Wikisource:News/2007-08-01

Wikimedia Foundation

2007 board elections results

The 2007 Board of Trustees elections (see last month's coverage) have concluded. Eloquence and Mindspillage have renewed their positions on the board, and Frieda replaces the outgoing Oscar (see summaries of their candidate platforms).

The 2007 elections committee has opened a request for comment about the elections process to gather suggestions for the next elections scheduled for July 2008.

#	User name	Real name	Links	Votes
1.	Eloquence	Erik Möller	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	1671 votes (elected)
2.	Mindspillage	Kathleen Walsh	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	1427 votes (elected)
3.	Frieda	Frieda Brioschi	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	1254 votes (elected)
4.	Oscar	Oscar van Dillen	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	1234 votes
5.	Michael Snow	Michael Snow	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	1217 votes
6.	Yann	Yann Forget	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	1153 votes
7.	Kim Bruning	Kim Bruning	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	1047 votes
8.	Kate	River Tarnell	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	889 votes
9.	Kingboyk	Stephen Kennedy	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	864 votes
10.	Ausir	Pawel Dembowski	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	693 votes
11.	^demon	Michael "Chad" Horohoe	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	672 votes
12.	WarX	Artur Jan Fijalkowski	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	571 votes
13.	DragonFire1024	Jason Safoutin	statement, questions & answers, endorsements	495 votes

^[1]

New hirings

Mike Godwin, April 2005.

Sue Gardner, June 2007.

• Mike Godwin has been hired as the Wikimedia Foundation's General Counsel and Legal Coordinator. His tasks include handling routine legal needs, coordinating free legal help worldwide, and evaluating Foundation policies and procedures.

  The official announcement states that "Mike is an accomplished attorney with over 17 years of experience in legal policy development and advocacy concerning technology, privacy and the Internet. Most notably, he was the first Staff Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to educating the public about civil liberties relating to technology, and acted as a defender of those liberties. He also served as Counsel to two Washington D.C.-based nonprofits, specifically Public Knowledge and The Center for Democracy and Technology."

• Sue Gardner will has been hired as a consultant and special adviser. Sue is tasked with assessing all aspects of the Foundation’s operations (from staffing to fund raising) and suggesting improvements.

  The official announcement states that "Sue comes to us from CBC.CA, the website of Canada’s national public broadcaster, and that country’s largest and most popular news site. Under her leadership as Senior Director there, CBC.CA more than doubled its audience size, and won dozens of international awards. Prior to running CBC.CA, she was a journalist for 10 years, writing for magazines and newspapers, and making documentaries and talk programming for media companies such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio."

^[2][3]

Wikisource

Statistics

The French Wikisource has passed 2000 registered users.^[4]

MediaWiki

Search engine upgraded

Special:Search has been upgraded. Although the upgrade has been implemented on the English Wikipedia, it is not yet active on the English Wikisource.

• The search page now understands namespace prefixes. For example, searching for "Help:Contents" will search the Help namespace. Searching "All:Title" will search all namespaces, regardless of user preferences. Administrators can also create custom preferences by editing [MediaWiki:searchaliases] (documentation).
• The score of a page, which affects sort order, now depends on how many other documents link to it.
• Redirects no longer show up as individual entries, but increase the score of the targets. (Searching the title of a redirect should show the target page as the top result.)
• Links from the top of the article (containing the {{header}} notes) are given more weight in scoring, since they are assumed to give a short keyword-like description of the article.
• Accents are now stripped during search ("Blasé" will match any variation like "Blase", "Blasè", et cetera).
• It's now possible to search numbers.

^[5]

New features

• Special pages
  • Special:DeletedContributions (admin-only access) lists edits by a user that were deleted.
  • Special:ExpandTemplates now shows a preview of the text after expansion.
  • Special:Watchlist has a new 'View raw watchlist' feature, which allows users to edit their entire watchlists as text
  • When uploading an image, a preview of the selected license template is shown.
  • [MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist] allows local administrators to prevent the addition of a particular URL pattern in pages on Wikisource. It is related to m:Spam blacklist (a global list) and [MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist] (which overrides the global list).
• The magic word {{DISPLAYTITLE:new page title}} has been enabled on all Wikimedia wikis. It allows users to change the displayed page title, as long as the new title is a valid link to the page. For example, this can be used to lowercase the first letter (ie, "EBay" to "eBay").
• JavaScript and CSS wiki pages (such as [MediaWiki:Common.css]) are now automatically rendered as syntax-coloured text.

^{[6][7][8][9][10][11]}

Fixed bugs

• Permanent links will no longer break if the page is renamed and the redirect deleted.
• Timed redirects (such as the redirect to the last viewed page after logging in) have been removed for accessibility reasons.
• The "rollback" link no longer appears for pages with only one revision (rollback failed in those cases).
• The "(del)" link on image pages is now only visible to administrators.
• The link syntax [[../#section]] (which links to a section on the parent page) now works correctly.
• The <gallery> and <math> tags now accept inline CSS formatting (style=""), like HTML tags.

^{[12][9][10][11]}

References

1. "Notice of the results of the WMF Board of Trustees election" (Foundation-l, 12 July 2007)
2. "[Announcement] Welcome Mike ! (Foundation-l, 03 July 2007)
3. "Welcome Sue !" (Foundation-l, 27 June 2007)
4. "News and notes" (Wikipedia Signpost, 23 July 2007)
5. "searcher engine update on en.wiki" (Wikitech-l, 01 July 2007)
6. "Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News" (Wikipedia Signpost, 02 July 2007)
7. "DeletedContributions extension live" (Wikitech-l, 10 July 2007)
8. New feature requests:
   • bug 7172: "Extend output of [[Special:ExpandTemplates]] with rendered HTML"
   • bug 7255: "{{DISPLAYTITLE}} not working"
   • bug 7959: "edit raw watchlist"
   • bug 8492: "Configure an additional local spam blacklist on French Wikipedia"
   • bug 10520: "License tags should be displayed on the upload form"
9. "Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News" (Wikipedia Signpost, 02 July 2007)
10. "Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News" (Wikipedia Signpost, 16 July 2007)
11. "Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News" (Wikipedia Signpost, 30 July 2007)
12. Bug reports:
    • bug 1962: "Allow HTML attributes for <math>"
    • bug 9151: "Cannot link to section on relative page"
    • bug 9153: "Remove timed redirect/refresh on "return to" pages"
    • bug 10377: "Permanent links (oldid) break if an inexistent title is specified (incorrect existent titles work)"
    • bug 10508: "Allow passing "style" (and possibly other attributes) to <gallery>"
    • bug 10552: "Rollback link shouldn't appear in pages with only 1 revision"
    • bug 10741: "Delete link in file history for non-admins"