Wikizine/2006-18

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                                    .org 
Year: 2006  Week: 18  Number: 23        

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

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=== Technical news ===

[Local botpower] The bureaucrats have now a new responsibility. The will find in the "Special pages" section the special page [[Special:Makebot]]. With this page the can give and revoke the bot flag of a user account. The stewards and the request page on meta is still the place to be for botrequest for wikis without a bureaucrat.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_bot_status

[Date of Caching] Bug 4327 is resolved. "Add a timestamp to special pages containing cached data". So now when look up a page like [[Special:Ancientpages]] you know how ancient that page is. To localize the message edit [[MediaWiki:Perfcachedts]]

[New Special pages] 
- with the page [[Special:Unusedtemplates]] you can find unused templates. To localize the message on that page edit [[MediaWiki:Unusedtemplatestext]] and [[MediaWiki:Unusedtemplateswlh]]

- with the page [[Special:Randomredirect]] you get a random redirect. You can find it by the "special pages". To translate it edit [[MediaWiki:Randomredirect]]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randomredirect

[Small stuff] 
- page protection/unprotection is now included in the revision history
- Watchlists now have a namespace selector.
- when a non-sysop attempts to edit a page in the MediaWiki-namespace the used to get the default "protected page warning". But this is not correct. That are not protected pages but pages with restricted access. There is now a special warning for MediaWiki pages. See [[MediaWiki:Protectedinterface]] to translate the message.
- Bug 93 resolved: Nowiki tags and tilde signatures in templates
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93

=== Request for help ===

[Wikimania] A new page is up for interested Wikimania volunteers.
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Volunteering

[Mirrors and Forks] Maintainers of mirrors and forks lists have been looking for help.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-compliant_site_coordination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Mirrors_and_forks

=== New project proposals ===

[Proposal] A timeline database with history facts for global history, people, corporations, products, etc., a global database of timelines that could be used to show graphic interactive timelines specified by the user.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTimeLine

=== Community ===

[Wikisource-l] A mailing list for Wikisource created. Like there is Wikipedia-l for all language Wikipedias this one is for all Wikisource related matters.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l

=== Media ===

[The Time 100] The issue of May 8, 2006 of Time Magazine is about "The People Who Shape Our World", the top 100. And Jimbo is one of them. 
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187286,00.html

[Jimbo] - on TV - again. But this time on "Geek Entertainment TV". It does not even has (yet) an article on EN Wikipedia so it must be very geeky.
http://www.geekentertainment.tv/2006/03/24/sxsw2006-jimmy-wales-uber-wikipedian/

[EFF] Honors Craigslist, Gigi Sohn, and Jimmy Wales with Pioneer Awards
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/

[CNN] Campaign manager resigns amid Wikipedia flap
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/26/cox.wikipedia/

=== Stats ===

[en.wikipedia] The English Wikipedia reaches 1.1 million articles on the 27th of April, adding an extra 100,000 articles only two months after reaching the one million milestone. This is only a twelfth of the time taken to create Wikipedia's first 100,000 articles.

=== Editorial  ===

Did you noticed there was no Wikizine last week? Until now there was every week a new edition of Wikizine. The concept of Wikzine is to bring you every week to most important news about the Wikimedia projects. Last week there was in my opinion nothing to report that qualified enough for real news to make an edition. So there was none. Can happen again. Filling a Wikizine with only Alexa and other stats, some Jimbo appearances on CNN and "Did you know" and a Quote is easy but no news. 

Something else;

Wikizine describes itself as "An independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community". I need to give some clarification about the "independent" part of it. Like many other people working in our community I have a lot of different functions on several layers of the Wikimedia community. Some of them are difficult to combine with my function as editor-in-chief of Wikizine. As a member of the WMF Communications committee I have access to confidential information that is not (yet) for publication. So as committee member it can be that I censor Wikizine by not reporting or not including all the information I know. That is more the exception. By being on the committee I have better access to people and information to inform you.

So, is Wikizine independent? Probably not really. But I find it is still independent enough to call it independent. This is not a Wikimedia Foundation publication. Texts are not approved by the board or so. I can live with it.

Greetings,
Walter Vermeir

=== Did you know ...  ===

... that Wikipedia, now at the 17th place of the top 500 of Alexa, is the only dot org?

All the other websites getting more visitors than Wikipedia are commercial.

=== User Quote ===

"Like most decisions on Wikipedia which actually get things done, I suspect large quantities of alcohol were drunk by someone who already had extraordinarily large testicles and who had just finished reading [[Wikipedia:Be bold]]." Rob Church 23:24, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

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Number of subscribers: 385
Editor(s): Shizhao, Walter
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
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