Gary Kirk

Bringing Wikimania 2008 to London

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

We now have a month - until September 23rd - to get a London bid to host Wikimania finalised, and seven days to get it into some reasonable shape until August 30th when the list of running cities is announced. Please, UK Wikimedians, take a look at the requirements and help out if you can at the bid page. Bringing Wikimania to London, site of the world’s first meeting between Jimmy Wales and other Wikipedians, would be a fantastic thing, as well as giving the new chapter something concrete to work towards. Let’s do it!

Posted in Wiki, Internet, Wikimedia | 3 Comments »

Wikibreak

Monday, May 28th, 2007

I’m on a wikibreak at the moment. On Thursday I blanked my Wikipedia userpage, adding {{wikibreak}}.

I need to temporarily abandon my day-to-day Wikipedia editing until my exams are over. It would probably be best if I unsubscribed from wikiEN-l and foundation-l, not to mention MediaWiki-l, but I don’t want the messages in my Gmail disrupted - I’ll just try to ignore most messages, maybe look through at weekends for the next ~month.

I’ll not be doing too much with Xinki either.

As for my The Apprentice proposal, well - I’ve sent it to the relevant person and it’s up to him to let me know.

Posted in Xinki, Wiki, General, Internet, Wikipedia | No Comments »

MediaWiki 1.10.0rc2

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

A second release candidate of MediaWiki 1.1.0.0 is now available. It’s currently running at sweet-technology.co.uk for testing purposes. The previous release, rc1, is running at garykirk.org.uk.

The final version of MediaWiki 1.10.0 should be released within the next week or two at the latest, I imagine.

Posted in Xinki, Internet | No Comments »

Xinki’s first bot attacks

Friday, May 4th, 2007

The Xinki project experienced minor vandalbot linkspam edits on several wikis over the last few days. This blog, as I have said before, gets many spam comments which are blocked by Akismet.
Until now, no anti-spam measures were in place on any of the wikis hosted by Xinki.
On Thursday (yesterday when I write this) the first spam edits were seen at the newly-installed pre-production stage Sweet Technology encyclopaedia wiki. The SpamBlacklist extension at mediawiki.org was installed and activated, but it is not known if it is functioning correctly as yet.
This morning similar spam was seen at the Xinki Lab and on the main Xinki Wiki, and consequently the ConfirmEdit extension was installed on all Xinki-hosted wikis as an emergency measure, going live at 14:30 GMT.

Posted in Xinki, Wiki, Internet | 2 Comments »

Freak error?

Saturday, April 7th, 2007

I just saw this when I clicked a link from a previous post to the English Wikipedia’s article on The Beatles:
“Not Found
The requested URL /wiki/The_Beatles was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
Standard 404 message, but on Wikipedia? A refresh sorted the problem for me. Someone on IRC just mentioned they found all the Wikimedia sites slow. Temporary I’m sure

Posted in Wiki, Internet | 1 Comment »

MediaWiki 1.10

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

I started individually downloading the files making up MediaWiki 1.10 (the next unreleased version for those who don’t know) from the Subversion repo today. After 20 minutes I could no longer be bothered and decided I could wait the few weeks (days maybe?) until 1.10 is released. When it is, I’ll install it at sweet-technology.co.uk before it’s rolled out across all Xinki wikis.

Posted in Xinki, Wiki, Internet | 4 Comments »

Can’t Buy Me Legal Downloads?

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

In February, the BBC reported that after Apple Corps (the Beatles’ record label) and Apple, Inc (formerly Apple Computer) reached an agreement over trademarks or something like that, it would shortly be possible to download the group’s back catalogue online using download sites such as Napster or the iTunes Store.
A UK download site called Wippit announced on Friday that they would be the first site to allow fans to legally download the music. EMI, Apple Corp’s parent record label came out today and said it ain’t happening - yet. The article does however, say “EMI is believed to be on the verge of releasing The Beatles’ back catalogue as digital downloads”.

Read the BBC article

Posted in Music, Internet | No Comments »

Mail on Sunday comments on Wikipedia

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Today’s (obviously…) Mail on Sunday - the tabloid that thinks it’s a broadsheet here in the UK - has an article on its website where four moderately well-known faces comment on Wikipedia. It’s a mixed bunch, with Edwina Currie declaring it rubbish and directing fans to her own site, complete with malformed domain name, to others taking the widely-accepted view that, as a wiki and a top-10 website, there are always going to be errors, but our volunteer editors try our utmost to quickly weed them out.

Of course, this being the MoS, there are errors - I wish we could weed them out! For example, Essjay’s supposed 20,000 edits - I think you’ll find it was 16,650, as I told Catherine Elsworth of The Daily Telegraph last week and she quickly updated it.
Read it yourselves

Posted in Internet, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

Xinki Photos gallery listed in Google!

Friday, March 9th, 2007

Xinki Photos, the Coppermine photo gallery on Xinki, now appears in Google search results. This blog, as well as Waggishmab’s also appears on Technorati. All good

Posted in Xinki, Internet | No Comments »

WaggishBLOG

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Due to the WordPress security exploit I mentioned earlier, WaggishBLOG was taken offline for just under ten minutes this afternoon as I worked on upgrading. It’s not quite as simple as for WordPress installations within Xinki, as Waggishmab.org.uk is a separate endeavour. Anyway, it’s done now, and both are running WordPress 2.1.2.

Posted in Technology, Internet | No Comments »

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