Goings-on/2004

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
This is the archive of Meta-Wiki Goings-on in 2004. See also the full archives.


December 2004

  • MediaWiki: v1.4 beta versions were released and installed on various Wikimedia sites. See Software section (right).
  • MediaWiki 12 Dec 2004: v1.3.9 was released with security and other fixes.
  • A poll was created to change voting requirements from about 80% consensus to 66.7% (two thirds). You can view it here.

Weekly translations for December

  1. ro:Oradea
  2. ca:Muixeranga
  3. en:Moresnet
  4. en:Georgian Uprising of Texel

Software for December

November 2004

  • Rotterdam board meeting: A meeting was held in real life (Jimbo, Angela, Anthere) on November 28th in Rotterdam. Topics discussed were membership, Soros meeting, domain names, board members and implication of local chapters. No report is yet available.
Wikinews is a proposed project with the goal to collaboratively report and summarize news on all subjects from a neutral point of view. This proposal describes the project goals, and outlines five basic requirements for the project. If it is implemented, there will be Wikinews communities in many languages. The precise implementation of the Wikinews requirements is left up to these individual communities.
  • MediaWiki: Pre-beta testing of the imminent MediaWiki v1.4 continued at test.wikipedia.org [note: this wiki does not exist as of 2005].
  • Call for Reports: the first attempt to gather status reports from all projects has started. Please join and deliver a report from your project!
  • Wikimania 2005, 5 Nov 2004: Name vote called; Wikimania is now officially "Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference". Discussion is now ongoing regarding potential banner designs; see Wikimania:Banner for details.
  • Assotiative Wiktionary proposal is open for discussion, on Wiktionary:Beer_parlour
  • Open board meeting: A meeting was held on IRC on November 6 to discuss new project policy, new language Wikipedia policy, and grants. The meeting was open to anyone. The full transcript was published on Meta.

Weekly translations for November

  1. fi:Pohjola
  2. en:Klaipeda
  3. pl:Rafael del Riego

October 2004

  • Board meeting: A meeting of the board was held on the 22nd of october. Location: IRC, #board.wikimedia, Present : Jimbo, Angela, Anthere. Topic : membership. Report : [1].
  • Board meeting: A meeting of the board was held Saturday 16 October, Location: IRC, #board.wikimedia, Invited: Board + Tim Starling, Time: 22:00 UTC (23 England, 00 France, 18 Florida, 15 California, 0800 Sun 17 Oct Australia EST). Please see feedback on Board agenda. Report : [2].
  • Wikimania 2005, 31 Oct 2004: Frankfurt am Main has been chosen as the city to host the meetup. Discussion is still underway regarding the date and the name. Visit Wikimania:Participants and Wikimania:Name/Vote respectively to show your support!
  • The proposal for a Wikimedia meetup Central and Eastern Europe is launched. This meeting will take place at the beginning of 2005 and will seek to unite the Central and Eastern European Wikimedia communities. If you're from this part of the world, please enlist yourself as a participant, propose ideas and nominate a city. Also, please translate the page in as many languages as possible. The co-ordinator for this proposal is Ronline from the Romanian Wikipedia.
  • Wikinews: a new project for Wikimedia ?. Check out this proposal and discuss it. Please, help translate this page and Wikinews/Vote needs to be translated into as many languages as possible until October 22! Please create translations at Wikinews/two-letter-code, e.g. Wikinews/De, and add them to Template:Wikinews translations. 15:02, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Board meeting : A meeting of the board is planned Saturday 16 October, Location: IRC, #board.wikimedia, Invited: Board + Tim Starling, Time: 22:00 UTC (23 England, 00 France, 18 Florida, 15 California). Please add feedback on Board agenda
  • Newsletter : A poll is being taken to see how many people would be interested in a print edition of the Wikimedia newsletter, and how it might best be distributed.
  • World Meet up : 18 Oct 2004 : Wikimedia meetup 2005. The final candidate list has been decided. The three finalists are Frankfurt, Dublin, and Rotterdam. The selection comittee - Angela, Anthere, Jimbo, Danny, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz, Tomos, Brion Vibber, Oscar and Gerard Meijssen, Arno Lagrange and elian - will choose the final city by the end of October.
  • Board meeting : A meeting of the board is planned Saturday 9 October, Location: IRC, #board.wikimedia, Invited: Board + Daniel Mayer (CFO), Time: 20:00 UTC (21 England, 22 France, 16 Florida, 13 California). Please add feedback on Board agenda.... Angela will give a report as soon as possible
  • Check whether your boss donated to Wikipedia ! Report from the fundraising from Mav. You will see day by day, each donation made to the foundation during the 2 weeks fundraising : amount, currency, donor names if no anonymity requested, as well as nice comments made during the donation.
  • As soon as you have a medium where audience members can watch each other work, you develop a sense of community good. That's clearly happening here - Ward Cunningham : Read about Ward and Ward's opinion of Wikis and Wikipedia in our first newsletter Wikimedia Newsletter.
  • New projects : Final decisions about the creation of Wikipeople are being discussed.

Weekly translations for October

  1. fy:Gangnihessou
  2. ko:삼국시대
  3. en:manatee

September 2004

  • In August and September 2004 the Wikimedia request rate roughly doubled : Do not miss JamesDay's very well researched latest report on growth and subsequent hardware needs : Hardware capacity growth planning
  • 28th of september : Developer task/membership first proposal for a paid task to developer from the wmf.
  • $wgSysopUserBans has been moved out of InitialiseSettings.php and into CommonSettings.php; defaulting to true. To change this setting for your project wiki, leave a request on non-dev tasks for devs, or talk to Fire.
  • Sep 13: The domain species.wikimedia.org is set up.
  • Sep 9: The ja: Wikipedia wins a Web Creation award from the Japanese Advertisers Association.
  • Sep 3-7: Wikipedia was presented at the Ars electronica festival in Linz, Austria. Full report
  • Interview with Ward Cunningham, Monday Sept 13, 10:10 EST [14:10 UTC] on IRC -- join #ward for a running transcript
  • The planning for an international Wikimedia conference in summer 2005 started on Wikimedia meetup 2005. Help and ideas welcome!
  • 1,000,000 articles - this milestone is approaching quickly. Please help translate and distribute the press release to a media outlet in your area.

August 2004

  • A Wikipedia Digest project has been started, to summarize journals and periodicals and link those summaries to relevant Wikipedia articles.
  • How to keep two GFDL-wikis synchronized? cf. the medical wiki Flexicon (German page, English abstract in the first URL, needs translation & update)
  • August 2004: Wikipedia auf CD
  • August 2004: Jimbo and Angela are interviewed by the BBC
  • August 2004: end of poll. Developer payment poll/results. The Foundation agrees to make a trial period for developer payment.
  • August 2004: Michaël Davis is treasurer. Daniel Mayer and Michaël Davis are establishing a financial report.

July 2004

  • 24th of july : Bounty : check reward systems for developers
  • July 20 Copyeditors and proofreaders are desperately needed for Wikimedia projects. Interested parties should list themselves on this page, along with their native languages.
  • July 18 Domain names please, add to this page information about domain names ownership for all projects.
  • July 1 : Wikipedia meets Brockhaus: On July 1, 2004, five German Wikipedians met with the 'new media' business unit of Brockhaus, Germany's largest and best-known producer of encyclopedias... the first contact between Wiki(p|m)edia and a traditional encyclopedia publisher.

June 2004


May 2004

  • Wiktionaries: Wiktionaries in all active languages have been set up by Tim Starling. See here for details. See also Requests for Wiktionary permissions for permission and new policy to get sysop status. (Update: De:wiktionary has switched to utf8.) Statistics are now available at [6].
  • Community: The English wikipedia opened a w:en:Wikipedia:Facebook. Most users seem to think this is great, while others fear Wikipedia appears built by a bunch of weirdos. Some mention privacy rights. And is a plaster bust appropriate? Should this be moved to meta? What is your opinion? Pictures or no pictures? Join the discussion on the discussion page.
  • Ars Electronica Award: please add mention of the Festival en:Ars Electronica, and update associated information (the de:Ars Electronica Center in sv:Linz, en:Internet art, the International Bruckner Festival) on your local Wikipedia!
  • Webby Award: Wikipedia wins an award for Best Community. Winners list. The English Wikipedia have started a press release. Other Wikipedias are encouraged to do the same, and link the various press releases together.
  • A vote on artificial languages equal rights is started.
  • Wikipedia language overviews (list of all language Wikipedias, their popular pages, and overviews of their size, growth, and active users)
  • Trophy box (list of awards and key press clippings; links to "In the Press" pages on monolanguage wikis.)
  • Translators (identification of multilingual people, willing to help in translation... think about it, we could have a press release set and distributed in a couple of days, in many languages!)
  • Press Corps (association of photographers - have you thought of covering the next huge sporting event in your city ?)
  • Offensive content (brainstorming on how to handle problematic images)
  • Requests for permissions - Request for deletion policy updated.
  • Blocked users on meta
The french wikipedia has restricted User:Stuart Little from editing all meta pages, including those on meta, from the 2nd of may to the 2nd of june. Please do not block him; it is a self-effort.
  • Should real names appear in the preferences? How should contributors list be displayed on article page? : See threads on wikitech-l, wikipedia-l and foundation-l
  • Update to version MediaWiki 1.3 are ongoing on all projects. Please report bugs.
  • Server outage message : please, add the translation in your langage.
  • Release of mediawiki 1.2.5
    • Changes since 1.2.4:
    1. Fixed install problem with blank root password
    2. Fixed Special:Emailuser/Username links
    3. Fixed main-page edit link s on fuzzy search results
    4. Fixed wikipedia-interwiki.sql
    5. Fixed install with apache2filter (ugly U RLs)
    6. IP in 'go' search brings up contributions
    7. Switch from broken & to ? on top-level wiki URL hack
    8. Fix for moved pages in enhanced Recentchanges
    9. Initial main page on new installs links to the online documentation
There are no database format changes.
Release notes: [8]
Download: download

See MediaWiki roadmap anytime, to know what is cooking for the new MediaWiki version.

April 2004

  • Extension Syntax: Voting begins on what syntax to use for extensions such as math, music, hieroglyphs, chemistry, etc. This vote is now closed. Erik's proposal (XML-like syntax) will be implemented.
  • Steward policies - Draft policies are being discussed. See also talk:developer access
  • Developer status clarification - Finally, thanks to Tim, great clarification of the different types of developer cess level, and who may do what. Update of developer names.
  • Administrators - policy for adminship on meta itself. Will go live on the 17th of april
  • Meta:Requests for deletion - Request for deletion policy updated.
  • On the main list, this week, two loooon g discussions are going on
  • Check out the start of the discussion about patents
  • Check out the fascinating discussion about new wikipedias and Language codes : start here, but look at the whole archive for more. With in particular a thread started by Erik : [9]. As of 06th of april, the discussion is still going on, join the fun !
  • Reported by Jimbo, this funny story

March 2004

Checked in code

  • History links, diff links for (top) edits in contributions list
  • Printable versions implemented through CSS
  • Section edit links in diff view to current version
  • Make ~~~~~ (five tildes) insert just date/time, without [[User:username]]
  • French Wikipedia switched to UTF-8. Resulting problems still not entirely solved.
  • Automatically generated meta keywords for search engines

Other Goings-on in 2004