Technical news
- [Wiki moved] – Betawiki, the wiki used to make the default translations of MediaWiki and therefore also for the WMF-projects, has moved to a new domain.
- [pyBot] – Plans are currently being made for a major overhaul of the code of the Pywikipediabot framework. The main goals are to start using the MediaWiki API and to unify the coding style.
- http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/pywikipedia-l — place for discussion
- [Anon page creation (not!)] – The announced reactivation of page creation by anonymous users is cancelled.
Foundation
- [$$$] – The fundraiser is going well in the sense that the money is rolling in. At present around 660,000 US$ is donated. The fundraiser is intended to run until the 22nd of December. At the current rate of donations it does not look like the 4.6 million US$, the WMF budget for 2008, will be collected. The counter that shows how many people have donated, has dropped a bit because the deduction of numerous donations of 1$ or less.
- http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/node/22 — current donations totals
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/21590 — do we get 4,6 million?
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising_2007#Suspicious_low-value_donations — strong increase of tiny donations
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/84986 — drop of counter
- [Legal] – French lawsuit against WMF won in court. An article on the FR Wikipedia contained personal information of 3 persons who where no pleased with that. They sued for compensations and the identity of the anonymous editor. The court ruled that Wikimedia is a hosting provider and as such does not need to follow up on what the users are writing. The WMF does need to remove illegal content when they are informed about it. Because the disputed information was removed after proper notification the case was dismissed, including the request for damages and information about the anonymous editor.
Florence Devouard, WMF chair, writes about this case:
“This is very good news for the Foundation. We maintain that WMF is not the publisher, owner or monitor on any of the Wikipedia projects (and obviously not the WP FR). We are pleased to have our position upheld and supported in a court of law.”
- [Illustration Project] – The WMF has received a donation of US$ 20,000 to be used for creating and improving illustrations. Around $40 per illustration will be paid. The idea is to get good illustrations for topics there are non-existing or in less suitable versions. Brianna Laugher [[commons:User:Pfctdayelise]] is in charge of this project. Concerns where raised that this project could undermine the defence of the WMF that is is only a hoster and not a publisher. Sue Gardner, the unofficial executive director of the WMF, said that is was not a problem because technically the Wikimedia Foundation is not paying the editors but the donor does. The WMF is “just facilitating a relationship between a donor who wants to see a particular thing happen in the projects, and a trusted volunteer who shares the same goal”.
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/3016 — list announcement of the project
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun_illustration_project — practical
- http://tinyurl.com/3e4leh — Philip Greenspun-Wikimedia Foundation illustration project proposal (pdf)
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/21457/ — legal concerns
- [Steward elections] – Elections for new stewards will start on the 26th of November. Stewards are users who can change the user level of any user on a WMF-project wiki. Candidates can nominate themselves now. To be a candidate you need to be at least 18 years old and be willing to provide real identification to the WMF. Also the current stewards are up for confirmation.
- [Chapters] – The chapters committee is looking for new members. The chapcom is responsible for checking the proposed bylaws for a new chapter and advises the board for acceptance of the new chapter.
Community
- [DE wp DVD] – A new edition of German language Wikipedia on DVD is coming out. It will be available either as a basic edition that contains thumbnail images only (10 €) or a premium edition that will include higher quality pictures as well as a bonus disc with 1900s encyclopedia ”Meyers” (25 €, total 4 DVDs). An image of the DVD will be available for downloading.
- [EN wp] – Founder Jimmy Wales has personally de-sysoped a user of the English Wikipedia. This caused very large community responds.
Reports of Wikinews
- EN Wikinews has a template that can display an image with a random text on it. A sort of ad.
- Wikinews will possibly change the Wikinews site slogan from “Wikinews, the free news source you can write!”” to something else to make the site sound more professional.
- On EN Wikinews is the service of providing spoken news is again restarted. Subscribing by RSS-feed is possible.
- [Webcomics] – Last time Wikizine reported about the problems with the EN Wikipedia community and the “webcomics” community. The Wikinews article about it received a unusual large amount of comments.
- http://tinyurl.com/36u43b — comments about the Wikinews report
- http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/31/0328239 – /. about it
Awards
- [Wikimedia IT] – The Italian edition of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Italia have been awarded the “Premio Aretê 2007 – forum per la Comunicazione Responsabile” (Aretê prize – forum for the responsible communication) for the “internet” section with the following motivation;
“for the commitment in favour of the diffusion of the universal knowledge, in a free, collaborative and constructive way, in the real spirit of the original ideals of the Net.”
The prize has been presented by [[w:en:Paolo Gentiloni]], the minister of the Communications and president of the jury, in Rome on the 5th of November.
Media
- [{{copyvio}}] – A book published in 2006 contains a large section of text taken from a Wikipedia-article. And this without and reference to Wikipedia. Ironically the publisher of this book is the same publisher who recently threatened a blogger who had used a diagram, with full attribution, from a publication of them on a blog.
- [Jimmy in Africa] – In South-Africa Jimmy Wales has give a keynote at Wikipedia Academy where workshops where giving about how to edit Wikipedia. The Wikipedias in the many local languages of South-Africa are extremely small, even the largest, Afrikaans has only 8600 articles. Because of the work during the workshops the isiZulu Wikipedia crost the 100 article mark.
- http://tinyurl.com/2cvcze — What has Jimmy Wales been up to?
- http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_7436295
- [eat Wikipedia] – Wikinews has the story that in china, where access to Wikipedia is mostly blocked, supermarkets now sell “Wekipedia” bread with a bearded man (= Jimmy?) on the packaging.
Stats
- [Erratum] – Commons has now 1000 featured pictures, not 10,000 as was reported in Wikizine 83.
- http://tinyurl.com/2e4xab — the 1000th featured picture
Other news
- [£ BBC] – The website of the British public broadcaster, who is funded by taxes, has started to display a limited number of advertisements to users who visited there website from outside the United Kingdom. Concerns where raised about impartiality of the BBC when carrying advertisement. The BBC explicitly stated that the advertisement will be clearly separated from editorial content. The BBC hopes to raise around 100 million euro yearly with the advertisements.
- [Comic] – “…articles on Wikipedia are written [..] by one extremely dedicated squirrel.”
- [Bye-bye Wiki-Wiki] – A classic part of any interview with the press is to explain that the name “wiki” comes from a bus service in Hawaii. The WikiWiki bus system in Hawaii, after which the software concept Wiki is named, will be soon no more. It will replaced by a “air-conditioned walkway”, a sort of bridge.
- [Wikizine: less short] – A core idea of Wikizine was to keep the items very short so you can read it very quickly. For more information there are the external links where you can read the whole story. The problem is that when you translate Wikizine into non-English editions, those short items alone contain sometimes too little information to be really informative. Most external links are in English. For non-English readers it is then difficult to get the story. Because of this it will be attempted to include more information in the Wikizine items. Being brief maybe good but if you end up by (almost) saying nothing, we are not achieving our goals.
Did you know …
… that donating small amounts by PayPal is not a good idea?
- donation 0,01 AUD – 0,01 AUD paypal fee = 0 AUD for WMF
- donation 0,25 USD – 0,25 USD Paypal fee = 0 USD for WMF
- donation 1,20 CAD – 0,59 CAD PayPal fee = 0,61 CAD for WMF (50% fee!)
- donation 1 EUR – 0,38 EUR PayPal fee = 0,62 EUR for WMF (38% fee)
- donation 5 USD – 0,41 USD PayPal fee = 4,59 USD for WMF (8,2% fee)
- donation 25 USD – 0,85 USD PayPal fee = 24,15 USD for WMF (3,4% fee)
- donation 100 USD – 2,50 USD PayPal fee = 97,50 USD for the WMF (2,5% fee)
Be aware that a very small donation means you are making a donation to Paypal and not to the Wikimedia Foundation. Best you give one higher donation then several smaller donations.
Verify of one of the other donation channels, like bank transfer (free inside Europa), is not a better solution for making a donation from you country.
Quote
“Hail Wikipedia” — Anonymous
“Wikipedia, OpenOffice.org , Ubuntu – three things that makes me feel good.” — Gergely Máté
“to get wikipedia is like to have the Alexandria’s library at home! thanks to the Wikipedia Team.” — eric malbos (editorial note: next Wikimania will be at the library of Alexandria)
“Wikipedia, une cathédralle informatique” — roland moreno
“Please do not go commercial.” — Anonymous
“Danke!” — Anonym
