Category: Wikimedia News

Technical news [Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet] – Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer, announced that he’s leaving the Wikimedia Foundation after four years. http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/announce-brion-moving-to-statusnet/ http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055358.html [Labs: FlaggedRevs] – due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn’t realize that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for people to poke at […]

Technical news [Image renaming re-enabled] – Image renaming has been re-enabled for administrators on all Wikimedia projects. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15842 http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/file-renaming-enabled-for-admins/ [LocalisationUpdate deployment delayed] – The deployment of LocalisationUpdate, an extension meant to keep the localized messages as up to date as possible, was delayed after it killed the entire site.  You don’t have to be a […]

Technical news [Media server problems] – there were some media load problems on all the sites, which caused “extreme slowness or temporary inaccessibility”. The sysadmins took advantage of this downtime to redo the way we access media files internally which will help reduce the impact on the rest of the site when load problems on […]

Technical news [Michael Jackson Kills WP] – Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop”, died this week and nearly took Wikipedia down with him (as well as many other websites).  Wikimedia sites were unresponsive for a whole due to the large number of page hits.  The Michael Jackson article got nearly 6 *million* hits on June […]

Technical news [dumps] – Dumps are becoming more regular now and are actually working, thanks to Foundation developer Tomasz Finc.  Two new mailing lists were created to discuss dumps. http://dumps.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/xmldatadumps-l — discussion list for the dumps https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/xmldatadumps-admin-l — admin list (Failures / Upgrades / Changes) [Abuse Filter] – After all the research done by […]

Happy Wikipedia-day! Technical news [Upload size] – The maximum allowed upload size of files in increased from 20 megabytes to 100 megabytes. That is especially important for Commons that now can receive more easy video. Brion says there is now 48 terabyte of storage space for the media. 5 terabyte is used currently. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/011309-wikipedia-digital-media.html [Time […]

Technical news [Wiki rename] – the first letters of the url of our projects indicate the language of that project. For some of them those will change to other ones. Effected languages are; Aromanian, Low German, Moldovan and Belarusian.  Redirects will be created. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/34563 [WikimediaNotifier] – A system has setup to create a message on Meta […]

As you all noticed the most visual form of the fundraiser has shown up on the wikis in the form of a very large banner. The banner is the main way to get people to donate. This fundraiser is the banner exceptional huge and not universally appreciated. Erik Möller, the Deputy Director, has posted a […]

Technical news [API] – Brion has disabled the old BotQuery interface and enabled the MediaWiki’s  machine-readable query API. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki.api/668 http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API Foundation [Job offer] – The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a Chief Program Officer. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Program_Officer Community [AR wp] – small groups of Wikipedians in Egypt organize a  “regional Wikipedia Day” to try to boost the low number of […]

Technical news [New and useful]  – it is now possible to insert the magic word __NOINDEX__ into a page. The result of this is that when a search engine spider comes by, it gets the instruction not to index that page. This way, it should for example be possible to keep certain pages out of the […]