Year: 2009 Week: 41 Number: 119

Technical news

[Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet] – Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer, announced that he’s leaving the Wikimedia Foundation after four years.
- http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/announce-brion-moving-to-statusnet/
- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055358.html

[Labs: FlaggedRevs] – due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn’t realize that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for people to poke at it for a month. The developers need interested people to be set up as local administrators to try out the per-page stabilization settings (accessed via the “protect” tab); by default most pages do not activate FlaggedRevs in the configuration we’re testing for English Wikipedia.
- http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/

[Labs: LiquidThreads] – another Wikimedia Labs wiki has been created, this time for Liquid Threads. Liquid Threads aims to clean up the way we communicate about articles, turning talk pages into cleaner/threaded discussion pages.
- http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/mediawikis-new-discussion-system-in-testing-on-wikimedia-labs/

[Supporting translatewiki.net] – the Wikimedia Foundation has hired Siebrand Mazeland as a contractor. He will get paid one day a week to work on translatewiki.
- http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/supporting-translatewiki-net/

Foundation

[WMFI and WMMK] – Wikimedia Suomi (Finland) and Wikimedia Macedonia were recently approved.
- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Approval_of_Wikimedia_Macedonia
- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Approval_of_Wikimedia_Finland

[Report to the Board] – Sue Gardner has posted her Report to the Board for the month of July 2009.
- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055326.html

[Fundraising page demos] – Rand Montoya, the Head of Community Giving, has posted some demos of the new Fundraising pages. Your feedback would be appreciated.
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Website_Design

[WMF IRC Office hours] – Following the Wikimedia Foundation Office hours with Sue Gardner, one with Rand Montoya was held on Thursday. The log is available on Meta.
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-09-25

Agenda

[NO: Academy] – Wikimedia Norway is planning a Wikipedia Academy for October 14-15, 2009.
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Academy#Wikipedia_Academy_Bergen.2C_Norway_2009
- http://no.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Academy_2009 (no)

Community

[DE: New Wikimedium] – Wikimedia Deutschland has published its third newspaper. This German newspaper is intended for sponsors, partners, friends and fans of Wikimedia. It’s very visually appealing and even includes content about Wikimedia “around the world”.
- http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/09/30/neue-ausgabe-der-vereinszeitung-wikimedium/ (de)

[Bug: Google News and Wikinews] – the recent MediaWiki updates caused yet another problem: now Wikinews isn’t being indexed by Google News anymore!
- https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20818
- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-September/001654.html

[Translatewiki.net as a WMF project?] – Siebrand asked what Translatewiki (the website where the MediaWiki interface is translated) and the Wikimedia Foundation would gain by translatewiki being made an official Wikimedia project. Gerard offered a few of his own thoughts.
- http://twitter.com/translatewiki/status/4366006901
- http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-benefit-of-translatewikinet-as-wmf.html

[Wikipedia Journal] – Liam Wyatt made a proposal about a peer-reviewed journal for academics to write Wikipedia articles. It might be interesting to read the proposal and discussions about it.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/844

[en.wn “Report”] – an English Wikinews user posted a mini-report about what happened in September 2009 on the project.
- http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-October/001671.html

Media

[BD: Chapter planning] – there has been more coverage on the planned Wikimedia chapter in Bangladesh.
- http://www.theindependent-bd.com/details.php?nid=144160

Stats

[sr.wn] – the Serbian Wikinews became the largest Wikinews version (by number of articles), ousting the English Wikinews from that spot. This is the second time that a Wikimedia project has surpassed the English version, the first time being the French Wiktionary.
- http://wikinews.org/
- http://sr.wikinews.org/wiki/Vikivesti_na_srpskom_prve_po_broju_%C4%8Dlanaka — (sr) Wikinews article on its own milestone

[fr.wikt] – the French Wiktionary has reached 1,500,000 entries.
- http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A9coredevance — 1.5 millionth article

Other news

[Google Search] – Google Search results now actually link directly to the section that you’re looking for.
- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/jump-to-information-you-want-right-from.html

[WikipediaVision] – A student from Helsinki has created “WikipediaVision”, a live visualization of anonymous edits to Wikipedia by location. The site combines Wikipedia’s Recent Changes feed with Google Maps. Although this seems to have been around for a while, the link has resurfaced after it was exhibited live at MFK in Bern (from April until August).
- http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html

[Why do they edit?] – Ziko offers some suggestions on the different reasons people choose to edit (and what/where they choose to edit).
- http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/why-do-they-edit-ego-subject-wiki-and-language/

Did you know …

…that you can even upload home movies to Wikipedia? Wikipedia’s video support is improving, Wikimedians have even been uploading videos of their children illustrating certain Wikipedia topics.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-September/104617.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_reflex

Quote
“A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.” — Mohandas Gandhi

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