-monuments-comes-to-a-close/

[Wiki Takes Cologne] - Wiki took Cologne, Germany in one of the last events of this year's Wiki Loves Monuments campaign. Jimmy Wales got Leonardo Award in Cologne.
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/2011/09/25/wiki-loves-monuments-cologne-koeln/
http://blog.wikimedia.de/2011/09/25/wiki-loves-monuments-koln/ (in German)
http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/leonardo-award-in-cologne/

[Wikimedia UK CEO] - Jon Davies is the new CEO of Wikimedia UK.
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2011/09/welcoming-our-new-chief-executive/

[Wikimedia UK charity status] - Wikimedia UK wants to get charity status. It will hold an Extraordinary General Meeting (a formal and required step for the organization) on 16 October to organize those efforts.
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2011/09/egm-16th-october-help-us-become-a-charity/

Languages

[The difference #Urdu makes] - Gerard Meijssen published a blog post on Philippe Beaudette's blog about Urdu writing systems.
http://philippebeaudette.com/the-difference-urdu-makes/

[RTL support] - Amir Aharoni wrote on Gerard Meijssen's blog about MediaWiki RTL support during the upgrade to the version 1.18.
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/09/mediawiki-rtl-support-when-upgrading-to.html

[Better localization support] - Niklas Laxström presents a new way of localization in MediaWiki.
http://laxstrom.name/blag/2011/09/26/mediawiki-grows-up-no-more-playing-with-lego/

Media

[Wikipedia Signpost] - A new Wikipedia Signpost has been published. In this edition you can read: Opinion essay: The global mission, the image filter and the “German question”, WikiProject Automobiles, Top female Wikipedians, reverted newbies, WikiSym previews and so on.
http://www.wikipediasignpost.com/blog/?p=438

Anniversaries

[1 October] - Newari Wikipedia will become five years old. Newari or Nepal Bhasa or Newah Bhaye is a Sino-Tibetan language of Tibeto-Burman branch spoken by more than 800,000 people, mostly in Nepal. Newari Wikipedia has around 70,000 content pages, but it is barely active.
http://new.wikipedia.org/
http://new.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal_Bhasa
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=new
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibeto-Burman_languages
http://new.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaNEW.htm

[Other anniversaries] - During the next month the Korean and Malay Wikipedias will become nine years old, while Abkhaz and Albanian will become eight years old. Wikimedia France will become seven years old, while Wikimedia Sweden will become four years old.

Wikizine

[Your reports] - Post your news for the next edition of Wikizine on Meta or in our Google form.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/EN2011-131
http://tinyurl.com/wikizine-feedback

Events and meetups

[21 August - 6 October] - Stewards election.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2
- [21 August - 6 October] - Questions to candidates.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2/Questions
- [15 September - 6 October] - Voting.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2/Guidelines/en#Voters

[19 September - 4 October] - Wikimedia servers upgrades to MediaWiki 1.18
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/
- [19 September] - Monday, September 19, 23:00-01:00 UTC -- Production test: test2.wikipedia.org – this stage will ensure that 1.18 is compatible with the rest of our production infrastructure. There’s a small chance that changes here could affect all wikis.
- [21 September] - Wednesday, September 21, 23:00-03:00 UTC -- Stage 1: simple.wikipedia.org, simple.wiktionary.org, usability.wikimedia.org, strategy.wikimedia.org, mediawiki.org, he.wikisource.org
- [26 September] - Monday, September 26, 23:00-03:00 UTC -- Stage 2: meta.wikimedia.org, en.wikiquote.org, en.wikibooks.org, beta.wikiversity.org, eo.wikipedia.org, nl.wikipedia.org
- [4 October] - Tuesday, October 4, 23:00-03:00 UTC -- Stage 3: remaining wikis.

[30 September] - The last day of the project Wiki Loves Monuments for this year is September 30th.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011

[1 October] - A Backstage Pass tour is an event aimed at sharing the expertise of real-world cultural institutions with our wiki-expertise. Wikimedia UK organizes it at Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, UK.
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Backstage_Pass

[1 October] - Washington DC meetup #23. Wiki DC board elections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/DC_23

[3-5 October] - WikiSym 2011 with the session "Understanding Wikipedia".
http://www.wikisym.org/category/wikisym-2011/
http://www.wikisym.org/2011/09/14/session-preview-understanding-wikipedia/

[7-8 October] - Board meeting, San Francisco, California, USA
http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Minutes/2011-08-03&oldid=68235#Welcome_.26_Housekeeping_Items

[8 October]: Cambridge 12 meetup
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Cambridge/12

[8 October]: National Archives (Wikimedia DC meetup 24)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NARA_2

[14 October]: Wikimedia UK's Extraordinary General Meeting
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/EGM_2011

[26-30 October] - Wikipedia conference in Esperanto will be held in Svitavy’s Esperanto museum, in Svitavy, Czech Republic.
http://www.vikimanio.estranky.cz/
http://www.transparent.com/esperanto/wikipedia-conference-in-esperanto-oct-26-30-2011/
http://www.muzeum.esperanto.cz/eo/cxefa

Did you know ...

... what protocol relative URLs are?

Normal URLs look like: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page or https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.
Both of these URLs define the protocol that will be used. Protocol relative URLs look like this: //test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Dropping the protocol from the URL allows the browser to assign the current protocol to the URL. So, if you are visiting the site in HTTPS mode, links will point to HTTPS, and if you are visiting the site in HTTP mode, links will point to HTTP.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/07/19/protocol-relative-urls-enabled-on-test-wikipedia-org -- full post about this by Ryan Lane
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/27/protocol-relative-urls-enabled-on-all-wikimedia-foundation-wikis/ -- protocol relative URLs are now live

Quote

"I’m sort of the anti-Julian Assange. I’m actually a nice person. I don’t mean to say anything negative about him, but he’s widely regarded as difficult." -- Jimmy Wales

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/fast-chat-jimmy-wales-135257

Wikizine-seeks-editors , Editor(s): Milos, Walter - Corrector(s): nathan - Thanks to: effeietsanders - Sources-Attributions: "Did you know" is by Ryan Lane blog post - Support: Walter - Contact: http://report.wikizine.org - Website: http://www.wikizine.org - Gophersite: gopher://gopher.wikizine.org - Wikizine-loves-feedback - Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions". Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Wikizine Techflash - Year: 2011 Week: 40

2011-09-27T11:46:00.005Z

Re-post:

Hi again folks,

We want to run another set of banners to recruit translators for the
fundraiser this week, in some areas overlapping with the WLM banners.

If it is alright with you we would like to do it the same way we did
previously, namely with a rough 25-75 split with the WLM banners, so
they are still shown. The banners will only run for logged-in users,
so anonymous users will not be affected.

The countries that will be affected are these:

Tuesday 27th

17:00–21:00 UTC: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands
15:00–21:00 UTC: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Andorra

Wednesday 28th

17:00–22:00 UTC: Portugal, Spain

Thursday 29th

12:00–23:59 UTC: Poland

Friday 30th

12:00–23:59 UTC: Russia, Hungary, Estonia, Romania

Please let me know if there is a problem – and sorry about the late
notice for the ones tomorrow.

--
Jon Harald Søby
Community Fellow
Wikimedia Foundation

Request for help
[Sign-up for translation] - Frequently there are messages that need to be translated in, if possible, all the languages of the projects. If you like to volunteer to be a translator you can register yourself (see link) so when you are needed you can be contacted.
https://sugar.corp.wikimedia.org/translators/translators.php?referrer=wikizine

Wikizine Opinion - Year: 2011 Week: 39 Number: 129 BIS

2011-09-25T15:45:00.002Z

Wikizine needs YOU!

Wikipedia has already changed the world. Wikimedia movement is at the beginning of that task. To push the movement into that direction, Wikizine needs your bold ideas and personal perspectives! Send your ideas to us or simply add them into the appropriate section. What YOU think can change the world!
Send us email, give us feedback, write it on foundation-l, on Meta!

Editorial
- Wikizine
- In the mean time on foundation-l...
- Wikinews: Criticism and fork
- Song of the week
Personal perspective: The cows of Jimmy Walker
In the news
Time machine
- 10 years ago
- 5 years ago
From Wikipedia

Editorial by Milos

Wikizine

As you can see, there are two regular and one irregular editions of Wikizine. Wikizine News should stay more or less like Wikizine always was: plain news for Wikimedia community. Breaking News or Tech Flash are for irregular editions for important news and they existed before, as well.
Wikizine Opinion or Talk Edition or Weekend Edition (we still want to get your input about the name of this edition!) should be for longer reading, over weekends.
You can see that there are five main parts of this edition: "Editorial", "Personal perspective", "In the news", "Time machine" and "From Wikipedia".
Of those, "Time machine" debuts in this edition. It's about events in and around the Wikimedia community ten and five years ago. We should remind ourselves of past events and still modern ideas.
Thanks to Walter, Wikizine got its gopher [1] site [2]. Gopher existed before the web and it was a non-graphical hypertext protocol. Just ~150 gopher sites left on the Internet by now. I was very happy when I realized that. My only objection is that we have to find a way to have the whole site in pure gopher menus and text, as some of the pages are in HTML, which is a shame! You know, we are geeks, at last :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
[2] gopher://gopher.wikizine.org/

In the meantime on foundation-l...

Like with any good soap opera, after years of discussions about nudity on Wikimedia projects and filtering it, you didn't miss anything! If you join now, you would see the same people, the same relations between them, the same intrigues, but in brand new packaging. But, most importantly, something which you can't do with soap operas, YOU can raise a pro or contra argument a year old and people would discuss it seriously and with the same passion as it was at the beginning! Once again, Wikimedia community proved that it's as vital as it was years ago.
On my Gmail account I have 43 foundation-l threads for the period of 17-23 September. Of those:

21 about image filter and similar, including another of Larry Sanger's self-promotional tweets
3 about forking Wikinews
3 about friendly organizations
4 chapter-related
3 WMF and tech related
2 related to languages
3 posts by internal bulletins (Wikipedia Signpost and Wikizine)
4 miscellaneous

Wikinews: criticism and fork

Wikinews was featured on foundation-l for the first time this month when it was complained that the English Wikinews project has a "codified bias toward non-Western articles" [1].
From a personal perspective, I can say that the English Wikinews, unlike the English Wikipedia, has a significant number of native English speakers who are not willing to accept non-English sources for anything: news source or proof that a Wikinewsie is good enough editor to become accredited journalist. A couple of years ago, I had a hard time trying to convince them to give accreditation to one Serbian and one Polish Wikinewsie. But, fortunately, the core of editors are sane enough.
Last week The Open Globe [2][3], a Wikinews fork, was created. That triggered long discussions about Wikipedia's sister projects and their ability to be self-sustainable.

In 2007 I made a deal with Beta News Agency [4], the main privately-owned news agency from Serbia, to give to Wikinews short news for free. The deal is, actually, that we've got everything from Beta's site under CC-BY 2.5 license. As you can see, besides Serbian, there are news services in English [5], Hungarian [6], Romani [7] and Albanian [8]. Four existing and one non-existing edition are able to get high quality news, mostly from Serbia.
A bot is running on Serbian Wikinews and adding news from Beta. Because of that, Serbian Wikinews has almost as many articles as all other Wikinews editions [9].
However, the bot on Serbian Wikinews is not running presently, actually. For about two weeks there has been a problem with harvesting and I have to fix it. I'll do that, but the problem is the fact that one substantial part of one project depends only on the free time and willingness of one volunteer.
For four years I was trying to find just one more person interested in developing and maintaining the bot, but I didn't find anyone. With two persons, we could maintain not just Serbian Wikinews, but other Wikinews editions, as well.

News is not news two days after it has been published. Only those who research a specific event read old news. Thus, one task is to "fix" encyclopedic article, the other is to do that with news.
Because of that Wikinews is not attractive to trolls, but it isn’t attractive to regular editors of Wikipedia, either.
The main problem with Wikinews is the lack of the fulfillment which Wikipedia offers: What did I do? Wrote an article which was popular for two days, one week?
Writing news requires another kind of motivation. Relevant encyclopedias shape cultures. Relevant news outlets shape public opinion. As our contemporary society is based on short-term goals, there is much more competition in writing news than in writing encyclopedias. The threshold for making a news outlet relevant is insanely high.
But, it is possible to change things!

While waiting for one WMF programmer devoted to Wikinews (there are a lot of programmers devoted to Wikipedia), if one volunteer programmer would be interested in programming bots for Wikinews, we could use the bot not just for the English Wikinews additionally, but for other Wikinews editions as well.
WMF should employ at least one person to deal with Wikinews. Many persons are employed to deal with Wikipedia.
WMF should promote Wikinews and the other sister projects. There are other projects beside Wikipedia and Commons in the Wikimedia family.

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/067943.html
[2] http://theopenglobe.org/
[3] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/068277.html
[4] http://www.beta.rs/
[5] http://www.beta.rs/default.asp?lan=en
[6] http://www.beta.rs/default.asp?lan=hu
[7] http://www.beta.rs/default.asp?lan=rm
[8] http://www.beta.rs/default.asp?lan=al
[9] http://www.wikinews.org/

Song of the week

The song of the week is [1]. Lyrics could be found, for example, here [2].
[1] http://tinyurl.com/66ctj3g
[2] http://tinyurl.com/6cdgnvm

Personal perspective

Joan Goma [1] wrote the text for this edition of Wikizine's Personal opinion. Joan Goma is the president of Associació Amical Viquipèdia [2][3], an organization which wants to be recognizes as the Wikimedia chapter for Catalonia [4].
[1] http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuari:Gom%C3%A0
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Associaci%C3%B3_Amical_Viquip%C3%A8dia [3] http://www.viquimedia.cat/
[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CAT

The cows of Jimmy Walker

In a far away country there was a town known as English where people engaged in the milk business. This is a very tricky business because you have to care for the cows, giving them food, milking them and sell the milk. The amount of milk that the cows gave never matched completely with the one needed by the population and this generated problems. To solve them they had tried all kinds of organizational systems. In a quarter of the town, if you had two cows then the district council took up the cows and they manage them taking in mind the needs of the population and not the selfishness of the owner. But then nobody had much interest on looking after them and they died.

In another quarter they let you have the cows but they took away the milk from you, this way the cows were cared of because there was that one who was interested on maintaining them and then the council decided how the milk was distributed according to the needs of the population and not based on who was richer. Then the owners of the cows had almost no income die of hunger or boredom, then no one will take care of the cows and the cows died. In another quarter they allow you to kept the cows and milk then you sell a cow and buy a bull have more and more cows and more and more milk then the price of milk falls so that you could neither feed the cows nor pay the salaries of the employees who looked after the cows and the cows eventually also died. [1]

One day a farmer named Jimmy Walker, with several crosses and genetic experiments, he obtained a new race of cattle. They were cows that give an infinite amount of milk and that did not eat any fodder. Those cows were very nice and many people liked to look after them, liked them so much that they were willing to do it for free. Jimmy started his farm with a new business model. He distributed the milk for free. At first nobody believed that this may work. Some said some cattle cared for by unpaid volunteers may not give good milk in any way. To take care of cows should be well prepared and very responsible. Others said that carers are volunteers, that cares for one day that they presented by his nickname instead of their real name and we do not know if they are really responsible for taking care of the cows. Others said that what costs nothing is worth nothing.

But Jimmy went ahead and the milk turned out to be better every day to the extent that many farmers folded because they could not compete with the milk of high quality and for free delivered by Jimmy. The business expanded. First milk was distributed only to the English town, and then he opened farms in other villages, opened in a town known as German, and in another known as Catalan. The people from Catalan town were quick to raise cows and started right away, [2] others did take a couple of months but the business also did well and soon was extended to more and more towns to virtually all world. [3]

On growing the first problem arose. Although the cows did not eat and caregivers did it for free, distribute milk cost money. At first Jimmy did not mind paying it out of his pocket but there was a moment that could not. Then he decided to set up a non-profit foundation. To find a way the foundation have income to pay the costs of transporting milk at the beginning he thought that maybe he could put ads on milk bottles. But then those that looked after the cows told him that they did not agree with this that, if he made this, they no longer wanted to continue caring for the cows for free.

Then he remembered a day walking around Prague had seen that some musicians played for free and the people who wanted giving them money. He thought that, as it was only necessary to pay the transport of the milk, perhaps there would be enough of maintaining the milk for free and without advertisements and asking those drinking the milk that give what they want. Said and done and the system worked.

The system worked so well that the foundation, with the money raised not only paid transport costs but also hired people to make technical improvements in the stables and to manage the storage and transport of milk, donations and legal requirements of handling money.

Some of those that looked after the cows were not very happy that others get paid while they worked for free. So Jimmy set up elections so that a few members of the Board of Directors of the foundation were chosen by carers of the cows. Thus, as the work of the foundation was necessary for delivering of the milk and improve the cow stables caregivers agreed to continue caring for them for free.

To encourage carers of cows foundation began to organize annual meetings called cow-mania and began to create local chapters of caregivers of cows. Encouraging carers to create associations and allowing them to use the brand of milk to promote its drink and to encourage more people to look after the cows.

Seeing that everything worked so well a new economic theory appeared. It was named cow-economics. The cow-economics consisted in obtaining a race of animals that they grew up without eating, like Jimmy's cows, and they should be very friendly then encouraging a community to take care of the animals for free. At the beginning of each business a small company paid the expenses of distributing the products obtained from animals and of organizing festivals and competitions to keep happy the community of caregivers. The products were given away for private consumption but they put advertising on packaging, they asked for donations and charged fees for uses for profit.

The cow-economic companies began to populate the economic system. Companies spent a lot of resources to studying the psychology of the caretakers of animals and build very user-friendly stables. Emerged a lot of companies like cow-how (engaged in the wool obtained from sheep), face-cow (who worked in chicken eggs) and so on, all of them with many benefits.
Suddenly the business of Jimmy began to see signs of crisis. The number of cattle keepers had stopped growing and began to fall. The amount of milk consumed also began to stop growing and it seems that also began to fall.

Faced with these threats Jimmy Walker tried to strengthen the chapters letting them raise the money from donations. The chapters were organized not by town but they were organized by race. There were many races on the basis of skin colour. There were races of people with different shades ranging from white to black. In the case of the English people they did not have a single chapter, but they were divided into several chapters according to the colour of the skin of the caregivers. In the case of the Catalan town they asked to have a chapter for all the people of the town because they were a small town and they feel comfortable working altogether.

The Catalan people was a very strange people who didn’t liked to discriminate people by skin colour and therefore they do not see anything good in being separated on the basis of skin colour. But their request was denied. They told them that they had to join the people of their same race, although they were of different towns because at the time of collecting donations and distributing the milk it was done according to race and not according to the town where the people lived and the laws on taxes and tax deductions were based on race and not the town ...

The truth is that there were cases where town agreed with a single race. Then they could have a chapter. There were also cases of very large villages where the village had many races that only lived in this place then those villages could have several chapters. The problems were in the small towns where people was of the same races than people living in neighbour villages that were much larger. They could not have a chapter. But since these were small towns that do not matter to anyone (except to themselves) the problem stayed unsolved.
Several problems arose. Some chapters raise the money but not paid to the foundation what had agreed to contribute to the maintenance of the common expenses of distribution of milk. Others had the money in the bank and did not use them for anything.

Others used it but not explained where they spent or what results they obtain. Although the primary law of this country was "presuppose good faith", seeing that there was always a very bad caretaker of cows non-compliant with the law that might thought that there were some kind of incompetence in handling of money or even corruption.
Moreover, sometimes there were problems among caregivers of cows and the chapters and or the foundation. The chapters were associations of people where not all partners were cattle keepers neither all of cattle keepers were associated. The foundation, although carers of cows appointed a few members of its governing body, had gone ahead with several initiatives which had upset carers of cows.

Another problem arose because not all races had the same economic level. The white races were very wealthy and were used to give money to non-profit activities. But the black was very poor and did not have the habit of making donations. The money collected was going mainly to the chapters of the white races and almost none to the chapters of the black races. In some cases such as in the Spanish town most of the caregivers, were quite dark but recently had created a chapter of white people that would raise the most of the money.
From here the story takes three finals. Choose what you like.

Final 1

(Centralization and decline)
Seeing all this chaos Jimmy turned to his leadership in establishing a system where money collected by the bodies of different races had to pledge for transparently managing the money and for transferring a large extent to the foundation and chapters in need in accordance with established rules. The Foundation will control and monitor the entire system.
The chapters fiercely opposed to it but as the foundation had the upper hand in controlling the distribution of milk, they had to accept it.

Then the foundation was tried to copy what the cow-economic companies did: Manage the community of caregivers making activities to attract more and redesign the stalls of cows so that they were more user friendly.
But the milk business is not as fun as wool or eggs. In addition, the foundation did not have as much money as companies engaged in this business because it could not place ads. Neither could count on much help from the chapters that were quite annoying. With a centralized structure with few resources could not encompass the diversity of races and towns with as much efficiency as other companies did.

Gradually caregivers were leaving the business. Some because they were bored, others because they sympathized with the chapters that were annoying for the affair of the money, others were simply move on to other business more fun without such problems, others assembled their own farms of cows aside. Of course there was a small core remained of irreducible who continued for a long time. They included the Catalan town; their only interest was providing their town a great deal of high quality milk.

As the cows gave infinite milk, the foundation could continue distributing milk for a long time. But nothing was ever as before again.

Final 2

(The chapters assault the foundation. General rush)
Seeing that Jimmy was proposed that the foundation overseeing the management of the money by the chapters, that not all chapters will be allowed to collect directly, and even proposed that the foundation appoint members in Chapters Board.
The chapters were quick to react against this approach. They set up a council of chapters to join forces with to face the foundation. With this organization they planned the assault of the foundation.
There were two members of the Board of the foundation that were traditionally chosen by the chapters. On the first occasion of renewing these charges ensured that the two new members of the Board agreed with its approach.

There were three more chosen by the community of caregivers of cows.
The community of caregivers of cows was totally disorganized, most had no idea what was going on. The only keepers of cattle that were organized and were informed they were the affiliated to chapters. Only 10% followed somehow what was discussed and they where basically the people's from the English town. The other towns were far away and were not aware of these discussions.
In the next election, the council of chapters orchestrated a good campaign. They promoted the presentation of three good candidates related to their postulates and asked the chapters to put all their influence to promote the vote for these candidates.

The result was a success. The 3 new members were those who promoted the chapters. With 5 members of the Board they had majority and were able to change the rules of the game to their taste.
The first thing that they did was change the way of appointing members of the Board. They increased the number of members appointed by chapters and lower the appointment of experts in various fields and those named by the community of caregivers of cows. This will ensure that they could continue controlling the foundation for ever more.

Then they left the foundation limited to the activities of distribution of milk and improvement of stalls. All that was raising money, promoting the consumption of milk and attract new carers of cows was in the hands of the chapters.
In each town the outcome was very different.
There were towns with only one race that had a good understanding between the chapter and the community of caregivers of cows, in these cases, besides if they were white and could raise a lot of money had very good cards in the game. For the German town things went very well.
Other towns had people of many races.

In the case of the English town the majority they were of white race. There were not many problems between the chapters and the community of caregivers. They saw many discussions and many caregivers left the business. But as its farm was very big it continued giving milk.
In the case of the Spanish town there are many races but the skin colour of the majority was rather dark. Only whites they have good funding. In the community of caregivers, there were many critics of the chapters and the foundation. They were devoted to discuss among themselves. They fill pages and pages of discussion and were becoming less dedicated to caring for cows.

Worst of all was for small towns. In small towns there were not enough people in any race to have its own chapter. All chapters were in bigger towns. They were left without money to promote that the people take care of their cows. Many towns were abandoned and are now ghost towns where nobody lives there. In some cases such as the Catalan people were riding back to the chapter of the Foundation and the Council of Chapters and they raise funds on their own to promote the business of milk for his people.

Final 3

(The French Revolution. Communities in power)
The keepers of cattle were beginning to see those tings were going wrong. They were not organized. Each town was living without much contact to the other and few people where involved in the tasks of organizing the farm. Most limited their activity to care a little cow and nothing more. Only when something happened that attracted much attention a few of them went out and make hear their voice.
But Jimmy remembered that the original spirit of the project included the caregivers of the cows that had to decide how best to organize the farm, therefore suggested to organize the keepers of cattle so that they could help to fix the problem.

The first step was to go for new blood. Those that is usually limited to caring for the cows and not saying anything more. Off course, there were many and not all were constant carers. Many were limited to go to the farm care for a cow during one day and never return. He thought that a reasonable approach would be bringing together all keepers of cattle that had the right to vote to choose the members of the board of the foundation. These were the ones that had helped to look after the cows for a long period and still continued doing it recently.
To go up to meet and talk to each other had to organize them by town. No matter the skin colour of each one. Said and done. In each town created a Council composed of all caregivers eligible to vote. The Council appointed representatives who took care of the relations with other towns.

The representatives of the town stayed alert of the affairs of the various farms and the distribution of milk and made a summary report to the Council. Every 3 months they sent this report to each member of the Council to keep them up to date. Also organized discussions among Council members when there were important issues and collected the outcome. The representatives of each town were gathered together to form a General Council of Cattle Carers.
The Council of each town allocated trusted caretakers of cows the task of supervising the chapters that were in the town, also ensured that the chapters of the richest races handed the money to the poorer chapters to get the best for the whole of the town.

The General Council ensured that all chapters handed the money to the foundation for the distribution of milk, to improve the stable, and to support activities to attract carers in the towns where there was no chapter .
Once organized caregivers, and once checked that everyone was involved (not just the same as always that in many cases had already been organized into chapters) then Jimmy changed the status of the foundation increasing the number of members of board elected by the communities so that caregivers so that they were majority. In this way the system was stabilized.

The case of small towns that previously could not have a chapter they discuss the matter with the Council of its town. Some decided to agree with chapters of neighbouring villages, others like the case of the Catalan town, decided to create its own chapter and were able to promote the business of milk in her town as everyone else. In the end most people were having a chapter that promoted the business of milk, either own or a neighbouring village who had come to an agreement.

With the house tidy, take care of cows was more fun than ever. In addition, the foundation could concentrate on making a much better stable. This gave a whole new air. The global milk market grew slowly and sooner or later they would cover all the demand.

In order to grow since they were enthusiastic about the subject, on the one hand they revived some businesses that had already begun and that they had not succeeded. Business of cheese, yoghurt etc. that did not work because they needed different facilities that the business of milk. They were focused on research and develop these infrastructures.
They also began to start new business ideas as the business of honey. At first this business was small but gradually grew and reached beyond the milk business.

References

[1] This is a summary. In fact they tried many more systems of organization. You can find a more expansive collection here: http://coffeehouse-economics.blogspot.com/2008/02/different-ways-of-market-systems-cow.html
[2] Although it has nothing to do and it is a pure coincidence, something similar happened with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Multilingual_monthly_statistics_%282001%29&oldid=18596064
[3] Jimmy Walker became famous. Even the diplomatic cables of the United States made some a follow-up of its movements. As can be seen thanks to Wikileaks. By mistake they attribute him the foundation of Wikipedia but obviously should say cow-pedia: http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/11/08SANTIAGO1015.html

In the news

[In defense of Wikipedia] - Bryn Neuenschwander aka Marie Brennan, an American fantasy author, wrote on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelists site an article called "Research for Writers #2: In Defense of Wikipedia". A good sum of the arguments in favor of Wikipedia. The Guardian and Arabian Business have stories about her, as well.
http://www.sfnovelists.com/2011/09/16/research-for-writers-2-in-defense-of-wikipedia/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Brennan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/18/hari-fake-quotes-training-peter-preston
http://www.arabianbusiness.com/dubai-bashing-journo-hari-admits-plagiarism-420786.html

[Unethically abusing Wikipedia] - The Economist published a story about Independent journalist Johann Hari, who used a pseudonym to harass rival journalists and edit the Wikipedia article about himself. He made a personal apology in the Independent. Wikizine reported about this incident in the previous Opinion Edition.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/09/unethical-journalism
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-personal-apology-2354679.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari
http://en.wikizine.org/2011/09/wikizine-opinion-year-2011-week-38.html
http://blog.tommorris.org/post/10400620996/hari-gate-behind-the-scenes-at-wikipedia

[Wikipedia accurate on cancer facts, but...] - DoctorsLounge published an article about the study "Wikipedia Accurate on Cancer Facts, But Hard to Read". That story has been republished by a number of news outlets.
http://www.doctorslounge.com/index.php/news/hd/23109
http://www.rocketnews.com/2011/09/wikipedia-accurate-on-cancer-facts-but-hard-to-read-study-healthday-2/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/09/16/wikipedia-cancer.html
http://machineslikeus.com/news/cancer-information-wikipedia-shown-be-accurate
http://news.yahoo.com/wikipedia-accurate-cancer-facts-hard-read-study-231410261.html
http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/15478525/wikipedia-accurate-on-cancer-facts-but-hard-to-read-study
http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2011/9/19/wikipedia-content-on-cancer-is-accurate-but-dense-study-finds.aspx
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_116511.html

[Poor readability] - In related news, instead of transferring the whole news about cancer facts, French Tribune extracted in a sensationalist way just "Wikipedia Offers Poor Readability!" Anyway, what should be expected from an organization which keeps default Drupal favicon on their site!
http://frenchtribune.com/teneur/117221-wikipedia-offers-poor-readability
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon
http://tinyurl.com/6c22ff7
http://drupal.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

[Jimmy Wales travels] - Jimmy Wales meets with Carlos Slim, the richest person in the world; discusses (on the beach) carbon emissions with Tony Blair.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-20/scene-last-night-carlos-slim-jimmy-wales-stephen-wolfram-picasso-kin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Slim
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/of-beach-sand-war-and-carbon/

[Book on Obama plagiarized Wikipedia] - White House attacks author of book on Obama, author responds.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/white-house-officials-attack-book-author-with-whom-they-cooperated/
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/white-house-refutes-confidence-men-book-suggests-portion-lifted-from-wikipedia/
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63991.html

Time machine

10 years ago

[19 September] - English Wikipedia User:The Cunctator proposed the creation of a 9/11 wiki.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-September/000478.html

[20 September] - Larry Sanger announced an article in The New York Times about Wikipedia.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-September/000475.html

[23 September] - Larry Sanger reported that Richard Stallman had called Wikipedia "exciting news".
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-September/000486.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-September/000489.html

5 years ago

[16 September] - Jimmy Wales announced Board elections and supported Oscar van Dillen and Kat Walsh.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023349.html
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2006

[16 September] - Delpine Menard published a shortlist of Wikimania 2007 candidates: Alexandria, London, Taipei, Torino.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023358.html

[16 September] - Citizendium announced.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023373.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium
http://en.citizendium.org/

[16 September] - Rob Levin, aka lilo, President of the Peer-Directer Projects Center which operates irc.freenode.net, died in an accident.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023396.html

[17 September] - Florence Devouard made a report from her visit to Abuja and posted her ideas about the development of Wikimedia projects related to Africa.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023408.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023409.html

[18 September] - Larry Sanger published his first post on citizendium-l, Kat Walsh reposted it on foundation-l.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023452.html

[18 September] - Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote about events related to Cherokee and Navajo languages.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023456.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023457.html

[18 September] - Angela Beasley informed us that Tim Starling had surgery, but everything went well.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023487.html

[18 September] - KDE wanted to use Wikiversity to train developers.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023518.html

[19 September] - Discussion about methods to elect ArbCom started.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027672.html

[21 September] - David Gerard wrote the essay "Wikipedia:100,000 feature-quality articles". Discussion about it started on wikipedia-l.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:100K
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027683.html

[21 September] - Samuel Klein on Board elections.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027698.html

[22 September] - Samuel Klein's essays "Wikipedia and the networked society", "Dreams, goals, and milestones", "Reflection and research: User surveys", "Parallels with other volunteer efforts & foundations"
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027699.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023641.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027700.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-September/023642.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027701.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027702.html

[22 September] - Erik Zachte created galleries of Main Pages of a couple of different Wikipedias.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-September/027710.html
http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/Gallery.htm
http://infodisiac.com/Wikipedia/Gallery/GalleryWayBack.htm

From Wikipedia

[WikiProject Cannabis] - WikiProject Cannabis is dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of cannabis, including articles relating to hemp and marijuana legislation, effects, policies, trends, activists, organizations, culture, and other aspects of the plant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cannabis

[Caral] - Caral was a large settlement in the Supe Valley, near Supe, Barranca province, Peru, some 200 km north of Lima. Caral is the most ancient city of the Americas, and is a well-studied site of the Caral civilization or Norte Chico civilization. Caral was inhabited between roughly 2600 BC and 2000 BC, enclosing an area of more than 60 hectares. Caral was described by its excavators as the oldest urban center in the Americas, a claim that was later challenged as other ancient sites were found nearby. Accommodating more than 3,000 inhabitants, it is the best studied and one of the largest Norte Chico sites known.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte_Chico_civilization

[Loveland frog] - The Loveland Frog (otherwise known as the Loveland Lizard) is said to be a humanoid creature with the face of a frog and is described as standing roughly 4 feet (1.2 m) tall with green leathery skin. It walks upright and has webbed hands and feet, and was allegedly first spotted in Loveland, Ohio. It is generally considered a cryptid—a creature rumored or reported to be living, but with no confirmable proof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveland_frog

[Argan oil] - Argan oil is an oil produced from the kernels of the argan tree, endemic to Morocco, that is valued for its nutritive, cosmetic and numerous medicinal properties. The tree, a relic species from the Tertiary age, is extremely well adapted to drought and other environmentally difficult conditions of southwestern Morocco.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argan_oil

[Clathrate gun hypothesis] - The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given to the hypothesis that rises in sea temperatures (and/or falls in sea level) can trigger the sudden release of methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in seabeds and permafrost which, because the methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, leads to further temperature rise and further methane clathrate destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

[Fan death] - Fan death is a widely held belief prevailing in South Korea that an electric fan left running overnight in a closed room can cause the death of those inside. Fans sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

[Turritopsis nutricula] - Turritopsis nutricula, the potentially immortal jellyfish, is a hydrozoan whose medusa, or jellyfish, form can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

[Prora] - Prora is a beach resort on the island of Rügen, Germany, known especially for its colossal Nazi-planned touristic structures. The massive building complex was built between 1936 and 1939 as a Kraft durch Freude (KdF) project. The eight buildings are identical, and while they were planned as a holiday locale, they were never used for this purpose. The complex has a formal heritage listing as a particularly striking example of Third Reich architecture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora

[Victoria Woodhull] - Victoria Claflin Woodhull (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927) was a 19th century American who was described by Gilded Age newspapers as a leader of the American woman's suffrage movement. She is most famous for her sensational 1872 campaign to run as the first female candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull

[Marsupial reproductive system] - Marsupials' reproductive systems differ markedly from those of placental mammals (Placentalia). Females have two lateral vaginas, which lead to separate uteri but both open externally through the same orifice. A third canal, the median vagina, is used for birth. This canal can be transitory or permanent. The males generally have a two-pronged penis, which corresponds to the females' two vaginas. The penis is used only for discharging semen into females, and there is instead a urogenital sac used to store waste before expulsion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsupial#Reproductive_system

[Misophonia] - Misophonia, literally “hatred of sound,” is a form of decreased sound tolerance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

[Literaturwurst] - Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage) is an Artist's book, made by the Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth between 1961 and 1974. Each book was made using traditional sausage recipes, but replacing the sausage meat with a book or magazine. The cover of the edition was then pasted onto the skin of the sausage and signed and dated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literaturwurst

[1% rule] - In Internet culture, the 1% rule or the 90–9–1 principle (sometimes also presented as 89:10:1 ratio) reflects a theory that more people will lurk in a virtual community than will participate. This term is often used to refer to participation inequality in the context of the Internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29
Wikizine-seeks-editors - Editor(s): millosh, Joan Goma - Corrector(s): nathan, Support: Walter - Contact: http://report.wikizine.org - Website: http://www.wikizine.org Gophersite: gopher://gopher.wikizine.org - Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions". Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Wikizine News - Year: 2011 Week: 39 Number: 129

2011-09-21T23:53:00.000Z

Technical news

[Babel on all Wikis] - There are a great deal of templates and signs that one can put on there user page. One of the most useful are the Babel-templates that indicate the knowledge of different languages. Now is there an extension active on all wikis for that. No need to manually setup all those templates on all wikis. The structure is easy; see the excellent blog posting of Mister Internationalisation himself - Gerard Meijssen.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/21/babel-extension-live-on-the-wmf-projects/

[New mobile gateway] - There is a new mobile gateway active for the Wikipedias. The the other projects will follow. This is provided by new extension of MediaWiki 1.17, the software our wikis are using. This replaces the old mobile gateway.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/14/new-mobile-site-launched-on-wikipedia-soon-for-sister-wikis-too/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MobileFrontend

[MediaWiki 1.8] - As announced in the TechFlash upgrade of the wikis is in progress. New functions in MediaWiki 1.8 include;

             - Support for gender-specific user pages: languages that have different words for User whether the user is male or female will be able to show the male or the female version, if the user has specified their gender in their preferences.
             - MediaWiki 1.18 will make it easier for left-to-right and right-to-left text to coexist on the same page.
            http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/

[Fundraiser-time?] - You could encounter the well known gigantic donation banner "personal appeal by ...". But no, it is not again the big fundraiser event. But only a banner test. If you see it then you where lucky. It is only at EN Wikipedia for anonymous users and generally only in certain countries. The tests are currently being conducted for 1 hour once a week. The real fundraiser will proably be in November. But, test or not, donations are welcome.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011

[Techs share knowledge] - Running a massive infrastructure like the WMF is using also mean that collect knowledge how to do that. In line with the mission of the WMF detailed information about the configuration of the system has been released so that others can learn from it.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/19/ever-wondered-how-the-wikimedia-servers-are-configured/

[Operations Engineer goals] - In another post, Ryan Lane gives a longer story about his goals for the past year.
http://ryandlane.com/blog/2011/09/19/ive-been-with-the-wikimedia-foundation-for-a-year-have-i-met-my-goals/

Request for help

[Petition to UNSECO] - Wikimedia Foundation, with full support of founder Jimmy Wales, is asking to support the request to the UNESCO to recognize Wikipedia as the first "digital World Cultural Heritage Site". Over 51,000 people have signed the petition already. Your are suggested to spread the word of this petition (after you signed) by all the communication channels of the modern day. If you sign the petition need to confirm by a link send by e-mail
http://wikipedia.de/wke/Main_Page

[Sign-up for translation] - Frequently there are messages that need to be translated in, if possible, all the languages of the projects. If you like to volunteer to be a translator you can register yourself (see link) so when you are needed you can be contacted.
https://sugar.corp.wikimedia.org/translators/translators.php?referrer=wikizine

Bureaucracy

[Stewards election] - You can vote in the election for new stewards until 6 October. According to the present situation, 9 Wikimedians have a good chance to become stewards: Axpde, Bencmq, Bennylin, Quadell, Quentinv57, Teles, Trijnstel, Vituzzu and Wikitanvir.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2
http://toolserver.org/~stewardbots/elections.php

Movement

[German Wikipedia] - On 15 September a poll on the German Wikipedia questioning participants about the proposed image filter was closed. German Wikipedians rejected implementation of an image filter on the German Wikipedia by a 86.23% majority (430 votes, 357 against, 57 in favour, 16 neutral).
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/068502.html
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Einf%C3%BChrung_pers%C3%B6nlicher_Bildfilter (proposal, arguments and votes)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Einf%C3%BChrung_pers%C3%B6nlicher_Bildfilter/en (proposal and arguments translation to English)

[Germanophone WikiConvention] - Wikimedians from the three major German speaking countries gathered to share their knowledge about Wikipedia, Wikimedia and other wikis at the first ‘WikiConvention‘. More than 170 participants attended.
http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/germanophone-wikiconvention-established/
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiConvention (in German)
http://blog.wikimedia.de/2011/09/06/treffpunkt-fur-freies-wissen/ (in German)

[Deletionism] - "Wikipedia needs to return to simplicity" is a blog post by Urpo Lankinen in which the author explains why deletionism is bad.
http://www.beastwithin.org/users/wwwwolf/blog/2011/09/wikipedia-needs-to-return-to-simplicity.html

[European Year of Volunteering 2011] - On September 12, 2011 a group of Polish Wikimedians took part in an open public event of the European Year of Volunteering in Warsaw.
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=pl&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.pl&sl=pl&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://wyborcza.pl/1,91446,10276273,W_Pawilonie_ERW_dzien_e_wolontariatu.html&usg=ALkJrhjmnsC5XwCIo-fZsSmYuiR8RmFKCA
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ERW-2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_volunteering

Foundation

[WMF; no test] - The Wikimedia Foundation declined to allow developers to make a trial for restricting non-autoconfirmed users from creating articles on English Wikipedia. The rejection comes despite the support of around 2/3 of involved participants (~500 editors took a part). Discussion about the proposal on English Wikipedia started on 3 April 2011 and concluded on 27 May. Discussion about the implementation started on 11 July and concluded on 18 August. A bugzilla bug request was filled on 3 August, but developers refused to implement it. On 14 September Erik Moeller said that "[WMF] believe that creating a restriction of this type is a strong a statement of exclusion, not inclusion, and that it will confuse and deter good faith editors" and rejected the proposal, which sparked long discussion and resignation by community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_article_creation_trial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29/Proposal_to_require_autoconfirmed_status_in_order_to_create_articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29/Proposal_to_require_autoconfirmed_status_in_order_to_create_articles/Trial_duration
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30208#c43
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/068494.html

[Board minutes] - The Board has published minutes from Wikimania meeting of 3 August.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2011-08-03

Chapters

[WM UK grants] - Wikimedia UK gives scholarships for traveling to the Wikimedia India conference for Wikimedians from UK. Deadline for applications is 27 September, 19:30 BST (UTC+1).
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2011/09/wikiconference-india-travel-grants/
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_Scholarships

[Wikipedia promo] - Wikimedia Sverige will be present at the Gothenburg Book Fair, around 100,000 visitors are expected to come by so it will be busy. WM Sverige has made 3 short silent movies to play at there stand. Because the are silent the can be used easily also by other Chapters, Wikimedia events. Wikimedia Sverige is even willing to localize it for you on request.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/55785

Chapters reports

[Wikimedia UK] - Wikimedia UK has published August 2011 report.
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/August

[Wikimedia Philippines] - Wikimedia Philippines published annual report for 2010.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMPH_2010_Annual_Report.pdf

Science

[Wikimedia Ambassador survey] - Results from first Wikipedia Ambassador survey released by WMF.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/14/results-from-first-wikipedia-ambassador-survey/

[Wikipedia on WikiSym 2011] - The technical session during WikiSym 2011 "Understanding Wikipedia" will feature four presentations: "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance", "Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing", "Finding Patterns in Behavioral Observations by Automatically Labeling Forms of Wikiwork in Barnstars" and "What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content".
http://www.wikisym.org/2011/09/14/session-preview-understanding-wikipedia/
http://www.wikisym.org/category/wikisym-2011/

[Wikipedia's gender imbalance] - Paper "Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance" from Wikisym 2011 has been published. The CBC interviewed Sue Gardner and published a story about it.
http://www.grouplens.org/node/466
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/09/sue-gardner-on-wikipedias-gender-gap/

Media

[Wikipedia Signpost] - A new edition of the Wikipedia Signpost has been published. Harry Burt (User:Jarry1250), the Signpost's editor-in-chief, leaves the Signpost to User:SMasters and User:Skomorokh, as his studies are going to begin soon. In this edition you can read the following stories and more: On the Wikinews fork, Back to school, ArbCom narrowly rejects application to open new case and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-09-19
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jarry1250
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SMasters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Skomorokh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-09-19/From_the_editor

Anniversaries

[Slovak Wikipedia] - 23 September 2003 is the best possible approximation of the date when the Slovak Wikipedia was created [1][2]. Slovak is a West Slavic language [3][4] spoken by 7 million people, mostly in Slovakia. Slovak Wikipedia has more than 127,000 articles [5] and more than 550 active users. Statistics [6] shows that Slovak Wikipedia is among the stable projects, which have a more or less constant number of new, active and very active Wikipedians.

[1] http://sk.wikipedia.org/

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20030923070746/http://sk.wikipedia.org/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_language

[4] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=slk

[5] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=slk

[Waray-Waray Wikipedia] - On 25 September the Waray-Waray Wikipedia[1][2] will be six years old. Waray-Waray[3] is an Austronesian language[3][4] spoken by 3.1 million inhabitants of Visayas[5] and Masbate[6] provinces of Philippines. It is used as a trade language, too. The Waray-Waray Wikipedia has more than 102,000 articles. Counting the number of speakers and considering the economic situation in Philippines, Waray-Waray Wikipedia is quite an active and successful project [7][8] (note the increase of new editors in 2010 in comparison to the number of new articles added to Wikipedia). Here is a short story about the beginnings of the Waray-Waray Wikipedia by war:User:Harvzs [9], the initiator of the Waray-Waray Wikipedia.
The proposal for the Waray-Waray Wikipedia was made on or about June 23, 2005. The native speakers who volunteered to help edit was myself (User:Harvzsf in Meta) and User:v.oyzon. User:Katimawan2005 and User:Bentong from the Kapampangan and Cebuano Wikipedias were also among those who lent their support. The test-wikipedia was set up in Meta shortly after although test wikipedias weren't mandatory at that time and Incubator hadn't been in existence. The reason for the test Wikipedia was for the double purpose of creating content in the event that the request to create the wiki was granted and also to get some practice on how to create and edit the wiki. The Waray Wikipedia was created on or about September 24, 2005 along with the Neapolitan and Judeo-Spanish/Ladino Wikipedias. By a coincidence, the ISO codes for the 3 wikipedias coincided with actual one-syllable words in the English language war, nap and lad respectively :) ) Shortly after, I obtained administrator rights on the Waray-Waray Wikipedia. Ten days after the Waray-Waray Wikipedia was created, it reached 100 articles (the 100th article was war:Guiuan, Eastern Samar).

[1] http://war.wikipedia.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waray-Waray_Wikipedia

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waray-Waray_language

[4] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=war

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visayas

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masbate

[7] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaWAR.htm

[8] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaWAR.htm

[9] http://war.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Harvzs

[Polish Wikipedia] - On 26 September the Polish Wikipedia [1][2] Will be 10 years old. Polish is a West Slavic language spoken by more than 40 million speakers [3][4], mostly from Poland. With more than 831,000 articles [5], the Polish Wikipedia is the fifth largest Wikipedia by number of articles. During its first years of existence, the Polish Wikipedia was filled with a lot of bot-generated articles, which created significant positive feedback from Polish speakers and made the Polish Wikipedian community one of the most vital ones [6].

Wikimedia Poland [7][8] was created on 15 August 2005 thanks to the work of Polish Wikipedians. Wikimedia Poland recognizes its 10th anniversary of the project by organizing a conference to be held on September 24-25, in Poznan, Poland [9][10].

[1] http://pl.wikipedia.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Wikipedia

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language

[4] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pol

[5] http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specjalna:Statystyka

[6] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaPL.htm (cf. new articles per day and new editors)

[7] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Polska

[8] http://pl.wikimedia.org/

[9] http://10lat.wikipedia.pl

[10] http://tinyurl.com/42tkjub (Google translate)

Press release of Wikimedia Poland is below:

The Polish Wikipedia was founded on September 26, 2001, being the eighth eldest Wikipedia to be established. Over the years, Polish Wikipedians have created over 830,000 articles, of which almost 500 have received a "Featured Article" status and additional 1,000 being categorised as "Good Articles".

In a continuation of the year-long celebration of the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, the Polish Wikipedia community is going to celebrate the 10th birthday of the project, with a conference being held on September 24—25 in Poznań, Poland. Two weeks earlier, on September 10, the public exhibition of the winning POTY (Picture of the Year) pictures has been opened in one of the most prestigious shopping and art centres in Poland, the Stary Browar (Old Brewery). 16 pictures, chosen by Wikimedians from all over the world in an annual POTY contest, are shown at the exhibition, with descriptions provided in Polish, English and German.

The conference will take place in the heart of the very best location in Poznań. It will be open to the public, as one of the main goals of the organisers is to involve people from outside the Wikimedia movement; therefore, the conference is heavily advertised in the local media, with increasing daily press coverage.

The event will consist of about 15 presentations and talks about Wikipedia. They will discuss Wikipedia's place in court judgements; Wikipedia's role as a source of information; the now-hot topic of women in the Wikipedia community, and many more topics. They will take an outside look at Wikipedia with a public screening of the documentary film Truth in Numbers?, which will be followed by a discussion, a short surprise from the organising team, and the real celebration: a massive Wikipedia birthday cake.

The Polish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation has generously decided to refund the costs of coming to the conference for Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe; as of September 20, 13 Wikipedians from Azerbaijan, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine and even Philippines have signed up for the conference. If you can't join us and you understand some Polish, don't worry — all talks from the conference will be streamed live on a special Internet radio. After the event, all talks – audio and video – will be released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence and made available on-line.

Polish Wikipedians hope to have a great event, and even if you can't join them, please keep your fingers crossed!

Stats

[RU WP] Russia Wikipedia has overtaken Japanese Wikipedia by the articles' count on 21 September 2011.

http://tinyurl.com/3cv7tlk -- RU Wikipedia

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Wikipedias%2FTable&action=historysubmit&diff=2916894&oldid=2913733

Events and meetups

[24 September] - Wiki Takes de Zaan (Netherlands) will be held on September 24th.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ontmoeten#Zaanstreek_24_september

[24 September] - Wikipedia Takes Göteborg, Sweden
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikitr%C3%A4ffar#Fotosafari.2C_G.C3.B6teborg.2C_l.C3.B6rdag_24_sep

[24 September] - Wikipedia Takes Porto, Portugal
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9dia_Toma_o_Porto

[24-25 September] - Polish Wikipedia community, supported by Wikimedia Polska, is going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project (founded on September 26, 2001) with a conference to be held on September 24-25, in Poznan, Poland.
http://10lat.wikipedia.pl
http://tinyurl.com/42tkjub (Google translate)

[25 September] - Wikipedia Takes Cologne, Germany
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_K%C3%B6ln

[25 September] - Wikipedia Takes Lisbon, Portugal
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9dia_Toma_Lisboa

[3-5 October] - WikiSym - The International Symposium on Wikis and Open collaboration -2011 with the session "Understanding Wikipedia".
http://www.wikisym.org/category/wikisym-2011/
http://www.wikisym.org/2011/09/14/session-preview-understanding-wikipedia/

Wikizine

[Your reports] - Post your news for the next edition of Wikizine on Meta or in our Google form.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/EN2011-130
http://tinyurl.com/wikizine-feedback

Quote

"Wikinews: Just because we wrote it in our pyjamas doesn't mean you shouldn't take us seriously." -- IRC quote

Wikizine-seeks-editors , Editor(s): millosh, Kpjas, Shizhao,Walter Corrector(s): nathan Thanks to: kaldari, Theo10011, pgehres , Support: Walter , Contact: http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Gophersite: gopher://gopher.wikizine.org , Wikizine-loves-feedback, Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions". Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Wikizine Techflash - Year: 2011 Week: 39

2011-09-20T12:56:00.001Z

Breaking news

[Wikimedia servers upgrade] - Wikimedia servers are in the process of upgrading. You may experience difficulties in reading and/or editing Wikimedia sites.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/
- Upgrade timeline:
  - [19 September] - Monday, September 19, 23:00-01:00 UTC -- Production test: test2.wikipedia.org – this stage will ensure that 1.18 is compatible with the rest of our production infrastructure. There’s a small chance that changes here could affect all wikis.
  - [21 September] - Wednesday, September 21, 23:00-03:00 UTC -- Stage 1: simple.wikipedia.org, simple.wiktionary.org, usability.wikimedia.org, strategy.wikimedia.org, mediawiki.org, he.wikisource.org
  - [26 September] - Monday, September 26, 23:00-03:00 UTC -- Stage 2: meta.wikimedia.org, en.wikiquote.org, en.wikibooks.org, beta.wikiversity.org, eo.wikipedia.org, nl.wikipedia.org
  - [4 October] - Tuesday, October 4, 23:00-03:00 UTC -- Stage 3: remaining wikis.
  Wikizine seeks editors - Editor(s): Milos ,Corrector(s): Nathan ,Support: Walter
  Contact: http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org
  - Wikizine seeks editors
- Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to,
  correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".
  Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Wikizine Opinion - Year: 2011 Week: 38 Number: 128 BIS

2011-09-16T19:40:00.000Z

Wikizine needs YOU!

[Name] - Working title of this edition is "Wikizine Talk Edition" because we didn't have better idea. Send us suggestions for the name!

Editorial
Personal perspective
In the news
From Wikipedia

Editorial by Milos

As you could read in Wikizine 127 [1], I took initiative and began a Wikizine revival. You may notice some changes and I can say that there will be more changes, as such changes keep all of us alive.

Editorial is one of those changes and it will have two main parts: (1) presentation of one of the Wikizine feature and (2) analysis of the most important event from the previous week or two. Opinion or Talk Edition of Wikizine will be published on Friday and “previous week” means approximately Friday-Thursday time frame.

Last week had begun with such intensity, I thought I could close this edition by Monday.
[1] http://en.wikizine.org/2011/09/year-2011-week-36-number-126.html

(Un)acceptible Foundation influence on chapters

On August 27th, almost 20 days before the conclusion of this edition, CasteloBranco, a member of the initiative for Wikimedia Brazil, sent an email to foundation-l [1] with the description of agreement inside of Brazilian Wikimedian community about chapter creation. That was the main obstacle toward formalizing the chapter, as Brazilian Wikimedians didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of having a formal organization.

That day five more Wikimedians discussed the outlines of this agreement on foundation-l, including a note from Ray Saintonge that it’s not the best idea to have a Wikimedia Foundation appointee in chapter’s Board (as suggested by WM Brazil’s agreement).

For five days discussion was dead, when Jimmy Wales said that having a WMF appointee is, actually, a good idea. That sparked long discussions on both foundation-l and internal-l (the latter one is a non-public list of the core of Wikimedia movement). A number of chapters representatives felt offended by the idea of having a WMF appointee on their boards.
[1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/246958

Image filter retrospective (from spring 2008 to early 2011)

For those who have forgotten what’s behind the image filter “referendum”, here is a retrospective.
The initial point of the drama started on 7 May 2008 [4]. Because of religion, of course. US-based “social conservative” site WorldNetDaily reported Wikipedia [5] because of the cover art for the Scorpions’ album Virgin Killer [6]. According to Concerned Women of America, another “social conservative” group, “Wikipedia is helping to further facilitate perversion and pedophilia.”

On 5 December 2008, in the moment of madness, worthy of the best of surreal poetry, Internet Watch Foundaiton (IWF) [7], the association of UK internet providers, listed Wikipedia as a child pornography site [8] because of the same album cover [6]. It seems that IWF needed just four days to find someone who knows what Wikipedia is. IWF reversed their blacklisting on 9 December.

In a moment of desperate need for self-promotion, Larry Sanger [9], known because he didn’t believe that his project (Wikipedia, for which has sometimes been described as a co-founder), would succeed and not so known because of a number of failed projects, reported Wikipedia to the FBI [10] on 10 April 2010 because, of course, “child pornography”.

Just a short 17 days later, Fox News discovered the hot news and published it [11] in a well known form of spreading FUD to everything which doesn’t fit to their retarded worldview.

The action of the IWF prompted discussions on Wikimedia Commons in 2008. However, just after the Commons community declined to change well defined policy toward images, which are handled based on their quality, not the biased opinion on content, on May 6th, 2010 Jimmy Wales started to delete not just poor quality Second Life animated pornography, but artworks, as well. That sparked a huge revolt among editors [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. At the other side, the action was praised by Fox News, of course [21].

Between May 6th and May 9th, the most striking event was the fact that smart people from the Board were talking nonsense just to stand behind Jimmy’s irrational behavior.

The Board’s statement from May 7th [22] was actually quite good. Note that part of the statement says “In saying this, we don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists.” Yet as it could be seen, in around one month the same Board changed their mind and pushed development with the aim to implement new policy.

After that the Kafkaesque parody started. Jan-Bart de Vreede, a Board member, interpreted Board’s statement as supporting Jimmy’s deletion of artworks [23]. Ting Chen, Board chair, also supported deletion of artworks [24]. Stuart West thinks that some deleted artworks are “hardcore pornography”, as well [25].
Digression about artworks for the complete picture. Jimmy deleted [28], among others, the next images:

Painting [27] by Édouard-Henri Avril, a 19th and early 20th century French painter [28].
Graphics [29] by Franz von Bayros, a late 19th and early 20th century Austrian illustrator [30].
Graphics [31] by Félicien Rops, a 19th century Belgian artist [32].

What is interesting with all of those artists is that they belong to the Decadent movement in art [33]. Which, by the way, says that you can create the most important educational resource in the history, but not be able to make distinction between pornography and art. And no matter of your ignorance, you would be supported by your fellow Board members,.

On May 9th, 2010, by concluding his regular behavioral iteration -- first makes a problem, then does the right thing to fix it --, Jimmy abandoned his permissions [34].
But, of course, that wasn’t the end of the drama. On June 24th, 2010 Board commissioned the Executive Director to find a way to satisfy Fox News and those who take Fox News seriously. [35]

I had personal conversation with Robert Harris, the person employed by the WMF to “solve” the problem. It was a very surprising discussion. During the first iteration of our communication, at the time when he presented some facts, including a perspective of one Canadian librarian [36], which clearly stated that libraries do not mark “objectionable” content in any particular way, it was a real pleasure to hear his insights.

But a month or two later it was clear that he wasn’t employed to make a decent suggestion, based on our values. He was employed to make a decision which would satisfy Fox News adherents. Instead of mentioning anywhere that it is not usual to mark sexually explicit content, instead of giving a multicultural perspective by adding at least Muhammad depictions to the list, he just produced a conclusion to please those to whom it is much more problematic that their daughter educate herself in sexual hygiene and contraception, then to see her pregnant at the age of 15. Of course, by mentioning “multiculturalism” just when it is in favor of those, exclusively American right-wing views [37].

Then the Censorship workgroup [not able to find public link; it was likely announced on internal-l] was created. The task of the group was to articulate what the censorship would look like. I offered, hesitantly, to participate in it, as a part of the responsibility which I had as one of the most vocal opponents of that task. Not unexpectedly, all of us were happy without me on the workgroup.

After a period of workgroup work, it presented the design of censorship software [38]. To be honest, it is not bad at all. People are able to click on “show image”, nothing is cemented. In an ideal world, such an image filter would be a very good option. However, we don’t live in an ideal world.

I’ll describe current events (the second part of 2011) after enough time passes and some distance from the current events would be created.

Milos

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum

[2] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content

[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/Results/en

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer#Internet_censorship

[5] http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=63722

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

[10] http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/11/018255/Larry-Sanger-Tells-FBI-Wikipedia-Distributes-Child-Pornography

[11] http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/27/wikipedia-child-porn-larry-sanger-fbi/

[12] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual_content/Archive_1

[13] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual_content/Archive_3

[14] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual_content/Village_pump/2010-5-6

[15] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Sexual_content/Village_pump/2010-5-7

[16] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057789.html

[17] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057791.html

[18] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Remove_Founder_flag

[19] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petition_to_Jimbo

[20] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Undeletion_requests/Archive/2010-05

[21] http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/07/wikipedia-purges-porn/

[22] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2010-May/000008.html

[23] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057795.html

[24] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057827.html

[25] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058026.html

[26] http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=Jimbo+Wales&page=&year=&month=-1&tagfilter=

[27] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%89douard-Henri_Avril_%2827%29.jpg

[28] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard-Henri_Avril

[29] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franz_von_Bayros_016.jpg

[30] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_von_Bayros

[31] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F%C3%A9licien_Rops_-_Sainte-Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se.png

[32] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licien_Rops

[33] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decadent_movement

[34] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/195612

[35] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Commissioning_Recommendations_from_the_Executive_Director

[36] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_Content&ldid=2103910#The_Librarians.27s_Perspective

[37] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_Content:_Part_Three

[38] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/en#What_will_the_image_hider_look_like.3F

Song of the week

For the end of the editorial, here is the song of the week:
http://tinyurl.com/6vaxls

Milos

Personal perspective

This week we have personal perspective from Salmaan Haroon, User:Theo10011 [1].

Theo is from India. He is originally from English Wikipedia but mostly active on Meta these days. He worked extensively on the WMF strategic plan on Strategy Wiki [2] a couple of years ago. He has been involved in Movement roles since early this year. He wrote for the Signpost briefly.

He worked for WMF for 3 months last year during the fundraiser, and got the chance to interact with chapters and see the fundraising issue from different perspectives.

Wikimedia chapters council [3] is his proposal.

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Theo10011

[2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/

[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters_council

I was invited to write about my perspective on the recent chapter and fundraising issues that have been doing the rounds. Let me first start out by making this disclosure- I am not affiliated with any chapter beyond a regular membership acquired a few weeks ago, I never sat on a chapter board, attended a general meeting, and neither do I plan on starting any time soon. Given a different set of circumstance, I am not sure if my perspective would be deemed completely neutral in the following matter.

Previously, as an outsider to the internal working of Wikimedia and chapter relations, I viewed the idea of chapters as a regular unaffiliated community member would i.e. with a mix of ignorance and skepticism. Chapters are viewed in some circles as legal organizations formed in different countries by a handful of people who then use Wikimedia trademarks and fundraising to raise funds to just exist and occasionally serve as a local outreach point.

Somewhere during the last year, I actually started meeting some of these people. I began to see the other side, how chapters perceive themselves and each other. True, there is an entire spectrum where each chapter falls and how close they actually are to what they want to be. Some of these people became my friends, I started seeing things from their perspective.

Over the last year, I saw chapters organize and take on activities like Wiki Loves Monuments, something the foundation never tried to do. I saw them do local GLAM outreach and activities in Germany and France, again, something that the foundation could not take on directly. They all do their own thing individually in their part of the world whether it be some open-license lobbying to their local institutions or outreach to a local exhibition.

I can not in good conscience accept that our movement would be any better off without them being independent. They are completely decentralized, and do their own thing independently, I love that model. A few dozen organizations doing their own things in tandem in different parts of the world is an unmatched model when it comes to productivity.

Lately however, there have been overtures that this model might be under threat. The distance and the relation between the foundation and the chapters has been getting more and more strained. The fundraising issue and the board letter that started the recent debate at the core placed concerns, that really no one disagreed with. I am yet to talk to a single person who thinks that most of those concerns aren't legitimate or there isn't a need for a sustained model of accountability. Almost every chapter in private and public, agrees that the issues are serious and require some action on everyones part.

The biggest issue is however how these concerns are being addressed. Some of the foundation's recent actions are being perceived as a heavy-handed towards chapters and the community at large. The conceptual directives have been coming from the board, perceptually overlooking an important distinction someone else made earlier- the board is the Wikimedia Foundation's board, not the chapter's, certainly not the movement's, the larger community is even less inclined to agree.

When the questions about the fundraising issue started, there were 2 large concerns that took over after the board's announcement. One, if the chapters that already agreed to participate in the fundraiser being allowed to continue, and second, if new half-a-dozen chapters that wanted to participate would be able to do so. The timing as others pointed out was less than ideal, having the staff and the board in person at Wikimania didn't help and instead compounded the problems.

The cross-talk between the board and staff at that stage seemed minimal. Sue gave a lengthy explanation about the issues and the board's concern, as did several board members who offered their perspective, staff members however seemed to be on a different page. Instead of giving any time to discuss and coordinate on how to address these issues, the entire fundraising model was taken away in what some perceive as a knee-jerk reaction and being replaced quietly by a grants-only model.

In hindsight, effective planning, and better timing might have avoided the initial confusion. But springing such an important change on chapters so close to the fundraiser, even after chapters attended an entire 'fundraising summit' just a few weeks prior could not have gone well. Chapters were told how to participate in the fundraiser by WMF staff that attended the aforementioned 'summit'.

They were now being told to re-evaluate it all, and forget about fundraising and focus on a grants-based model. With all the arguments and the questions that ensued, the staff hasn't addressed most of the issues publicly.

Delphine pointed out facts about WMDE, how the ideal independent chapter, the only one who would be allowed to fundraise came to be. How its independence, and the ability to stand on its own two feet made WMDE an example to follow for others. The notion that independent fundraising by chapters wouldn't affect the money needed by the movement is a fallacy.

The movement as a whole would lose millions every year, if the chapters are not allowed to do this locally. At some point, we have to realize - a one size fits all, global solution doesn't work. Our movement is decentralized, I think it's only logical that the fundraising be decentralized as well.

There is also a general sense of questioning the ownership of the fundraiser among the larger community. There are people who believe that it is the foundation's prerogative to only allow anyone it wants to fundraise or not, since it is the sole entity in charge of everything related to the movement. This would inevitably lead to more questions about ownership of the projects, and who is entitled to raise money in the name of Wikipedia?

Non-profits around the world use a decentralized model similar to the one we might have. The current structure looks identical to theirs. if someone were to visit Oxfam.com, they would be directed to the nearest office in their region where they can donate to the cause. In our case, the biggest identity would be our projects, a banner could serve the same purpose locally. Why do we then question the same model that already exist and work elsewhere?

Around the time these discussions were going on, I recalled something that we talked about during the Chapters conference in Berlin. An idea about a Chapters council, composed of all individual chapters to say "We, the chapters...." - The community itself is large enough that it can never completely agree on any point together, an important distinctions that chapters might not suffer from.

The number of chapters are not large, and some of the issues are so central that a single unanimous voice is not hard to form. There are and have been several iterations of this body, over the years and there is a clear need for it now than ever before. I have no idea if it can bridge the gap and address some of the concerns everyone has, but I do believe, it is worth trying, now more than ever.

Chapters, should ideally be the face of the movement- young, hard-working, active and mostly unpaid volunteers that take the good-nature and ethos of our movement, offline. Be it some small project in their backyard, outreach to a local library or museum or a small exhibition in their city, they should be given freedom to decide what works for them locally and then the ability to do so. The foundation should ideally, do its best to support and decentralize this model as much as possible. When chapters work, they work excellently.

Salmaan Haroon, User:Theo10011

In the news

[Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner in US diplomatic cable] - Jimmy Wales was mentioned in a leaked US diplomatic cable under the name Jimmy Walker. Among many people with that name, one Jimmy Walker was the mayor of New York City from 1926 to 1932. Another one is Jimmie Walker, comedian. Sue Gardner has been presented as "Wikipedia's leading editor".
http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/11/08SANTIAGO1015.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Walker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Walker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmie_Walker
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2009/05/09TELAVIV982.html

[Inventor of eBook died] - Michael Stern Hart, inventor of the eBook concept and Project Gutenberg, has died at the age of 64.
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart

[Celebrities’ Autographs] - Crushable reports (not quite) news that Wikipedia has started including celebrities' autographs in articles about them. In a related event, User:Hindustanilanguage uploaded ~300 autographs on Wikimedia Commons in mid-August.
http://crushable.com/entertainment/wikipedia-has-started-including-celebrities-autographs-on-their-profiles-394/
http://tinyurl.com/4xxmepz

["How do i edit a page on wikipedia without it gettin removed?"] - A classic high school question about editing Wikipedia appeared on Yahoo Answers.
http://malaysia.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110902133937AAVW9a8

[Positive critique in Washington Post] - The Washington Post journalist Valerie Strauss published article on "Wikipedia is not wicked!" by The Daring Librarian, otherwise known as Gwyneth Anne Jones, on her blog.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-daring-librarian-wikipedia-is-not-wicked/2011/09/06/gIQAYWSF8J_blog.html
http://www.thedaringlibrarian.com/

[Branding company plays with Wikipedia] - Branding company Moving Brands, invited by Viewpoint magazine to showcase their process, created a proposal for a new Wikimedia identity. While the value of the final product could be debated, it is interesting that the company has a clear understanding of Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wikipedia's core Five Pillars, which they included in their creative process.
http://www.movingbrands.com/
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/wikipedia_concept.php
http://www.movingbrands.com/?category_name=wikipedia-work

[Wikipedia editors motivation] - Business life has published the article "Why do people contribute to Wikipedia for free?"
http://www.babusinesslife.com/Tools/Economics/Why-do-people-contribute-to-Wikipedia-for-free-.html

[New York Times on Wikipedia and 9/11] - New York Times published an article "On Wikipedia, Echoes of 9/11 ‘Edit Wars’".
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/business/media/on-wikipedia-911-dissent-is-kept-on-the-fringe.html?_r=1

[Jimmy Wales guest of Cambridge Network] - Jimmy Wales gave a lecture to the Cambridge Network members. The Cambridge Network is a commercial business networking organization for business people and academics working in technology fields in the Cambridge area of the UK. In response to his lecture, Cambridge Business Media published the article "Running Wikipedia, possibly not as easy as Jimmy Wales makes it look".
http://www.pr.com/press-release/352263
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Network
http://www.cabume.co.uk/blog/running-wikipedia-possibly-not-as-easy-as-jimmy-wales-makes-it-look.html

[The worst Kindle eBooks] - "The worst Kindle eBooks ever written" is a compilation of Wikipedia articles.
http://www.beyond-black-friday.com/2011/08/30/the-worst-kindle-ebooks-ever-written/

[Copyright in EU] - Copyright on musical recordings extended by twenty years in EU.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Copyright_on_musical_recordings_extended_by_twenty_years_in_EU

[WikiSweeper] - Ushahidi and Wikimedia Foundation joint initiative to create a hot news tool for Wiki editors
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_add_research_mega-tool_for_hot_news_a.php
http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/09/13/announcing-the-wikisweeper-project/

[Jimmy Wales in Indianapolis] - Jimmy Wales was talking to 3,000 marketing experts in Indianapolis.
http://www.indystar.com/article/20110913/BUSINESS06/109130390/Wikipedia-founder-shares-passion-Indianapolis-crowd?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CIndyStar.com%7Cs

[Columnist for Independent and Wikipedia] - The award-winning Independent columnist Johann Hari has apologized for editing the Wikipedia entries of people he had clashed with, using the pseudonym David Rose.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/14/johann-hari-apologises-orwell-prize
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Hari

[Campus paper The Bell Ringer on Wikipedia] - Columnist of The Bell Ringer, the campus paper of the Augusta State University, published text "In the Defense of Wikipedia".
http://www.asubellringer.com/2011/09/14/in-the-defense-of-wikipedia/

From Wikipedia

[Hungry ghost] - Hungry ghost is a Western translation of an Eastern phrase representing beings who are driven by intense emotional needs in an animalistic way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_ghost

[Fenian raids] - The Fenian raids of the Fenian Brotherhood based in the United States on British army forts, customs posts and other targets in Canada were fought in order to bring pressure on Britain to withdraw from Ireland, between 1866 and 1871.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_raids

[Monte Cristo, Washington] - Monte Cristo is a ghost town northwest of Monte Cristo Peak, in eastern Snohomish County in western Washington. Prospecting in the region began in the Skykomish River drainage with the Old Cady Trail used for access. In 1882 Elisha Hubbard improved the trail up the North Fork Skykomish, from Index to Galena, then north up the tributary Silver Creek. A boom shortly followed at Mineral City. The mineral belt was traced in various directions, including north over the divide between the Skykomish and Sauk River drainages. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cristo,_Washington

[Persin] - Persin is a fungicidal toxin present in the avocado. It is generally harmless to humans, but when consumed by domestic animals in large quantities it is dangerous. It has been suggested as a treatment for breast cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persin

[Progress trap] - A progress trap is the condition human societies experience when, in pursuing progress through human ingenuity, they inadvertently introduce problems they do not have the resources or political will to solve, for fear of short-term losses in status, stability or quality of life. This prevents further progress and sometimes leads to collapse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap

[Phosphene] - A phosphene is an entoptic phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye. The word phosphene comes from the Greek words phos (light) and phainein (to show). Phosphenes are flashes of light, often associated with optic neuritis, induced by movement or sound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene

[HD 85512 b] - HD 85512 b is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star HD 85512 approximately 36 light-years away in the constellation of Vela. The planet was discovered by the scientists at University of Geneva, Switzerland, led by the Swiss astronomer Stéphane Udry of the GTO program of High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a high-precision echelle spectrograph installed on ESO's 3.6 m telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. HD 85512 b is one of the smallest exo-planets discovered to be in the habitable zone. HD 85512 b is considered to be the best candidate for habitability as of August 25, 2011.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_85512_b

[Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin] - Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was an English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin

[List of people claimed to be Jesus] - John Nichols Thom (1799–1838), Cornish tax rebel who claimed to be the "saviour of the world" and the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and his body temple of the Holy Ghost[citation needed] in 1834. He was killed by British soldiers at the Battle of Bossenden Wood, on May 31, 1838 in Kent, England. Arnold Potter (1804–1872), Schismatic Latter Day Saint leader; he claimed the spirit of Jesus Christ entered into his body and he became "Potter Christ" Son of the living God, he died in an attempt to "ascend into heaven" by jumping off a cliff.[citation needed] His body was later retrieved and buried by his followers. Bahá'u'lláh (1817–1892), born Shiite, adopted Bábism later in 1844, he claimed to be the prophesized fulfilment and Promised One of all the major religions. He founded the Bahá'í Faith in 1866. Followers of the Bahá'í Faith believe that the fulfillment of the prophecies of the second coming of Jesus, as well as the prophecies of the 5th Buddha Maitreya and many other religious prophecies, were begun by the Báb in 1844 and then by Bahá'u'lláh. They commonly compare the fulfillment of Christian prophecies to Jesus' fulfillment of Jewish prophecies, where in both cases people were expecting the literal fulfillment of apocalyptic statements. ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus

Editor(s): Millosh, Theo10011, Kpjas , Corrector(s): Nathan , Support: Walter , Contact: 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.
Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Wikizine News - Year: 2011 Week: 38 Number: 128

2011-09-15T10:33:00.000Z

Wikizine

[Your reports] - Post your news for the next edition of Wikizine on Meta or in our Google form.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/EN2011-129
http://tinyurl.com/5rpahqt

Movement

[Wikinews fork] - The Open Globe, a Wikinews fork, has been announced. The fork produced much discussion on Foundation-l about the causes of the fork, Wikimedia Foundation support for projects other than Wikipedia, and the nature of Wikinews.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/068277.html
http://theopenglobe.org/

[Wiki Loves Monuments] - 15,000 images from Wiki Loves Images and counting.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/06/pan-european-wiki-loves-monuments-contest-receives-15000-images-from-more-than-1000-participants-and-counting/
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/2011/09/01/294/
http://whatisgoingonineurope.blogspot.com/2011/09/monuments-in-europe.html
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/2011/09/12/special-award-for-pyrenees-mediterranian/

[Hungarian Wikipedia] - Hungarian Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/12/asteroid-shower-helps-propel-hungarian-wikipedia-to-200000-articles-at-warp-speed/

[Image filter "referendum"] - Discussions on image filter still ongoing (similar size of the foundation-l archive for the half of September in comparison to the whole August). They escalated last week. The German Wikipedia opened a poll which ends today. As of Tuesday morning, more than 85% (340:56) of voters are against implementation of an image filter on the German Wikipedia. "Next steps" for the de.wp community are in the process of analysis.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/thread.html
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Image_filter_referendum/en
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Einf%C3%BChrung_pers%C3%B6nlicher_Bildfilter
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/Next_steps/en

Technical news

[Translation rally] - Wikimedia Netherlands sponsors translatewiki.net to run a translation rally.
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/09/localisation-rally-for-mediawiki-and.html

[Wiki Golf] - Proprietary computer game "Wiki Golf" features "six degrees of separation" on Wikipedia.
http://www.pr.com/press-release/352263

Foundation

[August report] - Wikimedia Foundation published August report.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/08/wikimedia-foundation-report-august-2011/

[Wikipedia Sepedi] - Wikipedia in Northern Sotho or Sepedi has been approved.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30882

[Donate wiki] - Donate wiki has been opened. However, donate.wikimedia.org still redirects to Wikimedia Foundation Donate page.
http://donate.wikimedia.org/

Chapters

[Wikimedia DC becomes chapter] - Board has recognized Wikimedia DC as 36th Wikimedia chapter and the second chapter in the United States.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Recognition_of_Wikimedia_District_of_Columbia

[Wikipedia club at University in Mexico] - In a guest post on Gerard Meijssen's blog, Leigh Thelmadatter presents the Wikipedia club at University in Mexico.
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/09/wikipedia-club-at-university-in-mexico.html

[Wikimedia UK's CEO] - Wikimedia UK asks Wikimedians to help them to choose a CEO.
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2011/09/help-us-choose-our-chief-executive/

[WikiConference India] - WikiConference India is warming up. It will be held in Mumbai between November 18th and 20th.
http://www.penn-olson.com/2011/09/07/wikipedia-indi/
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011

[Wikimedia Canada] - Wikimedia Canada offers scholarships for Wikipedia articles in medicine.
http://wikimedia.ca/wiki/Scholarship_application

[Wikimedia UK and Institute of Physics] - Wikimedia UK members visited the Institute of Physics.
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2011/09/wikimedia-uk-at-the-institute-of-physics/

Chapters reports

[Wikimedia India] - Wikimedia India has published its fifth report.
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Reports/Report_5

[Wikimedia Sweden] - Wikimedia Sweden has published its report for August 2011.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2011-September/000234.html

Science

[Wikimedia Summer of Research] - Findings from the Wikimedia Foundation Summer of Research are now available.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/06/summer-research-findings/

[Pupils love, teachers hate Wikipedia] - On his blog, Ziko van Dijk describes research by Wikimedia Germany about the use of Wikipedia by teachers and students.
http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/pupils-love-wikipedia-teachers-hate-it/

[Wikipedia in Liberal Arts Classroom] - National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education has published a good article on Wikipedia in liberal arts classrooms.
http://blogs.nitle.org/2011/09/12/wikipedia-in-the-liberal-arts-classroom/

[Breaking news trends] - Ushahidi, a non-profit software company from Africa, has started a project to track breaking news trends on Wikipedia.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/13/ushahidi-to-track-breaking-news-trends-on-wikipedia/
http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2011/09/13/announcing-the-wikisweeper-project/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_add_research_mega-tool_for_hot_news_a.php

Media

[Wikipedia Signpost] - New edition of Wikipedia Signpost has been published. In this edition you can find stories: Foundation reports on research, Kenya trip, Mumbai Wikiconference, 9/11 anniversary casts its shadow on the wiki, A minimalist makeover and so on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-09-12

Events and meetups

[21 August - 6 October] - Stewards election.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2
- [21 August - 6 October] - Questions to candidates.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2/Questions
- [15 September - 6 October] - Voting.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2/Guidelines/en#Voters

[14-16 September] - [New Orleans Hackathon] - New Orleans Hackathon will take place between October 14th and 16th.
http://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2011/09/01/0
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon

[16 September] - Hong Kong 57 meetup
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Hong_Kong/57

[16-25 September] - Wikipedia Takes Mittelhessen, Germany
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_Mittelhessen

[17 September] - Wikipedia Takes Barcelona will be held on September 17th.
http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquip%C3%A8dia:Wikipedia_Takes_Barcelona

[17 September] - Wiki Takes Amersfoot (Netherlands) will take place on September 17th.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ontmoeten#Amersfoort_17_september

[17 September] - Wikipedia takes Fremantle (Australia) will be held on September 17th.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Fremantle

[17 September] - Manchester meetup
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Manchester

[17 September] - Berkeley Wikipedia Meetup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Berkeley

[18 September] - Wikipedia Takes Andorra
http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquip%C3%A8dia:Viquip%C3%A8dia_prem_Andorra

[24 September] - Wiki Takes de Zaan (Netherlands) will be held on September 24th.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ontmoeten#Zaanstreek_24_september

[24 September] - Wikipedia Takes Göteborg, Sweden
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikitr%C3%A4ffar#Fotosafari.2C_G.C3.B6teborg.2C_l.C3.B6rdag_24_sep

[24 September] - Wikipedia Takes Porto, Portugal
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9dia_Toma_o_Porto

[24-25 September] - Polish Wikipedia community, supported by Wikimedia Polska, is going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project (founded on September 26, 2001) with a conference to be held on September 24-25, in Poznan, Poland.
http://10lat.wikipedia.pl
http://tinyurl.com/42tkjub (Google translate)

[25 September] - Wikipedia Takes Cologne, Germany
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_K%C3%B6ln

[25 September] - Wikipedia Takes Lisbon, Portugal
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Wikip%C3%A9dia_Toma_Lisboa

[30 September] - The last day of the project Wiki Loves Monuments for this year is September 30th.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011

[1 October] - A Backstage Pass tour is an event aimed at sharing the expertise of real-world cultural institutions with our wiki-expertise. Wikimedia UK organizes it at Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, UK.
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Backstage_Pass

[1 October] - Washington DC meetup #23. Wiki DC board elections.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/DC_23

Meetups are filled from Wikipedia:Meetup page at English Wikipedia. Please, add your meetup there and it will be published by Wikizine. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup)

GLAM-related events are held on Outreach Wiki. If you add your GLAM-related event there, it will be published in Wikizine. (http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Events)

For other events, please post them on our events page or send us email with short description of your event. (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/Events)

Quote

"United we stand; divided we fall."
Aesop in "The Four Oxen and the Lion", Fables, also known as "The Lion and the Bulls"
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aesop

Wikizine seeks editors - Editor(s): Millosh , Corrector(s): Nathan , Support: Walter, Contact: 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. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. 
Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions". Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].
Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Year: 2011 Week: 37 Number: 127

2011-09-07T21:27:00.003Z

Wikizine

[Editorial] - As Walter said in the previous edition, I took initiative and there are some changes in the Wikizine concept. But, more about them on Friday, in Talk Edition of Wikizine! Milos.

[Your reports] - Post your news for the next edition of Wikizine on Meta or in our Google form.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/EN2011-128
http://tinyurl.com/3w8wg5j

Request for Comments

[ISO 639-1 => ISO 639-3] - User:とある白い猫 has started discussion about moving Wikimedia projects with ISO 639-1 code in the name (like "en") to ISO 639-3 code (like "eng"). The discussion was held in 2008 on Bugzilla, as well.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_language_ISO_639-1_%E2%86%92_639-3_proposal
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14010

Movement

[Wiki Loves Monuments] - Wiki Loves Monuments launched last week. Press release published: Make European Cultural Heritage Accessible to the World.
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/2011/09/06/make-european-cultural-heritage-accessible-to-the-world/

Technical news

[Wikidroid for Wikipedia] - Positive analysis about (likely) proprietary software "Wikidroid for Wikipedia" published on Android Pit.
http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/tests/test/392588/Wikidroid-for-Wikipedia-Knowledge-in-the-Palm-of-Your-Hand

Foundation

[Image filter "referendum" over] - It said to us what we already know: Wikimedians are multicultural and want to allow themselves to change their mind. However, no consensus emerged in relation to the most important question: should images be filtered at all? The survey questions were not asked in a form allowing "yes/no" answers; participants were asked to indicate the importance of some features on a scale. "Referendum" turnout was around 3%: ~700,000 emails were sent to eligible users, ~24,000 respondents expressed their opinions. (In comparison, Board elections have 10-15% turnout.) The next step is to analyze those numbers.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/Results/en

[GLAM report] - WMF's GLAM initiative published August 2011 reports from USA, UK, Canada, Spain, Germany, Mexico and Israel.
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/August_2011

[Wikipedia Editor Satisfaction Index] - Mani Pande and Ayush Khanna from WMF introduced a new measurement, the Wikipedia Editor Satisfaction Index.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/02/introducing-wikipedia-editor-satisfaction-index/

Chapters

[WMF representatives in chapters' boards?] - The initiative for Wikimedia Brazil presented the idea to have a WMF appointed member of their chapter Board. After Ray Saintonge noted that it's not quite regular, Jimmy Wales supported the idea, which, in turn, sparked long discussion about (un)acceptable WMF influence over chapters.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/246958

Science

[Gender Bias] - In the Volume 5 for 2011, International Journal of Communication published a paper by Joseph Reagle and Lauren Rhue called "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica".
http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/777/591 (pdf)

[Investigating editing anxiety in new users] - A project by Dr. Benjamin R. Cowan and Professor Russell Beale has been added to the Research directory.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Investigating_editing_anxiety_in_new_users

[Research committee meeting] - RCom held a meeting on September 2nd. Notes from the meeting are available on Wikimedia Etherpad.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meetings/Meeting_2011-09-02
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/RCom201109

[Virtual community research] - Stuart Easterling, WMF Virtual Community History Fellow published an update on Virtual community history research of Wikipedia in Spanish.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/02/update-on-virtual-community-history-research-spanish-language-wikipedia/

Media

[Wikipedia Signpost] - New edition of Wikipedia Signpost has been published. In this edition you can find stories: Riding with WikiProject London Transport, The copyright crisis, and why we should care, Britannica and Wikipedia like "apples and chairs", Should anyone who's anyone get an article? etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-09-05

Events and meetups

[21 August - 6 October] - Stewards election.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2
- [21 August - 6 October] - Questions to candidates.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2/Questions
- [15 September - 6 October] - Voting.
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2/Guidelines/en#Voters

[10 September] - Wiki Takes Amsterdam will be held on September 10th.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ontmoeten#Amsterdam:_Zaterdag_10_september

[10 September] - Kolkata7 meetup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Kolkata/Kolkata7

[11 September] - London 49 meetup
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/London/49

[14 September] - Workshop for GLAMs at Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, UK will be held on September 14th.
http://museumnetworkwarwickshire.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/something-wiki-this-way-comes-workshop-14th-september/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Art_Gallery_and_Museum

[14 September] - Amical Viquipèdia and Foundation Joan Miró organize the contest for improving articles about Joan Miró, on September 14th.
http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquiprojecte:Mir%C3%B3
http://www.viquimedia.cat/
http://www.fundaciomiro-bcn.org/

[14-16 September] - [New Orleans Hackathon] - New Orleans Hackathon will take place between October 14th and 16th.
http://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2011/09/01/0
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon

[15 September] - Wiki Wildlife Bristol, an event focused on writing about endangered species for Wikipedia, will take place on September 15th.
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Wildlife_Bristol

[16 September] - Hong Kong 57 meetup
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Hong_Kong/57

[17 September] - Wikipedia Takes Barcelona will be held on September 17th.
http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquip%C3%A8dia:Wikipedia_Takes_Barcelona

[17 September] - Wiki Takes Amersfoort (Netherlands) will take place on September 17th.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ontmoeten#Amersfoort_17_september

[17 September] - Wikipedia takes Fremantle (Australia) will be held on September 17th.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Fremantle

[17 September] - Manchester meetup
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Manchester

[17 September] - Berkeley Wikipedia Meetup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Berkeley

[24 September] - Wiki Takes de Zaan (Netherlands) will be held on September 24th.
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ontmoeten#Zaanstreek_24_september

[24-25 September] - Polish Wikipedia community, supported by Wikimedia Polska, is going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project (founded on September 26, 2001) with a conference to be held on September 24-25, in Poznan, Poland.
http://10lat.wikipedia.pl
http://tinyurl.com/42tkjub (Google translate)

[30 September] - The last day of the project Wiki Loves Monuments for this year is September 30th.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011

Meetups are filled from Wikipedia:Meetup page at English Wikipedia. Please, add your meetup there and it will be published by Wikizine. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup)

GLAM-related events are held on Outreach Wiki. If you add your GLAM-related event there, it will be published in Wikizine. (http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Events)

For other events, please post them on our events page or send us email with short description of your event. (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikizine/Events)

Editor(s): Millosh , Corrector(s): Nathan , Support: Walter , Contact: 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.
Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources.
Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions". Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Year: 2011 Week: 36 Number: 126

2011-09-02T19:14:00.000Z

Wikizine

[Wikizine] - you may have have noticed changes to Wikizine in the most recent editions. This is under the impulse of user Millosh who has taken the lead in relaunching Wikizine. We love to hear your ideas and feedback about this.

http://report.wikizine.org

[Your reports] - Post your news for the next edition of Wikizine on Meta or in our Google form.

Technical news

[Wikipedia for Android 1.0] - A non-free software called "Wikipedia for Android 1.0" has been published. It doesn't look to be affiliated with the WMF.

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/download-review/2105274/wikipedia-android

[Engineering report] - Wikimedia engineering report for August 2011 published.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/01/wikimedia-engineering-august-2011-report/

Request for help

[Tech help] - Tech volunteers needed for Hurricane Irene relief.

http://philippebeaudette.com/crisiscommons-tech-help-needed/

Foundation

[Report for July] - Wikimedia Foundation published report for July 2011.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_July_2011

[Editors survey] - Wikimedia Foundation published report for editors survey for April 2011.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/08/29/report-for-editor-survey-april-2011/

Chapters

[Silver Knowledge Project] - Wikimedia Germany has a project "Projekt Silberwissen" or "Silver Knowledge Project", which aims to teach older people how to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Between July 1st and 3rd the first such project was held in the city of Ulm.

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2011/08/29/neues-aus-dem-projekt-silberwissen/
http://tinyurl.com/3r2vt43 (Google translate)

Chapters reports

[Wikimedia Germany] - Wikimedia Germany published report for July 2011.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Deutschland/April_2011

[Wikimedia Israel] - Wikimedia Israel published report for August 2011.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Israel/August_2011

[Wikimedia Hungary] - Wikimedia Hungary published report for June and July 2011.

[Wikimedia Austria] - Wikimedia Austria published report for August 2011.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_%D6sterreich/August_2011

Community

[Blogs about Wikimedia translators] - Philippe Beaudette suggests reading a blog post series about Wikimedia translators by Julie McDonough Dolmaya

[Language committee] - Language committee has published the August 2011 report

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Reports/2011-08

Events

[Stewards election] - Candidate submission will last until September 7th. Voting will be held between September 15th and October 6th.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2

[Wiki Loves Monuments] - Wiki Loves Monuments takes off.

http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/2011/09/01/wiki-loves-monuments-takes-off/

[New Orleans Hackathon] - In a letter to Wikizine editors, Sumana Harihareswara informs us about a New Orleans Hackathon, which would take place between October 14th and 16th:

"We've now chosen a focus for the New Orleans Wikimedia/MediaWiki developers' days! The theme of this event: "the infrastructure of innovation". We're going to improve and discuss the Wikimedia Labs projects infrastructure and other stuff that makes it easier for anyone to supercharge Wikimedia with awesomeness. We're going to work on our gadgets/extensions/tools support, authorization/authentication strategy, dev-ops virtualization, and general training and hacking.

It's mostly going to be dev sprints and bugsmashing, with some discussion and workshops. The event is open to anyone who wants to come and contribute, and is an opportunity to spend time with senior MediaWiki developers & ops engineers, write beautiful code, and learn about the latest developments."

Meetups

[Hong Kong 57] - September 16, 2011

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Hong_Kong/57

[Manchester wikimeet] - September 17, 2011

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Manchester

[Berkeley Wikipedia Meetup] - September 17, 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Berkeley

(Meetups section is filled from Wikipedia:Meetup page at English Wikipedia. Please, add your meetup there and it will be published by Wikizine.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup

Media

[Wikipedia Signpost] - A new edition of Wikipedia Signpost has been published. In this edition you can find stories such as: Effective collaboration leads to earlier article promotion, Deleted revisions in the English Wikipedia, Wikipedia and open-access repositories, Quality of featured articles doesn't always impress readers, and more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-08-29

In the news

[8 minutes] - Wikipedia needed just 8 minutes to cover an earthquake in Virginia on August 23rd.

[Hudong] - The biggest single-language encyclopedia, Chinese Hudong, raised 100M RMB (15.6M USD).

[Jimmy Wales on China] - Jimmy Wales interviewed by the Huffington Post, talks about China.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/08/29/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-sp_n_941239.html

[User:Hylian Auree and Hurricane Irene] - Daily Dot reports about 17 year old Wikipedian Hylian Auree, who was the most active editor on the Wikipedia article about Hurricane Irene.

[Selling links or not?] - WMF's Sustaining corporate donors page presented in a sensationalistic way: "Wikipedia Selling Links For $5000".

[Positive Psychology News on Wikipedia] - Positive Psychology News author Shannon Polly calls on university professors to assign students to work on Wikipedia.

http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/shannon-polly/2011082619017

From Wikipedia

[Santa Claus Conquers the Martians] - "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" is a 1964 movie considered as one of the worst movies in the history of cinematography. This holiday staple was the creation of Nicholas Webster. When Martian children get to see Santa Claus only on TV, their parents decide to abduct Santa to make them happy. Like many others in this category, it has been featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000. The film is cited on a 10-worst list in The Book of Lists, in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. It is also known for starring a very young Pia Zadora. Cinematic Titanic released a production of the movie in November 2008.

[Southern barbarian trade period] - Nanban trade or Southern barbarian trade period in Japanese history extends from the arrival of the first Europeans (Portuguese) to Japan in 1543, to their near-total exclusion from the archipelago in 1614, under the promulgation of the "Sakoku" Seclusion Edicts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanban_trade

[Holocene extinction] - The Holocene extinction refers to the extinction of species during the present Holocene epoch (since around 10,000 BC) generally from the impact of humans. The large number of extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods; a sizeable fraction of these extinctions are occurring in the rainforests. 875 extinctions occurring between 1500 and 2009 have been documented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Quote

"Look horses! ... Not pretty,. Really not pretty." -- POV of a 2-year old girl about the current line of "My Little Pony" as seen in a toy shop

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony

Editor(s): Millosh , Corrector(s): Nathan , Thanks to: Sumana , Support: Walter
Contact: 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.
Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources.
Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions". Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Year: 2011 Week: 36 Number: 125

2011-08-29T23:01:00.000Z

Community

[Stewards election] - Candidate submission will last up to September 7th. Voting will be held between September 15th and October 6th.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2

[Writing contest] - In 2004 the Dutch language Wikipedia was the first Wikipedia to organize a writing contest. Now at the 1th of September already the 8th edition will start and run for 2 months. Users can work alone or in a team on an article of their choice. At the end the jury will award the prizes to the winners; an image of the trophy they can put on their user pages.

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schrijfwedstrijd

[Research committee] - Next Research committee meeting will be held on September 2nd

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meetings/Meeting_2011-09-02

[Project closures] - Scots Wikipedia proposed for closure; proposal rejected during the same day. Proposals for Inuktitut and Old English Wikipedias closure rejected, while proposal for Asturianu Wikibooks closure accepted using the standard procedure.

Other news

[WikiLoves Monuments] - Have a date with a monument and send the proof to Commons! And, you never know, you may win one of many nice prizes.
WikiLoves Monuments is project in 18 European countries to get quality pictures of important items of cultural heritage. It is organized by national groups, with the exception of the program representing the Kingdom of Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg - which is one project that crosses state lines and includes several languages. The project takes the form of an image contest. The user needs to upload their pictures to Commons in September. A national jury, depending on the country where the monument is located, will judge and proclaim the winners and award prizes. But the best prize is to get freely licensed pictures of our heritage out there.

http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/ --- see menu at the right for list of participating country's
http://tinyurl.com/3bzt2oc -- Wikimedia Germany about WikiLoves Monuments (google translation)

Technical news

[AbuseFilter] - this is an extension for MediaWiki, which helps prevent vandalism on wikis, and is now active on all wikis. Before you needed to ask (via a bugzilla request) to enable it for your wiki.

Foundation

[Results are in] - ... of the editor survey of April 2011. The actual report is available as a PDF on Meta. But there is also an extensive summary on Meta. And if that is also too long to read for you - check out the Wikipedia Signpost - they will probably give a short summary of it.

Chapters

[Wikipedia.no] - YES! - The Chapter Wikimedia Norway has unanimously decide to make the domain wikipedia.no a portal page instead of pointing it to the bokmål version of Wikipedia. In many countries the first thing internet users enter is +national TLD when they look for a website. By sharing this important internet real estate other, mostly very small, Wikipedias in languages of that county get exposure to visitors. Others, like wikipedia.be and wikipedia.be made this change long ago. Some, like wikipedia.de , choose not to.

http://www.wikipedia.no
http://tinyurl.com/3l7cchr -- WM Norway press release about it (Google translation)

[Chapters Planet] - There are many WM Chapters so a special blog aggregator for all the postings by them seemed to be a good idea. User Bence, a student in Hungary, is offering this service at chaptersplanet.org Also is there an applet with the chapters twitter streams.

http://www.chaptersplanet.org/

[Wikimedia Washington DC] - Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc. has been approved by Chapters committee as sub-national chapter under the name Wikimedia District of Columbia. It is now before the Board for discussion and approval.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee/Resolutions/Approval_of_Wikimedia_Washington_DC_-_August_2011

[Wikimedia Hungary] - Wikimedia Hungary published their report for May 2011.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikim%C3%A9dia_Magyarorsz%C3%A1g/May_2011

[Wikimedia Sweden] - Wikimedia Sweden published their report for June and July 2011.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2011-August/000223.html

[Wikimedia Denmark] - Wikimedia Denmark published their report for July 2011.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Danmark/Kvartalsrapport_juli_2011 (in Danish)
http://tinyurl.com/3kvnwxm -- Google translation

[Iberocoop] - Report from Wikimania published by Wikimedia Argentina (in Spanish).

http://www.wikimedia.org.ar/node/45 (in Spanish)
http://tinyurl.com/3g3vsyh -- Google translation
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Iberocoop

[Women and Wikimedia] - Wikimedia UK published report "Girl Geeks V. Wikimeet – An exercise in real-time collaboration"

http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2011/08/girl-geeks-v-wikimeet-an-exercise-in-real-time-collaboration/

[Wikimedia UK] - Wikimedia UK published report for July 2011.

http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/July

Meetups

[RegioWikiCamp Brest (France)] - September 2, 2011

http://wiki.regiowiki.eu/RegioWikiCamp_2011

[Hong Kong 57] - September 16, 2011

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Hong_Kong/57

[Manchester wikimeet] - September 17, 2011

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Manchester

[Berkeley Wikipedia Meetup] - September 17, 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Berkeley

(Meetups section is filled from Wikipedia:Meetup page at English Wikipedia. Please, add your meetup there and it will be published by Wikizine.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup

Media

[Wikipedia Signpost] - Volume 7, Issue 34 – 22 August 2011 has been published. Stories in this edition: Journalist regrets not checking citation, PR firms issue advice on how to “survive” Wikipedia (but U.S. Congressman caught red-handed), Girl Geeks edit while they dine, JJ Harrison on avian photography, After eleven moves, name for islands now under arbitration.

http://www.wikipediasignpost.com/blog/?p=374

Stats

[Wikipedia] - July 2011 was the best July ever by the number of very active users for Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, French and many more Wikipedias.

In the news

[News.com.au] - Article "The Wikipedia article 'philosophy game' in numbers" published in news.com.au

http://www.news.com.au/technology/the-wikipedia-article-philosophy-game-in-numbers/story-e6frfro0-1226119845491

[Daily India] - Daily India published article about Wikimedia India (although wrongly named "Wikipedia-India")

http://www.dnaindia.com/academy/report_college-of-engineering-pune-students-to-co-author-wikipedia-india_1578420

[Jimmy Wales on BBC] - Jimmy Wales will appear at BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival 2011 begin November.

http://www.newsonnews.net/radio/11213-wikipedia-founder-heads-line-up-at-bbc-radio-3-s-free-thinking-festival-2011.html

[Network World] - Network World authors Jim Metzler and Steve Taylor think that Wikipedia "is an open source, peer-reviewed online dictionary".

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/frame/2011/082211wan1.html

[Inquirer News] - Inquirer News author Paolo G. Montecillo thinks that "Wikipedia is our smartest teacher".

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/45417/when-kids-go-online-unguided

From Wikipedia

[Khat] - Khat is a flowering plant native to tropical East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It contains the alkaloid called cathinone, an amphetamine-like stimulant which is said to cause excitement, loss of appetite, and euphoria. Khat is so popular in Yemen that its cultivation consumes much of the country's agricultural resources. It is estimated that 40% of the country's water supply goes towards irrigating it, with production increasing by about 10% to 15% every year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khat

[Kingdom Tower] - Kingdom Tower is a supertall skyscraper approved for construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Its preliminary cost is 1.23 billion USD and it will be tall at least 1,000 meters, becoming the tallest building in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Tower

[Louie Louie] - In February, 1964, an outraged parent wrote to Robert Kennedy, then the Attorney General of the United States, alleging that the lyrics of "Louie Louie" were obscene. The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the complaint. In June 1965, the FBI laboratory obtained a copy of the Kingsmen recording and, after two years of investigation, concluded that the recording could not be interpreted, that it was "unintelligible at any speed" [...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Louie#Lyrics_investigation

Wikizine seeks editors - Editor(s): Milos, Walter - Corrector(s): Nathan - Thanks to: Nathan - Contact: http://report.wikizine.org - Website: http://www.wikizine.org - Reader feedback is welcome - Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Year:2011 Week: 34 Number:124

2011-08-19T21:34:00.000Z

Foundation

[Image filter referendum] - Voting has started and it will last up to August 30th. You can discuss it as well. It is about providing the reader the opt-in option to hide certain types of images that reader does not like to see.

Chapters

[Wikimedia Hungary] - Wikimedia Hungary published reports for March and April 2011.

Community

[Wikimania 2011] - has come and is gone. It was in Israël, city of Haifa, this year. Media is available online. Reports about it can be found in The Signpost. Next Wikimania, the 2012-edition, will be in the United States of America, Washington.

http://www.youtube.com/user/WikimediaIL -- video of Wikimania 2011 on Youtube
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2011 -- media at Commons
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2012

[Stewards election] - Candidate submission for the second election for stewards this year will be open between August 21st and September 7th. Voting will be held between September 15th and October 6th.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011-2

[Mingrelian Wikipedia] - Wikipedia in Mingrelian language has been created in July. Mingrelian is a Karvelian (South Caucasian) language spoken by 500,000 people in Georgia. There are now 282 Wikipedias but not all are active.

[Language committee] - Language committee report for July has been published.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_committee/Reports/2011-07

[Research committee] - Next Research committee meeting will be held on September 2nd.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meetings/Meeting_2011-09-02

Meetups

[Manila 14] - August 27, 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Manila_14

[RegioWikiCamp Brest (France)] - September 2, 2011

http://wiki.regiowiki.eu/RegioWikiCamp_2011

[Manchester wikimeet] - September 17, 2011

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Manchester

[Berkeley Wikipedia Meetup] - September 17, 2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Berkeley

Meetups section is filled from Wikipedia:Meetup page at English Wikipedia. Please, add your meetup there and it will be published by Wikizine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup

Request for Comments

[Stewards] - A proposal has been made to simplfy the rules for granting admin and bureaucrat rights by Stewards. This only relevant for small wikis that have no (active) bureaucrat.

Media

[Wikipedia Signpost] - Volume 7, Issue 33 – 15 August 2011 has been published. Stories in this edition: Women and Wikipedia, Chapter funding and what skeptics and Latter Day Saints have in common, Wikipedia a “sausage fest”, Chicago Wikipedians (“the people you’ve probably plagiarized”), and other silly season stories, WikiProject report: The Oregonians and so on.

http://www.wikipediasignpost.com/blog/?p369

Stats

[Wikipedia] - Chinese Wikipedia is again in the top 10 Wikipedias by page views and it seems that it will stay so in August, as well. For the period July 2010 - July 2011 Kazakh Wikipedia raised visits for 514%.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm

[Wikinews] - Page views raised for 16% during the last year, mostly thanks to the raise of French, German and Portuguese editions. Persian Wikinews raised for almost 6000% during the past year.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikinews/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm

[Wikisource] - The first 13 Wikisource editions by page views have increased level of visits for the last year.

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikisource/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm

Was ist das?

"OpenZim" - if you have used the function on the wiki to make a "book" you maybe have noticed that besides PDF and ODT as export option there is also "OpenZim".

Kiwix is the program you need for that. It is a project to offer a offline reader for Wikipedia. The have just released a new beta-version, version 0.9. Supported are; GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows.

Kiwix provides a user experiences that is very close to reading the live wiki. You can view a selection of articles you have bundled yourself or someone else, like The Signpost (see "book edition").
You can also download the database of a specific language edition of a Wikipedia. This gives a very convenient way to have a offline version of Wikipedia.
http://www.kiwix.org

PS; do not confuse it with "kwiki" when installing form repository.

Did you know ...
... you can edit your Galaxy?

When Wikipedia started 10 years ago it was revolutionary; a encyclopedia that everybody can edit. How to top that? Edit your own galaxy!
http://www.galaxiki.org/

Quote

"It's a bad idea, and should be strangled at birth."
-- mailing list responds about the idea to include a "like button" to edits

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/54328

Wikizine seeks editors Editor(s): Millosh, Walter - Contact: 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. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".

Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Year: 2011 Week: 4 Number: 123

2011-01-18T23:17:00.001Z

When you thought you were relieved of it...

2010

[News of the Wiki: year 2010] - Wikizine totally failed at informing you about Wikimedia news last year. This was regrettable but unavoidable due the lack of active staff. Fortunately, "The Signpost" looks better than ever and provides an excellent overview about the main topics of the past year in the Wikimedia world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-01-03/2010_in_review

Technical news

[Virginia Data Center] - the WMF has rented space in a data center in Virginia, USA. Installation of the hardware has been scheduled for February 2011. This location will soon become the main WMF data center.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Center_Virginia

[Article feedback] - a function to give readers the option of rating the quality of an article has been activated on a few pages of the English Wikipedia. The test showed that anonymous users give a much higher score than registered users. It started in September 2010 and is ongoing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion -- an article with the feedback function enabled
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot_Phase_2

[WMF Engineering Update] - an extensive overview of technical news, events and more.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/01/wmf-engineering-update/#more-1268

Request for help

[Keep your news clippings] - Do you see an article about Wikipedia in a newspaper or other printed media? Keep it. Contact your local chapter (if it exists) to ask if they can keep it safe for your local community. When there is no chapter, just keep it yourself -- especially if you are from a small language Wikipedia. Every article that appears in print is something to collect.

Foundation

[Founder] - A video message from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, to the world

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WalesCalltoAction.ogv

Agenda

[StrataConf 2011] - February 1-3, 2011, Santa Clara, California — Many Wikimedians will be attending the O'Reilly conference, and there will be a an informal meetup with foundation staff member Erik Zachte on Wikimedia Data.

http://strataconf.com/strata2011

[FOSDEM] - February 5-6, Brussels, Belgium — Tomasz Finc, Arthur Richards, and Roan Kattouw will be at FOSDEM 2011 this year. They will be speaking about data collection at Wikimedia.

http://www.fosdem.org/2011/

Community

[Celebrations] - A collection of photos from many Wikipedia 10 community events are available on the "Ten Wikipedia". All of these photos, especially the "international birthday cakes", are very nice and worth a look. Online you could see that there was something special at the English Wikipedia which used the special Wiki10 logo, and at the Dutch Wikipedia which used the old Wikipedia logo for one day.

http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_gallery#Wikipedia_10_Cakes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-01-17/News_and_notes -- report about Wiki10 by the Signpost

Media

[10 years] - There has been a huge amount of media coverage. A very long - and totaly incomplete - list of links to articles can be found at the "Ten Wikipedia". There has been also radio and television interviews, not only with WMF key figures but also with regular users.

http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage

[A few links] - A very small selection of recent articles about the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia. For more, see above.

Other news

[Translating EN WP] - A common misconception is that the many language editions of Wikipedia are actually translations of the English Wikipedia. In the case of Thai, however, this is correct. "Asia Online" created a complete translation of EN Wikipedia to the Thai language. This was done through advanced machine translation and a staff of 10 proofreaders.

http://www.globalwatchtower.com/2011/01/13/asia-online-thai-wikipedia/

Did you know ...

... there are two Spanish language "Wikipedias"?

The ES Wikipedia forked to an independent project in the early days of Wikipedia: "Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español". At first the new project was very successful, but ES Wikipedia overtook the fork in 2004. A couple of days ago the Spanish language Wikipedia passed the 700,000 article mark and remains the 7th largest Wikipedia. The fork is still bravely working on their own version and has a respectable 46,000 articles. It would be 53th largest Wikipedia if it were part of our club.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre_Universal_en_Espa%C3%B1ol
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/lang/de/2011/01/15/spanish_fork/ -- read me; long interview with Edgar Enyedy, early ES Wikipedia about the fork and Wikipedia

Quote

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film)

Editor(s): Walter , Corrector(s): Casey, Alex , Thanks to: Dennis Tobar, Jan M. Von Sitel, Platonides
Sources-Attributions: WMF Engineering Overview January 2011, Contact: 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]]. Some content can be highly inspired or directly copied from other sources. Those sources are listed above at "Sources-Attributions".
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Year: 2011 Week: 2 Number: 122

2011-01-13T15:25:00.000Z

Community

[Wikipedia-day] - Once more it is almost the most important holiday of the year: Wikipedia day. Now Saturday we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project. The start of the very first Wikipedia, the English language Wikipedia.

But this is also a day of celebration for all the other many projects and language editions who form the Wikimedia-family;

Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Commons

10 years. 400 million unique visitors a month. 80,000 active volunteer editors. 17 million articles (wikipedia's only). A very successful fundraiser ( $US 16 million).

Time to celebrate! - And how to do that? - With a special celebration-wiki;

http://ten.wikipedia.org/

There are many Wikimeets and events world-wide. Check the celebration-wiki for an event near you. Wikipedia will also come these day extra in the news so watch those news reports on TV and newspapers to see what the traditional media write about our project.

Wikimedia news

[Steward elections] - Call for candidates for the upcoming steward-election. Stewards perform technical tasks on all Wikimedia wikis. Sort of über admin.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011

[Wikimania 2011] - Applications are open until the end of the month for a subsidy to go to Wikimania 2011 in Israel

http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships

Quote

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

That's our commitment.

Jimmy Wales

Editor(s): Walter , Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT 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 published 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/Share-Alike License 3.0

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Anno Domini MMX Week III Number CXXI

2010-01-18T22:36:00.001Z

Technical news

[Flagged revisions] - status information about flagged revisions and how the English Wikipedia is going to use it.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/flagged-revisions-your-questions-answered/

[10gbit/sec] - on the 11th of January Wikimedia's world-wide five-minute-average transmission rate crossed 10gbit/sec. This peak rate was achieved while serving roughly 91,725 requests per second.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/46655

[Wikipedia and Google] - A custom Google skin for Wikipedia is created. It provides advanced Google/Wikipedia search options.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/26/google-experiments-with-new-ways-to-search-wikipedia/

Foundation

[Stewards] - Candidate submissions are open for the function of Steward. A steward is a user who has the administrative user rights to grant and revoke all existing user levels on all Wikimedia Foundation projects. It can be compared with a super-bureaucrat.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2010/Guidelines#Candidates -- until 28th January

[WMF fundraiser] - it has come and is gone again. The Wikimedia Foundation was able to raise just over $8 million USD. In Euro it 5,5 million. In any case it was the most successful fundraiser to date.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/2009_Fundraiser_Closing_Release

[WMF move] - The Wikimedia Foundation started in Saint-Petersburg, Florida. And moved in early 2008 to San Francisco, California. A couple of months ago the WMF moved again to a larger office in the neighborhood of the old office.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/27/wikimedia-finds-a-new-home/

Community

[Commons] - Post of Erik about how the contend imported on Commons from partnerships have been used on the projects.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/43645

[Wiki jobs] - If you work on a WMF project and do your best, maybe, just maybe, you will be offered a job. That was the case with [[user:Mike Halterman]] from EN Wikinews. His work on Wikinews attracted the attention of a new magazine starting up in Tampa, Florida, USA, This user did had a journalistic background but this online work at Wikinews was the ticket. Nine months after being hired as a writer, Mike Halterman is now lead editor of OMG! Magazine.

Awards

[PL Wiki] - Polish Wikipedia has been awarded a "Jan Łukasiewicz special award for social innovation in the application of IT" by the Polish IT Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Informatyczne). The award has been received by Paweł Jochym, a co-founder of pl.wiki, and Prof. Janusz "Ency" Dorożyński, an active Polish Wikimedian and a member of the Society.

Media

[A editor story] - A nice article about one of the many people working on the wiki

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/22/AR2009102204715.html

Other news

[Wikitravel] - has changed there license to "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0". This is the same license as the Wikimedia Foundation is using for most projects.

http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:License_upgrade

[Upcoming holiday] - 25th of January Magnus Manske Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Magnus_Manske_Day

Editorial notice

So, this was the first Wikizine of 2010 (and it was not even a good one). It has been a couple of months since the previous Wikizine. There was a short revival of Wikizine in the period of August, September and October. And now this edition in January. I can not make any promises for a next edition. Maybe until Wikizine 121,

Greetings,
User:Walter

Editor(s): Walter, Casey , Thanks to: Erik, Jay, Cary, George Herbert, Frank, Magnus Manske, Jyothis, Amgine, Sage, Jay, Tim, Marlita, Kat, David, Wpedzich, Naoko, Kul, Evan 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 published 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/

Year: 2009 Week: 41-42 Number: 120

2009-10-24T01:09:00.000Z

Technical news

[Wikimedia data sets] - Wikimedia XML data sets have been released on Amazon Public Data Sets. This should help Wikimedians who do analysis on project data.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/wikimedia-xml-data-sets-released-on-amazon-public-data-sets/

[Media Features Gadget] - there is a "New Media Features" gadget on Commons. When it is enabled, you can test out the new media developments from the Kaltura sponsorship.

[Click Tracking Deployed] - click tracking has been deployed for the edit toolbar. This collects information about which buttons are clicked on the toolbar during editing for the Usability Initiative.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/click-tracking-on-edit-toolbar-deployed/

[Babaco: Now ready] - preview of the second set of usability features, Babaco, is now available through user preferences. Be sure to try out the new tools.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/babaco-is-ready-for-tasting/

[Book creator updated] - the new version of the Book creator interface has been deployed within the Wikimedia projects. The extension is now a lot more intuitive and useful.

http://blog.pediapress.com/2009/10/create-books-easily-new-version-of-book.html

[WP Mobile Update] - Hampton Catlin, the Wikipedia Mobile developer, posted a blog entry detailing the updates done to the Mobile interface this month.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/october-mobile-update/

[en.wp: FlaggedRevs update] - two people, William Pietri and Howie Fung, have been signed on as contractors to help with the deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-October/104938.html

Request for help

[Perspectives from other projects] - the Wikipedia Signpost is calling for editors active in one or more non-English Wikipedias to write accounts comparing governance, process and policy, and editing culture across languages. The key questions are: how is it different working on another Wikipedia?; and what could English Wikipedia learn from that project—and vice versa?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-10-12/From_the_editor

Foundation

[Bookshelf Project: Manager Announced] - Frank Schulenburg (Head of Public Outreach) announced that Wikimedia's Bookshelf Project will be led by Marlita Kahn. The Bookshelf project aims to develop a slate of basic educational materials -- print, online and video -- to attract new authors and editors to Wikipedia.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055518.html

[Office hours] - the log of the Office Hours with Mike Godwin, the Foundation's General Counsel, has been published.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055517.html
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-10-09

[Job openings] - two job openings are now open: Chief Development Officer (a fundraising-related position) and Code Maintenance Engineer (a technical position).

[Wikimedia Report Card] - Erik Zachte has published the first Wikimedia "report card" that aims to help everyone get a quick overview of trends in the Wikimedia projects.

[Multimedia Usability: Product Manager] - Guillaume Paumier ("guillom") has been announced as the Project Manager for the Ford Multimedia Project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055659.html

[Report to the Board August 2009] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, has published her Report to the Board for October 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055639.html

[OpenMoko Launches WikiReader] - OpenMoko, a company that previously created an open source smartphone, has just launched The WikiReader, a dedicated reader device with an offline copy of the entire English Wikipedia (without images) stored on a small chip.

Community

[Nobel Prize] - when announcing the recipients of its Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize committee used free photos from Wikimedia Commons to depict two of the prize winners.

http://bit.ly/2BWN4Q

[German ArbCom dissolves] - the German Wikipedia has dissolved its Arbitration Committee. On projects that have them, the Arbitration Committee (or "ArbCom") is the final step in on-site dispute resolution.

http://bit.ly/3hg64n

[Wikinews: new Main Page and skin] - in addition to selecting "Vector" (the Usability skin) as its default skin, Wikinews has also created a new Main Page design. There are even "copy us" and "social networking" links on the page, like other news sources.

[Academy: Telugu wiki] - on October 6, the first Telugu Wikimedia Academy was held in Chirala, India.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2009-October/000209.html

[Wiktionary lookup gadget] - A new gadget is being developed on English Wikinews and slowly being spread to other wikis. The gadget looks up the wiktionary definition for the language of the wiki you are reading, but what it returns is the definition in your user-preferences language.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WiktLookup

[Bing search] - Bing.com, the Microsoft search engine, is offering "Bing Reference", a way to search "enhanced Wikipedia articles". The Wikipedia Signpost has a detailed story on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-10-12/Bing_search

[WikiTrust demo now live] - demos of WikiTrust are now up on some Wikipedias. WikiTrust is a Firefox add-on that changes the color of the text based on how reliable or unreliable it seems to be.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikiquality-l/2009-October/000560.html

Media

[Encyclopedias + China] - CNN published a very good article about the situation in China with regards to Wikipedia and other encyclopedia sites.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/14/wiki.china/

[Meet Jimmy Wales] - the newspaper of Yale, a prestigious university in the United States, recently interviewed Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).

http://www.yaledailynews.com/scene/interview/2009/10/09/meet-jimmy-wales-founder-wikipedia/

[Real fight becomes Wikipedia War] - a rivalry fight on a college campus turned into a big edit war on the English Wikipedia.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2009/10/10/war-over-bladderball-extends-wikipedia/

[Wikipedia + Olympics Committee?] - Wikipedia seems to be at the center of a recent copyright battle between a photographer and the International Olympics Committee.

http://ragesoss.com/blog/2009/10/09/wikipedia-and-olympics-committee-heading-for-collision/

Did you know...
...about the proposal for global sysops on Meta-wiki?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysop

Quote

"I really have no idea what most of those languages are, but I'm also super happy to support them." - Hampton Catlin, Mobile Wikipedia developer, after reporting the localization status of the Mobile Wikipedia site.

Editor(s): Casey, Alex Corrector(s): None Thanks to: Frank, Cary, Daniel, Philippe, Rodrigo, Liam, Infodisiac, Signpost, Tomasz, Sage, Michael Dale, Nimish, Bawolff, ShakataGaNai, ErikZ, Naoko, Arjun, Brianmc, Sage, Phoebe, Hampton, Sue, Jay, Luca, Erik, Greg 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/

Year: 2009 Week: 41 Number: 119

2009-10-10T23:38:00.000Z

Technical news

[Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet] - Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer, announced that he's leaving the Wikimedia Foundation after four years.

[Labs: FlaggedRevs] - due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn't realize that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for people to poke at it for a month. The developers need interested people to be set up as local administrators to try out the per-page stabilization settings (accessed via the "protect" tab); by default most pages do not activate FlaggedRevs in the configuration we're testing for English Wikipedia.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/

[Labs: LiquidThreads] - another Wikimedia Labs wiki has been created, this time for Liquid Threads. Liquid Threads aims to clean up the way we communicate about articles, turning talk pages into cleaner/threaded discussion pages.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/mediawikis-new-discussion-system-in-testing-on-wikimedia-labs/

[Supporting translatewiki.net] - the Wikimedia Foundation has hired Siebrand Mazeland as a contractor. He will get paid one day a week to work on translatewiki.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/supporting-translatewiki-net/

Foundation

[WMFI and WMMK] - Wikimedia Suomi (Finland) and Wikimedia Macedonia were recently approved.

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner has posted her Report to the Board for the month of July 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055326.html

[Fundraising page demos] - Rand Montoya, the Head of Community Giving, has posted some demos of the new Fundraising pages. Your feedback would be appreciated.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Website_Design

[WMF IRC Office hours] - Following the Wikimedia Foundation Office hours with Sue Gardner, one with Rand Montoya was held on Thursday. The log is available on Meta.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-09-25

Agenda

[NO: Academy] - Wikimedia Norway is planning a Wikipedia Academy for October 14-15, 2009.

Community

[DE: New Wikimedium] - Wikimedia Deutschland has published its third newspaper. This German newspaper is intended for sponsors, partners, friends and fans of Wikimedia. It's very visually appealing and even includes content about Wikimedia "around the world".

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/09/30/neue-ausgabe-der-vereinszeitung-wikimedium/ (de)

[Bug: Google News and Wikinews] - the recent MediaWiki updates caused yet another problem: now Wikinews isn't being indexed by Google News anymore!

[Translatewiki.net as a WMF project?] - Siebrand asked what Translatewiki (the website where the MediaWiki interface is translated) and the Wikimedia Foundation would gain by translatewiki being made an official Wikimedia project. Gerard offered a few of his own thoughts.

[Wikipedia Journal] - Liam Wyatt made a proposal about a peer-reviewed journal for academics to write Wikipedia articles. It might be interesting to read the proposal and discussions about it.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/844

[en.wn "Report"] - an English Wikinews user posted a mini-report about what happened in September 2009 on the project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-October/001671.html

Media

[BD: Chapter planning] - there has been more coverage on the planned Wikimedia chapter in Bangladesh.

http://www.theindependent-bd.com/details.php?nid=144160

Stats

[sr.wn] - the Serbian Wikinews became the largest Wikinews version (by number of articles), ousting the English Wikinews from that spot. This is the second time that a Wikimedia project has surpassed the English version, the first time being the French Wiktionary.

http://wikinews.org/
http://sr.wikinews.org/wiki/Vikivesti_na_srpskom_prve_po_broju_%C4%8Dlanaka -- (sr) Wikinews article on its own milestone

[fr.wikt] - the French Wiktionary has reached 1,500,000 entries.

http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A9coredevance -- 1.5 millionth article

[ru.ws] - The Russian Wikisource has reached 50,000 texts.

[hy.wp] - The Armenian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.

Other news

[Google Search] - Google Search results now actually link directly to the section that you're looking for.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/jump-to-information-you-want-right-from.html

[WikipediaVision] - A student from Helsinki has created "WikipediaVision", a live visualization of anonymous edits to Wikipedia by location. The site combines Wikipedia's Recent Changes feed with Google Maps. Although this seems to have been around for a while, the link has resurfaced after it was exhibited live at MFK in Bern (from April until August).

http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html

[Why do they edit?] - Ziko offers some suggestions on the different reasons people choose to edit (and what/where they choose to edit).

http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/why-do-they-edit-ego-subject-wiki-and-language/

Did you know ...

...that you can even upload home movies to Wikipedia? Wikipedia's video support is improving, Wikimedians have even been uploading videos of their children illustrating certain Wikipedia topics.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-September/104617.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_reflex

Quote
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -- Mohandas Gandhi

Editor(s): Alex, Casey Corrector(s): Thanks to: Sue, Liam, Kat, jeblad, Rand, Judson, Belayet, Shizhao, bawolff, David, Brion, Otourly, Cary, Sage, Gerard, Signpost, @WikimediaDE, Andrew, Ziko, Erik, Philippe, Filip, Milos, Belayet, Jon, Platonides 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]].

Year: 2009 Week: 37 Number: 118

2009-09-27T01:48:00.001Z

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/

Year: 2009 Week: 36 Number: 117

2009-09-17T02:28:00.000Z

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/

Year: 2009 Week: 34-35 Number: 116

2009-08-29T16:14:00.000Z

Technical news

[Tech Update] - Brion posted an update on the status of a few projects, before shipping off to Wikimania.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update-pre-wikimania-edition/

[Commons: ImageAnnotator] - Wikimedia Commons added a new gadget: an Image Annotator, where users can place comments *onto* images (like flickr).

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator

[Bugs] - Trevor Parscal, of the Usability Project, gave an update on the Usability Beta by saying that more than 40,000 users have now participated in the process.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/squashing-the-bugs/

[iPhone app released] - the Wikimedia Foundation released its own official iPhone/iPod application for Wikipedia, in addition to the regular mobile interface.

[SmartWikiSearch] - Smart Wiki Search, a "concept similarity" search, tries to make your Wikipedia search experience better by finding other Wikipedia pages that discuss the same or similar concepts to the one you searched for.

http://www.smartwikisearch.com/

Request for help

[Wikipedia Signpost RfC] - the Wikipedia Signpost, the English Wikipedia's newspaper, is looking for comments about what is their mission, purpose and where they should go from here. Feedback is appreciated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/About#Where_does_the_Signpost_go_from_here.3F

[Multimedia Usability Meeting] - we previously reported on the upcoming Multimedia Usability Project by Wikimedia France, suggestions and feedback are being requested on Meta-Wiki. There is also a planning event to take place in October 2009.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Usability_Project_Meeting_October_2009

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published her report to the board for May 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054008.html

[New "labs" sites] - two new "labs" sites have been created to test out the flagged revisions and reader feedback extensions. In general, "Wikimedia Labs" is the name given to sites created to test out new extensions before they are used on Wikimedia wikis.

[Hewlett Foundation grant] - the Wikimedia Foundation received a US$500,000 grant towards operational support from Hewlett Foundation. The grant's purpose is to allow the Foundation expand its work bringing free educational content to everyone on the planet.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Hewlett_Foundation_grant_August_2009

[Omidyar Network Grant] - the Omidyar Network gave a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grant will support Wikimedia's key goals: to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia?s projects.

[New board members/officers] - at Wikimania, the Board of Trustees officially accepted the results of the election, welcoming Samuel Klein (Sj) and thanking Domas for his service. Kat Walsh has also taken the position of executive secretary. In addition to these community-selected board members, an "expertise" seat was filled with Matt Halprin.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054318.html
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/user:Mhalprin -- biography of Matt

[Wikimania 2009] - Wikimania 2009, the international Wikimedia conference, ended this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even if you were not there, you can enjoy it too with twitter, flickr photos, and presentation videos.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23wikimania+OR+%23wikimania2009 -- twitter for #wikimania2009 or #wikimania
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wikimania2009/ -- flickr
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2009_presentations -- videos of the presentation

[WikiExpedition 2009] - a summary (in English) of the recent Polish Wikimedian's "WikiExpedition" was published.

http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja/Summary

[mediawiki/ IRC cloaks now available] - the Group Contacts are now offering "mediawiki/" IRC cloaks for developers.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054120.html - mailing list post
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Cloaks -- IRC cloak explanation

[GLAM-WIKI Recommendations] - now that the GLAM-WIKI conference is over, Liam Wyatt (the conference coordinator) has compiled a list of recommendations to "GLAM", to Wikimedia, and to the government. This list is based on the discussions and findings at the conference.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_Recommendations

[Wikimedia UK blog/twitter] - Wikimedia UK, the British chapter, has started a blog and twitter account.

[WMES: Planning Reboot] - Wikimedia España, the planned Spanish chapter, has had a planning reboot. Join the mailing list if you're interestd in creating a Spanish chapter.

http://lists.wikimedia.org.ar/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-es

[WMSE: Image donation] - Wikimedia Sweden has helped Regionarkivet (the municipal archive of the Gothenburg area in Sweden) upload some of its most prized images to the Wikimedia Comons.

[Chapcom membership update] - the Chapters committee (those charged with coordinating the chapters, especially with getting new chapters started) welcomes two new members. Milos Rancic and Lodewijk Gelauff replace the seats of Carlos Barcenilla and Michael Bimmler, who recently resigned.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee

[Wikinews ArbCom] - Blood Red Sandman, Brian, Brian McNeil, Cirt, Cspurrier, and Tempodivalse were elected to the Arbitration Committee on the English Wikinews.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Arbitration_Committee/2009_elections

[Wikimedia Belgium Meeting] - Wikimedia Belgium, the proposed Belgian chapter, had a coordination meeting on August 28. The English and French minutes are available.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediabe-l/2009-August/000006.html

Awards

[UK Wikipedia Loves Art - prizes] - Wikimedia UK's Wikipedia Loves Art project finally announced its winners.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediauk-l/2009-August/004565.html -- mailing list post
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2009/08/wikipedia-loves-art-prizes/ -- WMUK blog post

Media

[Generate PDFs from Wikipedia] - Lifehacker.com covered the ability to creates PDFs and Multi-Article Books using PediaPress, something that happened a while ago.

[Tale of another Mangalore on Wikipedia] - some commentary on a local Wikipedia Academy in Mangalore, India.

[Health Care and Wikipedia] - Columbia Journalism Review compliment's the English Wikipedia's coverage of the American "health care debates".

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/health_care_and_wikipedia.php

[Wikimania 2009] - a pre-Wikimania article about Wikimania 2009 and the Wikimania idea.

http://www.en.argentina.ar/_en/science-and-education/C954-wikimania-2009-in-argentina.php

[Wikinews: The unsung news source] - Wikinews got a favorable blog post that includes a Q&A and explanation of the project.

http://perspective.cfezra.com/?p=105

[AP tries to rival WP?] - apparently the Associated Press is going to try to rival Wikipedia in the search results. The AP will hold back some content from member websites and hope that Google will rate it higher due to the increased number of links to that page.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/how-the-associated-press-will-try-to-rival-wikipedia-in-search-results/

[Wikiversity media coverage] - Wikiversity is in the news again, with a whole article devoted to it. According to the article, "Wikiversity" is to be a university for every Internet user. Some professors are smitten with it - others are skeptical.

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/magazin/wissen/Wikiversity;art304,2876731 (de)

[Inkblot Poster] - remember the controversy on the English Wikipedia because there were copies of the Rorschach inkblot tests in the article? Well, according to the New York Times, te doctor who helped publish the 10 inkblots is being investigated by his local doctors? organization after it received complaints that his actions were unprofessional.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/24inkblot.html

Stats

[enwp: 3m] - the English Wikipedia has reached 3,000,000 articles with the creation of "Beate Eriksen", a Norwegian actress.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/17/3000000/

[cswikt] - the Czech Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.

http://cs.wiktionary.org/

Other news

[Growing Wikipedias] - Hausa Wikipedia, one of the African-language Wikipedias, was previously in danger of being closed but now it's growing very quickly. This comes at an interesting time, there have been recent foundation-l discussions about the process for closing projects.

http://hausaonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/hausa-wikipedia-is-growing/ -- Hausa Wikipedia
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/175836 -- mailing list thread
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects -- current project closing process

[Wikipedia Diver] - a new Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10315483-248.html

[Enterprise Wikis] - a blog post gives 8 more reasons to use a wiki for you internal corporate site.

http://www.ikiw.org/2009/08/21/8-things-you-can-do-with-an-enterprise-wiki/

[Citizendium founder ready to leave] - Larry Sanger, the founder of Citizendium (another encyclopedia created to rival Wikipedia) and one of the first contributors to Wikipedia, is ready to leave his project and move on.

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/08/citizendium-founder-ready-to-jump-ship/

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Corrector(s): MarkW, Thanks to: Too many to name. 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.

Year: 2009 Week: 33 Number: 115

2009-08-14T05:53:00.001Z

Technical news

[Tech Update] - the sysadmins posted a tech update of what happened last week and what will be coming up this week and beyond.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update/ -- techblog post

[clone $brion;] - Brion Vibber, the current Foundation CTO, announced that they want to split his position into two. There will be a new Chief Technical Officer and Brion will become the "Senior Software Architect"; more information about the responsibilities of each can be found on the blog post.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- techblog post

["Try Beta"] - Have you noticed the new "Try Beta" link at the top of Wikimedia project sites? The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the newly enhanced edit toolbar. Check it out and give them your feedback!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/try-the-usability-beta/ -- techblog post

[pl.wp: Report a Problem] - The Polish Wikipedia has put together a neat little pop-up tool for reporting errors in articles. (The "Zgłoś błąd" link in the sidebar.)

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-August/102708.html -- post on wikien-l

[MW.org: FlaggedRevs] - MediaWiki.org is currently testing out Flagged Revisions in their Manual and Help namespaces.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/043806.html -- reason for FlaggedRevs
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-August/044582.html -- brion telling about it being enabled

[Image Annotations] - a hack for Wikimedia Commons allows for image annotations, just like Flickr has them, be sure to check it out!

http://ur1.ca/8tik -- example image
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator -- help page

[MediaWiki Wave] - a new project, "MediaWiki Wave", has been launched. It attempts to find a way for Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in development, to work with and make the best of MediaWiki.

http://mediawikiwave.blogspot.com/ -- blog
http://code.google.com/p/mediawikiwave/ -- project code

Request for help

[BBC & Wikimania] - this is a weird request for help, because it doesn't come from the community. The BBC's "Digital Revolution", an open and collaborative documentary on the way the web is changing our lives, wants to come to Wikimania 2009 but can't make it! They're looking for people to film some content for them, are you going to Wikimania and interested? Visit the blog post for more information and contact them ASAP.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/08/wikimania-2009-are-you-going-w.shtml

Proposals

[Global sysop opt-out] - a new proposal about global sysops has been created and feedback is requested!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops/opt-out_proposal

Foundation

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, has published her report to the Board of Trustees for April 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053920.html

[Board Election Results] - the results of the Board of Trustees elections have been released; the three winners are: Ting Chen (Wing), Kat Walsh (Mindspillage), and Samuel Klein (Sj). The Election Committee started a "post-mortem" section to collect commentary for future elections. Your comments on what went wrong and what went right will be highly appreciated.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Results/en -- results
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2009#Post_mortem -- post mortem

Agenda

[IN: WP Takes Chennai] - Are you in India? Love Wikipedia? Got a camera? Then participate in 'Wikipedia Takes Chennai' this Sunday (August 16).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Chennai

Community

[WMFR: Multimedia Usability] - Wikimédia France has announced a new Multimedia Usability Project. It is intended to support and compliment the Wikimedia Foundation's project funded by the Foundation.

[MW Translation Rally] - Translatewiki.net, the site that coordinates translations of the MediaWiki software, is running a translation rally. Contribute 500 MediaWiki translations and share in 1,000 Euro!

[WikiExpedition] - the Polish community has had its first annual WikiExpedition. The ten-day journey to the Polish region of Podlasie (northeastern part), focusing on collecting material that would be used to enrich Wikimedia project content with photographs, has brought gigabytes of photos and tons of material.

http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja (pl)
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja#Wikiekspedycja_w_mediach -- media coverage (pl)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikiekspedycja_2009 -- images

[New wikis] - a large number of new projects were created this week: 5 content projects and 2 chapter wikis. The 5 content projects were Sorani Wikipedia (ckb), Western Panjabi Wikipedia (pnb), Mirandese Wikipedia (mwl), Acehnese Wikipedia (ace), Turkish Wikinews (tr) and the 2 chapter wikis, Wikmedia Ukraine (ua) and Wikimedia Colombia (co; in planning).

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20181 -- bug: content projects
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19533 -- bug: ua.wikimedia.org
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19609 -- bug: co.wikimedia.org

Media

[Usability Feedback] - Mashable, "the social media guide" has posted an article covering Wikipedia's recent usability release.

http://mashable.com/2009/08/07/wikipedia-redesign/

[Wikipedia's on the wane] - the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian both ran an article about a new California study related to Wikipedia. The study found the number of new articles added a month was on a steep decline and new contributors were being pushed out by the rusted-on Wikipedia elite.

[Wikimanía] - a Spanish technology site reports on Wikimania and Richard Stallman's keynote ("the Father of the Free Software Movement")

http://www.infobaeprofesional.com/notas/85723-El-padre-del-software-libre-dara-una-conferencia-en-Buenos-Aires.html&cookie (es)

[GLAM-WIKI coverage] - the GLAM-Wiki conference in Australia has gotten a lot of media coverage, and the organizers are keeping a list on their site. One of the articles has an interesting analogy from Liam Wyatt, "People who like sausages or obeying the law shouldn't see either being made, and the same goes for encyclopedias - it's a messy process but the outcome is good." Tim Starling has also posted a report on what he saw while he attended.

http://glam.wikimedia.org.au/ -- glam coverage listed
http://wikimedia.org.au/w/images/5/52/GLAM-WIKI_twitter_hashtag_transcript.pdf -- 59 page pdf with all the #glam-wiki tweets
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053946.html -- Tim's report

[Wikiversity] - Wikiversity was mentioned in a news article! The Colombia news site, Unviersia, ran an article entitled: "Web 2.0 to share and build collective knowledge" and used Wikiversity as one of its examples.

http://www.universia.net.co/noticias/mas-noticias/web-2.0-para-compartir-y-construir-conocimiento-colectivo.html (es)

Stats

[sr.wn 10k] - the Serbian Wikinews has reached 10,000 articles and is now the second largest Wikinews.

http://tinyurl.com/srwn10k -- ten thousandth article

[pt.wp 500k] - following closely behind the Spanish Wikipedia (es), the Portuguese Wikipedia has also reached 500,000 articles!

Quote

"Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were." - Cherie Carter-Scott

Editor(s): Alex, Casey, Corrector(s): Ryan, MarkW, Thanks to: Techman224, Wpedzich, Naoko, Erik, Brion, Milos, Pharos, @wikipedian, private musings, Sage, Siebrand, Julien, NuclearWarfare, Liam, Lijealso, Gerard, 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.

Year: 2009 Week: 32 Number: 114

2009-08-06T22:21:00.000Z

Technical news

[Full downtime] - All of Wikimedia's services (sites, mailing lists, etc.) were down on July 31 at 12:00 (UTC) to allow the primary router at the Tampa hosting facility to be rebooted.

[SysAdminDay] - System Administrator Appreciation Day was held on July 31st; it's the day where you appreciate and thank all the system administrators who make your lives easier!

http://www.sysadminday.com/

[Override this function] - on August 6, users were temporarily getting the message 'Override this function' when visiting pages on Wikipedia, due to a server only partially getting an update. The issue was supposedly fixed but the sysadmins are still getting reports, it needs further investigation of the problem.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20081

Request for help

[WikimediaMobile] - Wikimedia Mobile, the mobile interface for Wikipedia, has started accepting translations on betawiki. Help is greatly appreciated in localizing it for your local Wikipedia.

[Flickr tool maintainers] - Bryan Tong Minh posted a request for co-maintainers for his flickr tools on the toolserver. The bots are written in Python and use the mwclient library to edit and upload.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2009-August/004976.html

[Best practices team] - "Best practice in public outreach" is a collection of articles describing experiences in winning new volunteers, partners, content and audiences. The group will help coordinate the creation and enhancement of the best practices documentation pages on Meta-Wiki, which will help share the knowledge about engaging new target groups or deepening relationships to new Wikimedians. Volunteers are needed!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Best_practices_documentation_team

[BLP task force] - Cary Bass is in the process of launching a new task force on Biographies of Living People (as a result of the board resolution on the subject). The task force will be focusing on the English Wikipedia, but its recommendations and guidelines will probably be useful on other projects too. Volunteers are needed, see the blog post for more information.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-August/102667.html -- call for volunteers
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people -- resolution

Proposals

[Strategic Proposals (Call)] - the Strategic Planning team has sent out a call for proposals. They'd like to encourage people to put their ideas into proposals for what the Wikimedia movement should be doing over the next five years. What's more is that you can write it in the language of your choice.

Foundation

[Guidestar] - the Wikimedia Foundation has finally received a profile on GuideStar, one of the largest American databases for non-profits. Be sure to visit the profile and write a review!

http://tinyurl.com/wmfGuidestar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GuideStar -- article on the site

[Usability: Babaco] - the Usability team is preparing for its next release and has some new designs and ideas that need feedback from users, community members, and interested parties.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/29/the-abcs-of-usability/ -- blog post
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Babaco_Designs -- designs

[Transcom newsletter] - the Translation committee (the people whose job it is to coordinate translations of Wikimedia Foundation-related items) has released its newsletter, which is a summary of open requests. If you speak another language, please look and see if there's anywhere that you can help out!

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-July/000982.html

[LSS: foundation-l] - a new list summary of foundation-l posts between July 16-31 has been published. Phoebe has also posted a request for help, reminding others that she's not the only one who can do it and there are other lists that could be summarized too!

Legal

[EFF&NPG update] - Another update on the National Portrait Gallery legal issue, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, Fred von Lohmann, has posted a legal analysis of the situation.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/eff-defends-wikipedi

Agenda

[PL: pl.wp meeting] - the Polish Wikipedia is having its annual working meeting in Sopot, Poland from September 11-13.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GDJ_2009 (pl)

[SE: Book Fair] - Wikimedia Sweden will have a booth at the largest book fair in Scandinavia with 100,000+ attendees. The fair will be September 24-27, 2009.

http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Bok_och_Biblioteksmässan_2009 -- WMSE's page about the booth (sv)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothenburg_Book_Fair -- enwp article about the fair

[JP: Conference] - Wikimedia Conference Japan has opened up its official website and has finalized its details: November 22 at Tokyo University!

http://www.wcj2009.info/ (ja)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_Japan/en -- summary on Meta (en)

[BE: Fosdem] - FOSDEM, the FOSS conference, has announced the dates for its 2010 conference: February 6-7, 2010

http://www.fosdem.org/2010/

Community

[GLAM-WIKI] - GLAM-Wiki, Wikimedia Australia's conference for galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and how they can collaborate with Wikimedia, is being held this week (August 6-7) and a live "play-by-play" can be found via twitter.

https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23GLAM-WIKI -- twitter posts
http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/230/glam-wiki-day-one -- blog post summarizing day 1

[Simple Wikipedia] - this little known Wikipedia works since 2004 on a encyclopedia that is using fewer words and easier grammar then the English Wikipedia. The small community has managed to get again at the 54,000 articles mark, after falling down 2000 articles due to a quality cleanup. For those who find other Wikipedias has become to large to be happy there a small project like Simple could be attractive.

http://simple.wikipedia.org

[WMNL: Partnership] - just in time for GLAM-WIKI, Wikimedia Nederland officially announced a partnership with the Tropenmuseum (one of the largest museums in the Netherlands). This new partnership will bring over 2100 high quality images to the Wikimedia Commons!

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/05/wikimedia-netherlands-and-the-tropenmuseum-bring-2100-images-to-the-commons/ -- blog post and press release

[Wiki-Conference NY] - Archive.org is hosting a few videos of the proceedings at Wiki-Conference New York, so far Jimmy Wales's keynote and Cary Bass's OTRS presentation have been published but more will come soon.

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Wiki–Conference%20New%20York

[IRC Meeting] - a general IRC meeting was hosted by the Group Contacts. There was a high number of participants (~80 people) and a wide array of topics, from contacting the GCs and new cloak options to public logging and alternate channel management techniques.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Meetings/August_2009

[WMDE: Report from the Office] - the new Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland, Pavel Richter, has published his first "Report from the Office" on the WMDE blog. He shares his new priorities and introduces himself.

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/07/31/1-bericht-aus-der-geschaftsstelle-juli-2009/ (de)

Media

[GLAM-Wiki] - As described above in the "Community" section, GLAM-WIKI is being held this week and it has been covered by a few media outlets.

[Judges & Strippers] - Wiktionary was quoted when defining a lap dance in a legal case!

[Anecdote] - there's a nice, thoughtful blog post from a paleontologist/geoscientist and his experiences with contributing to Wikipedia.

http://triassiccritters.blogspot.com/2009/08/contributing-to-wikipedia-as.html

[Experts obliged?] - experts and people who find errors in Wikipedia are obliged to correct them, a blog post says. "Whether you like it or not, Wikipedia is the source that people go to for information."

http://blog.k1v1n.com/2009/08/if-tree-falls-in-forest-part-1.html

[We're NC-17] - Apple has rated us NC-17! Wikipanion, an iPhone/Pod application giving access to Wikipedia (nicely formatted with extra features), featured a warning when downloading: "Rated 17+ for the following: Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes".

http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/covering-your-click/ -- blog post about this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC-17 -- in case you have no idea what we're talking about

Stats

[comScore: down to #5] - Facebook is now the 4th largest site in the world and has pushed the Wikimedia Foundation down to the 5th largest web property. Wikipedia is still far above an beyond the most popular non commercial website. By the way; the ranking of Wikizine is 50% up to become the 2,983,528th most popular site :) (Source:Alexa)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/04/facebook-is-now-the-fourth-largest-site-in-the-world/

[African Wikipedias] - Swahili Wikipedia "has raced ahead with great momentum" and surpassed Afrikaans as the largest African Wikipedia by number of articles. There's also stats about the other African Wikipedias and sister projects.

http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=614 -- blog post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa -- African languages

[Wikipedias] - the Spanish Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles, the Lithuanian Wikipedia has reached 90,000, and the Latin Wikipedia reached 30,000 articles with the addition of "Magninovilla".
[EN Wikinews] - Not really a direct goal of Wikinews to have many "articles" but nevertheless the English language Wikinews has surpassed 15,000 news stories.

http://en.wikinews.org

Other news

[wikiHow&MediaWiki] - wikiHow showcased an interesting article (on its twitter feed) about how to make a MediaWiki skin, worth a read if you're ever in the need for a new skin. :-)

https://twitter.com/wikiHow/status/3111069632

[Mobile Feedback] - the Mobile Wikipedia site requested feedback from its users and got a few interesting results, you might get a laugh out of them!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/amusing-mobile-feedback/

[Correction: WMUK&Schools] - we previously reported that the new WMUK schools project was about revisiting its "Wikipedia Version for Schools" project. This is actually a new initiative, one focused on going into schools and teaching the staff and students how to effectively use and contribute to Wikipedia.

http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Schools_project

[Wiktionary users] - Dvortygirl posted an interesting blog post about the type of users who are attracted to writing a dictionary. She found that most of the people in the #wiktionary IRC channel all shared similar characteristics to her (and a Dutch Wiktionary visitor), more information in the blog post.

http://dvortygirl.blogspot.com/2009/08/wiktionary-type.html

Quote

"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all." - Rita Mae Brown

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Walter , Thanks to: Cary, David, Brianna, Phoebe, Bryan, Steve, Brion, Sage, Hampton, Signpost, Naoko, Bark, ErikZ, Jay, wikihow, Mecredis, Liam, Jessica, Pavel, Leinad, Mile K., Dvortygirl, St-Lemur , 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 nearly Weekly 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/

Year: 2009 Week: 31 Number: 113

2009-07-30T22:10:00.001Z

Technical news

[arwp: New namespace] - the Arabic Wikipedia Community has agreed to create a new namespace called "Supplement". It will contain most of date pages (days, months, years, decades, etc.), disambiguation pages and lists to give the exactly number of encyclopedic articles. There are about 6000 pages that will be moved to the new namespace. It may be possible that your community would like to apply the same idea.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19357 -- bug report
http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project:Supplement -- guideline of namespace

[Commons: Off-site archive] - A off site archive for Commons and the XML snapshots will be added. Thanks are due to eBart consulting and User:Milosh for proving a backup server and storage array at their colocation facility in Europe. This server will store archives of our publicly available data of Wikimedia Commons and the XML snapshots.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/were-adding-an-off-site-archive-for-commons-and-the-xml-snapshots/ -- techblog post

[Passwords plz] - Watchlistr.com was an outside site that asked for Wikimedia passwords in order aggregate user watchlists across all projects for them. Although in this case it did not have a malicious intent, use of external sites asking for passwords place in risk the accounts used. Users are asked not to share their user password with any external site. Not even toolserver tools are allowed to request your password for any service. The site has now been shut down, and further analysis revealed that it had important vulnerabilities. Magnus Manske has created an alternative tool for people to use if they liked this feature.

http://www.watchlistr.com/
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044238.html -- initial thread
http://magnusmanske.de/MetaWatchlist/ -- alternative proposed by Magnus

[TS: Multi-maintainer tools] - the toolserver is pushing multi-maintainer tools and will be actively discouraging single maintainer ones. They want to encourage collaboration amongst toolserver users and make tools last even when one of the users disappears

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.toolserver/1515

[SVN account requests] - there's a new process for requesting SVN accounts to the MediaWiki source code. Brion announced that he'll be going through the queue every week, so if you have request throw them up on MediaWiki wiki. ;-)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/44683 -- mailing list post
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_access_requests -- requests

Proposals

[Geonotice + Wikinews/Commons?] - Sage Ross recently proposed something interesting: using an opt-in geonotice (notice that displays based on the location of your IP) to show local reporting or photographing opportunities. Hopefully this will help with one of the great frustrations that inhibit original reporting.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044367.html

Foundation

[Board elections: Voting] - the Foundation's Board elections has finally entered into the voting phase (voting is open until August 10) and translation is continuing. Visit the Meta pages for election information (including a "Questions" page), the Wikipedia Signpost also has interviews with the candidates.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009#voters -- voter requirements
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Translation -- translation page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-27/Board_elections#Candidate_interviews -- signpost interviews

[More donation buttons] - the second round of donation button designs has been posted, feedback is appreciated to determine which designs we'll end up using!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade

[Audit Committee] - the new members of the 2009-2010 Audit Committee have been announced.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053280.html -- foundation-l post

[wm2009: Registration] - Media Registration for Wikimania 2009 has opened. For regular registration, there is a new update: it is also possible to extend your stay past the Wikimania dates, but you need to contact the hotel directly.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration#Accommodations -- extending stay options
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimania_2009_Media_Registration -- media registration

[Strategy: "Office Hours" & Wiki] - the Strategic Planning team has announced their "office hours" which are teams that they will be on the channel to answer questions and participate in discussions, everyone's invited! The team has also "soft-launched" their wiki (most of its content is also available for translation).

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Office_Hours
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/40527 -- soft-launch post

[TS donation] - the Wikimedia Foundation has awarded a US$40,000 grant to the Toolserver toward improving the toolserver's reliability. With that money they will buy three database servers, so they can keep two copies of each wiki database instead of just one. This should greatly improve the availability of up to date data in the wiki databases.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2009-July/002278.html -- announcement
http://journal.toolserver.org/entry/2009/07/29/wikimedia-foundation-grants-40000-to-the-toolserver/ -- blog post
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_DE/Improve_toolserver_reliability -- original grant application

[Active ombudsmen?] - there was a discussion on the DE Wikipedia (and then foundation-l) about whether or not the Ombudsmen commission (the group that hears privacy violations) is actually fulfilling its mission actively.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/40241

Community

[NY Wiki-Conference] - the first New York City Wiki-Conference was a success with more than 100 people attending. The Signpost has a write-up about the event and there was also a twitter "report" with the tag #nywikiconference.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nywikiconference -- twitter feed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-27/Wiki-Conference -- signpost update

[Institutions editing] - the Tropenmuseum, a Dutch museum, was preparing to upload images to the Dutch Wikipedia until it's account was blocked due to its name. Erik Möller (User:Eloquence, Deputy Director WMF) suggested on Commons-l that this is something we want to avoid -- "these institutions are helping expand our content, we should Assume Good Faith and let our first impressions be friendly and professional".

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/07/tropenmuseum-is-blocked.html -- Gerard's blog post on the museum
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/5006 -- Erik's commons-l post

[WMUK: Schools project ML] - Wikimedia UK has started a new mailing list for its schools project, dedicated to creating a Wikipedia version with selected articles for schools. Interested parties are welcome to subscribe.

http://wikimedia.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/schools-project-l_wikimedia.org.uk

Media

[Wikipedia flawed, but that's okay] - Wikipedia is a flawed and incomplete testament to the essential fallibility of human nature. An interesting blog post from the BBC about Wikipedia being okay. ;-)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/07/wikipedia.shtml

[Mobile Wikipedia tips] - Wikipedia Expert Tips: How to Keep the Facts at Your Fingertips. The article talks about different ways to serve Wikipedia content, from tweaking the skin to a random article screensaver to mobile phone versions.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/168655/wikipedia_expert_tips_how_to_keep_the_facts_at_your_fingertips.html

[NIH] - a few more media outlets have covered the National Institutes of Health Academy with article titles ranging from "Should you trust health advice from the web?" to "NIH Gets Schooled on Wikipedia".

[CK-12 Foundation] - Jimmy Wales joined the Advisory Board of the CK-12 Foundation, a Silicon Valley non-profit organization with a mission to provide online up-to-date and standards-aligned textbook content to K-12 students around the world.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/jimmy-wales-joins-advisory-board-of-ck-12-foundation,897842.shtml

[NPG] - the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has sided with the National Portrait Gallery *against* Wikipedia, as the NPG incident continues.

[Jimmy on CNN Money] - Jimbo did a piece on "CNN Money" where he talked about Wikipedia's non-profit status and it's usability and stategic planning projects.

http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2009/07/28/n_co_wikipedia_wales.cnnmoney/

[Rorschach censors] - the New York Times covers the Rorschach controversy: whether or not we should include the ink blot tests in our articles (for "ethical reasons").

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/technology/internet/29inkblot.html

[WP has poor photos?] - the NY Times ran an article a few weeks ago called: "Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It's a Desert for Photos" which pointed out that Wikipedia has some trouble with good quality pictures in its articles (especially ones of celebrities). This caused a bit of controversy on the mailing lists, with image contributors complaining that the Foundation didn't steer the article in the right direction -- highlighting good works instead of bad ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html -- article
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053282.html -- mailing list thread

Stats

[50k] - the Galician and Nynorsk (Norwegian) Wikipedias have both reached 50,000 articles.

[mhr.wp] - the Meadow Mari Wikipedia is less than a month old and already has over 500 articles (almost 600)!

http://mhr.wikipedia.org/

Other news

[Facebook] - the Wikipedia fan page on Facebook, managed by Cary Bass (Bastique) Volunteer Coordinator WMF, now has a URL. If you use Facebook, make sure to add yourself as a fan.

[Wikipedia Art] - some awesome posters/t-shirts from last year have resurfaced, they display people with a common theme: "I [edit] Wikipedia". They show ordinary people surrounded by words that display their editing interest depending upon their personality.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeeperez/sets/72157604803121347/

[Attracting newbies?] - David Gerard pointed out an interesting article with tips about attracting newbies and making them effective. Although the author is talking about software development, it definitely could relate to our projects.

http://denise.dreamwidth.org/23600.html

Did you know ...

... parody is the highest form of flattery?

[Bigipedia] - BBC Radio launched a "broadwebcasting" show parodying the internet by mocking pop-ups, search boxes and other aspects of online activity. Produced and directed by Pozzitive, the four-part series is called 'Bigipedia' and has taken its inspiration from Wikipedia. If you can appreciate British humor, check it out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lpr29/Bigipedia_Episode_1/ -- first episode (30 min)

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Platonides , Thanks to: OsamaK, Rand, Stu, Sage, Daniel Kinzler, Skenmy, Frederic, Brion, Jay, Philippe, David, River, Roan, Galio, Cary, Signpost, Gerard , 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/

Wikizine

Year: 2012 Week: 53 Number: 133

Technical news

Proposals

Policy

Foundation

Community

Media

Stats

Other news

Did you know ...

Quote

Year: 2012 Week: 4 Number: 132

The EN Wikipedia goes offline for 24 hours

Anno Domini MMXII Week II Number CXXXI

Foundation

Technical news

Movement

Media

Events and meetups

Other news

Wikizine

Request for help

Did you know ...

Quote

Wikizine News - Year: 2011 Week: 40 Number: 130

Movement

Technical news

Foundation

Jimmy Wales

Chapters

Languages

Media

Anniversaries

Wikizine

Events and meetups

Did you know ...

Quote

Wikizine Techflash - Year: 2011 Week: 40

Wikizine Opinion - Year: 2011 Week: 39 Number: 129 BIS

Wikizine needs YOU!

Contents

Editorial by Milos

Wikizine

In the meantime on foundation-l...

Wikinews: criticism and fork

Song of the week

Personal perspective

The cows of Jimmy Walker

Final 1

Final 2

Final 3

References

In the news

Time machine

10 years ago

5 years ago

From Wikipedia

Wikizine News - Year: 2011 Week: 39 Number: 129

Technical news

Request for help

Bureaucracy

Movement

Foundation

Chapters

Chapters reports

Science

Media

Anniversaries

Stats

Events and meetups

Wikizine

Quote

Wikizine Techflash - Year: 2011 Week: 39

Breaking news

Wikizine Opinion - Year: 2011 Week: 38 Number: 128 BIS

Wikizine needs YOU!

Contents

Editorial by Milos

(Un)acceptible Foundation influence on chapters