Gary Kirk

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 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.

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!

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

A Wikimedian, Essjay, has been the subject of much controversy over the last day or two. In the summer he gave an interview to Stacey Schiff, a journalist with US paper The New Yorker. In it he said he was a “tenured professor of theology”. Recently, after taking up a paid position with Wikia, it was revealed he is in fact a 24-year-old kid named Ryan Jordan, as his userpage currently says. He is no professor, and he has no degrees. Of course, there is no obligation to be “real” on Wikipedia - rightly so. The debate has erupted after The New Yorker published an editor’s note on the article’s page on their website. Essjay is a long-standing and respected Wikimedian - he (was - as of today) an arbitrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, oversight - in positions of trust, for those unfamiliar with WP) and the issue is whether he used his fake credentials in content issues. I am simply reporting how I see it here; for detailed information you can read the wikiEN-l mailing list archives - particularly this thread started by Jimmy Wales.

If Wikipedia gets $100 million, here’s what they should spend it on by ZDNet’s Russell Shaw — A week ago Sunday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales put out this enticing sounding open letter asking Wikipedia users for recommendations about how the collaborative, free online encyclopedia might spend an um, maybe-not-so-hypothetical $100 million war chest to acquire the rights to digital works. OK, Jimbo. First you should, in conjunction with experts, draw up a list […]

I’ve now seen Firefox 2.0. I like it. It’s basically all a Web browser needs to be, and is open-source too. I’m not looking to be making toast with a Web browser - I just want to browse the Web. Of course, not just browse it - create it too, but you know what I mean.

Finally, Microsoft has apparently set release dates for Windows Vista (and Office and Exchange 2007). Five years, three months and five days after XP was launched. I suppose this is good news…though it does mean I didn’t win the guess-the-launch-date contest. Actually I’ve forgotten which date I guessed…so who knows?

This has been an interesting week. Firefox 2.0 was released on Wednesday with new features, themes and…stuff. (I haven’t tried it so I don’t know - but it’s bound to be good, isn’t it?) Nearly two years since the original Firefox was released, out of Phoenix and previously Firebird - built on the Mozilla Suite. Notice how they haven’t made a huge fuss about it like Microsoft have with IE7.

Installing MediaWiki on my new 1&1 hosting package was disappointing - they don’t have PHP 5. Angela Beesley recommended HostGator.com, so once I cancel my contract I’ll be going with them. Yes, you can have subdomains if you want!

Finally, I copyedited Wikizine this week. It’s a short, to-the-point plain text newsletter about Wikimedia.

Various news this first week. First, Google is going to buy YouTube. What this means for Google and YouTube is yet to be seen, but it is known the site will keep its own branding and 67 members of staff at the headquearters they recently moved into. So, like Writely is at the moment - no great “Google Write” re-branding or anything. - Update: Late last night Google merged Writely with Google Spreadsheets and relaunched as Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Maybe people will be able to log in to YouTube with their Google Account, in time, pre-empting some sort of merge with Google Video. On a side note, I first blogged about Google Video back in March 2005!

The other thing is my Request for Adminship on the English Wikipedia, which ends this Friday.