Wikizine/2006-34

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                                    .org 
Year: 2006  Week: 34  Number: 39        

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

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Technical news
[edit]
[ExpandTemplates] - There is a new special page called "ExpandTemplates". With this you are able to copy a page from a Wiki without having to copy all the templates. In the first field you define the page you took the input from. So if you took it from the page named "Sesame Street" you fill that in and without {{}} arround it.
You can put the input of a template, or of a series of templates, or even the whole page, in the second field. If you wish to enter a whole page you can paste the source text or do it like this; Sesame Street 
The Special:ExpandTemplates will write the result you get in ordinary Wikitext as it looked like on that specific page, and you will be able to copy and paste that to whatever wiki you want. The only thing you have to do now, is uploading the images. If you move a page this way you loose off course the benefit of the templates that by changing the template you change all the pages where the template is used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ExpandTemplates

[Operations report] - Overview about what the status is of hardware and software
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/26122/focus=26122

[Wiki down] - It has been a wile since the last total system down. And this time the servers where running perfectly. But there ip-addresses where temporary invalid due to external reasons. The wikis where down for less then three hours. See the article of EN Wikinews for more information.
Remark: when the WMF-systems are down the Wikizine.org website and email is still functional. Feel free to submit news about the situation or see of Wikizine has news about it. Due to the limited core staff of Wikizine this service can not be guaranteed.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers_unreachable_for_3_hours_due_to_network_outage

Community
[edit]
[ES.wikipedia] has decided in two polls to disallow the upload of files to the Spanish wiki and to do it exclusively in Commons.

[ES.wp BIS] - The fifth Wikiconcurso (Wikicontest) has just finished. This edition was about translating featured articles from en.wiki, de.wiki, fr.wiki, it.wiki, pt.wiki, pl.wiki, nl.wiki, sv.wiki and ja.wiki. The Spanish language Wikipedia translated about 88 articles. 17 of those will be proposed as "Articulo destacado" (outstanding articles) on the Spanish Wikipedia.

[ZH.wp news] The Signpost brings a report about how the the Chinese language Wikipedia is doing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-08-14/Interwiki_report

Agenda
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[Italia] - On September 2nd, Italian Wikipedians are going to meet in Valentano, near Viterbo, and in the afternoon they will attend to the second Annual Meeting for Wikimedia Italia, the Italian Chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. The assembly is going to elect a new Board and the meeting is going also to approve the budgets and to to describe the strategies for achieving a better promotion to Wikimedia Projects in Italy. 
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Raduni/Viterbo_2006
http://www.wikimedia.it/

[Netherlands] - Also on September 2nd, there will be a local one day Wikimedia conference in Utrecht.  
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_Netherlands

Media
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[it.wikipedia] -On Monday, August 14th, at 7:34 local time in the morning, one Wikipedian found himself on air on RAI1, the national TV station of Italy. The producers had also invited for the interview Enrico Cogno, a professor at the University of Perugia, and Federica Lanzellotto, a student from Rome. The subject of the interview was "Wikipedia: il sapere per tutti", with the aim of understanding how Wikipedia is getting more and more present in every day's life. It was only for 9 minutes and extremely early in the morning. But nevertheless it was National television and the Italian Community is very happy with it. The links to the video can you find on the page linked below.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Intervista_ad_Unomattina_di_M/

[Anthere's Blog] A mission: providing free knowledge. Free as in ?
http://blog.anthere.org/index.php/2006/08/19/73

[Wikizine] made its first appearance in an news article (and made the visitor stats explode)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/77032

Stats
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[fr.wikt] - The French language Wiktionary has now already 200,000 definitions in its database.
http://fr.wiktionary.org

Other news
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[ERRATUM] - The webhoster and sponser of Wikizine is Memebot.com and not "memobot.com"

[WikiBritanica] - The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is now online in a wiki-form. Because the conversions form print to digital text is done by computer mistakes are made. On that wiki you can fix them. And also include some more recent information on a separate page. This is not a WMF-project. 
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/

Editoral
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A murderer of a 10 year old murder is arrested. A minister-president says something in a interview about a very sensitive local topic. An ethnic group of people continuous to be exterminated while the world does not care.

What is considered important depends highly about your personal point of view shaped by who and where you are.  In the virtual city of Wikimedia the important topic is the board election.  Why is it important? It is only for one place on the board. And because of this is only to replace Angela's spot, it is only for the remaining term of Angela's original term of 2 years. And that means it will not even be for one year.

This election is important because the board is not so big. One voice can make a difference. And it is likely that this new board will have to make decisions about significant reforms of the organisation of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Now the candidates present there candidacy to the community. This election is not like a real election where you only can choice between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", like expressed so colorful in South Park.  This are all people from our community. There are very good people between them who I know personally and are deeply committed to do good for the projects. You can not know everybody. Consider also the ones you do not know. This is not a "vote for your friends" contest and also not "vote for the candidate form you local wiki". Raise above that. Read there statements. Check there behavior in the history. Ask them questions. Know for who you are voting. This is not a sysop election.

I have send an offer to all candidates to write a few words to present themselves to the readers of Wikizine. This to lower the step for the candidates to reach the community. The first two candidates will say there piece in an extra Wikizine send out soon after this one. Readers of the website will find it below this edition.  Depending on the number of candidates who requested inclusion in Wikizine a second extra edition can be send out this week. 

Thanks for reading this,
Greetings,
Walter Vermeir

Did you know ...
[edit]
... how to verify of a user who is contacting you off-wiki is really the user he claims to be?

You write (email, Jabber, IRC, etc.) or say (Skype, etc) to the user to write a specific phrase on the wiki like on his talk page. 

You can also contact him or ask that user to send you an email by means of the "E-mail this user" function of the wiki. Look at the headers, the source of the message. It must contain "X-Mailer: MediaWiki mailer" and the name in the "From:" field is the username of that user on that wiki. This way can be falsified. Asking to edit is the most secure way.

IRC Quote
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<frank> can you help me install GTA3?
<knightmare> first, shut down all programs you aren't using
frank has quit IRC. (Quit)
<knightmare> ...

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