Wikizine/2005-51

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Year: 2005  Week:51  Number: 5        

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

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=== Technical news ===
[IRC] IRC client restarted, allowing new channels on the Browne IRC server.
irc://browne.wikimedia.org

[Q4] and the money is pouring in! If you put the code below on any page you get the donation status bar. Hit F5 and be amazed; it is going faster then the article counter.
<center class=plainlinks>Already received [http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/ <fundraising/>]</center>

=== Policy ===
[Semi-protection policy] is a new policy from the English Wikipedia. When a page is "semi-protected" then newest X% of registered users and all unregistered users can not edit that page. The technical aspect of it does not yet work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Semi-protection_policy
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2147680/vandals-force-wikipedia-lock

=== Politics ===
[Stewards] are users who can give and remove user rights to any Wikimedia project, among such rights are: bot, sysop and checkuser. There is now a nomination round for new stewards. Voting will start on 20th December 2005 and it'll end on the 10th January 2006. You can list yourself during that time, but you'll have lower chances then. The Board will eventually choose a group of users (from 1 to 10) who'll gain steward status.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2006

=== Foundation ===
[Bravo Italia] Wikipedia wins two Awards in Italy.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goings-on&oldid=251967

=== Media ===
[Good] One week Wikipedia is "not trustworthy", the next we are "almost as good as Encyclopedia Britannica". The result is a lot of very good press around the world. And also Wikipedia traffic skyrockets. We are now bigger then CCN.com (according to alexa.com).
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/v438/n7070/nature-2005-12-15.mp3  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/Nature_compares_Wikipedia_and_Britannica

[Nobel Prize] In a program called "Noble minds", with the nobel prize winners of 2005 in a round table talk with the BBC reporter John Simpson Wikipedia got merit. The medicine prize winner Barry Marshall mentioned the Wikipedia article about their discovery (he got the prize together with Robin Warren) and he said that they could not have written a better article themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori

=== Proposal===
A New proposal for a Wikimusic, "A Wiki with (1) both score and text of a free piece of music, (2) the music itself in a playable music file (in different versions, for example one version with trumpet, one with a whole orchestra, not MIDI), (3) the sheet music in a wiki-text format (MIDI can be made out of it) and (4) information about the piece of music. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimusic_II . 

=== Stats ===
[milestones] The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB%E7%A8%BF/2005%E5%B9%B412%E6%9C%88

[Stats, no more] wikipedia.be and wikipedia.nl are probably the oldest national portals of Wikipedia. Since the creation of them, end of 2002, they have been counting the visitors with their own visitor counters. This until last thursday when these where removed by the technical staff without any notice.

In those years traffic to Wikipedia.nl started with 255 page views a month to 194372 page views in november 2005. And wikipedia.be from 128 page views a month to 33755 in november 2005.

=== Other news ===
[meetup] 10 December 2005, Taiwan Wikipedians meetup in Taipei. about 25 people.
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%81%9A%E6%9C%83/2005%E8%87%BA%E5%8C%97%E5%86%AC%E8%81%9A%E5%A0%B1%E5%91%8A
http://vista.tw/2005/12/10/39/
http://fancy.twbbs.org/blog/tsaiid/2005.12.10/
http://www.wretch.cc/blog/kaurjmeb&article_id=2709059
http://charlesc.ilovemeow.net/node/451?PHPSESSID=408e4d34d0606c4b1590530985460ddc

[Law] - ERRATUM: in last week's issue it was not very cleary indicated the the website "www.wikipediaclassaction.org" is not a Wikimedia Foundation website. They are people who say they will try to sue Wikipedia. But some are also making fun of them because there exists also a parody site of it: www.wikipediaclassaction.com
http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VPN#Wikipedia_Class_Action_Lawsuit
http://www.wikipediaclassaction.com

=== Quote ===

About Wikipedia;
"I call you my husband's mistress because you get his attention much of the time..." by anonymous "

=== Editorial ===
Wikipedia was never very good in internal communication. But lately we have seen some sad highlights. The implementation on the English Wikipedia of the reduced edit powers came as a total surprise and we have received the news from external news media. My first reaction when I read about it was; what a load of bullshit! We, the Wikipedians, would surely know about it if such change of a fundamental aspect of Wikipedia was true?

Also the policy of "Semi-protection" only gets widely known after articles in the traditional media about it. 

And finally the removal of visitors counters after more then 3 years of service without any word to there Wiki is also not nice. Wikipedia has no working statistics about visitor counts. So when you try to do it yourself you do not expect that your own system gets sabotaged. It are not only the articles of Wikipedia that need improvement.  [[user:Walter]],  Editor-in-chief Wikizine

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Number of subscribers:208
Editor:Walter, [[zh:user:Shizhao]], Oscar
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Wikizine makes no guarantee of validity.