Wikizine News – Year: 2011 Week: 39 Number: 129

Product reviews
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Technical news

  • [Babel on all Wikis] – There are a great deal of templates and signs that one can put on there user page. One of the most useful are the Babel-templates that indicate the knowledge of different languages. Now is there an extension active on all wikis for that. No need to manually setup all those templates on all wikis. The structure is easy; see the excellent blog posting of Mister Internationalisation himself – Gerard Meijssen.
    http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/21/babel-extension-live-on-the-wmf-projects/
  • [MediaWiki 1.8] – As announced in the TechFlash upgrade of the wikis is in progress. New functions in MediaWiki 1.8 include;

– Support for gender-specific user pages: languages that have different words for User whether the user is male or female will be able to show the male or the female version, if the user has specified their gender in their preferences.
– MediaWiki 1.18 will make it easier for left-to-right and right-to-left text to coexist on the same page.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/

  • [Fundraiser-time?] – You could encounter the well known gigantic donation banner “personal appeal by …”. But no, it is not again the big fundraiser event. But only a banner test. If you see it then you where lucky. It is only at EN Wikipedia for anonymous users and generally only in certain countries. The tests are currently being conducted for 1 hour once a week. The real fundraiser will proably be in November. But, test or not, donations are welcome.
    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011

Request for help

  • [Petition to UNSECO] – Wikimedia Foundation, with full support of founder Jimmy Wales, is asking to support the request to the UNESCO to recognize Wikipedia as the first “digital World Cultural Heritage Site”. Over 51,000 people have signed the petition already. Your are suggested to spread the word of this petition (after you signed) by all the communication channels of the modern day. If you sign the petition need to confirm by a link send by e-mail
    http://wikipedia.de/wke/Main_Page

Bureaucracy

Movement

Foundation

Chapters

  • [Wikipedia promo] – Wikimedia Sverige will be present at the Gothenburg Book Fair, around 100,000 visitors are expected to come by so it will be busy. WM Sverige has made 3 short silent movies to play at there stand. Because the are silent the can be used easily also by other Chapters, Wikimedia events. Wikimedia Sverige is even willing to localize it for you on request.
    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/55785

Chapters reports

Science

Media

Anniversaries

  • [Slovak Wikipedia] – 23 September 2003 is the best possible approximation of the date when the Slovak Wikipedia was created [1][2]. Slovak is a West Slavic language [3][4] spoken by 7 million people, mostly in Slovakia. Slovak Wikipedia has more than 127,000 articles [5] and more than 550 active users. Statistics [6] shows that Slovak Wikipedia is among the stable projects, which have a more or less constant number of new, active and very active Wikipedians.
[1] http://sk.wikipedia.org/
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20030923070746/http://sk.wikipedia.org/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_language
[4] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=slk
[5] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=slk
  • [Waray-Waray Wikipedia] – On 25 September the Waray-Waray Wikipedia[1][2] will be six years old. Waray-Waray[3] is an Austronesian language[3][4] spoken by 3.1 million inhabitants of Visayas[5] and Masbate[6] provinces of Philippines. It is used as a trade language, too. The Waray-Waray Wikipedia has more than 102,000 articles. Counting the number of speakers and considering the economic situation in Philippines, Waray-Waray Wikipedia is quite an active and successful project [7][8] (note the increase of new editors in 2010 in comparison to the number of new articles added to Wikipedia). Here is a short story about the beginnings of the Waray-Waray Wikipedia by war:User:Harvzs [9], the initiator of the Waray-Waray Wikipedia.
    The proposal for the Waray-Waray Wikipedia was made on or about June 23, 2005. The native speakers who volunteered to help edit was myself (User:Harvzsf in Meta) and User:v.oyzon. User:Katimawan2005 and User:Bentong from the Kapampangan and Cebuano Wikipedias were also among those who lent their support. The test-wikipedia was set up in Meta shortly after although test wikipedias weren’t mandatory at that time and Incubator hadn’t been in existence. The reason for the test Wikipedia was for the double purpose of creating content in the event that the request to create the wiki was granted and also to get some practice on how to create and edit the wiki. The Waray Wikipedia was created on or about September 24, 2005 along with the Neapolitan and Judeo-Spanish/Ladino Wikipedias. By a coincidence, the ISO codes for the 3 wikipedias coincided with actual one-syllable words in the English language war, nap and lad respectively :) ) Shortly after, I obtained administrator rights on the Waray-Waray Wikipedia. Ten days after the Waray-Waray Wikipedia was created, it reached 100 articles (the 100th article was war:Guiuan, Eastern Samar).
[1] http://war.wikipedia.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waray-Waray_Wikipedia
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waray-Waray_language
[4] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=war
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visayas
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masbate
[7] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaWAR.htm
[8] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaWAR.htm
[9] http://war.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Harvzs
  • [Polish Wikipedia] – On 26 September the Polish Wikipedia [1][2] Will be 10 years old. Polish is a West Slavic language spoken by more than 40 million speakers [3][4], mostly from Poland. With more than 831,000 articles [5], the Polish Wikipedia is the fifth largest Wikipedia by number of articles. During its first years of existence, the Polish Wikipedia was filled with a lot of bot-generated articles, which created significant positive feedback from Polish speakers and made the Polish Wikipedian community one of the most vital ones [6].

Wikimedia Poland [7][8] was created on 15 August 2005 thanks to the work of Polish Wikipedians. Wikimedia Poland recognizes its 10th anniversary of the project by organizing a conference to be held on September 24-25, in Poznan, Poland [9][10].

[1] http://pl.wikipedia.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Wikipedia
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language
[4] http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pol
[5] http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specjalna:Statystyka
[6] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaPL.htm (cf. new articles per day and new editors)
[7] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Polska
[8] http://pl.wikimedia.org/
[9] http://10lat.wikipedia.pl
[10] http://tinyurl.com/42tkjub (Google translate)

Press release of Wikimedia Poland is below:

The Polish Wikipedia was founded on September 26, 2001, being the eighth eldest Wikipedia to be established. Over the years, Polish Wikipedians have created over 830,000 articles, of which almost 500 have received a “Featured Article” status and additional 1,000 being categorised as “Good Articles”.
In a continuation of the year-long celebration of the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia, the Polish Wikipedia community is going to celebrate the 10th birthday of the project, with a conference being held on September 24—25 in Poznań, Poland. Two weeks earlier, on September 10, the public exhibition of the winning POTY (Picture of the Year) pictures has been opened in one of the most prestigious shopping and art centres in Poland, the Stary Browar (Old Brewery). 16 pictures, chosen by Wikimedians from all over the world in an annual POTY contest, are shown at the exhibition, with descriptions provided in Polish, English and German.
The conference will take place in the heart of the very best location in Poznań. It will be open to the public, as one of the main goals of the organisers is to involve people from outside the Wikimedia movement; therefore, the conference is heavily advertised in the local media, with increasing daily press coverage.
The event will consist of about 15 presentations and talks about Wikipedia. They will discuss Wikipedia’s place in court judgements; Wikipedia’s role as a source of information; the now-hot topic of women in the Wikipedia community, and many more topics. They will take an outside look at Wikipedia with a public screening of the documentary film Truth in Numbers?, which will be followed by a discussion, a short surprise from the organising team, and the real celebration: a massive Wikipedia birthday cake.
The Polish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation has generously decided to refund the costs of coming to the conference for Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe; as of September 20, 13 Wikipedians from Azerbaijan, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine and even Philippines have signed up for the conference. If you can’t join us and you understand some Polish, don’t worry — all talks from the conference will be streamed live on a special Internet radio. After the event, all talks – audio and video – will be released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence and made available on-line.
Polish Wikipedians hope to have a great event, and even if you can’t join them, please keep your fingers crossed!

Stats

  • [RU WP] Russia Wikipedia has overtaken Japanese Wikipedia by the articles’ count on 21 September 2011.
http://tinyurl.com/3cv7tlk — RU Wikipedia
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Wikipedias%2FTable&action=historysubmit&diff=2916894&oldid=2913733

Events and meetups

  • [24-25 September] – Polish Wikipedia community, supported by Wikimedia Polska, is going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project (founded on September 26, 2001) with a conference to be held on September 24-25, in Poznan, Poland.
    http://10lat.wikipedia.pl
    http://tinyurl.com/42tkjub (Google translate)

Wikizine

Quote

“Wikinews: Just because we wrote it in our pyjamas doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take us seriously.” — IRC quote

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