Planet Wikimedia

From The Wiki Wiki - a wiki about wikis

Planet Wikimedia is a collection of blog posts from Wikimedia project participants. This page shows 500 character summaries of the last 15 posts from the English and German Planet Wikimedia feeds.

See also WikiZine and the latest wiki news on the home page.

[edit] English

moulin - Wikipedia offline: Release: Wikimedia by moulin in Arabic

Available now, the Arabic version of moulin. It includes the following Wikimedian projects: Wikipedia (69, 411 articles) Wiktionary (11, 642 articles) Wikisource (2, 578 articles) While the ratio of articles per Arabic speakers (in the world) is not that great, it's still an enormous amount of free information for the numerous people the Arab-world, especially ...

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moulin - Wikipedia offline: Work in Progress

Folks, We haven't communicated much lately. We apologies for that. We've been busy distributing moulin and advocating Wikimedia. An update of the software is planned for the coming quarter, thanks to the efforts of Emmanuel and people from the OpenZim project. Please, allow me to translate a substract of a comment we just ...

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Joseph Reagle: Gender Bias in Wikipedia Coverage?

The recent controversy about gender imbalance and sexism in open content communities has been remarkable this summer, and this week's news about Shuttleworth's comments might mean it will extend into the autumn. While I think these events merit a historical and cultural analysis -- and prompts the questions if sexism increased, is it being noticed more, or both? -- I want to postpone that undertaking for the moment. Instead, I wonder if the recent demographic data that shows women are about...

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Joseph Reagle: Gender Bias, Part II

In the previous analysis, of the 174 women from the National Women's History Project, Wikipedia lacked articles on 23 of the women, Britannica missed 65. Hence, I found no support for the idea that gender imbalance in Wikipedians leads to similar imbalance in biographical coverage. However, this did support the (unsurprising) fact that Wikipedia has greater coverage in its number of subjects and article length. Therefore, as noted, on the gender question it would be nice to have a sense of...

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Brion Vibber: Putting the media in Wikimedia!

I’m here in the city of lights for Wikimedia’s big Multimedia Usability meeting. We’ve got a fair chunk of our MediaWiki devs and folks with more of the media & communications organization end in one place to hash out some of the key issues and see what we can really accomplish in the short and medium term, including long-needed reworking of the upload interface and the workflow of manually tidying up metadata for newly uploaded files — sometimes coming in batches of...

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WikiVoices: A real measure of popularity

Today it was revealed that Wikipedia editor Durova is almost as famous as Barack Obama. According to Wikipedia:Database_reports/Pages_with_the_most_revisions, Barack Obama has 18,522 edits, making it the 104th most edited page on the English Wikipedia. User talk:Durova follows closely behind at 14,324 revisions, ranking it at number 163 on the aforementioned list. Durova's talk page is the fourth most edited user talk page on enwiki, behind only Jimbo, SandyGeorgia, Dr. Blofeld, and of course...

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User:Durova: Palenque revisited

The bas relief at Palenque has deteriorated a lot since 1787 when Ricardo Almendáriz sketched it.  Thanks go to Infrogmation for spotting this 2008 photograph of the same panel. And here's another look at the digitally restored version of the 1787 drawing.

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Brianna Laugher: [guest] AntWeb goes CC-BY-SA

Waldir has previously guest-blogged here and I am happy to welcome him back for his second post. Congrats on helping make this cool project happen! —Brianna Image by AntWeb, licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0 written by Waldir Pimenta Did you know that the most venomous insect in the world is an ant? That’s right. One sting from the Maricopa Harvester Ant is equivalent to twelve honey bee stings — the required amount to kill a 4.5 pound rat. I found that over a year ago, through...

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Brion Vibber: StatusNet Sphinx search work in progress

I’m retooling StatusNet’s Sphinx search engine support to pluginize it and better support multiple sites… Putting some notes up on the wiki. Would love to see any additional issues or suggestions from folks using, or wanting to use, Sphinx for their SN instances!

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User:Durova: Goals

Awadewit is among the Wikipedians I most admire: a prolific contributor of high quality articles on scholarly topics, and a joy to work with.  She's completing her dissertation in eighteenth century children's literature this year, so as a gesture of thanks for her hard work I've done a little restoration for her today.  She surprised me last month by saying she's actually used my restorations as examples in the introductory undergraduate classes she teaches. Well here's something...

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Yaron Koren: Announcing WikiWorks

I’m thrilled to announce WikiWorks - a MediaWiki-focused consulting company that I just launched. This is my first serious business venture, unless you count Referata. But it doesn’t feel like a huge leap into the unknown, because consulting is already what I do - I’ve done at least some paid MediaWiki work for dozens of sites and companies over the last few years. The difference now is the additional people - WikiWorks is a samll team of programmers around the world, all with...

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User:Durova: Spinal curvature

One problem with book scans occurs when the printing goes close to the spine and the page fails to lie flat on the scanner bed.  The subject here is a detail from the Mayan ruins at Palenque and the illustration carries particular historic importance: it was drawn by Ricardo Almendáriz in 1787 during the initial excavation of Palenque and his illustrations formed part of the first significant archaeological report in the Americas. The lower left corner on this image makes it a bit more...

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Wikimedia Foundation: Wikimedia launches Bookshelf Project

Maybe you’ve been editing Wikipedia for years. Or maybe you made your first edit a few days ago. Whatever your experience, you likely know at least one central fact about editing – that it can be difficult for newcomers to master the skills necessary for contributing to Wikipedia. We want to change that, and we need your help. That’s why Wikimedia is kicking off a new project, the Bookshelf Project, developed to extend the reach and improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by...

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Gerard Meijssen: My monthly chore

Every month I write on all the Wikipedias about the quality of their localisation. Some languages I skip, for instance when there localisation is complete. Some languages I do not message because there has never been any localisation for that language. The Kikuyu Wikipedia is one such. It has 89 articles and many of those are by someone putting his Italian places on the map.. look for instance at this article about "Zerba". Kikuyi is spoken by some six million people, mostly in Africa. It...

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Gerard Meijssen: Criteria for featured pictures

On many of our projects we feature the best illustrations we have. Some of them are photos, some drawings, paintings, etches.. Some are created by our contributors, some are restored by our contributors and we judge them all by the same criteria. We do even when it does not make sense. This is an enlarged copy of a portrait by William Blake. You can deduce its size because of the structure of the paper. The issues with its restoration where documented here. The original picture is according...

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[edit] German

This feed is auto-translated to English. See de.planet.wikimedia.org for the original German feed.