Wikimedia News/2002

Wikimedia News

2003

December 2002

26

• Wiktionary now has its own url and has moved to wiktionary.org.

12

• Wiktionary, a companion project aiming to be a multilingual dictionary and thesaurus linked to Wikipedia's encyclopedia articles, is starting up at http://wiktionary.wikipedia.org/.

7

• An interlanguage WikiProject aimed at translating the already created en.wiki country tables is now underway at Countries of the world tables (removed in 2007).

6

A few changes to interwiki/interlanguage linking:

• Interlanguage links in talk pages now appear as inline links instead of magic article links, making it easier to cite existing pages in discussion.
• Unicode-numbered character references can now be used in interlanguage links; depending on your browser, you may be able to paste non-Latin1 text directly into links on the Latin1-based wikis (English, German, etc). (Also the 8-bit capitalization bug that broke some links to East Asian languages has been fixed.)
• Interwiki links to other non-Wikipedia wikis (as per the MeatBall:InterMap) can now be used. This is primarily intended for citing discussions, but they can be handy for references as well.

Also note that there's a Turkish Wikipedia stub. Contributors and would-be interface translators are welcome to stop by!

2

• The Swedish Wikipedia is now running on the new server with a fully localized user interface. Also, a stub has been set up for Greek; the user interface is not yet localized, but it's set up for Unicode and should work for inputting Greek text.

November 2002

26

• Performance tweaks: Until table locking problems are sorted out, the following slow special pages have been disabled on the English-language Wikipedia during high-access times to keep the rest of the site moving: Orphaned articles, Long articles and Short articles, Popular articles, Most wanted articles, and the Maintenance page. They will still be accessible between 02:00 and 14:00 UTC (9 pm to 9 am EST); sorry for the inconvenience.

Also, the watchlist is undergoing some reconstruction; it is now limited similarly to the recent changes list so users with long watchlists don't have to wait and wait and wait quite so long. This will be added to the other-language wikis once a few minor bugs are worked out.

25

• New discussion pages have been created to explore the possibility of adding a dictionary project and gazetteer project alongside the Wikipedia project. Please let me know if you think this is a good idea.

23

• Polish Wikipedia is now upgraded to the new software, and searching works properly on the various non-Latin1-encoded languages such as Esperanto, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese.

22

• User contributions lists should no longer be atrociously slow.

21

• We've recently made some tweaks to the database configuration which should be making site response a bit snappier during peak hours. (yay! pwnage biach)

15

• The Esperanto Wikipedia is one year old today, and has been moved over to the new server and upgraded to the new wiki software.

14

• Two new mailing lists have been set-up in an attempt to reduce the almost overwhelming number of posts made to the Wikipedia-L mailing list; WikiEN-L@Wikipedia.org and Announce-L@Wikipedia.org. WikiEN-L will be used to discuss matters that only concern the English Wikipedia. Announce-L will be a place to post general announcements that pertain to the whole Wikipedia project. Wikipedia-L will now be reserved for policy and other discussion that pertains the whole Wikipedia project -- all languages.

A Polish language mailing list has also been set up. You can subscribe at WikiPL-L.

Wikimedia News

2003