Wikimedia Quarto/4/Draft

Draft content for Wikimedia Quarto #4, April-June 2005

Drafts : 1 (Q3 2004) | 2 (Q4 '04) | 3 (Q1 '05) | 4 (Q2 '05) | 5 (Q3 '05) | 6 (Q4 '05)
Skeletons: WQ/1 | WQ/2 | WQ/3 | WQ/4 | WQ/5 +/-

This is a draft for content from april-june. More recent or upcoming events should go in WQ 5 or 6.

If you have a general idea for a report or essay not tied to a particular date; a dynamic content source that always providing new information; or a report from some time before April, 2005; add it to the general Drafts page.

Letters

Founder

"[Ten] things that will be free"

Board

Content

Stats

date!

Kate wrote:
> webalizer statistics and access breakdowns by country are now available for
> all Wikimedia projects:
> 
> * http://www2.knams.wikimedia.org/stats/
> * http://www2.knams.wikimedia.org/country-stats/


This is a table of the 31 highest-pageview countries, but sorted on a
per-capita basis, using population figures from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

It's a little hard to read here in plain text, but there are some
interesting things to observe.  First, as I have personally felt for a
long time, Wikipedia is most popular (per capita) in German-speaking
countries.  In Germany, for example, there were .3749 pageviews per
person (for whatever time period Kate studied, a day?), as compared to
.2519 in the United States.

--Jimbo (sitting in Germany at the moment)

CH      SWITZERLAND     3257554 1.50%   7,489,370       0.434957012
DE      GERMANY 30918990        14.60%  82,468,000      0.37492106
AT      AUSTRIA 2597402 1.20%   8,184,691       0.317348816
FI      FINLAND 1497528 0.70%   5,223,442       0.286693717
IL      ISRAEL  1736050 0.80%   6,276,883       0.276578359
CA      CANADA  8732647 4.10%   32,805,401      0.266195405
NL      NETHERLANDS     4132982 1.90%   16,407,491      0.251896039
US      UNITED STATES   67764804        31.90%  296,202,709     0.228778475
JP      JAPAN   25753169        12.10%  127,333,002     0.202250545
SE      SWEDEN  1814517 0.90%   9,001,774       0.201573268
SG      SINGAPORE       764117  0.40%   4,425,720       0.172653715
BE      BELGIUM 1762902 0.80%   10,364,388      0.170092243
NO      NORWAY  758707  0.40%   4,593,041       0.165186202
AU      AUSTRALIA       2927652 1.40%   20,090,437      0.145723659
UK      UNITED KINGDOM  7746798 3.70%   60,441,457      0.128170272
FR      FRANCE  7241067 3.40%   60,424,213      0.119837175
DK      DENMARK 630803  0.30%   5,432,335       0.116120048
HK      HONG KONG       779969  0.40%   6,898,686       0.113060516
PL      POLAND  4327531 2.00%   38,635,144      0.112010221
PT      PORTUGAL        966668  0.50%   10,566,212      0.091486713
CL      CHILE   1239153 0.60%   16,136,137      0.076793659
IT      ITALY   4139186 2.00%   58,103,033      0.071238725
ES      SPAIN   2587800 1.20%   43,209,511      0.059889592
PE      PERU    1649896 0.80%   27,925,628      0.059081787
MY      MALAYSIA        880847  0.40%   23,953,136      0.036773765
AR      ARGENTINA       1432035 0.70%   39,537,943      0.036219259
MX      MEXICO  2594245 1.20%   106,202,903     0.024427251
PH      PHILIPPINES     1674005 0.80%   87,857,473      0.019053644
BR      BRAZIL  3353760 1.60%   186,112,794     0.01802004
CN      CHINA   2498070 1.20%   1,306,313,812   0.001912305
IN      INDIA   1400545 0.70%   1,080,264,388   0.001296484

Zanimum's design for issue 2, English edition.

LockeShocke's design for issue 3, English draft.

Collaborations

Chinese Wikipedia mirror site (July? Jun?)

SBF support Chinese Wikipedia mirror site. wikipedia.cnblog.org. SeeMeetup/SBF.--Shizhao 15:15, 4 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Report section

(June)
A collaboration between KDE and Wikimedia was made public at Jimbo's keynote speech at the Karlsruhe LinuxTag in Germany on June 23, 2005. KDE want to provide our desktop users with a way to easily access Wikipedia content and at the same time want to create a technology that developers of other projects can draw from. See KDE and Wikipedia for more information on the collaboration.

Focus from Wikibooks

By Karl Wick (should be cut down to avoid redundancy +sj | Translate the Quarto |+)

See the Wikibooks newsletter.

Prizes, Awards

More up to date information on awards might be at Trophy box.

(April)

Japanese award ("All About Japan"), April. Ask Sui (he attended the celemony).

Communication

(date!)

Kennisnet supports Wikimedia Projects
Kennisnet and the Wikimedia Foundation are working together as partners. Jimbo will speak about this at the Holland Open. It does involve both content and technical support. For more details see the press release.

On 20 April 2005 the French Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles, 7 months after the 50,000. Other significant milestones of April 2005 are as follows: 1,000 articles: Vietnamese Wikipedia, 5,000 articles: Neo-Norwegian Wikipedia, 25,000 articles: Chinese Wikipedia.

Events

Week of April 18

MySQL conference The week of April 18 was a busy one for Wikipedia-related events. Wikipedia was invited to the annual MySQL Users Conference in mid-April, where it was honored on April 20 as one of three MySQL Applications of the Year. Both Jimmy Wales and long-time MediaWiki developer Jamesday were present to receive the award.

FLOSS At the same time, Wikimedia Trustee Angela Beesley and Eloquence were in w:Pretoria, South Africa, attending the three-day "Free/Libre and Open Source Software" (FLOSS) and Free Knowledge Workshop. Angela later summarized the event on meta. Angela had been invited to speak about "Wikipedia – A Vision in the Making". Eloquence had a chance to give a wiki technology workshop.

On the third day of the event, Wednesday April 20, Angela and Eloquence took part in an extended discussion of w:e-Learning, which is a major focus in Africa. This discussion including potential plans for Wikiversity, relevant extensions to MediaWiki, ways to work with a Bridges to the Future project and the CSIR Open Source Centre, who hosted the conference. Other ideas that came up during the conference included an audio interface to Wikipedia via cell phones, and ways to produce static HTML dumps and update-feeds to assist the use of Wikipedia in local schools, something which is already happening regularly. There was particular interest in this last idea from Wikiwizzy and a representative from the Shuttleworth Foundation. Wikimedia was encouraged to send someone to the 8th World Conference on Computers in Education in Capetown in early July, but currently no one is planning to attend.

Wednesday evening saw the first African Wikipedian meetup, in Pretoria, with seven Wikipedians in attendance. Angela noted that it "lasted about 3 hours and was very enjoyable." People discussed ways to increase interest in the Afrikaans Wikipedia, machine translation into African languages, and more e-Learning ideas.

Cyberarts Boston That Thursday, Wikipedians in Boston put on an audiovisual presentation of Recentchanges at the launch party of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Sj set up a display table and an array of speakers at the event with the help of Wikinewsie Pingswept; they then broadcast a real-time map of Recentchanges to birdsong and other nature sounds, while displaying a colorful real-time RC feed on the display. This was done with the software package rcbirds, a creation of German Wikipedian Datura, which relies on the w:IRC version of Kate's RC-bot. w:Stephen Wolfram was in attendance, and noted that he was watching Wikipedia for ideas about how to improve projects like MathWorld and PhysicsWorld.

Tech

Other topics: New facilities (see Report by Domas), MediaWiki1.5b and major update of the entire site (from the end of June, still on-going).

Kennisnet report by Mark.

Wikipedia Check-Usage

Tim Bartel (aka Avatar) published a new tool for checking the usage of media files.

Wikipedia Check-Usage is a web based tool which can be used to check where media files are used throughout the wikimedia universe. Also it is able to find "local" duplicates to commons media.

Check-Usage is strongly inspired by Arnomane's - now outdated - check-usage.sh - a unix shell script doing mostly the same job. Because this script has several preconditions to run, like shell access to a unix/linux system and several programs installed on this machine, I though of writing a small web based interface. After short consideration I decided not to write only an interface calling Arnomane's script, but to re-code it completly. Check-Usage is written in PHP using libcurl.

So if you are interested where 'your' pictures are used - give it a try.

And commons sysops can use it before deleting files. In the past it was often problematic deleting/moving a file on commons, because doing this the included pictures in other wikimedia-projects were broken.

Other tools

A Wikipedia history-animation contest, sponsored by bloggers, yields four entries...
CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter hits the big time (er, starts working smoothly :)
rcbirds upgrade? other tool upgrades? maybe worth a few words
taw's open-source IRC summerbot that can selectively report vandalism, trolling, new users and what have you

Down times

By Domas Mituzas

Wikimedia site down on May 13
-> I asked Domas for complements. ant

Stats - current state

Portuguese Wikipedia reaches 50,000 articles
On 21 May the Portuguese Wikipedia reached 50,000 articles. The 50,000th article is Sé de Viseu. This makes Portuguese the eighth Wikipedia with more than 50,000 articles. Other significant milestones of May 2005 - 100 articles: Gujarati Wikipedia, Bosnian Wiktionary, French Wikinews. 500 articles: Danish Wiktionary, Marathi Wikipedia. 1000 articles: Albanian Wikipedia, Corsican Wiktionary, Alemannic Wikipedia, Georgian Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia. 10,000 articles: Estonian Wikipedia.

For more details, see the by the numbers piece.

Press

Please add any feedback in our press book.

'April: DVD

so ? How are most people supposed to read this and understand it ?

Writing contest

The project inspires us. Wikipedia is more than an encyclopedia. It's more of an attempt at collecting all knowledge about the world. The fact that it's being created by amateurs doesn't make it bad - if they write enough articles, they become professionals. And when they are not limited by space, enthusiasts can present all knowledge on every possible topic. I'm not afraid about the future of printed encyclopedia. The cinema did not kill the theatre, the television did not kill the cinema, and the Internet did not kill books, so the future of classic encyclopedia also seems safe.

Bartłomiej Kaczorowski, editor-in-chief of PWN Encyclopedia (the biggest Polish encyclopedia). He was quoted in an article in Polish magazine "Ozon", published on August 18. The article was mostly about Polish Wikipedia and the Polish Wikimedia meetup. Part of the article can be found online here: http://www.ozon.pl/tygodnikozon_2_7_464_2005_18_1.html but it lacks this quote. The original (for Polish Quarto) is:

Nas ten projekt inspiruje. Wikipedia to więcej niż encyklopedia. To raczej próba zebrania calosci wiedzy o świecie. Fakt, że tworzą ją amatorzy, to nie zarzut - jeśli dużo piszą, stają się profesjonalistami. A zapaleńcy, gdy nie są ograniczeni ilością miejsca, potrafią zaprezentować wszelką wiedzę na każdy temat. Nie obawiam się o przyszłość drukowanej encyklopedii. Kino nie zabiło teatru, telewizja kina, a Internet książki, więc o klasyczną encyklopedię jestem spokojny.

Community

Minneapolis meetup

Suggestions

date?

Slavopedia cooperation and communication inter-Wikip(m)edia project.

Extras

There are always some extras that didn't fit into the current newsletter.

For extras from all issues (so far), see Wikimedia Quarto/Extras.