Wikimedia Quarto/2/wikimania

This is a draft of the upcoming Wikipedia newsletter.
Old drafts : #1 (Sep 2004)
Old skeleton: WQ/1
Current skeleton : WQ/2

Reports

Founder & Board

Status : missing founder letter and part of board report

Chapters

Creation of the French chapter

Status : completed : Was added to WQ

German chapter

Status : completed : transfered to Quarto

BBC job

Report from Ang and JW about the prelude, the event, the experience, the aftermath.

I've emailed a start of this to Jimbo to add to. Angela 22:57, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Project statistics

status : this part still needs to be updated in Quarto

• Wikipedia:
• Wiktionary:
• Wikibooks:
• Wikiquote: 25 languages, 6,680 articles
• Wikimedia commons: 4846 articles, 16414 images, ? sound file, 1489 users
• Wikisource: 6748 sources and texts, 1473 users,
  • Hebrew Wikisources: 194 sources and texts, 29 users
• Wikispecies: 1752 entries, 192 users

Technical developments

Status : transfered to Quarto

Note : Anthere would like to add something

Community

Meetups

Status : needs to be updated.

Japan meetup: draft on ja:User:Aphaia/Sandbox2; image mailed to sj and villy. --Aphaia 23:47, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Rotterdam (the Netherlands) meetup.
Could Gerard or Oscar makes us a nice report about this ? Anthere

actually i did this tonight :-) you will find it here. oscar 12:46, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

neat. Good. Ant

images available

Berlin meetup (bei Berlinux) and other meetup in deutschsprachigen Orten. 1 or 2 paragrah (Berlinux is already refered to Elian's German Chapter report, fyi). Also Stammtisch ... es ist fremd fuer meisten Auslaendern ...

cf. de:Wikipedia Diskussion:Treffen der Wikipedianer/Berlin

Bolzano meetup (it and de) it:Wikipedia:Incontro di Bolzano--27 novembre 2004#resume for wikimedia by M/

New York meetup
[1]

Taipei Meetup: draft is here.

Beijing Meetup: I will translate it soon.--Mountain 08:58, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

New year's greetings project

Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo!

wikt:it:Buon Natale e felice Anno Nuovo! is a project to have as many translations and pronunciations as possible by Christmas. This project can be extended by any project that wants to do something Christmassy. Important is that both Wiktionary and Commons are benefactors of this project. GerardM 08:42, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Buon Natale-Quarto article

Wikimania

Status : needs reading by authors as two texts were merged. Was put in international section with introduction in section 3.

Research

Summary of Vala Thesis

Status : transfered to Quarto. We need to add a link to her user page.

Projects

Wikijunior

Status : transfered to Quarto. Needs proofreading and probably some links to the project. To do as well, mention in the grant area the more detailed part in project.

It would be nice that Danny or anyone involved in this project makes us a report both on the funds offered to us, and on what we are currently trying to do with these funds. Anthere

If Danny doesn't mind, I'd like to try my hand at the article. -- user:zanimum

• compare with other print projects
  • Do we have other print projects. -- user:zanimum
    • Not wikimedia print project (for kids) or WikiReader - it's a shame we couldn't make it sure before Ant departed. Aphaia.
• user:zanimum asked by Sj and myself to write something here by the week-end. notafish }<';> 16:46, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi all. This article is 393 words as it stands, feel free to edit it down as you like. I'm sure despite proofing it, my sleepy eyes have missed some grammar errors and awkward sentences. Anyway, if there's anything you need me for, I'll be back on Wikipedia/Meta more now than I was earlier this weekend. -- user:zanimum

Great, thank you :-) Anthere

Wikibooks

... and other topic including Wikiversity

• arne can report Wikiversity?

Spanish Wikiversity

Right now, the Spanish Wikiversity is growing quite faster than "Wikilibros" (Spanish Wikibooks). It seems that the foundations of this project are getting stronger as we already have Schools with active members in Chemistry, Physics, Computing Science, Philosophy and Linguistics. Especially active at the moment are the School of Computing Science (Escuela de Ingeniería Informática), with 7 members, 8 departments and 1 university course outlined; the Physics Department and the Chemistry Department have also very active members and the Department of Linguistics have a recently created Area of Synology. In the "Claustro" we discuss how the organization of the Wikiversity should be.

One of the topics being discussed is if we should propose to Wikimedia community that the Wikiversity should be an independent project from Wikibooks, with or without another "dominio" (for example .wikiversity.org). Actually, eventhough Wikiversity may/should use Wikibooks to create didactic material, different departments may be involved in other Wikimedia projects. For example, the "Area de Sinología" is going to begin the Chinese-Spanish and Spanish-Chinese section of the Wiktionary and also the article "Literatura de China" from the Wikipedia. So, the vision of the Wikiversity is quite wider than Wikibooks. It involves and tends to get profit and participate in all the projects from Wikimedia. I encourage you to have a look and to participate :P. What? don't you have a Wikiversity in your language, and what are you waiting for creating it ;-)?User:Javier Carro, a Sysop of Spanish Wikibooks and also user in Spanish Wikiversity

• ... and/or de:User:Philipendula on dewikibooks? Aphaia

Wikinews

Status : transfered to Quarto.

• Erik and Lyellin should write a bit about this.
• Compare with other news-related projects

You can use my editorial at n:User:Eloquence/State_of_the_Wiki.--Eloquence 07:56, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

That Editorial is a great summation- use that ;). Lyellin 04:08, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It's too big. Two or three paragraphs will be readable in the newsletter as a part of project report. --Aphaia 05:58, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

• Okay, since nobody was doing it, and I happened to be around when the production team was looking for help, I wrote a short piece. Wikinews participants' help to improve this is very much appreciated. Tomos 17:03, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I've copyedited Tomos' article a bit.--Eloquence 13:21, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Translation of the week

• Asked Shizhao to write something, since has been pretty active on the project. If can't I'll do something. notafish }<';> 16:29, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • Shizhao will be with his family at weekend, and will not be online. As I know, he learned Russian in university, not English; so he can only understand English, but may not write a good English articals. Bad news.--Mountain 19:34, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
    • yes, sorry. --Shizhao 14:12, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)
• Danny has no interest. How about Ronline? S/he is also active. --Aphaia 21:13, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Started by Danny at the end of October as little less than a challenge, after the success encountered with the translation of en:Gangnihessou into various languages, the Translation of the week, a project designed to translate an article across the different language wikipedias has picked up very well, and counts 10 translations to this day. The idea behind the translation of the week is to choose an article in one of the wikipedias and present it as cadidate for a cross-wiki translation. Articles that reach a majority of supporters are then put up as Translation of the week and set to be translated in as many languages as possible. After 10 weeks, the project counts 64 declared participants, and surely that many more across the different wikipedias. Although the record established by en:Gangnihessou, translated into 39 languages, has yet to be matched, no article has been translated into less than 16 languages. notafish }<';> 09:33, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Other project reports

Wikispecies

• compare with related projects

Local projects

Ar, De, En, Es, Fr, Hi, It, Ja, Nl, Pl, Pt, Sw, Zh ...

One line notes with 20-30 words; see also previous reports on the Project page on Wikimedia:Wikimedia Quarto/1/En-4.

News from Ar: A lot of effort is put into improving the existing articles, with some new additions everyday. No special projects are currently going on.

News from Es: A very successful project called País de la Semana (Country of the Week) encourages contributors to enhance the article of the country chosen for that week. Countries with little to no information are prioritized.

News from Ja: Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation (MLIT) clarified that their aerial photos are available under GFDL. This is a big good news for us, because fair-use images are not accepted for legal reasons on Japanese Wikipedia. Our big thanks go to the effort of User:っ and the magnanimity of MLIT. e-Goat

News from Zh: The long-requested feature - Traditional/Simplified Chinese automated conversion - are coming with MediaWiki 1.4, which will attract more traditional Chinese users to Mediawiki projects and reshape the community. We owe Zhengzhu a lot for this wonderful work.

Content

Images

Featured images, with thumbnail blurb and backstory, from each of ten projects

• Osezaki Lighthouse - see ja:User:Aphaia/Sandbox2 --Aphaia 00:48, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Articles

3-5 Featured articles, linked-to by four-sentence excerpts, in the newsletter's language.

I have no idea about the editorial policy, but Aphaea suggested me to pick en:Joshua A. Norton, which is not free from controversy, but well-written (perhaps both in en & de), and an interesting read for sure. Feel free to use it or ignore it. Tomos 08:11, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Joshua A. Norton lived in the 19th Century San Francisco, and he is best known for his self-proclaimed Emperor status. "His Imperial Majesty Norton I, by the Grace of God, Emperor of the United States, and Protector of Mexico," surprisingly , was treated respectfully by some local citizens, business, media, and even government. He reigned until his death, and issued decrees, including the one dissolving the United States Congress, disbanding the Democratic and Republican Parties. Read more on his life, his deeds, and the public's reception on Wikipedia in English, German, or other languages.

Art & poetry

Something for the end-pages: original art, poetry, music, animation, funny stories from project members.

Like this?

• "Wizardpedia Academy" by ja:User:Lenji Disclaimers: its characters have no relation to any existing users nor an existing project of WMF :p
• ArdvarkTheAardvark This is quite cool :) notafish }<';> 18:32, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • How cute! Both the character and the project are worthy to be introduced on Quarto :) --Aphaia 04:18, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Grants/awards/contests

Pirelli contests

Someone should mention this, at least the March relativity contest.

Other grants

NEH? OSI? Other?

In the media

Radio 4 interview

I've emailed Sj a report on this. Angela 22:59, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)