Wikizine/2006-15

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                                    .org 
Year: 2006  Week: 15  Number: 21        

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

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=== Technical news ===

[Outage] Wikimedia was down from 19:19 UTC on 9th April to around 01:30 UTC on 10th April. The explanation we have at this time is that one of the 800A circuit breakers between the generators/UPS and our servers failed at our Florida co-location facilities causing obvious problems. Staff at the datacenter struggled to resume service as soon as possible, and are now investigating the reason said breaker failed.
Wikimedia sites were unavailable for just over six hours.  

Several servers came up with bad clocks. Brion has corrected the times in the 'revision' database entries for the entries edited from these servers so 'history' and 'contribs' will be correct, but you might see some edits listed in your watchlist etc 8 hours earlier than their actual times.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22810/
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22827/

[Parser functions] Tim Starling created a MediaWiki extension supporting parser functions, along with four new functions: if, ifeq, expr, and rand.  These can replace inefficient templates such as {{{qif}}} and {{{switch}}} from the English Wikipedia.  Parser functions such as LOCALURL have existed for a while; but including them in an extension has only been possible since MediaWiki 1.6, released last week.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ed_Poor/subtract&action=edit  -- example of inefficient template
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/tags/REL1_6_1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES -- MediaWiki 1.6

[Move to Commons] Magnus Manske has made a online tool to make it more easy to mo move files from a local wiki to commons
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/27061/
http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/commonshelper.php

[SpamWar-IV] The coming of the Redirects - new way of link spamming
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/22799

=== Request for help ===

[Wikimania] Needs volunteers and translators.  Spanish, French, and Chinese translators are especially welcome.  
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006/Meetings#General_volunteer_meeting
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/6795/

[en.wikinews] Needs more people to help out with the daily audio recording of the news. If you'd like to help contact User:Mrmiscellanious
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Mrmiscellanious
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews

=== New project proposals ===

[List of proposals] User:Robert_Harrison is working on a new version of the new project proposals page on Meta
http:// tinyurl.com/z5ek3

=== Foundation ===

[PR] Schwartz Communications, a public relations firm, provides on a voluntary basis there services to the Wikimedia organization. The are from now on included to the Communications committee as advisors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwartz_Communications
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee

=== Community ===

[EN.wikinews] is now offering a podcast of their daily news briefs on a daily basis and actively promoting it.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AudioWikinewsNewsBriefs

[EN.wp CD] User:BozMo produces a CD with 2006 articles and 8500 images for use in UK schools to benefit the group 'SOS Children' from the English Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BozMo/2006_Wikipedia_CD_Selection
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/education-cd.htm

=== Media ===

[no print] the print edition of German Wikipedia is postponed due to lack of support from the community. 
http:// tinyurl.com/lhpmn - google translation

[AlistApart.com] Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters - about registered and anonymous users and Wikipedia
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/identitymatters

=== Stats ===

[The TOP] The classic traffic ranking is from Alexa where Wikipedia has the 18the place of all websites of the internet. But there are also others. According to "Hitwise" Wikipedia is on the 38th place, just after CNN.com That seems impressive but that is still only 0,17 % market share. When limited to "Education websites" Wikipedia is the clearly the number one. Also according Hitwise the visitors of Wikipedia are 47,2 female and 52,8 male and users of all ages are using Wikipedia.

According to the statistics of "comScore" Wikipedia is on the 28th place and rising. All those reports are nice to know but it is important to realize that the give an strong English / American POV of the use of the internet.  
http:// tinyurl.com/g6uog  -- Hitwise data and demographics (USA) for Wikipedia, March 2006 (doc file)
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?id=783 -- February 2006 'top 50' list (WP: #28)

[KW.wp] The Cornish Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. According to EN Wikipedia there are around 3500 speakers of this language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_language
http://kw.wikipedia.org

[jp.wp] The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles. 
http://jp.wikipedia.org

=== Did you know ...  ===

... that you *can* switch of your computer, go outside in the real world, leave your phone, iPod and PDA at home, go to a forest of a park and watch to the movement of the leaves in the wind and the breaking of the sunlight in those leaves and enjoy its fantastic resolution?

=== MediaZilla-IRC Quotes ===

"And so, we don't need a business model, we're just doing it." [Jimmy Wales, early 21st century]

Sweater: optional piece of clothing applied to child when its mother feels cold. 
"The life is too short, and Wikipedia too slow ..." - Anon
"George Bush is a good president. No really. Please stop laughing."

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Editor(s): Walter, Shizhao, Sj
E-mail: ihavenews AT wikizine DOT org
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