Wikizine/EN2008-92

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                                    .org 

Year: 2008  Week: 10  Number: 92       

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

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=== Technical news ===

[__HIDDENCAT__] - there is a new magic word __HIDDENCAT__ When used on a "Category:Foobar"-page it is not listed among the other categories at the bottom of an article in the category. 
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/36831

[New dump!] - There is a new database dump of the English language Wikipedia. The full dump of EN Wikipedia, all articles, full history is 130gb (compressed).
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20080103/ -- EN Wikipedia dump
http://download.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html -- other wikis dump

[New Skin] - When you go to your "preferences" you have the option "skin" where you can select what the interface will look like. The default skin is Monobook. There are several others to choice from but besides "classic" they are not very usable. But now is there a new good looking and usable skin: "Modern". Check it out.
http://tinyurl.com/22gsy6  -- Wikipedia style "Modern"

[RC on IRC] - Recent changes of the projects are posted on IRC by means of a Wikimedia IRC-server. By request access to this service has been added to the Wikizine IRC gateway for a selection of projects. 
http://chat.wikizine.org 

=== Request for help ===

[Wikimania 2008] - Call for Participation; Submissions are open until 16 March. Submissions are warmly welcomed
http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Participation

=== Foundation ===

[4 new Wikimedia Chapters] - The board of the Wikimedia Foundation approved 4 new chapters. The new chapters are: Wikimedia Česká republika, Wikimedia Österreich, Wikimedia Australia Incorporated, Wikimedia Hong Kong Limited
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters

[Wikimanina 2008] - A site risk assessment will be ordered for Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt announced Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. Concern for the safety of Wikimanians in Alexandria has been a topic on Foundation-l and the assessment will look at various threats.
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/26221

[Board elections 2008] - there is a call for election officials
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/25911
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Committee/en

=== Media ===

[Sue on CNET] - Video intervieuw of Sue Gardner (executive director of the WMF) about the Jimmy Wales buzz and Wikipedia.
http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-32449.html

[Wikipedia in Africa] - story about Wikipedia on DVD in Africa.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/23906

[1984] - Japan is considering legislation to "govern top news Web sites"
http://tinyurl.com/2dt26j

[The Economist] - inclusionists versus deletionists
http://tinyurl.com/23agss

=== Stats ===

[WikiWoordenboek] - the Dutch language Wiktionary passed the 30,000 page milestone.
http://www.wikiwoordenboek.org

[Counts] - The Wikimedia Commons has reached 2,500,000 media files. 

[Again new stats] - A site that is using the squid logs to generate Wikipedia article traffic statistics. You can get the stats for a specific article or get a list of the most popular pages. There can you learn that for some reason "Canine reproduction" is very popular.
http://stats.grok.se

[Wikipedia is 2nd in the world!] - at least in the "2008 Web Globalization Report Card". The number of languages supported is a big factor in this ranking.
http://bytelevel.com/news/reportcard2008.html

=== Other news ===

[Dirty dishes] - Bad week for Jimmy Wales. His personal life is getting media coverage. It is reported that Jimmy had a brief relationship with Rachel Marsden, a conservative blogger who works in the media industry. The relationship broke off and Rachel Marsden provided private communications between herself and Jimmy to a gossip site, which published them.  Jimmy published a statement about it on his blog.

And at the same time Danny Wool, ex WMF staff member, published a blog posting where he writes about his time at the Wikimedia Foundation and requests for reimbursement of expenses by Jimmy, among other things.
http://blog.jimmywales.com/index.php/statement/
http://tinyurl.com/22t42g -- Wikinews article
http://allswool.blogspot.com/2008/03/money-for-nothing-chicks-for-free.html
http://tinyurl.com/23f3am -- Signpost article about it

[Encyclopedia of Life] - the EOL has gone live with more than one million species pages that are mostly minimal articles. Only 25 articles are like the EOL wishes the articles to be, articles containing rich media with extensive information.
http://www.eol.org/

[About Wikipedia] - author John Broughton wrote the book "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual" . A guide to editing Wikipedia. ISBN 0596515162
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-03-03/Book_review

[CNN goes (a bit) Wikinews] - CNN, an American news network, has started a website where everyone can submit news and pictures. As it looks now every article has only one author and people can post comments about it. So it is more a blog than a wiki.
http://beta.ireport.com/

[Wikileaks] - An attempt to bring down Wikileaks has failed. There was a DOS-attack, a fire at their web hosting facility and the release of lawyers who obtained a court order to remove the domain "wikileaks.org" from DNS. Wikileaks did remain online by means of other domains and by entering the ip-address. The court order was later revoked. Wikileaks.org is again online.
http://tinyurl.com/2pbk3q

[Wikirace] - Wikirace.org is game where you compete with other people to try get from one "start-article" to try to reach the "end-article" in as few steps as possible.
http://wikirace.org

=== Message to the readers ====

Wikizine is there to inform you, readers, about the news related to the Wikimedia projects or what seem relevant to inform you about. 
It has been increasingly more difficult to get a new edition ready for distribution the last half year. At present the publication rate is below the necessary frequency necessary to inform our readers in a timely manner about the relevant news. 
Because of this I recommend, as editor, that the readers of Wikizine read the Wikipedia Signpost as their primary internal news source to keep informed.  -- [[meta:user:Walter]] , Editor of Wikizine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost

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

... there is dedicated program to browse Wikipedia visually?

The program is called indywiki. (And no, it has nothing to do with Indymedia.) Basically it is a GUI that displays Wikipedia content in a different way then your browser. Focus is on the visual aspect. You search for a entry, you get a selection of pictures related to that article. By clicking on an image you can browse Wikipedia. Also is there a text box that displays text sections of the article, a list of sections of the article and a list of external links. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. 

Indywiki is young software and the main developer is looking for assistance with this project.  The developer is looking for a python developer to work on features and people who can work on the GUI to make it better looking. 

http://indywiki.sourceforge.net/ -- website
http://indywiki.sourceforge.net/indywiki_fosdem.pdf -- presentation of Indywiki
Contact indywiki: <mgogoulos AT gmail DOT com> 

=== Quote ===

"[..] And for the encyclopedia, it turned out
that a volunteer model was able to do quite a reasonable job." --  Bill Gates reffering to Wikipedia

http://tinyurl.com/32kpw9

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