Gary Kirk

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 24 ringtones theme | polyphonic ringtones | download free ringtones tracfoneкомпютри | free ringtones for cricket phone | download free polyphonic ringtones | mp3 ringtones converter | cheap mobile ringtones virgin | ringtones for nextel phone | hotlink maxis caller ringtones | blackberry free ringtones | free phone ringtones verizon wireless | blackberry free mp3 ringtones | virgin mobile usa ringtones | мебелиdownload free new ringtones | info nokia remember ringtones | ringtones composer | info polyphonic remember ringtones | 24 ringtones free | free gospel ringtones | free composer ringtones | 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!

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.

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.

A new Xinki site has launched. CGSB News is a kind of portal for CGSB news, views and content. I’ll advertise it about and see what happens…

I’m going to be reviewing a book in the next few weeks. I’ve ordered a review copy of “MediaWiki Administrator’s Tutorial Guide” and will write what I think here. A guy on the MediaWiki-l mailing list recommended it, so I’m interested.
Finally I recommend Akismet to anyone running a WordPress blog. If like me you allow anonymous comments, you can easily get spammed. WordPress tells me: “Akismet has caught 53 spam for you since you first installed it.” - all without me even seeing it!

The hard-working Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team have now completed the first stage of their ultimate goal: 1,964 of the best (many featured) articles of the English Wikipedia are now available on a CD costing $13.99 (around £8.50) from a French firm called Linterweb. A proportion goes to the Wikimedia Foundation.
You can also download an .ISO (’image’) of the release, which, like the disc itself, contains static versions of each article and open source software written to display the articles offline called KiwiX.
Update (08/04/07):
While this is certainly an important step towards a useful offline edition of Wikipedia, I don’t quite understand the people on foundation-l who are saying they will buy it. Why? It’s online for free! I’d suggest donating to the Foundation instead. The target audience for WP 1.0 is not Wikipediholics like us, it’s those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to a good quality encyclopaedia - for example, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project which inspired Jimbo to announce One Encyclopedia per Child.
I said this on foundation-l but I’m not sure if people understood me. Someone else made a similar, better-formed point later on which I clarified was what I was attempting to say.

Read the announcement on foundation-l and Titoxd’s post with interesting information on how we arrived at today’s news.

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

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.

Today Xinki Learn went live. This is an installation of Moodle, the open-source course management system. The idea is short courses can be created on anything people request. The first course is for administrators of MediaWiki sites who are not involved with the actual server administration of the site - volunteers, mainly.

We use Moodle in school and I’m interested in administering it, so it’s a learning experience for me too. We’ll see how it goes!

Feel free to join the first course, “Using MediaWiki”. The enrolment key is JIMBO.

Old news now yes, but I was in France yesterday and have been busy with Xinki the rest of the week so I thought I’d blog about it.

I visited the site as I was curious. What did I get? An error page. Then I accessed the site proper, and saw warnings about re-trying if I got errors, and lots of red links on the main page. Not good…
I checked out the new user log to see who was on this thing. Account creation is disabled; you have to request an account be created for you, with your username being your real name.

I then visited Special:Version. It said “MediaWiki 1.10 (modified)”, whatever modified means on an as-yet unreleased version of MediaWiki, and that they were using PostgreSQL as their database.

Will Citizendium be around in a years’ time? It’s hard to gauge. Back in 2001, nobody knew if Wikipedia was going to be successful. Here we are six years and over 1.7 million articles later. So who knows? Comments please!

Wikipedia’s volunteer UK press contact David Gerard was on BBC Radio 2 last Tuesday Thursday discussing Wikipedia. The phone call with Chris Evans live on air lasted around five minutes. David put in a good plug for much-needed cash after Chris asked whether, “like the BBC, Wikipedia would be free-to-air forever”. David also gave a brief history of Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales, prompted by Chris saying “He’s in China today, or…somewhere?”. I think it was Japan actually, but yeah. Good job! As they say, all publicity is good publicity.

He sounded really Australian on the radio. Yes David, I know you are Australian, but it sounded much more pronounced than when I heard you speak at the January London meetup - just an observation! (That’s a good thing )

Listen to the show

Update: Sorry, Thursday - not Tuesday!