Wikizine/2006-07

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                                    .org 
Year: 2006  Week:07   Number:13        

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An independent internal news bulletin 
for the members of the Wikimedia community

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=== Technical news ===

[wikidown] due to reasons still under investigation the Wikimedia projects where mostly down during Monday 13 february. Best guess now is due physical hard disk failure. Emails send to Wikimedia (OTRS) and the lists should be saved and arriving soon.

Many of the issues have been sorted but there are still some on-going problems, as such no wikipedia or wikimedia project should be considered as stable for the moment. Please see sources listed here for more and better news.

http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Status
http://www.thewritingpot.com/wikistatus/
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_log
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/21992

[Anon!] There is a new field to give a warning to anonymous users that their ip-address will be exposed if the edit. It appears above the edit box. Default is English if you have not translated it. 
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning

[Larousse] (2003-2006) - the oldest Wikimedia server still in service has gone offline. Larouse came to serve Wikipedia in may 2003 as the second server ever that Wikipedia acquired. Larouse started to work as THE webserver of Wikipedia with its companion Pliny, the long gone first server, acting as the database server. In his later life cycle Laurouse was used for various light tasks, including nagios, DNS, some IRC services and web serving for kohl.wikimedia.org. Larouse expired at the age of 2 and 10 months, without warranty, because of hardisk failure at the Wikimedia hosting facility in Tampa, Florida.
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Larousse

[No Tinyurl] On Meta there is a global blacklist of domains. Url's of domains listed there can not be posted on any Wikimedia wiki. This is an anti-spam function of Wikimedia.  The widely used domain "tinyurl.com" is now added to the blacklist. Tinyurl.com is a free redirect service to make a very long url very short. This service has been abused by spammers to link sites already on the blacklist. But it is also used by Wikimedians to point to a specific page or revision. Below the item you find a tinyurl to the discussion page about this. Wikizine is constructed on Meta so this short url could not be saved in this form on Meta. To compare you find the long tinyurl target also included.
http: // tinyurl.com/exp3t
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Homepages_of_URL_hiders_.28tinyurl.com.2C_tinylink.com.2C_etc..29

[Robots.txt] the page "Articles for deletion" and similar of the EN Wikipedia are added to Wikipedia's Robots.txt file. This will prevent them from being indexed by search engines like google. 
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4776  - request for adding AFD & co to robots.txt

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4787 - feature request to make a wikitag to specify this for a specific page

=== Request for help ===

[Grants] Wikimedia Germany has been offered to participate in the Google Grants
International-Programm. We can kindly use Google AdWords to promote Wikimedia sites.Final deadline for suggestions is February 14th.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_Grants
http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden

=== Legal ===

[TRON] Judgement in the TRON case; Wikipedia wins in the name controversy - wikimedia.de points again to de.wikipedia.org - Tron's parents said they would appeal the ruling.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,400028,00.html

=== Foundation ===

[Meeting 2006-02-05] A open Wikimedia meeting was held and also a follow-up meeting. The full log of the open Wikimedia meetings is online.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Board_meeting%2C_February_5%2C_2006
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetings

=== Community ===

[Questions for Jimbo] the English language Wikipedia approaching one million articles. The Wikipedia Signpost is organizing a interview with Jimbo about this and is accepting questions for him now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-06/From_the_editor

=== Media ===

[The Cartoons] - also on Wikipedia EN are those a hot topic. The article about it is created on 27th January. The article is already edited about 4500 times in that time. Even more impressive is the discussion page of that article. Notice too the long archive section. You can print a book with all those talk files. And because we live now in the year 5 A.W. (after Wikipedia) somebody has actually done that and made some sort of book of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-02-06/Cartoon_chaos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
http://i-newswire.com/pr56324.html
http://www.baghdadmuseum.org/

=== Stats ===

[Alexa] Wikipedia has risen into top 25 most popular sites on the web according to Alexa Internet.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.wikipedia.org

=== Other news ===

[WikiPubs] New project proposal; a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide pub guide.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6155
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipubs
http://wikipubs.org/index.php/Wikipubs

=== Did you know ...  ===

... that the website "copyscape.com" is ideal to see if newly created articles aren't copies?

http://copyscape.com/

=== Computer quotes ===
My computer goes down on me more often than my girlfriend. -- Robert Paul 
The only way to make your PC go faster is to throw it out a window.
The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim. -- Edsgar Dijkstra 
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. -- Thomas Watson 
How many Visual Basic programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? They don't know how. They have C++ programmers to change their lightbulbs. They make wonderfully decorated light switches, though.

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Number of subscribers: 298
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
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