Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Episode7

Episode 7: 1.5 Million Articles Released: 26 November, 2006

WikipediaWeekly episode 7.

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Transcript

A transcript is available here.

Wikipedia Weekly Episode 7

The Panel

Currently, it's planned that we make a conference on Skype, which works up to five folks.

Those signing up should be experienced with previous episodes, and be regular listeners of other podcasts.

Main hosts

• Fuzheado | Talk
• Tawker from Vancouver, Canada

Guest hosts

• Daveydweeb

Agenda

This is the basic layout of how the episode is planned to move along.

Time of Recording

• 26 November 2006, 0100 UTC

Introduce the panel

That'd be the speakers listed above. Each person says what they'd like to about themselves, and we move on.

See the script

News

Please note we need a "reponsible person" for researching each news item, and to be the default person to provide insight and details.

• We have a new subscription format, like the Wikipedia Signpost's, in the form of the {{WikipediaWeekly-subscription}} template.
• MILESTONES -- Wikipedia has now reached 1.5 million articles - (MessedRocker)
  • Celebrated on the main page with the banner: "The English language Wikipedia thanks its contributors for creating over 1,500,000 articles!"
  • German has reached 500,000 articles
  • French has 400,000 articles.
  • Article number 1.5M is Kanab Ambersnail.
  • Commentary: Jimbo implored the community to work on quality, rather than quantity. Since then Wikipedians have gone on to add over a hundred thousand more articles. Meanwhile, research by Greg Maxwell identified that there are nearly 300,000 unsourced articles on Wikipedia -- and that's a lower bound. Is the English Wikipedia really concentrating on improving quality? (Kelly)
• CITIZENDIUM -- CZ is "chugging along", has reached 300 users, and has implemented WikiProject-like "Discipline Workgroups". I gave CZ a bit of a rundown if anyone needs some more information on the site. (Daveydweeb, MessedRocker as backup)

From the Signpost

• DANNY'S CONTEST -- Military history dominates writing contest. - (1ne)
  • The winning entry was Crawford expedition, which went from this paragraph to a full-sized and excellent article.

• WIKIBOOK - Pearson to publish business wikibook (Fuzheado)

  The Wall Street Journal reports that Pearson PLC is partnering with University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and MIT's Sloan School to create a business book that will be authored and edited using wiki processes by an online community committed to the project. Wikipedia is mentioned as "inspiring" the effort. [1]

  "The wiki book, produced by a community of business experts and managers, will be called "We Are Smarter Than Me." It will explore how businesses can use online communities, consumer-generated media such as blogs, and other Web content to help in their marketing, pricing, research and service."

  • Will it work? (and why are they using such an awful wiki engine?)
  • Remember the Esquire article? Wikipedia:Improve this article about Wikipedia (and the better Wired article)

• STANDARDIZE WARNINGS -- (1ne)
  • From News and notes
  • Upcoming change to user page warnings by WikiProject User Warnings, aiming to standardise user warnings in order to improve their ease of use:

  "These messages are, for a lot of editors, their first actual interaction with the Wikipedia community. There are currently just short of 300 user templates, ranging from the ubiquitous test messages to messages about behaviour and format suggestions. Technical and wording changes will bring this number down to roughly 100, although redirects will ensure that old templates still work."

• WIKIMARKUP - (Kelly?)

  "It was a pleasure meeting you at the Wikimania in Boston and I just enjoyed listening to your last podcast and I heard mention of a "universal wiki syntax". I'm not sure if you are aware of my research work at Heilbronn University. We are working on WikiCreole, a wiki markup not to replace existing wiki markup, but as an additional way for new visitors to edit a wiki without having to learn that wiki engine's "native" markup. Do you know if on your last program they were speaking of WikiCreole or another project?"

  • Wikicreole
  • Wiki markup syntax standards, should we have more than Brion? (suggestion: talk to Christoph Sauer or Chuck Smith)

• CALACANIS/ADSENSE - (TBD)

  Guest from previous show, Jason Calacanis, writes more about Wikipedia, ads, and a commenter on his blog created a sample Greasemonkey script to do the opt-in adveretising when one surfs Wikipedia on Firefox.

  • However, they noticed the robots.txt file on Wikipedia foils this.
  • Intentional or not?
  • What does it mean?
    • http://www.calacanis.com/2006/11/10/wikipedia-blocks-opt-in-adsense-script/
    • http://www.calacanis.com/2006/11/03/wikipedia-proposal-part-5/#c1210058

Feedback

If anybody provides some particularly interesting feedback, or one of us has anything cool to say, we'd say it here. Who knows? It might be interesting, if we ever have anything to say.

The World According to Wikipedia

This would be a quick, light-hearted discussion of any particularly funny page-rankings we see on The Top 100 pages at Wikipedia. There's at least two or three minutes' worth of humour in that.

If lacking material, we could look at another Top 100 page, such as The Top 100 Vandalised pages on Wikipedia.