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報告

 

Article state : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit
 
Epicyclic gear


概要

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By Anthere


ご報告に当たり、まず2004年の財務状況について説明いたします。 To start with, here is a brief summary of our financial state at the end of 2004:

2004年は、総収入15万ドル、総支出は12万3,000ドルでした。 In 2004, our global revenues were US$150,000, while expenses reached about US$123,000 dollars.

詳しくは次のリンク先をご参照下さい。[4] The full bank history for 2004 is available on the Foundation Website.

2004年の財務状況の一番の特徴は、需要の増大でした。 The most striking financial trend for 2004 was the amazing growth of our needs.

この1年で、サーバを3台増やし、全部で50台に達しました。 In just one year, our server farm grew from 3 servers to 50!

当然ながら、このことは新しい機器を購入する費用と帯域維持のための費用が年間を通して増加することでもあります。 Naturally, this meant increasing costs throughout the year, to purchase new equipment and to support bandwidth requirements.

2005年の最初の予算会議では、私たちのニーズを検討しました。[5] A budget meeting was held in early 2005, to estimate our growing needs.

このときの見通しに基づいて、2月には募金活動を行い、9万ドル強が集まりました。 Following this estimate, a successful fundraising drive was held in February, yielding over US$90,000 dollars.

今まで得てきた収入のほとんどは個人からの寄付によるもので、1人大体5ドルから20ドルを寄付して頂きました。 To date, most of our income has come from individual donations, ranging from US$5.00 to US$20.00 dollars.

これらの寄付は、私共の活動を高く評価した編集者や読者の方によるものです。 These donations have come from editors and readers who appreciate what we are doing.

この募金活動の成功から、私共の活動の成長は依然として個人の皆さんからの寄付に大きく支えられていることがわかります。 The success of our fundraising suggests that our growth can still essentially be supported by individual donations.

その他の私共への支援について説明します。 Other revenues included grants and sponsorship.

直近では、ラウンズベリー科学財団[6]より支援を受けました。 Our most recent grant was from the Lounsbery Foundation.

最大の出来事はアメリカ合衆国内国歳入庁より、私共が非営利公益団体として認定され、寄付に際して免税資格を得たことです。 An important issue with regard to grants and donations is that the Wikimedia Foundation has finally been classified as a public charity, and granted tax exempt status by the IRS.

このことは私共へ寄付を考えている方にとって、前向きな検討をもたらすことになります。 This will certainly offer new incentives to potential grantors.

2005年の最初の月に、IRCにて私共は会合を開き、寄付担当者を雇用することを検討しました。 During the first months of 2005, an IRC meeting was held on grant issues, and we considered looking for a Grants Manager for the Foundation.

その3ヶ月後、8月に開催される第1回ウィキマニアでは、Gurunet(Answers.com)[7]がスポンサーとなりました。 Later in the quarter, Wikimania, the first international meeting organised by and for wikipedians (taking place in August), was granted its first sponsorship, from Gurunet.

2005年の1月、私共は既存の資金から、機材を購入しました。[8][9] With our existing funds, we purchased some technical equipment in January.

この四半期には、ホスティングの提供を数多く受けたので、機材の購入は見積もりより少なくて済みました。Numerous hosting proposals this quarter allowed us to purchase less hardware than expected.

フランスのsquidsサーバを提供してくれた寄付者がさらに3組を無償で提供して下さり、それらは Lost Oasis.netが無料でホストしてくださることになりました。その他のご提案については現在、検討中です。(詳しくは次のリンクをご参照下さい[10]) The donor of the first set of French squids donated three more, soon to be hosted by Lost Oasis for free; other propositions are currently being studied (see Wikimedia partners and hosts).

なかでも、Google社との協議は進行中ですが、合意には達していません。 In particular, discussions are ongoing with Google, but no agreement has been reached.

基本的な傾向として、私たちの独立性を維持しながら、これらの技術協力先を増やしていかなければならないと考えています。 The general trend is to multiply our partners, insuring independence; while making agreements that are technically relevant.

新しい支出は人件費です。 A new expense is salary.

2005年の始めより、財団は2人の非常勤の開発者、チャッド・ペリンとブライオン・ヴィヴァーを雇用しています。 Since early 2005, the Foundation has been employing two part-time developers, Chad Perrin and Brion Vibber.

また、理事会は、設備の購入や電話番、事務的な仕事の処理のため、専任の事務員を雇用することを決定しました。 The board has also decided to hire a person full time to do secretary work, such as physical paper work, sending out packages, purchase of tech parts, phone calls.

その勤務先は本部のあるフロリダ州となります。 The position will be local to Florida.

その他の仕事についての求人も検討されていますが、決定には至っていません。 Discussions are ongoing about hiring other people but no decision has been taken at that point.

全てのウィキメディア・プロジェクトにおよぶプライバシー・ポリシーは、前回の理事会で承認されました。 The Privacy policy on all Wikimedia projects was approved at the last Board meeting.

今後数週間の間に、全ての言語に翻訳し、編集者と読者に提示することになります。 It will be translated in all languages and made visible to users and visitors over the next few weeks.

最後ですが、財団を法律的に適切な組織とするため、過去数週間にて、法的な諸問題について議論するページ[11]を設けました。 Finally, the legal organisation of the Foundation has been strengthened in the past few weeks, with the creation of a page to coordinate discussions of legal issues.

理事会 会議録

未解決の議題についての議事録もご覧下さい。[12]

 

法的整備

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Der Bücherwurm ; Spitzweg, Carl ; 1850

財団の進展を助けるため、財団に関する現在、及び将来についての法的問題を集約しました。 In order to help the Wikimedia Foundation move forward, current and future legal issues regarding the Foundation are being centralized.

問題解決のために有用な内部および外部リンクとリソースを保存するためになされました。、 This is being done to preserve the memory of useful internal and external links to solved problems and resources.

議論と情報はメタウィキのリーガルのページ[13]に集めました。 Discussion and information are being gathered on the meta-wiki's legal page.

また、このページは財団及び支部が外部の弁護士に依頼を行うために必要な全ての法的問題に関するページを集めています。 This page is also the place to gather all legal material that the Foundation or local chapters might need to make requests of outside lawyers.

財団に関わる法的問題の主要なものには、著作権、商標、マーケティング、寄付、税、団体法、協定などがあります。 The Foundation's typical legal needs releate to copyright, trademarks, marketing, donations, taxes, and laws of associations and partnership.

慣習法の国と成文法の国があることも考慮しなければなりません。 Legal issues must be considered both for common law countries and for civil law countries.


Creative Commons unveils new license for wikis

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クリエイティヴ・コモンズがウィキのために新ライセンスを公開 By Michael Snow (21 march)

 
"100-sided" dice

先週の木曜日、クリエイティヴ・コモンズはウィキのための新ライセンスのベータ版を紹介しました。このライセンスはローレンス・レッシグがその著書の中で紹介した物の改良版です。

Last Thursday, Creative Commons introduced a beta version of its new license designed specifically for wikis,in conjunction with Lawrence Lessig's introduction of a wiki to help draft an updated version of one of his books.

レッシグの説明によれば、その新しいライセンス、CC-wikiは「著作権者に帰属させるよりも、著作権者もしくは指定された組織に帰属させた方が有効だと思います」とのことです。 As Lessig explained it, with the new license (given the designation of CC-Wiki), "rather than requiring attribution back to the copyright holder,[the license would] require attribution back to either the copyright holder or a designated entity."

なお、「指定された組織」とはウィキを管理している組織のことを指すものと思われます。 The designated entity would presumably be whatever organization controlled the wiki.

レッシグは、このライセンスを、全く新しいライセンスではなく、CC-BY-SA(著者名表示・継承)の新バージョンだと位置づけています。 Lessig characterized it as a newly branded version of the attribution/share-alike (CC-by-sa) license, rather than being an entirely new license.

因みに、レッシグは2000年に初版が刊行された彼の著書『CODE―インターネットの合法・違法・プライバシー』の改訂のためにウィキを利用しています。 Lessig is also using a wiki to coordinate updates to his book,Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, originally published in 2000.

その本のためのJotspotで動作しているウィキには、新しいライセンスを導入しようとしていますが、紙媒体の物については、版元に新ライセンスの適用を承知させることは出来ないだろうと、ビジネス・ウィークで彼は語っています。 The wiki for the book, powered by JotSpot, will use the new CC-Wiki license, although the published version will not be under a Creative Commons license - Lessig told BusinessWeek that he wasn't able to get his publisher, Basic Books, to agree to such a license.


この新しいCC-wikiライセンスは、完全に遵守することに労力を要するGFDL(これまでのCCとは非互換)を利用しているために長い間苦情が寄せられていたウィキペディアにとって、意味のあるものとなるでしょう。 The new CC-wiki license could have implications for Wikipedia, as for quite some time there have been periodic complaints that the GNU Free Documentation License is difficult to comply with, and incompatible with the popular Creative Commons licenses.

ウィキペディアの情報を再利用する場合のライセンス遵守の手続きの緩和の試みとして、ミラーサイトよりウィキペディアへのリンクを徹底することが推奨されています。 In an attempt to reduce the burden of license compliance on those who reuse Wikipedia content,Wikipedia's copyright notice encourages mirror sites to focus on providing a link back to the Wikipedia article.

英語版の編集者、Ram-Manは、自分の貢献について複数ライセンスmulti-license(GFDLとCCのどれかなど)を認めるように組織的に呼び掛けていました。 English Wikipedian Ram-Man spent some time this quarter systematically asking people to multi-license their contributions, usually under the GFDL and one of the Creative Commons licenses.

しかしながら、レッシグのこの計画は、いくつかの筋から、批判されました。 However, Lessig's project received a cool reception from some corners.

アンジェラは彼のウィキは、独占的なソフトウェアであるJotspotで作成されているのだから、これは奇妙な決定だと述べています。 Angela called the decision to use proprietary software from JotSpot to host Lessig's wiki a bizarre choice.

Jamesdayを含むその他からは、特に共同著作権が著作者個人の権利に及ぼす効果に関してCC-wikiライセンス自体を批判しています。 Others, including Jamesday, criticized the CC-Wiki license itself, particularly over the effect of group attribution on the rights of individual authors.

このライセンスはまだ実験版で、ウィキペディアへの導入についての本格的な議論も始まっていません。 The license is still in "beta", and there has yet been no serious discussion about implementing such a license for Wikipedia content.

 

協働/Collaboration

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Water striders using water surface tension when matting.

Summary on collaboration

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他団体との提携の概要

私たちはこの第一四半期に他団体との提携活動をいくつか企画し、さらに多くについて、検討が重ねられています。 We worked out a number of collaborations with other organisations in the the first quarter, and are discussing many more.

ベルネットからは22Uものラックスペースとホスティングサービスを無料提供されました。これについては最近提携文書が調印されました。 Belnet is providing free hosting and 22U of rackspace. This agreement has been signed recently.

ケーニスネットからは、ソフトウェアの研究・開発、ホスティングサービスなど、様々な提供を受けています。(詳しくは7ページのケーニスネットの節をご覧下さい) Kennisnet is collaborating with Wikimedia in many ways; both by sponsoring software research and development, and by offering local hosting and the use of their servers. (For more information on Kennisnet collaborations, see Kennisnet, pg 7.)

私たちはAnswers.comにデータをライブ・フィードを提供するとの合意に達しました。 We reached an agreement to provide a live feed of our public data to Answers.com. ブライオンは現在その実現のために働いています。 Brion Vibber is currently working with them to make this happen. アスク・ジーブスとオペラがそのライブ・フィードに関心を持っています。また、アマゾンからも関心が寄せられています。しかし、これらとは提携までには至っておりません。 Ask Jeeves (a search engine) and Opera (a web browser company) are interested in such a feed as well, and Amazon.com has expressed some interest, but no agreements have been reached with any of them.

また、私たちはいくつかのコンテンツ・ホルダーと提携するに至り、そのコンテンツの提供を受けました。 We have also reached some collaborations with content owners, who have provided their content for reuse in the project.

EU環境局は、ウィクショナリーのために、その多言語シソーラスの提供に同意しました。 The European Environment Agency has agreed to license their General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) so that it may be included in Wiktionary;

ボイス・オブ・アメリカは、英語発音ガイド[14]5000語をウィキペディアに提供しました。 Voice of America agreed to make the 5000 terms of its Pronunciation Guide available for use in Wikipedia;

Whole Earth Catalogの編集者、スチュアート・ブランドは、同誌の最初の5年間分のデータをウィキソースとウィキブックスに提供してくれました。 and the original publishers of the Whole Earth Catalog agreed to make the content of the first 5 years of Whole Earth Catalogs available for use in Wikisource and (in updated, wikified form) in Wikibooks.

その他の大小合わせ12のホスティングサービスの提供について検討中です。 Another dozen hosting offers, both large and small, are under discussion. あるものについては一時的なもの、またあるものについては共同マーケティングなどが絡みます。 Some are tentative, some want "co-marketing opportunities," etc.

今、それらの申し出について、私たちは関心はあるのだが技術的にすぐに準備できないので数ヶ月待ってほしいと答えています。そのため私たちは計画推進を話し合っても、すぐに発表というわけにはいかないのです。 Right now, we are telling most of them that we are interested but that we will not be technically ready for a few months; so we should talk now to plan ahead but are unlikely to announce anything soon.

私たちはあわてて先に進むよりもまず、最近締結された内容を実行に移し、時間をかけて検討する必要があります。 We must first organise the deals recently concluded, and take time to think and organise,rather than proceeding in haste.

Top rank sales for Directmedia DVD of German Wikipedia

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ダイレクトメディア社発売のドイツ語版WikipediaのDVD版が好評

 
German DVD cover

ドイツ語版WikipediaのCD-ROM版の頒布が成功した後、 After the succesful distribution of the German Wikipedia on CD,

ドイツの出版社ダイレクトメディア社は、DVD版を発売しました。 the German publishing company Directmedia has released a DVD edition.

そのDVDは3月3日時点のものを基本とし、著作権侵害や荒らし行為、編集用テンプレートを取り除いた閲覧版を準備しました。 The DVD is based on a snapshot of the wiki from March 3, which was quickly reviewed to remove potential copyright violations, vandalism and templates which are only useful in the online version of Wikipedia.

CD版作成に際して追加された人名録については、更に多くの人物を増補しました。 Structured bibliographic information about key people, a new feature added for the CD distribution, was also added for more people.

DVDには20万3000もの項目と数千もの画像を収録されています。 The DVD contains 203,000 articles and thousands of images.

それには高速閲覧のための全文検索とブックマークが含まれています。 It includes software for browsing the content with a fast full text search and features for annotations, bookmarks and so on.

DVDはWindows、Mac、Linax上で動作するようにしています。そのほかのOSへの対応については、目下、重要な課題となっています。 The DVD is shipped with software for running on Windows, MacOS and Linux; although the latter is still new and under heavy development.

DVDは発売直後ドイツAmazonソフトウェア部門で1位を獲得しました。 The DVD was the best-selling software product at Amazon Germany the day after it was announced.

その2日後、予定していた1万部が売り切れましたので、追加分を工場に発注しました。 Two days later, the 10,000 copies made for the release had sold out and a new set were ordered from the factory.

それらは来週以降配布予定となります。 These will be delivered within the next few weeks.

DVDには、付録特典CDとして、PDAへのインストール用として、TomeraiderとMobipocket用のデータを同梱しています。 The DVD also contains data packages for Tomeraider and Mobipocket, allowing it to be installed on PDAs, as well as a "bonus CD-ROM."

このCDはアパッチ、MySQL、Mediawikiを含むbootable LAMPPIX-CDです。 This CD is a bootable LAMPPIX-CD containing an Apache server, a MySQL database and Mediawiki.

これは20万以上の項目に直接アクセスするために、CD-ROMから直接起動します。 This runs a Mediawiki installation directly from the CD-ROM, which you can boot from in order to have access to over 200,000 articles from your web browser.

DVDのISBNは3-89853-020-5です。 The DVD's ISBN is 3-89853-020-5;

ドイツ・オーストリア・スイスの書店にて9.90ユーロで販売しています。 it can be ordered for 9.90 Euros from every book shop in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

そのうち1ユーロが財団ドイツ支部へ寄付されます。 For each DVD sold, one euro is donated to Wikimedia Deutschland.

DVDとCDについてはISOイメージが、P2PネットワークといくつかのFTPサーバから、普及と共有を目的として無償で提供されています。 Both the DVD and the CD-ROM are available for free as ISO images, via P2P networks and on several FTP servers, encouraging sharing and broader distribution.

Public Relations

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広報活動

 
Masks from Guatemala

理事会活動で増大した部門には、広報活動が含まれます。 An increasing part of the Board's activity is related to public relations.

ジミー・ウェールズは世界中から講演に呼ばれているため、ほとんどオフラインで、世界中を飛び回っています。 Jimmy Wales is travelling or offline more frequently, due to invitations to talks all over the world.

彼の日程scheduleの概観は、この最も良い要約です。 A quick view of his schedule is probably the best summary of this.

その他の講演としては、Angela と Anthereが数日間、ウェブデザインの10年に呼ばれました。 Other presentations have taken Angela and Anthere offline for days at a time (most recently at PixelAche for Anthere and A Decade of Web Design for Angela).

これら、会議、インタビュー、報告などについては、6ページの報道、7ページの国際関係をご参照下さい。 For more on these conferences, interviews and press reports, see Press (pg. 6) and International (pg. 7).

最近では、プレゼンテーション用の広報資料の収集方法を改良しました。 Effort has recently been put into improving the public collection of presentation materials.

Anthereは2005年1月のTIC21会議のためにNotafishと共にフランス語の資料を作りました。 Anthere crafted a leaflet in French with Notafish for the TIC21 meeting in January 2005.

エリアンは、後でFosdem会議での発表用の翻訳用資料群を公開しました。 Elian later released a collection of leaflets to be translated for the Fosdem meeting.

 
Jimmy Wales and Howard Rheingold [1] at Stanford University [2].
Screenshot of a video[3] by Alterego.

現在、プレゼンテーション用資料、広報資料、資料の3資料群において完備されたものを見ることが出来ます。 The full collection of current material may be found in three collections, for presentations, promotion, and leaflets.

この情報のほとんどは英語、ドイツ語、フランス語、オランダ語で見つけることが出来ます。 Most of this information may now be found in English, German, French and Dutch.

その他の言語版についても翻訳して追加していただけると幸いです。 Please add to these in other languages.

 

Finances

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By Maveric

 
Credit cards

The first fund drive of 2005 was held from Friday, February 18, 2005, to Tuesday, March 1, 2005.
Our goal was to raise 75,000 USD to meet the immediate expenses in our 2005 budget. Originally, the fund drive was planned to run for three full weeks; however, we soon exceeded the original goal, and cut the fund drive short by 9 days. When all sources of donations were counted, we had surpassed the goal by 26%, raising the equivalent of 94,648.70 USD. A full breakdown of contributions by source is available; a quick overview:

  • 76.44% (72,352.01 USD) from PayPal
  • 21.18% (15,254.66 Euros | 20,046.15 USD) from Wikimedia Deutschland.
  • 1.22% (1,155.00 USD) from snail mail/post
  • 1.16% (1,095.54 USD) from MoneyBookers

Last December, the Lounsbery Foundation granted the Foundation 40,000 USD for hardware expenses in the first quarter of 2005. This grant, added to the money generated in the drive, allowed the foundation to purchase up to 75,000 USD worth of hardware.

20,000 USD were set aside for additional hardware and/or to pay for development projects. This is also the first quarter where the full cost of hosting is being charged to the foundation; 16,000 USD was allocated for this. The extra 20,000 USD over the fundraiser goal was put into a reserve fund.

The foundation now has two employees: a part-time hardware assistant and one full-time developer under contract. The 8,000 USD for the developer is being provided by official mirror contracts. The 1,500 USD for the hardware assistant has been allocated from the budget.

Other budgeted items: 5,000 USD for travel, 500 USD for domain names, 2,500 USD for office expenses, 500 USD for fundraising and promotion, and 1,000 USD for miscellaneous expenses

Wikimedia Deutschland was the only chapter with its own financial report to issue; for details, see Chapters, page 5.

 

501(c)(3) status granted to Wikimedia Foundation

Article state : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit
 
501(c)3 form of Wikimedia Foundation Inc

After many months of waiting, the Wikimedia Foundation has been officially classified as a public charity and granted 501(c)(3) (tax exempt) status by the IRS. Donations to the Foundation are now tax deductible in the United States. The Foundation is now qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers, or gifts. The effective date of the exemption is June 20, 2003 (the date on which the Foundation was created), and the status is fully retroactive. If you have donated to the Foundation in the past, those donations may be claimed as tax deductions.

 

Grants

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One grant meeting was held on IRC in February, with about 10 people in attendance. As a direct result, a UNESCO IFAP grant was pursued, unsuccessfully, to support the initial development of a universal dictionary.

Shortly thereafter, a similar proposal won a 5000 EUR grant for software development from Kennisnet, a Dutch educational organisation (for a full report on the grant and its effects, see Kennisnet and Wikimedia, pg. 7).

Wikimania supported by GuruNet

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Bob Rosenschein of GuruNet agreed to be a primary sponsor of Wikimania for an amount of 30,000 EUR. He is a very enthusiastic supporter of Wikimedia's charitable goals, and his company is prospering in part due to reuse of Wikipedia content.

Socialtext, a corporate wiki development company, agreed to sponsor the conference for 5000 EUR; and other sponsorships were being discussed as of the end of March.

 

Technical Development

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LCD layers

January and February saw a number of slowdowns and, on one occasion, a complete shutdown of Wikimedia sites. These were due to a variety of reasons. Many individual servers broke; 10 machines in the main cluster were fixed in the first quarter alone; and traffic continues to rise. The colocation facility had a massive power failure in February, leading to two days of downtime and read-only availability. As of the start of Q2, almost all servers are back in action, and the cluster is looking healthy.

Developers have recently started a LiveJournal as a way to communicate about servers issues with the community. That's one more feed for your preferred RSS aggregator.

Power outages

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There were two major power outages in the first quarter. The first outage, around February 21st, was due to a double power failure: two different power supplies to our cluster were switched off at the same time, when some of the internal switches in our colocation facility failed. Some databases were corrupted by the sudden loss of power; the surviving database had not been completely up-to-date with the most current server, and it took almost two days for developers to recover all data. In the meantime, the site was restored to read-only mode after a few hours.

The second outage took place on March 16th due to a human error: one of the master database's hard disks filled up, preventing slaves from being updated. At this point the data cluster had not fully recovered from the previous outage, and there was less than full redundancy among the database slaves. By the time space was made on the disk, the most up-to-date slave was already many hours behind. It took over eight hours of read-only time for the databases to be resynchronized.

Caches installed near Paris

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Report from David Monniaux.

 
Our servers are the three machines in the middle.

In December 2004, servers donated to the Wikimedia Foundation were installed at the Telecity facility located in Aubervilliers on the outskirts of Paris, France. The network access is donated by French provider Lost Oasis. In January, the software setup was completed; however, various problems then had to be ironed out.

As of April 1, 2005, those machines cache content in English and French, as well as all multimedia content (images, sounds...), for users located in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switerland, and the United Kingdom (daily stats per country). The caches work as follows: if they hold the requested page in their local memory, they serve it directly; otherwise, they forward the request to the main Florida servers, and memorizes the answer while passing it to the browser of the Wikipedia user. Typically, for text content, 80% of accesses are cached (that is, they are served directly); the proportion climbs to 90-95% for image accesses. Due to the current way that the Mediawiki software works, content is cached much more efficiently for anonymous users: essentially, all text pages have to be requested from Florida for logged-in users.

The interest of such caches is twofold:

  • First, they relieve the load on the main Wikimedia Florida servers. We have to buy our bandwidth (network capacity) for Florida, whereas we can get (smaller) bandwidth chunks in other locations.
  • Second, they make browsing much quicker and responsive, at least for anonymous users. Any access to the Florida servers from Europe may take 100-150 ms round trip; this means that retrieving a complete page may take a significant fraction of a second, even if the servers respond instantaneously. The Paris servers, on the other hand, have much smaller roundtrip times from the countries they serve.

The Paris caches serve as a production experiment and test bed for future cache developments, which are currently being studied. We may, for instance, change the caching software in order to reduce the load on the caches (currently, with all the countries they serve, the machines are loaded 80-95%; the machines are, however, quite outdated), and see how we may improve efficiency and cache rates (it appears that the caches do not perform as efficiently as they should by fetching data from each other).

Release of MediaWiki 1.4

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MediaWiki

MediaWiki 1.4 became stable on March 20th, although the Wikimedia farm had been using 1.4 betas since December 2004. This means that most bugs have been fixed and developers are free to work full time on the next release. MediaWiki 1.5 will use an improved database schema, which should greatly enhance performance. There is also some interesting new code to improve page caching: pages served to anonymous users and to logged-in users will look the same, something which is not the case in 1.4.

Blocking of open proxies

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Since March 28th, Wikipedia has been automatically blocking edits coming from open proxies. The feature is still in testing; details are being worked out on the Meta-wiki.

Jimmy Wales asks for more developers at FOSDEM

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As the opening speaker at the FOSDEM 2005 conference in Brussels, Jimmy Wales appealed to the development community for support with the technical side of running Wikipedia. Analyses of these remarks were published in several places last week.

 

Statistics on the projects

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Paper tape

There are currently nine active Wikimedia projects. "Language count" below refers to the number of languages with at least five articles.

  • Wikipedia (encyclopedia, since January 2001): 134 languages, 50,000 editors, 1.6M articles, 27M internal links [15]
    English : 6,000 users, 400K articles, 10% new users/month;
    German : 2,000 users, 250K articles
  • Wiktionary (dictionary/thesaurus, since December 2002): 70 languages, 1,000 editors, 170K articles [16]
  • Wikiquote (quotation collection, since July 2003): 30 languages, 500 editors, 11K articles [17]
  • Wikibooks (textbook/manual collection, since July 2003): 37 languages, 1100 editors, 12K articles [18]
  • Wikinews (news portal, since November 2004): 11 languages, 290 editors, 3,200 articles [19]
  • Wikisource (primary source repository, since November 2003): 50 language portals, 300 editors, 15K articles/documents [20]
  • Meta (Wikimedia coordination, since November 2001): 33 language portals, 800 editors, 3.2K articles [21]
  • Wikicommons (Media repository, since September 2004) : 520 editors, 8.4K articles, 60K media files [22]
  • Wikispecies (Species directory, since September 2004) 42 editors, 2.8K articles [23]



This quarter, a much awaited new statistics feature has been announced by Erik Zachte. It took a couple of weekends to get the scripts up to date for the new database format. The layout has been improved in some places, with newest statistics showing up on top, and language names in comparison tables.

New features:

 
Propellors of an ATR-72
  • Record counts per namespace: [24]
  • Percentage categorised articles (same url as above)
  • Hierarchical category trees per Wikipedia (some are huge!): [25]
  • Overview for wikibooks: Chapters and counts per book

EasyTimeline charts are collected for each Wikipedia language, and listed together with the script code. This may serve as a source of inspiration to help learn the syntax. This can also help find real gems on other Wikipedias that deserve to be translated. While starting a timeline from scratch is not trivial, expanding, correcting or translating an existing chart is indeed "easy."

Wikipedia is more popular than...
According to Alexa Internet, as of March 2005, Wikipedia is more popular than Altavista, Excite, Walmart and Amazon UK; it is on its way to overtaking Reference.com and the New York Times.