Wikimedia Quarto/4/En

We are still looking for reports, stories, and images or other media for Quarto #4 (covering April, May, and June 2005). Please post abstracts or outlines of content to the drafting board for this edition; when they have taken shape, you can add them directly to the appropriate subpage below. For more general Quarto links, see the Quarto meta-page

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Welcome

Press

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Wikimedia Foundation logo

Wikimedia Quarto

Mania Edition July 2005

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Board of Trustees

Jimmy Wales, Founder
Angela Beesley
Michael Davis
Florence Nibart-Devouard
Tim Shell

Staff

Editor-in-Chief
Samuel Klein
Executive Editor
Florence Nibart-Devouard

Contributing Editors

Contributing Designers
Layout [MH]
Print Layout [SL]

Contributing Writers
+/- Alterego, SonicR, Nicholas "Zanimum" Moreau

Contributing Proofreaders
+/- English Copyeditors:

Contributing Translators
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--WQ

Table of Contents

Cover: ???

Welcome, Table of Contents	. . . . . . 1
Letters from the Founder and the Board	. . . . . . 2
Quarterly Reports	. . . . . . 3
Out of the Projects	. . . . . . 4
Chapter Notes
Wikimania! A global conference in Frankfurt	. . . . . . 5
In the Media	. . . . . . 6
International Notes	. . . . . . 7
Endnotes, Gallery, Editorials	. . . . . . 8

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Letter from the Founder

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Jimbo Wales speaking at FOSDEM 2005 in Brussels, Belgium.
By Chrys.

Letter from the Board

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Wikimedia Foundation Reports

Overview

By Anthere

Board meetings

See also this recent list of open questions to the board.

Legal

Juriwiki-l

Defamation, Libel...

Trademarks...

Copyright Violations...

WNL...

note : un article annonce le changement de license de wikinews ici : [1]

Policy...

Collaboration

Public Relations

Finances

By Maveric

Grants

MediaWiki development and update

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And on the hardware side

By Domas Mituzas

Already in March it was clear that we needed more hardware to solve our main performance bottlenecks, but there was lots of hesitation on what to buy. This somewhat ended in mid-April, when we ordered 20 new application server (Apache) boxes, which were deployed in May. Then again, our main performance bottleneck happened to be our database environment, which was resolved by ordering and deploying two shiny new dual-Opteron boxes with 16GB of RAM each, accompanied by an external Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) enclosure. In this configuration we eliminated previous bottlenecks, as disk performance and in-memory caches were critical points. These two boxes have already shown to be capable of handling 5000 queries per second each without any sweating and were of great aid during content rebuilds during the MediaWiki 1.5 upgrade (we could run live site without any significant performance issues).
Lots of burden was removed from databases by using some more efficient code, disabling really slow functions and, notably, deployment of the new Lucene search. Lucene can run on cheap Apache boxes instead of our jumbo (well, not that really in enterprise scale) DBs, therefore we could scale up quite a lot since December with the same old, poor boxes. Archives (article history) were also placed on cheap Apache boxes thus freeing expensive space on the database servers. Image server overloads were temporarily resolved by distributing content to several servers, but a more modern content storage system is surely required and planned. There were several downtimes related to Colocation facility power and network issues, of which the longest one was during our move (on wheels!) to a new facility, where we have more light, power, space and fresh air. Anyway, acute withdrawals were cured by working Wikis.
There was some impressive development outside Florida as well. A new datacenter in Amsterdam, generously supplied by Kennisnet, provided us with a capability to cache content for whole Europe and neighboring regions. Moreover, it enabled us to build distributed DNS infrastructure, and preparations are made to serve static content from there in case of emergencies. Various other distribution schemes are researched as well.
Currently there are preparations made to deploy our content in a Korea datacenter provided by Yahoo. There we sure will use our established caching technology, but we might already take one step further and put our master content servers for regional languages there. As well, further expansion of our existing Florida content-processing facility is thought about.

As always, keep up information thanks to the following links

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But... down times...still happen...

Wikimedia site down on May 13
On May's Friday the 13th power supply troubles knocked out the majority of Wikimedia servers. Because of this, the main network switch, core file server and nearly all web and cache servers failed to function. As all of database servers had dual power supplies, they were the only ones to survive the crash. Proper site recovery took more than one hour, with some resulting side effects (some hardware needs replacement).

Statistics on the projects

...historical metrics

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Out of the projects reports and essays

Statistical gluttony

By Alterego

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The Wikimedia Foundation has experienced an exciting amount of growth across all projects. The growth is attributed in part to more the more than three thousand users who register to contribute per month, and in part to the Foundation’s commitment to meet increased popularity with increased capacity.

Wikipedia in particular has experienced a dramatic rise in publishing, with English Wikipedians creating more than 1,250 new articles every day at a 7% monthly increase. With more than 650,000 articles, the trend indicates that as the overall corpus grows, so too does the percent of new articles created in relation to it.

In the German language, Wikipedianer have been busy too, writing articles at a clip of 6% per month. As the total number of words grows at 8% per month, the depth of information increases in proportion to the breadth. According to Jakob Voss, a member of the German board, 20% of all German articles are focused on biographies of people.

Speakers of nearly 200 languages have come together in Wikipedia communities, resulting in similar - sometimes never-before-seen - linguistic phenomena. According to the Wikipedia Signpost, more than 100 different language Wikipedias each have more than 100 articles. With some of the languages being quite obscure, this may be the first time their culture has had a compendium of information such as an encyclopedia.

Most popular article for each top 10 wiki entering June

English: Karla Homolka
German: Ortsneckname
French: France
Japanese: Japan Airlines Flight 123
Swedish: Pizza
Dutch: Adolf Hitler
Polish: Great Britain
Portuguese: Brasil
Spanish: Kufra
Italian: Italy

Over all languages, there is a 10% growth of new articles per month, totaling 1.8 million at present. Between these articles there are 500 million words, 30 million inter-wiki links and 1.3 million links to other websites. These were contributed between 30 million edits by 60,000 registered, and many more anonymous users.

Having so much quality content freely available has made Wikipedia an attractive destination for visitors. According to data donated to the Foundation by Hitwise, the Wikipedia.org domain surpassed Dictionary.com as the most popular reference site in late May. This followed a 618% increase in share among traffic from all websites in the previous year. In the two months following the milestone, Wikipedia strengthened its lead by more than 25%, increasing its share of traffic to all reference sites by an additional 92%.

Search engines have increasingly recognized the encyclopedia’s value to visitors, sending 66% of all incoming traffic. Google, in particular, sends 50% of this traffic, taking an overall share of 33%. In late May, Google briefly increased the English Wikipedia’s PageRank ™ to 9 out of a possible 10, formally recognizing it as one the most trusted websites. This culminated in a great flurry of spidering as Google went from having 3 million Wikipedia pages indexed in March to more than 25 million in July. Pages from the Wikipedia.org domain currently occupy .32% of all pages in Google’s index, a number that synchs closely to the .20% of all search engine traffic that Wikipedia attracts. Wikipedia is now the 22nd most recommended site by search engines, and the gap continues to widen.

Among the thousands of keyword searches that Wikipedia ranks high for, several in particular consistently draw considerable traffic. These include Bobby Fischer, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin and, most notably, Pope John Paul II.

Having been established as a primary source of papal news, when Pope Benedict XVI was elected an article was created instantly and received over 2,400 edits in its first day. It was then cited heavily by blogs and news sources such as Reuters, causing a large influx of traffic, peaking at 2,100 requests per second. While this number was spectacular at the time, only two months later it is common to receive over 2,500 requests per second.

As increased and better content attracts more users, who in turn expend more server resources, it has been necessary to greatly expand the Wikimedia server grid to several locations in Florida, France, Amsterdam and soon, South Korea.
There are now more than 100 servers, which, added up, have 260 gigahertz of processing power, 210 gigabytes of memory, and 16 terabytes of hard drive space.

As increased capacity is also a factor in attracting new visitors, these numbers can be expected to increase significantly.

Topic #X

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Wikimedia Research Network

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by Cormaggio

The Wikimedia Research Network is a network of people interested in the development and improvement of Wikimedia's project needs and processes; a sort of long-term planning and steering group. It began in May 2005 with the provision of new roles outlined by Jimmy Wales in a letter to the foundation-l mailing list [2], one of which was Chief Research Officer, which was filled by Erik Möller. Erik then created the Network [3] (originally called the Wikimedia Research Team), and invited anyone interested to get involved and list their individual interests.

These interests are quite diverse, spanning technical, legal, and sociological fields, and projects to reflect and focus these fields are underway. These include issues pertaining to unified single login, article validation, collaboration with universities, and a general user survey to test the "state of the wiki", or rather the various wikis. A privacy policy is also being drafted. There have been three full meetings of the network so far, taking place on IRC, for which full logs are available. They have normally at some point in the meeting split between technical and sociological issues to give a better focus to people with those interests.

As evidenced by the Meta research page, there are many individuals doing research into some aspect of Wikimedia's work, mostly Wikipedia, and the WRN is a chance for people to work together on these ideas. However, the Research Network has come under criticism for potentially stifling these individual projects - though Erik Möller was adamant in setting it up that individuals collaborating on a particular research project would get full credit for their work. Wikimania 2005 was a great opportunity for people to brainstorm and share ideas for projects, many of which have yet to blossom.

The WRN is currently without a central co-ordinator, following Erik Möller's resignation from his role as Chief Research Officer as well as mainly from all other Wikimedia projects. This does not mean, however, that its work is not continuing, but it has given the opportunity for a further reflection on its goals and role in the community, as much as it needs to be done for the CRO position itself. Whatever the current situation, it will certainly be an exciting time to do research into Wikimedia projects as they continue to increase in size and complexity. Of course, any ideas on existing or future projects are always welcome, which you can do on the WRN main page or its talk page.

Topic ##

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Wikimania!

Notes, mini-program, background

Chapter notes

Overview

Wikimedia Deutschland

By ...

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Wikimedia Italia

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Wikimédia France

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The association is slowly starting to take contacts with different organisations. We had a lengthy discussion with a photograph company, where we presented the concept of Wikipedia, talked about common current topics (including access issues to public domain work to take pictures or reproduce it). We will contact other similar organisations in the future. Our aim is to spread the word about Wikimedia projects in associations, organisations, companies, which can give us leads to meet people who can support us.

There were some nice articles in the french press about Wikipedia lately, including a one-pager in one of the big newspapers, Le Monde.

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In the Media

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In the media

Authors: ...

A review of press coverage of Wikimedia projects in the second quarter of 2005.

Positive

Ambivalent

Downright mean

Bizarre

News of the wikiweird...

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International

Moraine_Lake, Canada

Conferences

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By Marianne

Wikimania!

Program and overview; see also Page 5

Sidebar : Great wikis

around the world, on other platforms, non-interactive (gasp!)

Getting involved

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Portal proliferation

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Calendar

See also Calendar.

April

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May

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June

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July

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August

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September

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October

16 Jimmy at Depaul University, Chicago, Illinois (Colloquium talk about Wikipedia and Wikinews)

20-23 Jimmy in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil (ICML9)

28-29 Jimmy at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT)

November

December

A Swedish almanac from 1712		Clockwork of an old spring-cover clock
Woodcut from the 16th century History of the Nordic peoples, by Olaus Magnus, supposedly depicting the astronomical clock in Uppsala Cathedral, which was later destroyed in a fire.	Station Clock in Musée d'Orsay	Wearth, KayEss, Media lib and Ahoerstemeier meeting in Thailand on 15th January 2005

Gallery

Opinion

Review / Op-ed

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Trains in the Distance