Translation requests/WQ/3/Ja

Wikimedia Quarto

第三号 2005年4月号

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理事会

Jimmy Wales, Founder
Angela Beesley
Michael Davis
Florence Nibart-Devouard
Tim Shell

編集スタッフ

Editor-in-Chief
Samuel Klein
Executive Editor
Florence Nibart-Devouard

寄稿

+/- Erik Zachte, Nicolas Weeger, GerardM, Hashar, Yann Forget, Jean-Christophe Chazalette (villy), 利武, David Monniaux; Florence Devouard, Michael Snow, Maveric, Aphaia, Elian, oshitake, Presroi, Worldtraveller, others

校正

+/- English Copyeditors: Ruth Ifcher, Sj, Quinobi, others

翻訳

+/- Alexey Krasheninnikov, Aegis Maelstrom, Angela, Arno Lagrange, Blueshade, Carmen, Fruggo, Fulup, Guria, kocio, Minh Nguyễn, Oleg Izyumenko, Patio, presroi, Pubuhan, roc, Sbisolo, Shizhao, Simon Shek, Totti, Cedric31 Shakura

ウィキメディア財団ニュースレター Wikimedia Quarto 第3号をお届けします。2005年第一四半期に、ウィキメディア財団では初の従業員を雇い入れました。外部からウィキデータプロジェクトへの支援を得ることができ、また短期間ながら実り多い募金運動を実施いたしました。多くの展示会や会議にかつてない規模でウィキメディアンが参加・発表し、理事へのインタビューや講演の依頼、主要メディアでの紹介、理事会宛のメールなど、財団へ寄せられる関心の高まりは、時として私たちの受け入れ能力を超えかねないほどでした。この1月にウィキペディアは4周年を迎えましたが、それを記念するかのようにデータセンターで障害が発生し、6週間にわたりプロジェクトへの接続が断続的に遅くなりました。

本号では、通常の四半期報告、会議の概要、プロジェクトの最新情報に加えて、いくつかの新しい企画が掲載されています。Quatroへの寄稿者数が増え、新プロジェクトやイベントについての報告も寄せられています。ギャラリーとカレンダーも改善されました。従来通り、ご提案・ご寄稿・ご意見をぜひ newsletter (at) wikimedia.orgまでお寄せください。またはメタウィキのプロジェクト用ノートページまでお願いします。各プロジェクトの秀逸な画像やイベントの投稿、投書を歓迎します。

この場を借りて、この春、財団にご支援くださった多くの皆様に感謝申し上げます。また、各プロジェクトおよび国別協会にて、執筆、編集、画像、音声、動画、プログラミング、理性的議論、その他諸々の貢献をしてくださっているすべての皆様に深く感謝します。

多くの翻訳者が、過去最大の規模でこのニュースレターの翻訳に取り組み、コンテンツの一部は17カ国語にも翻訳されています。デザインチームも作業に励み、今回のよりすっきりとしたデザインに改良するとともに、初めてPDF版を刊行しました。また、長らくお待たせしましたが、ニュースレター配信用のメーリングリストができ、テキスト版もしくはPDF版を発行と同時にお届けできるようになりました。努力の成果をお楽しみいただければ幸いです。

-- WQ 編集チーム

目次
表紙: 冬の木々と雪(作者: LockeShocke)

ごあいさつ、目次	. . . . . . 1
創設者及び理事会より	. . . . . . 2
四半期報告	. . . . . . 3
各プロジェクトから	. . . . . . 4
国別協会より	. . . . . . 5
メディアにて	. . . . . . 6
国際欄	. . . . . . 7
あとがき、ギャラリー、編集後記	. . . . . . 8

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創設者ごあいさつ

Article state : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

ベルギー・ブリュッセルで行われたFOSDEM 2005にて講演するジンボ・ウェールズ
撮影 Chrys

ウィキメディアの使命は、世界の知識をこの惑星上のひとりひとりにそれぞれの言語で届けることです。この活動の一貫であるウィキペディアは、なによりもまず、可能な限り質の高いフリーな百科事典を編纂、配布しようとする取り組みです。この目標とコミュニティのどちらが優先されるのかという質問は、そもそも間違っています。この目標こそが、コミュニティの目的そのものなのですから。

そして、この二つの間に本当の意味での緊張が存在したケースを私は知りません。すなわち、コミュニティの中心、つまり実際に作業をしている人たちは皆、「私たちは非常に質の高いものを創っているのであり、単にコミュニティ自体を目的としたオンラインコミュニティを構築しているのではない」ということを熱烈に支持しています。

コミュニティは私たちが自らに課した作業に優先するものではなく、コミュニティは我々が行うべき作業のまわりに構築されているのです。この違いは単純です - あらゆる判断は、常に、社会的便宜や人気の多寡、伝統的資格を理由としてではなく、私たちが自らに課した仕事の求めるところはなにかという観点から下されるべきだということです。

私の知る限りごく一部のみであるものの、ウィキペディアが反エリート主義、反専門家主義だという見解があるようですが、私はこれを是認しません。どちらかといえば私たちは超エリート主義なのであり、ただし反資格主義なのです。学術的専門家を惹きつけ継続的に協力を得ることは、私たちの目標の一つです。つまり、私たちが求めているのは、思慮深く聡明であり、そして他人と協調して正確かつバランスのとれたものを作成するという非常に難しい作業に取り組む意欲のある人々です。それを満たせない場合は受け入れません。博士号はこの意欲を証明するのに有益ですが、上記の資質の代わりにはなりません。

博士号をもつ人が、自分の書いた専門的項目は他人が編集するべきではないと考えたり、自分の観点に疑問を呈されることを容認できなかったり、議論に応じる寛容さを欠いたりする場合があるかもしれません。そのような場合、彼らの専門性は限られた価値しか持ちません。周囲と友好的・協力的に作業できず、自分は資格をもっているのだから記事について最終決定権をもつべきだと感じるならば、彼らにとっても、私たちにとっても問題です。このような状況をいかに取り扱うかについては、今後も常に複雑な判断が必要となると思われます。

私は、ウィキペディアを「従来通りかそれ以上」の品質の百科事典にするという目標のために100％尽力していますし、私たちのコミュニティのルールは全てがこの目的のために展開されるべきです。オープンさと包括性は私たちにとって不可欠ですが、これらは我々の過激な目的のための過激な手段なのです。

理事会ごあいさつ

Article state : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

アンジェラと私が理事に選ばれてから一年が経ちました。この一年は刺激に満ちるとともに、困難な年でした。そして財団および理事会が実際に始動する最初の年でもありました。

財団の誕生は、とりもなおさず、2004年6月、ジンボが財団の趣旨を宣言した時にあります。その目的はウィキメディア・プロジェクトの必要に応じるための法的組織を作り、各プロジェクトの発展を支え、あわせてそのフリーかつオープンであるという性質を促進する、というものでした。手短に言えば、財団の設立により、プロジェクト初期にただよっていた商業的傾向（例えば wikipedia.com や bomis.com との関係）を取り除き、特定の理念にきちんと合致した体裁を整えることを目指していました。

一年前、財団は紙の上では存在していましたが、実体は何もありませんでした。ジンボには理事会がどのような形をとるべきか、具体的な考えがありました。彼の構想は四半期の会合と、基本原則についての幾つかの合意を行うというものでした。全部をあわせて考えても、さほど大変な活動ではありません...…

引用: 「理事会の役割は、ウェブサイトの日々の運営に全般的に関わるということでは*ありません*。理事会は財団に関する最終的な決定を委ねられた法人です。ウェブサイトの運営はまったく別の次元の話です。理事の仕事はさほど難しかったり、きつかったりするものにはならないと考えています。」 — ジミー・ウェールズ

しかしアンジェラと私は違ったふうに考えていました。アンジェラも私も、「会議にいくつか参加する」よりももう少し活動するつもりでした……そして、もう少しおもしろい立場を作り出してしまったのではないかと思っています。 (^^)

ジンボが技術および財政面の運営の主要部分を対処する一方で、私たちはすこしずつ私たちが考える私たちの役割の実現に取り組みました。すなわち、編集者の意見をジンボに伝えること、財団の総体的な運営を組織すること、理事会の行った決定を公表すること、執筆者の発案を援助すること、そして徐々に、ジンボの仕事のうち、彼が行い続けることが現実的でないのに、ますます彼が巻き込まれていっていたような作業を助けることに取り組みました。

皆さんによく聞かれるのは「いったいどんなふうに運営しているのか」ということです。その答えは、なんといいますか、この一年の間に変化してきました。2004年夏には、私たち3人ともたっぷり時間があり、IRCチャンネルを通じて一日中、話し合うことができました。7月、11月、12月と、3回にわたり会合を開くことができました。ジンボとアンジェラは、秋にロンドンにてともにBBCと活動しました……
アンジェラと私にとって、最大の困難は、自分の場所を見つけ、かつ、互いの足を踏み合わないようにすることでした。それはたやすいことではありませんでした。私たちは二人とも役立ちたいと、そして自分の仕事を高く評価されたいと強く願っていたからです。

今では事情が違います。アンジェラと私は、職業上の活動や私生活でも大変忙しくしています。今では3人がIRCに現れる時間も偶にしかかちあいません。ジンボは週日にはいないことが多くなりました。私たちのプロジェクトが世界的に成功を収めた結果、プロジェクトについての講演依頼は増える一方なのです。そして、ジンボは週末には私生活に時間を割くようになりました。

私たちのウィキメディアに避ける時間が少なくなり、それに伴ってストレスが増えているという否定的要素は、また肯定的な要素にもなると思います。私たちは財団に多くの時間を割いてきましたが、私たちにも個人の生活があります。私たちはプロジェクトに完全に依存しているわけではありません。

したがって、現在、私たちは以前よりはるかに非同期的に、メールやIRCでの一対一の話し合いで活動しています。以前にはジンボが担っていた役割をアンジェラや私が担う機会も増えています。例えばローカルでの衝突への対応や、法的な要請への対処などです。仕事は膨大にありますので、労働分担を試みています……その代償として、時には理事会の他のメンバーがすでに対応した問題について情報伝達が不足する事態もありますが。

理事会の活動の一部は執筆者に見えるものです。もっとも目立つものでは、Yahoo!とのパートナーシップの調印や、ウィキペディアの会合への参加があります。しかし、より日常的な理事会の活動はウィキの上にも、またもっとも参加者の多いメーリングリストにも現れてきません。私たちの日々の活動を構成するのは、数え切れないほどの電子メールへの対応、予算の作成、イベント運営、Quarto やプレスリリースの作成・配布への参加、財団ウェブサイトの更新、新部門やそのためのメーリングリスト作成の促進、名誉棄損や著作権侵害に関する法的訴訟の手続きへの対応、ロゴ使用の法的義務への配慮、各プロジェクトでの対立の調停、開発者への情報提供の要請、助成金の打ち合わせの設定、請願書への署名、学会でのプロジェクトについての発表、インタビューやプレスへの応答、ハードウェアの注文、非営利の状態についての確認、所得税の控除や資金調達活動の組織、パートナーとの契約に対する分析や意見表明、国別教会の創設への対応および支援、執筆者からの依頼の伝達、などなど……

これらを小さな一つの集団で対応することはできません。しかも、この集団は時に必要な基礎や決定がもたらしうる結果について決定的に知識が不足しています。たとえば、私たちの一人として法的な訓練を受けていません。したがって、恒久的な協力体制を織り上げ、すべてが最善の結果となることを願う必要があります。

そして、総じてそれがうまくいくのです！残念ながら、日々の作業量に圧迫されて、財団の然るべき発展に関する重要な決定が先送りになっている面はありますが。

財団は、今年、上に述べたような形で機能してきました。失敗もあり、部分的な成功もあり、そして成功もありました。日を追って、変わりゆく必要に応じ、不断の、しかし筋の通った成長のために奮闘しながら役割を作り上げてきました。投票ではなく、合意に基づく決定のために奮闘しながら、多くの人からの提案を支持しながら、可能な限り意見を聞き入れながら、です。この方法で今後も成長が続き、徐々にそして継続的に運営の確固とした基盤（財団にどうしても必要なものです）が構築されることを願っています。

Florence Nibart-Devouard, "Anthere" 17:58, 24 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

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報告

Article state : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

概要

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By Anthere

ご報告に当たり、まず2004年の財務状況について説明いたします。 To start with, here is a brief summary of our financial state at the end of 2004:

2004年は、総収入15万ドル、総支出は12万3,000ドルでした。 In 2004, our global revenues were US$150,000, while expenses reached about US$123,000 dollars.

詳しくは次のリンク先をご参照下さい。[4] The full bank history for 2004 is available on the Foundation Website.

2004年の財務状況の一番の特徴は、需要の増大でした。 The most striking financial trend for 2004 was the amazing growth of our needs.

この1年で、サーバを3台増やし、全部で50台に達しました。 In just one year, our server farm grew from 3 servers to 50!

当然ながら、このことは新しい機器を購入する費用と帯域維持のための費用が年間を通して増加することでもあります。 Naturally, this meant increasing costs throughout the year, to purchase new equipment and to support bandwidth requirements.

2005年の最初の予算会議では、私たちのニーズを検討しました。[5] A budget meeting was held in early 2005, to estimate our growing needs.

このときの見通しに基づいて、2月には募金活動を行い、9万ドル強が集まりました。 Following this estimate, a successful fundraising drive was held in February, yielding over US$90,000 dollars.

今まで得てきた収入のほとんどは個人からの寄付によるもので、1人大体5ドルから20ドルを寄付して頂きました。 To date, most of our income has come from individual donations, ranging from US$5.00 to US$20.00 dollars.

これらの寄付は、私共の活動を高く評価した編集者や読者の方によるものです。 These donations have come from editors and readers who appreciate what we are doing.

この募金活動の成功から、私共の活動の成長は依然として個人の皆さんからの寄付に大きく支えられていることがわかります。 The success of our fundraising suggests that our growth can still essentially be supported by individual donations.

その他の私共への支援について説明します。 Other revenues included grants and sponsorship.

直近では、ラウンズベリー科学財団[6]より支援を受けました。 Our most recent grant was from the Lounsbery Foundation.

最大の出来事はアメリカ合衆国内国歳入庁より、私共が非営利公益団体として認定され、寄付に際して免税資格を得たことです。 An important issue with regard to grants and donations is that the Wikimedia Foundation has finally been classified as a public charity, and granted tax exempt status by the IRS.

このことは私共へ寄付を考えている方にとって、前向きな検討をもたらすことになります。 This will certainly offer new incentives to potential grantors.

2005年の最初の月に、IRCにて私共は会合を開き、寄付担当者を雇用することを検討しました。 During the first months of 2005, an IRC meeting was held on grant issues, and we considered looking for a Grants Manager for the Foundation.

その3ヶ月後、8月に開催される第1回ウィキマニアでは、Gurunet(Answers.com)[7]がスポンサーとなりました。 Later in the quarter, Wikimania, the first international meeting organised by and for wikipedians (taking place in August), was granted its first sponsorship, from Gurunet.

2005年の1月、私共は既存の資金から、機材を購入しました。[8][9] With our existing funds, we purchased some technical equipment in January.

この四半期には、ホスティングの提供を数多く受けたので、機材の購入は見積もりより少なくて済みました。Numerous hosting proposals this quarter allowed us to purchase less hardware than expected.

フランスのsquidsサーバを提供してくれた寄付者がさらに3組を無償で提供して下さり、それらは Lost Oasis.netが無料でホストしてくださることになりました。その他のご提案については現在、検討中です。（詳しくは次のリンクをご参照下さい[10]） The donor of the first set of French squids donated three more, soon to be hosted by Lost Oasis for free; other propositions are currently being studied (see Wikimedia partners and hosts).

なかでも、Google社との協議は進行中ですが、合意には達していません。 In particular, discussions are ongoing with Google, but no agreement has been reached.

基本的な傾向として、私たちの独立性を維持しながら、これらの技術協力先を増やしていかなければならないと考えています。 The general trend is to multiply our partners, insuring independence; while making agreements that are technically relevant.

新しい支出は人件費です。 A new expense is salary.

2005年の始めより、財団は2人の非常勤の開発者、チャッド・ペリンとブライオン・ヴィヴァーを雇用しています。 Since early 2005, the Foundation has been employing two part-time developers, Chad Perrin and Brion Vibber.

また、理事会は、設備の購入や電話番、事務的な仕事の処理のため、専任の事務員を雇用することを決定しました。 The board has also decided to hire a person full time to do secretary work, such as physical paper work, sending out packages, purchase of tech parts, phone calls.

その勤務先は本部のあるフロリダ州となります。 The position will be local to Florida.

その他の仕事についての求人も検討されていますが、決定には至っていません。 Discussions are ongoing about hiring other people but no decision has been taken at that point.

全てのウィキメディア・プロジェクトにおよぶプライバシー・ポリシーは、前回の理事会で承認されました。 The Privacy policy on all Wikimedia projects was approved at the last Board meeting.

今後数週間の間に、全ての言語に翻訳し、編集者と読者に提示することになります。 It will be translated in all languages and made visible to users and visitors over the next few weeks.

最後ですが、財団を法律的に適切な組織とするため、過去数週間にて、法的な諸問題について議論するページ[11]を設けました。 Finally, the legal organisation of the Foundation has been strengthened in the past few weeks, with the creation of a page to coordinate discussions of legal issues.

理事会会議録

未解決の議題についての議事録もご覧下さい。[12]

法的整備

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財団の進展を助けるため、財団に関する現在、及び将来についての法的問題を集約しました。 In order to help the Wikimedia Foundation move forward, current and future legal issues regarding the Foundation are being centralized.

問題解決のために有用な内部および外部リンクとリソースを保存するためになされました。、 This is being done to preserve the memory of useful internal and external links to solved problems and resources.

議論と情報はメタウィキのリーガルのページ[13]に集めました。 Discussion and information are being gathered on the meta-wiki's legal page.

また、このページは財団及び支部が外部の弁護士に依頼を行うために必要な全ての法的問題に関するページを集めています。 This page is also the place to gather all legal material that the Foundation or local chapters might need to make requests of outside lawyers.

財団に関わる法的問題の主要なものには、著作権、商標、マーケティング、寄付、税、団体法、協定などがあります。 The Foundation's typical legal needs releate to copyright, trademarks, marketing, donations, taxes, and laws of associations and partnership.

慣習法の国と成文法の国があることも考慮しなければなりません。 Legal issues must be considered both for common law countries and for civil law countries.

Creative Commons unveils new license for wikis

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クリエイティヴ・コモンズがウィキのために新ライセンスを公開 By Michael Snow (21 march)

先週の木曜日、クリエイティヴ・コモンズはウィキのための新ライセンスのベータ版を紹介しました。このライセンスはローレンス・レッシグがその著書の中で紹介した物の改良版です。

Last Thursday, Creative Commons introduced a beta version of its new license designed specifically for wikis,in conjunction with Lawrence Lessig's introduction of a wiki to help draft an updated version of one of his books.

レッシグの説明によれば、その新しいライセンス、CC-wikiは「著作権者に帰属させるよりも、著作権者もしくは指定された組織に帰属させた方が有効だと思います」とのことです。 As Lessig explained it, with the new license (given the designation of CC-Wiki), "rather than requiring attribution back to the copyright holder,[the license would] require attribution back to either the copyright holder or a designated entity."

なお、「指定された組織」とはウィキを管理している組織のことを指すものと思われます。 The designated entity would presumably be whatever organization controlled the wiki.

レッシグは、このライセンスを、全く新しいライセンスではなく、CC-BY-SA（著者名表示・継承）の新バージョンだと位置づけています。 Lessig characterized it as a newly branded version of the attribution/share-alike (CC-by-sa) license, rather than being an entirely new license.

因みに、レッシグは2000年に初版が刊行された彼の著書『CODE―インターネットの合法・違法・プライバシー』の改訂のためにウィキを利用しています。 Lessig is also using a wiki to coordinate updates to his book,Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, originally published in 2000.

その本のためのJotspotで動作しているウィキには、新しいライセンスを導入しようとしていますが、紙媒体の物については、版元に新ライセンスの適用を承知させることは出来ないだろうと、ビジネス・ウィークで彼は語っています。 The wiki for the book, powered by JotSpot, will use the new CC-Wiki license, although the published version will not be under a Creative Commons license - Lessig told BusinessWeek that he wasn't able to get his publisher, Basic Books, to agree to such a license.

この新しいCC-wikiライセンスは、完全に遵守することに労力を要するGFDL（これまでのCCとは非互換）を利用しているために長い間苦情が寄せられていたウィキペディアにとって、意味のあるものとなるでしょう。 The new CC-wiki license could have implications for Wikipedia, as for quite some time there have been periodic complaints that the GNU Free Documentation License is difficult to comply with, and incompatible with the popular Creative Commons licenses.

ウィキペディアの情報を再利用する場合のライセンス遵守の手続きの緩和の試みとして、ミラーサイトよりウィキペディアへのリンクを徹底することが推奨されています。 In an attempt to reduce the burden of license compliance on those who reuse Wikipedia content,Wikipedia's copyright notice encourages mirror sites to focus on providing a link back to the Wikipedia article.

英語版の編集者、Ram-Manは、自分の貢献について複数ライセンスmulti-license（GFDLとCCのどれかなど）を認めるように組織的に呼び掛けていました。 English Wikipedian Ram-Man spent some time this quarter systematically asking people to multi-license their contributions, usually under the GFDL and one of the Creative Commons licenses.

しかしながら、レッシグのこの計画は、いくつかの筋から、批判されました。 However, Lessig's project received a cool reception from some corners.

アンジェラは彼のウィキは、独占的なソフトウェアであるJotspotで作成されているのだから、これは奇妙な決定だと述べています。 Angela called the decision to use proprietary software from JotSpot to host Lessig's wiki a bizarre choice.

Jamesdayを含むその他からは、特に共同著作権が著作者個人の権利に及ぼす効果に関してCC-wikiライセンス自体を批判しています。 Others, including Jamesday, criticized the CC-Wiki license itself, particularly over the effect of group attribution on the rights of individual authors.

このライセンスはまだ実験版で、ウィキペディアへの導入についての本格的な議論も始まっていません。 The license is still in "beta", and there has yet been no serious discussion about implementing such a license for Wikipedia content.

協働/Collaboration

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Summary on collaboration

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他団体との提携の概要

私たちはこの第一四半期に他団体との提携活動をいくつか企画し、さらに多くについて、検討が重ねられています。 We worked out a number of collaborations with other organisations in the the first quarter, and are discussing many more.

ベルネットからは22Uものラックスペースとホスティングサービスを無料提供されました。これについては最近提携文書が調印されました。 Belnet is providing free hosting and 22U of rackspace. This agreement has been signed recently.

ケーニスネットからは、ソフトウェアの研究・開発、ホスティングサービスなど、様々な提供を受けています。（詳しくは7ページのケーニスネットの節をご覧下さい） Kennisnet is collaborating with Wikimedia in many ways; both by sponsoring software research and development, and by offering local hosting and the use of their servers. (For more information on Kennisnet collaborations, see Kennisnet, pg 7.)

私たちはAnswers.comにデータをライブ・フィードを提供するとの合意に達しました。 We reached an agreement to provide a live feed of our public data to Answers.com. ブライオンは現在その実現のために働いています。 Brion Vibber is currently working with them to make this happen. アスク・ジーブスとオペラがそのライブ・フィードに関心を持っています。また、アマゾンからも関心が寄せられています。しかし、これらとは提携までには至っておりません。 Ask Jeeves (a search engine) and Opera (a web browser company) are interested in such a feed as well, and Amazon.com has expressed some interest, but no agreements have been reached with any of them.

また、私たちはいくつかのコンテンツ・ホルダーと提携するに至り、そのコンテンツの提供を受けました。 We have also reached some collaborations with content owners, who have provided their content for reuse in the project.

EU環境局は、ウィクショナリーのために、その多言語シソーラスの提供に同意しました。 The European Environment Agency has agreed to license their General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET) so that it may be included in Wiktionary;

ボイス・オブ・アメリカは、英語発音ガイド[14]5000語をウィキペディアに提供しました。 Voice of America agreed to make the 5000 terms of its Pronunciation Guide available for use in Wikipedia;

Whole Earth Catalogの編集者、スチュアート・ブランドは、同誌の最初の5年間分のデータをウィキソースとウィキブックスに提供してくれました。 and the original publishers of the Whole Earth Catalog agreed to make the content of the first 5 years of Whole Earth Catalogs available for use in Wikisource and (in updated, wikified form) in Wikibooks.

その他の大小合わせ12のホスティングサービスの提供について検討中です。 Another dozen hosting offers, both large and small, are under discussion. あるものについては一時的なもの、またあるものについては共同マーケティングなどが絡みます。 Some are tentative, some want "co-marketing opportunities," etc.

今、それらの申し出について、私たちは関心はあるのだが技術的にすぐに準備できないので数ヶ月待ってほしいと答えています。そのため私たちは計画推進を話し合っても、すぐに発表というわけにはいかないのです。 Right now, we are telling most of them that we are interested but that we will not be technically ready for a few months; so we should talk now to plan ahead but are unlikely to announce anything soon.

私たちはあわてて先に進むよりもまず、最近締結された内容を実行に移し、時間をかけて検討する必要があります。 We must first organise the deals recently concluded, and take time to think and organise,rather than proceeding in haste.

Top rank sales for Directmedia DVD of German Wikipedia

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ダイレクトメディア社発売のドイツ語版WikipediaのDVD版が好評

ドイツ語版WikipediaのCD-ROM版の頒布が成功した後、 After the succesful distribution of the German Wikipedia on CD,

ドイツの出版社ダイレクトメディア社は、DVD版を発売しました。 the German publishing company Directmedia has released a DVD edition.

そのDVDは3月3日時点のものを基本とし、著作権侵害や荒らし行為、編集用テンプレートを取り除いた閲覧版を準備しました。 The DVD is based on a snapshot of the wiki from March 3, which was quickly reviewed to remove potential copyright violations, vandalism and templates which are only useful in the online version of Wikipedia.

CD版作成に際して追加された人名録については、更に多くの人物を増補しました。 Structured bibliographic information about key people, a new feature added for the CD distribution, was also added for more people.

DVDには20万3000もの項目と数千もの画像を収録されています。 The DVD contains 203,000 articles and thousands of images.

それには高速閲覧のための全文検索とブックマークが含まれています。 It includes software for browsing the content with a fast full text search and features for annotations, bookmarks and so on.

DVDはWindows、Mac、Linax上で動作するようにしています。そのほかのOSへの対応については、目下、重要な課題となっています。 The DVD is shipped with software for running on Windows, MacOS and Linux; although the latter is still new and under heavy development.

DVDは発売直後ドイツAmazonソフトウェア部門で1位を獲得しました。 The DVD was the best-selling software product at Amazon Germany the day after it was announced.

その2日後、予定していた1万部が売り切れましたので、追加分を工場に発注しました。 Two days later, the 10,000 copies made for the release had sold out and a new set were ordered from the factory.

それらは来週以降配布予定となります。 These will be delivered within the next few weeks.

DVDには、付録特典CDとして、PDAへのインストール用として、TomeraiderとMobipocket用のデータを同梱しています。 The DVD also contains data packages for Tomeraider and Mobipocket, allowing it to be installed on PDAs, as well as a "bonus CD-ROM."

このCDはアパッチ、MySQL、Mediawikiを含むbootable LAMPPIX-CDです。 This CD is a bootable LAMPPIX-CD containing an Apache server, a MySQL database and Mediawiki.

これは20万以上の項目に直接アクセスするために、CD-ROMから直接起動します。 This runs a Mediawiki installation directly from the CD-ROM, which you can boot from in order to have access to over 200,000 articles from your web browser.

DVDのISBNは3-89853-020-5です。 The DVD's ISBN is 3-89853-020-5;

ドイツ・オーストリア・スイスの書店にて9.90ユーロで販売しています。 it can be ordered for 9.90 Euros from every book shop in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

そのうち1ユーロが財団ドイツ支部へ寄付されます。 For each DVD sold, one euro is donated to Wikimedia Deutschland.

DVDとCDについてはISOイメージが、P2PネットワークといくつかのFTPサーバから、普及と共有を目的として無償で提供されています。 Both the DVD and the CD-ROM are available for free as ISO images, via P2P networks and on several FTP servers, encouraging sharing and broader distribution.

Public Relations

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広報活動

理事会活動で増大した部門には、広報活動が含まれます。 An increasing part of the Board's activity is related to public relations.

ジミー・ウェールズは世界中から講演に呼ばれているため、ほとんどオフラインで、世界中を飛び回っています。 Jimmy Wales is travelling or offline more frequently, due to invitations to talks all over the world.

彼の日程scheduleの概観は、この最も良い要約です。 A quick view of his schedule is probably the best summary of this.

その他の講演としては、Angela と Anthereが数日間、ウェブデザインの10年に呼ばれました。 Other presentations have taken Angela and Anthere offline for days at a time (most recently at PixelAche for Anthere and A Decade of Web Design for Angela).

これら、会議、インタビュー、報告などについては、6ページの報道、7ページの国際関係をご参照下さい。 For more on these conferences, interviews and press reports, see Press (pg. 6) and International (pg. 7).

最近では、プレゼンテーション用の広報資料の収集方法を改良しました。 Effort has recently been put into improving the public collection of presentation materials.

Anthereは2005年1月のTIC21会議のためにNotafishと共にフランス語の資料を作りました。 Anthere crafted a leaflet in French with Notafish for the TIC21 meeting in January 2005.

エリアンは、後でFosdem会議での発表用の翻訳用資料群を公開しました。 Elian later released a collection of leaflets to be translated for the Fosdem meeting.

Jimmy Wales and Howard Rheingold [1] at Stanford University [2].
Screenshot of a video[3] by Alterego.

現在、プレゼンテーション用資料、広報資料、資料の3資料群において完備されたものを見ることが出来ます。 The full collection of current material may be found in three collections, for presentations, promotion, and leaflets.

この情報のほとんどは英語、ドイツ語、フランス語、オランダ語で見つけることが出来ます。 Most of this information may now be found in English, German, French and Dutch.

その他の言語版についても翻訳して追加していただけると幸いです。 Please add to these in other languages.

Finances

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By Maveric

The first fund drive of 2005 was held from Friday, February 18, 2005, to Tuesday, March 1, 2005.
Our goal was to raise 75,000 USD to meet the immediate expenses in our 2005 budget. Originally, the fund drive was planned to run for three full weeks; however, we soon exceeded the original goal, and cut the fund drive short by 9 days. When all sources of donations were counted, we had surpassed the goal by 26%, raising the equivalent of 94,648.70 USD. A full breakdown of contributions by source is available; a quick overview:

76.44% (72,352.01 USD) from PayPal
21.18% (15,254.66 Euros | 20,046.15 USD) from Wikimedia Deutschland.
1.22% (1,155.00 USD) from snail mail/post
1.16% (1,095.54 USD) from MoneyBookers

Last December, the Lounsbery Foundation granted the Foundation 40,000 USD for hardware expenses in the first quarter of 2005. This grant, added to the money generated in the drive, allowed the foundation to purchase up to 75,000 USD worth of hardware.

20,000 USD were set aside for additional hardware and/or to pay for development projects. This is also the first quarter where the full cost of hosting is being charged to the foundation; 16,000 USD was allocated for this. The extra 20,000 USD over the fundraiser goal was put into a reserve fund.

The foundation now has two employees: a part-time hardware assistant and one full-time developer under contract. The 8,000 USD for the developer is being provided by official mirror contracts. The 1,500 USD for the hardware assistant has been allocated from the budget.

Other budgeted items: 5,000 USD for travel, 500 USD for domain names, 2,500 USD for office expenses, 500 USD for fundraising and promotion, and 1,000 USD for miscellaneous expenses

Wikimedia Deutschland was the only chapter with its own financial report to issue; for details, see Chapters, page 5.

501(c)(3) status granted to Wikimedia Foundation

Article state : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

After many months of waiting, the Wikimedia Foundation has been officially classified as a public charity and granted 501(c)(3) (tax exempt) status by the IRS. Donations to the Foundation are now tax deductible in the United States. The Foundation is now qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers, or gifts. The effective date of the exemption is June 20, 2003 (the date on which the Foundation was created), and the status is fully retroactive. If you have donated to the Foundation in the past, those donations may be claimed as tax deductions.

Grants

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One grant meeting was held on IRC in February, with about 10 people in attendance. As a direct result, a UNESCO IFAP grant was pursued, unsuccessfully, to support the initial development of a universal dictionary.

Shortly thereafter, a similar proposal won a 5000 EUR grant for software development from Kennisnet, a Dutch educational organisation (for a full report on the grant and its effects, see Kennisnet and Wikimedia, pg. 7).

Wikimania supported by GuruNet

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Bob Rosenschein of GuruNet agreed to be a primary sponsor of Wikimania for an amount of 30,000 EUR. He is a very enthusiastic supporter of Wikimedia's charitable goals, and his company is prospering in part due to reuse of Wikipedia content.

Socialtext, a corporate wiki development company, agreed to sponsor the conference for 5000 EUR; and other sponsorships were being discussed as of the end of March.

Technical Development

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January and February saw a number of slowdowns and, on one occasion, a complete shutdown of Wikimedia sites. These were due to a variety of reasons. Many individual servers broke; 10 machines in the main cluster were fixed in the first quarter alone; and traffic continues to rise. The colocation facility had a massive power failure in February, leading to two days of downtime and read-only availability. As of the start of Q2, almost all servers are back in action, and the cluster is looking healthy.

Developers have recently started a LiveJournal as a way to communicate about servers issues with the community. That's one more feed for your preferred RSS aggregator.

Power outages

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There were two major power outages in the first quarter. The first outage, around February 21st, was due to a double power failure: two different power supplies to our cluster were switched off at the same time, when some of the internal switches in our colocation facility failed. Some databases were corrupted by the sudden loss of power; the surviving database had not been completely up-to-date with the most current server, and it took almost two days for developers to recover all data. In the meantime, the site was restored to read-only mode after a few hours.

The second outage took place on March 16th due to a human error: one of the master database's hard disks filled up, preventing slaves from being updated. At this point the data cluster had not fully recovered from the previous outage, and there was less than full redundancy among the database slaves. By the time space was made on the disk, the most up-to-date slave was already many hours behind. It took over eight hours of read-only time for the databases to be resynchronized.

Caches installed near Paris

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Report from David Monniaux.

In December 2004, servers donated to the Wikimedia Foundation were installed at the Telecity facility located in Aubervilliers on the outskirts of Paris, France. The network access is donated by French provider Lost Oasis. In January, the software setup was completed; however, various problems then had to be ironed out.

As of April 1, 2005, those machines cache content in English and French, as well as all multimedia content (images, sounds...), for users located in Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Switerland, and the United Kingdom (daily stats per country). The caches work as follows: if they hold the requested page in their local memory, they serve it directly; otherwise, they forward the request to the main Florida servers, and memorizes the answer while passing it to the browser of the Wikipedia user. Typically, for text content, 80% of accesses are cached (that is, they are served directly); the proportion climbs to 90-95% for image accesses. Due to the current way that the Mediawiki software works, content is cached much more efficiently for anonymous users: essentially, all text pages have to be requested from Florida for logged-in users.

The interest of such caches is twofold:

First, they relieve the load on the main Wikimedia Florida servers. We have to buy our bandwidth (network capacity) for Florida, whereas we can get (smaller) bandwidth chunks in other locations.
Second, they make browsing much quicker and responsive, at least for anonymous users. Any access to the Florida servers from Europe may take 100-150 ms round trip; this means that retrieving a complete page may take a significant fraction of a second, even if the servers respond instantaneously. The Paris servers, on the other hand, have much smaller roundtrip times from the countries they serve.

The Paris caches serve as a production experiment and test bed for future cache developments, which are currently being studied. We may, for instance, change the caching software in order to reduce the load on the caches (currently, with all the countries they serve, the machines are loaded 80-95%; the machines are, however, quite outdated), and see how we may improve efficiency and cache rates (it appears that the caches do not perform as efficiently as they should by fetching data from each other).

Release of MediaWiki 1.4

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MediaWiki 1.4 became stable on March 20th, although the Wikimedia farm had been using 1.4 betas since December 2004. This means that most bugs have been fixed and developers are free to work full time on the next release. MediaWiki 1.5 will use an improved database schema, which should greatly enhance performance. There is also some interesting new code to improve page caching: pages served to anonymous users and to logged-in users will look the same, something which is not the case in 1.4.

Blocking of open proxies

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Since March 28th, Wikipedia has been automatically blocking edits coming from open proxies. The feature is still in testing; details are being worked out on the Meta-wiki.

Jimmy Wales asks for more developers at FOSDEM

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As the opening speaker at the FOSDEM 2005 conference in Brussels, Jimmy Wales appealed to the development community for support with the technical side of running Wikipedia. Analyses of these remarks were published in several places last week.

Statistics on the projects

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There are currently nine active Wikimedia projects. "Language count" below refers to the number of languages with at least five articles.

Wikipedia (encyclopedia, since January 2001): 134 languages, 50,000 editors, 1.6M articles, 27M internal links ^[15]

English : 6,000 users, 400K articles, 10% new users/month;
German : 2,000 users, 250K articles
Wiktionary (dictionary/thesaurus, since December 2002): 70 languages, 1,000 editors, 170K articles ^[16]
Wikiquote (quotation collection, since July 2003): 30 languages, 500 editors, 11K articles ^[17]
Wikibooks (textbook/manual collection, since July 2003): 37 languages, 1100 editors, 12K articles ^[18]
Wikinews (news portal, since November 2004): 11 languages, 290 editors, 3,200 articles ^[19]
Wikisource (primary source repository, since November 2003): 50 language portals, 300 editors, 15K articles/documents ^[20]
Meta (Wikimedia coordination, since November 2001): 33 language portals, 800 editors, 3.2K articles ^[21]
Wikicommons (Media repository, since September 2004) : 520 editors, 8.4K articles, 60K media files ^[22]
Wikispecies (Species directory, since September 2004) 42 editors, 2.8K articles ^[23]

This quarter, a much awaited new statistics feature has been announced by Erik Zachte. It took a couple of weekends to get the scripts up to date for the new database format. The layout has been improved in some places, with newest statistics showing up on top, and language names in comparison tables.

New features:

Record counts per namespace: [24]
Percentage categorised articles (same url as above)
Hierarchical category trees per Wikipedia (some are huge!): [25]
Overview for wikibooks: Chapters and counts per book

EasyTimeline charts are collected for each Wikipedia language, and listed together with the script code. This may serve as a source of inspiration to help learn the syntax. This can also help find real gems on other Wikipedias that deserve to be translated. While starting a timeline from scratch is not trivial, expanding, correcting or translating an existing chart is indeed "easy."

Wikipedia is more popular than...
According to Alexa Internet, as of March 2005, Wikipedia is more popular than Altavista, Excite, Walmart and Amazon UK; it is on its way to overtaking Reference.com and the New York Times.

Page 4

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Translation requests/WQ/3/Ja/5
Translation requests/WQ/3/Ja/6
Translation requests/WQ/3/Ja/7

ar |

br | cs | de | en | eo | es | fr | he | it | ja | ko | nl | oc| pl | pt | ru | sr | sv | zh | simple | vi || +/-

Out of the projects

Non-Wikipedia projects have grown more rapidly than Wikipedia over the past quarter, with Wikicommons well ahead of all other projects. Here are some of the project strengths and highlights.

Wikinews

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By Amgine

Article state : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

"Our three chief weapons are... "NPOV, NPOV, NPOV"

— From "WikiWiki Thing", remix by JoiIto

"Wikinews is not Wikipedia!" This is the rallying cry sometimes heard at Wikinews. Because of the wild success of Wikipedia, Wikinews has been closely scrutinized by citizen journalists and the traditional press throughout its development. In this past quarter, the community has often been compared to Wikipedia, despite being a very different project with different goals and measures.

Wikinews has grown rapidly. At the start of the year the project had editions in two languages; now it has eleven. What began as a few hundred editors has grown to over 2000 registered users competing for productivity and quality of story writing. Within the Wikimedia family the project continues to have impressive growth, with the third largest increase in registered users for the past two months, and the largest article growth rate¹.

Some noteworthy events this quarter included both the German and the English editions reaching their 1000th news article. One important goal of the project is to develop an archive of historical articles which may be used as references by others, including Wikipedia^2,3, as a record of world and local events.

Breaking a news story before any major news service was never the goal of Wikinews, but it has happened a few times. Tech stories such as Chinese researchers crack major U.S. government algorithm used in digital signatures might seem like natural opportunities for Wikinews, but there were also big and small articles which were "firsts". Minuteman bike path iced out through Arlington after 4th snowiest winter on record may not have been a scoop of larger press, but Unrest in Belize was. A range of original articles covered stories not seen in the mainstream press, or which incorporated interviews, photojournalism, and research by wikinewsies.

The project continues to generate interest in the journalistic spheres; for example, the English edition was featured in articles in Business Week⁴ and the New York Times^{5 (requires registration)}. Critical coverage of Wikinews has been of great interest within the project, and has ranged from Simon Waldman's analysis and EditorsWeblog rebuttal to Korby Parnell's near cheerleading. Overall there is no consistency to its critical reception; some reviewers love the project, some hate it. While most have both good and bad things to say about it, it has been picked, panned, and praised.

Members of the Wikinews community have reached out to other journalism efforts as well. en:Jimmy Wales and others attended the Harvard conference Blogging, Journalism & Credibility, which led to the organization of an IRC chat conference with bloggers, asking them for input on Wikinews development priorities. A representative was invited to speak at the International Symposium on Online Journalism, and similar presentations are being contemplated for the future.

Wikinewsies continue to experiment with the project. Members of the project have created a range of software tools as well, including WeatherChecker which retrieves weather data, Wikinews Flickr License Search to search Flickr for images by license type to illustrate stories, and the Wikinewsbot for automated Wikinews content retrieval and upload.

Wikinews contest
The first English Wikinews writing contest ran for 40 days, a test of endurance which produced hundreds of articles and ended in a three-way tie. Between them, HiFlyer, Simeon, and Pingswept produced over 100 articles, on top of the dozens more produced by eight other competitors. I encourage readers from other Wikinews editions to consider the possibility of implementing similar local contests.

Wiktionary is a dictionary

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Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

by GerardM

Demotic script on a replica of the rosetta stone on display in Magdeburg.
By Chris 73

To be excited about a dictionary, you have to be crazy. I must confess, I am guilty as charged... Consider that you cannot understand a word you are trying to understand, if you do not already know the concept. A dictionary should offer all words for all concepts; an ideal dictionary would offer all words in all languages.

But what does this mean? There are many kinds of dictionaries. Traditional dictionaries, listing words with definitions and history; glossaries, thesauri, and translation dictionaries. Wiktionary is bold; it wants to be all of these. Under the current software, the wiktionaries in different languages all contain largely the same content — lists of words and languages. Only their definitions change from one language to the next. Wouldn't it be nice for the Wiktionary entry on a word to be available automatically in every Wiktionary language?

The ideal of a single ultimate Wiktionary for all languages is a dream for people who care about such resources. Merging the different communities is not easy. What I personally like best is that such a project would give me a place to put the glossary of botanical terms compiled by Herman Busser. Herman was a remarkable person in the Dutch cactus and succulent world who published several papers on cacti. His glossary was given to me before his death, to give it another lease on life.

Technically, this combined Wiktionary requires an extension to the Mediawiki software, something like the Wikidata project. This would allow for fields where users can select predefined values, to indicate, for instance, that a word is an English language word. Other fields might include text with wikisyntax. An implementation of Wikidata is underway, and we are slowly progressing toward such a Wiktionary.

As I write this, I am still dreaming: what would it be like if we had not just the GEMET thesaurus, but the other EU thesauri as well; would it not be grand to have a resource in Papiamento or Hopi? I wonder how many dreams will come true, and what we will dream up next once we have an ultimate Wiktionary.

An Arbitration Committee for the French Wikipédia

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Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

by villy

A French arbitration committee was elected on March 22, 2005. This election was the result of a process begun on September 19, 2004 to decide firstly whether such a committee was needed, and secondly what its powers and rules would be.

Conflicts in 2004 had exposed the shortcomings of the French-speaking community's previous conflict resolution methods. Previously, the community had held public votes to decide upon which editors to impose sanctions. The voting periods invited personal attacks and an excessive number of vote pages. Voters would hesitate to commit to one position or the other, in the end voting for reasons of loyalty or based on actions unrelated to the one being disputed. To make matters worse, page histories were difficult to follow, resulting in uninformed voting and subjective opinions. The atmosphere became so unpleasant for everyone that civility in the community began to collapse.

After three successive sessions discussing adoption of the policies, the arbitration committee was allowed to proceed subject to certain rules:

The committee would reserve the right to decline a request for arbitration.
The committee members, or referees, would settle individual cases rather than setting rules for behavior for the whole site. Such rules should be based on consensus within the entire community rather than the arbitration committee acting on its own.
The referees can establish and use precedence in deciding future cases as long as they provide a concise explanation of how the cases are comparable.

Currently, the only remaining question is whether and how one can appeal decisions of the committee. The seven referees elected for the first 6-month renewable term were: Aoineko, Arnaudus, Greudin, (:Julien:), Romary, Semnoz and Spedona.

The introduction of such a committee is seen by some as excessive bureaucracy, but in the case of a fast-growing Wikipedia, it should make it possible to manage conflicts in a fair and managed way.

Overview of Wikicommons

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Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

Report by villy

Wikimedia Commons was launched on September 7, 2004 as a free repository of multimedia files (including images, sounds, and video) to be used on all projects of the Wikimedia foundation. It has developed faster than any other Wikimedia project. By April 16, 2005, over 76,000 multimedia files were available, and the site had over 5,250 users, including 53 administrators and 2 bureaucrats.

Multilingualism is probably the most difficult challenge to address on the Commons. This single project directly serves the collected sites of the foundation in every language. Contributors to the Commons, from all languages, must be able to communicate with each other without language barriers becoming insurmountable obstacles. The possibility of assigning one or more categories directly to images, and of being able to visualize image labels from their category page entries, has been one early response to this problem of multilingualism in searching for files. Within the pages of the Commons site, users have developed a significant linguistic infrastructure, with the principal help pages available in some ten languages.

However, the creation of a coordination center for translations has made it possible to reduce the need for translating the various help pages. The interface for the Commons is also available in the majority of Wikipedia languages. A final revealing detail: for every fifteen English-language administrators, there are thirteen German administrators, six in French, three in Dutch, three in Polish, two in Russian, two in Swedish, and one each in Romanian, Japanese, Portuguese, Icelandic, Hebrew, Czech, Bulgarian and Belarusian.

The Commons has seen the addition of many design features to improve the ease of use of its files. The central feature of the Commons is that its files can be included directly on other Wikimedia Foundation sites without needing to copy them into the local database for each site. Another new feature is a sidebar link that displays a gallery of the most recently uploaded files, with a thumbnail of each image. A new "gallery" software library, developed for the latest version of the MediaWiki software, allows for these thumbnails to be constructed quickly.

Though the Commons exists primarily to provide a service to the other Wikimedia Foundation projects, the users of the Commons quickly implemented the kinds of tools for community interaction that one finds on the Wikipedia sites—in particular, a "café" for general conversation, and a page for voting to remove individual files. A separate mailing list and IRC channel were created (#commons.wikimedia). A specific community spirit has thus been gradually developed. This spirit is particularly well-expressed in a recent vote for high-quality images: nominations for such 'featured' images are discussed and voted upon every day. Some of these images are of great beauty, and are often the personal work of gifted Commoners. 86 images have thus been chosen so far. In these featured images one can see a sign of the vitality and originality of this project, hardly seven months old, yet already seen by some as one of the most beautiful achievements of the Wikimedia Foundation.

10 000 articles for Wikiquote

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by Aphaia

Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

The Wikiquote project is a multilingual, open-content compendium of quotations. On March 25, 2005 the project reached 10,000 total articles, according to Pumpie, an editor on English Wikiquote. This was 21 months since the project's start in July 2003.

As of March 31, 22 of over 70 Wikiquote languages are very active. About 4,000 user accounts have been created in total, along with many unregistered editors (as on other projects). There are currently four Wikiquote projects, English, German, French and Polish, with more than 1,000 articles; the largest being English with almost 2,700 articles. Among the top ten Wikiquotes, eight are in European languages, and two in Asian languages - Chinese and Japanese. Among the non-latin-alphabet projects, Bulgarian is the largest, with over 500 articles.

Most Wikiquote languages focus on authors who wrote in their own language, but there are many good translations. Some Wikiquote languages, including the Japanese and English projects, show a strong inclination to reference the original text, and many quotes are accompanied by original texts. This inclination is readily observed in the extensive collections of proverbs.

Persian training material

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Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

Persian, (فارسی), is a language with a rich tradition that is the official language in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan and is widely spoken in Uzbekistan.

AdamM's Persian teacher really liked the idea of a wiki when it was shown to her, and she was really happy when it was suggested that she put her training materials on Wikibooks.

Realizing this idea proved to be a struggle. Learning Persian is like going back to primary school — you are learning to recognize the shapes and sounds of characters when you learn your first words. It involves learning words you may not be interested in, chosen to introduce a few characters at a time. The materials in question are being used to teach Persian to men and women with Iranian partners who live in the Netherlands. To these people it is particularly important to speak well, as many pupils go to Iran after learning the basics to meet their new families for the first time.

All of the Persian texts have been pronounced, recorded, and uploaded to the Commons, a process that proved to be troublesome: sound files use the naming scheme xx.word.ogg, where xx is the ISO 639 code. When this was applied to a word like برادر, you get fa-برادر.ogg. A file with this name cannot be uploaded with Firefox, cannot be saved with Audacity, and cannot be listened to with Ashampoo. You can, however, use Internet Explorer to upload such a file to Commons.

The upload functionality received a facelift while this was going on, making it possible to upload a file and add all of its categories at once, which cut down the time needed for these uploads by more than half.

A deeply iterated Buddhabrot, a special rendering of the Mandelbrot set
By Evercat

As Persian is read from right to left, it makes sense to have the Persian material in the fa.wikibooks.org domain and not in the nl: or the en: domain. This leads to a not-so-funny problem. The symbol that indicates an external link does not move to the left in a Persian article; instead, it obscures the first characters in a word, making it somewhat unreadable. Luckily there is a <div class="plainlinks"> style which removes this nuisance on an article-by-article basis. Depending on which browser you use, an article such as PersianLes2 may be almost impossible to edit, even for people familiar with wiki syntax.

We currently have articles with Persian pronunciations, and intend to add Dutch words and phrases to Wiktionary as well. This way we hope to have many functional translations, to make it easy to localize the material for students of Persian who speak other languages. For now, please enjoy the current English-Persian wikibook.

PlanetMath Exchange

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Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

In January 2005 the PlanetMath Exchange project was started by Derek Williams to assist in content exchange between Wikipedia and PlanetMath, a community-based math encyclopedia begun in 2001 whose content is released under the terms of the GFDL. The project aims to enrich the content of mathematics articles on Wikipedia. Although there are currently only nine participants, nearly 500 articles from PlanetMath have been examined, and about 40% have had content merged into Wikipedia. Oleg Alexandrov has since written some scripts to help automate the process; statistics for the project are available on the statistics page.

Osezaki lighthouse

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Article status : Editing - Proofreading - Translating - edit

by 俊武 (Toshitake)

A Japanese Wikipedian contributed an article on a landmark from his hometown, the Osezaki Lighthouse, to the Japanese Wikipedia. He found a nice photo on the web and asked the photographer if he could use it on Wikipedia. He received permission from the copyright holder and uploaded this image to Wikipedia, but forgot to add licence information to the image. When the image became a candidate to be featured on the Main Page of the Japanese Wikipedia, another Wikipedian pointed out the omission, and made him aware of the seriousness of careful copyright and licensing. He mailed the copyright holder again to explain the GFDL, and to ask him to release the image under its terms. The photographer agreed willingly. This photographer had been frequently bothered by copyright infringements, including one by an official municipality website, and he felt that these sites neglected the value of his works and his effort. The Wikipedian's request therefore impressed him greatly, and the young contributor realized how important it is to respect copyright in order to promote the project.

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