Year: 2007 Week: 31 Number: 78 Extra

• [Start] – Wikimania will start now very soon. The opening ceremony with a welcome speech by Anthere and Jimbo is at 01:00 UTC upcoming (2007-08-03)
• [Wikimania online] – At present there is no information available about live streaming of the Wikimania events on the Wikimania-wiki. There are indications that there is the intend to provide some sort of online access to Wikimania by the Wikimania organization.
  Best hope to find out about it if it will exist is the Wikimania IRC channel #wikimania and the “Schedule”-page on the Wikimania-wiki.
  • http://chat.wikizine.org — webbased IRC access
  • http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule
• WikipediaWeekly has already some audio reports from Wikimania.
  • http://wikipediaweekly.com/2007/08/01/wikipedia-weekly-21/
  • http://wikipediaweekly.com/2007/08/02/wikipedia-weekly-22-wikimania-07-introduction/
• [Wikimania Awards] – submissions are open for the Wikimaina Award. Pictures, and only pictures, are welcome. There are 7 awards for 7 categories. The awards are sponsored. For example; there is the “EPSON History Award” for the best picture about “history”. The other topics are; share, mother nature, news, people, society, Wikimania activities.The 7 winners wil get an award cup and a USB stick that includes a Wikipedia local database and a search software.

  The winners will be announced during the closing ceremony on the 5th of August.

  • http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Awards

• [FY Wikipedia] – Fryske wikipedy no oer de 5.000 siden. (The Frisian wikipedia has reached 5.000 articles
  • http://fy.wikipedia.org
• [LT Wikipedia] – The Lithuanian Wikipedia reached a big milestone – 50,000 articles. The 50000th article was XXXV Europos krepšinio čempionatas – an article about upcomming basketball tournament EuroBasket 2007.
  • http://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/XXXV_Europos_krep%C5%A1inio_%C4%8Dempionatas

• [WikiSearch] – Wikia,inc has announced by means of Jimbo last year that Wikia would start with a community based search engine. Now has Wikia announced that the have bought the web crawler Grub. A web crawler is software the spiders the internet and maps all websites. The websites that are discovered by a web crawler can be included in an index to create a search engine. Wikia has released Grub now as an open source project. 

  Grub is an p2p program (like bittorent) that users need to install on there personal computer. When the client computer has nothing better to do it starts exploring the internet trying to find new websites where no webcrawel has gone before. The results will be send back to SearchWikia where volunteers will proces them and put them in the search engine index. That is at least the idea.

  When the new system will be online is not known yet.

  • http://tinyurl.com/w6gyd — Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to start wiki-based search engine (2006)
  • http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia_OSCON
  • http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/08/open-or-closed-.html — Video of Jimmy Wales announcing it
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grub_%28search_engine%29
  • http://tinyurl.com/2npls3 — Critical blogposting about it
  • http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/30/1632251 — /.
  • http://tinyurl.com/25wtv3 —  Wikia details plans for search rival to Google

“Hopefully we will have the first stab of something that sucks up by the end of the year,” he said. “And then we will start to revise, reconsider, rethink, delete, add, edit, change, until we start making something better and better over time. Will it take 2 years? 5 years? I dunno. It will take however long it takes. But it will be fun.” — Jimmy Wales about Search Wikia