Year: 2007 Week: 28 Number: 77

Technical news

• [Spam-blacklist] – For a long time is there on meta the spam blacklist. That list is used to make it impossible to save a page the contains the domains the are listed on the blacklist. More recent but also since a long time the local wikis have a local white-list to overrule the global blacklist on Meta. Now there is also a local blacklist. So if you want to block a domain it can be blocked by requesting to include it on the global list on meta or you can put it on your local list so it is only blocked on your wiki.
  • [[MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist]]
  • [[MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist]]
• [New special page] – There is new special page and it is even a useful new special page. [[Special:DeletedContributions]].  By means of this page a sysop can very easy get a list of all the deleted contributions of any user.
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/32551
• [Ugly bug] – One of the fundamentals of concept of the wiki-software is that you can see in the history who has edited what and when. Tuesday there was a bug in the system of the wikis that resulted in random edits being saved to an other specific article on that wiki. On the dutch Wikipedia the edits ended up in the article about Albert Speer. This bug is fixed now. The result is that users could have done a normal edit from there point of view edit but when you look the edit is saved and logged in an totally other article. So it could look like you have vandalized that article when reviewing the history.

Request for help

• [Wikizine] – The English edition of Wikizine is looking for a core editor, the German version for a translator. Please only respond if serious.
  • http:/report.wikizine.org
• [Wikimedia Canada] – The people attempting to found a Canadian chapter are looking for people to help out, especially with the legal stuff.
  • http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada

Foundation

• [Board elections] – The elections are closed. The results are expected to be announced on July 15. There are 4179 votes counted.  Invalid votes are not yet deducted from that number.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-09/Board_elections
  • https://wikimedia.spi-inc.org/index.php/Reports/Day_10
• [New hire] The WMF has hired Mike Godwin as “General Counsel and Legal Coordinator” = the WMF lawyer. Mike Godwin is the person most geeks of us know from “Godwin’s Law”.
  • http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/17982
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-09/New_hires
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Godwin
• [Wikimania] – The first draft version of the schedule for Wikimania is online. Being a draf it can change but at least now you can have an idea about what will happen.
  • http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule
• [Board meeting]  – Report of the in person board meeting in june in the Netherlands.
  • http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings/June_1-3%2C_2007
• [Removal] – Carolyn Doran, who works as Chief Operating Officer since January 2007 for the WMF, is removed from the list of the current staff of the WMF. This suggests that Carolyn does not work anymore for the WMF.
  • http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Current_staff
• [Wikimedia Taiwan] – The WMF has given Wikimedia Taiwan the formal status as a Wikimedia Chapter.
  • http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Taiwan
  • http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_Taiwan

Community

• [Murder he wrote] – On the EN Wikipedia an anonymous users included in the article about [[w:en:Chris Benoit]], professional wrestler, that his wife was dead. This was many hours before the police discovered the wife of Chris benoit (and himself and son) dead. Writing that someone is dead before the police knows about it is suspicious behavior. It was noticed and reported by EN Wikinews. Also the police noticed this event and investigated it. The anonymous user posted on the talk pages of EN Wikinews extensive statements that it was all a coincidence and that he had nothing to do with the dead. The police was able to locate the anonymous users was after interrogation convinced that he was not involved with the murders.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-02/Wrestler_death
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Benoit
  • http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Death_of_Nancy_Benoit_rumour_posted_on_Wikipedia_hours_prior_to_body_being_found
  • http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chris_Benoit_mystery_editor_confesses:_Claims_%22terrible_coincidence%22
• [DE Wikipedia] – The German Wikipedia will get support from the German state. The idea is to   pay experts to work on certain articles on the DE Wikipedia that are about or related to renewable resources.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-02/German_chapter
  • http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/26/159232
• [Wikiclosed] – The Chocktaw Wikipedia has been closed. Chocktaw is a Native American language with arround 9200 speakers. Also Wikipedias in Kwanyama, Muscogee and Hiri Motu languages are closed. End the Wiktionaries in Rhaetian and Tibetan languages are closed also.
  • http://cho.wikipedia.org/
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw_language

Media

• [japan] – Newspaper obituary plagiarizes Japanese Wikipedia
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-07-09/Japanese_plagiarism

Stats

• [Vote stats] – Gregory Maxwell  has made some graphs to help to understand the impact of the Board elections across projects. That graphs are very clear: the board is elected by the English Wikipedia. Only when you put all the non-EN Wikipedia votes together and besides the votes from the EN Wikipedia the number of votes comes in the neighbourhood of the number of EN Wikipedia votes. Many users have not voted. Depending of the project between 2,5% and 20% of the possible voters have voted. Not only the voters where not very enthusiastic about these elections. From the 15 candidates only 5 accepted the invitation of Wikizine to present them self to the communitity.
  • http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/election_analysis/ivote3/graphs.html
• [nds.wp] – The Low Saxon Wikipedia now has reached 10,000 articles with the article on Erskine Caldwell
  • http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erskine_Caldwell

Other news

• [Wiki Maps] – Openstreetmaps.org is a community project to make free maps of the world. These are made by a community of volunteers. The collect the information needed to make the maps from volunteers who import data from GPS-units that then is used as the raw data for making the maps and drawing the roads. There are places where the streets are present in great detail but in general there maps are still largely empty. The company Automotive Navigation Data has decided to release there street database of the Netherlands under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. This will mean the there will become a free streetmap available of the Netherlands on Openstreetmaps.org when the data is processed.
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap
  • http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=223
  • http://www.openstreetmap.org/
• [Special offer] – Wikizine will provide mailing list hosting service on request to its readers for Wikimedia related activities. This most explicitly is not indented to replace the mailing list  hosting service of the WMF. This service is intented as a supplementary service when a WMF list is not practical or possible. This is in situations you need very quickly a list for some small temporary project or as an temporary mailing list while waiting for the creation of the official WMF list.  Creation is subject to approval by the editor of Wikizine.

Did you know …

• http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php
• http://www.wikigroaning.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikigroaning#Systemic_bias_in_coverage

Quote

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. — Mike Godwin”

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law