Wikisource:News/2019-04
From the Editors: Volume 3 confirmed
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After 43 months of inactivity, a new English Wikisource contributor has taken on the task of Wikisource:News's resurrection. User MJL, a relative newcomer to Wikisource, will be taking a leadership role in the development of this newsletter. The April 2019 edition will have five articles with more editions to follow of various sizes.
"I decided to restart this project because I felt it really had brought a lot of value to the community here. Ideally, Wikisource:News would have been kept going for longer than it did, but now here we are." MJL wrote in a statement. They continued, "I hope no one minds that I am trying to do this. While it is a pretty important responsibility, my priority will remain transcribing works here. Anyone is free to step in my place for the May issue because I really would prefer to focus on Wikiproject Validate." [1]
Wikisource:News has its origins loosely tied with a project by Dovi on multilingual Wikisource on 17 September 2005 (link). That project is still ongoing to this today, yet it is not as frequently updated.
On March 2006, Pathoschild conceived of a newsletter more similar to the Wikipedia Signpost at the Scriptorium.[2] During the discussion, Dovi expressed their support for the initiative and requested it cover other language Wikisources. The platform was soon launched.
Primarily written by Pathoschild,[3] the publication continued for 27 issues. However, issues 25, 26, and 27 of the newsletter were each nearly a year apart from one another. Volume 1 is generally considered to have ended by its last issue in 2010 written by Billinghurst. They would go on to note the difficulties of maintaining this project. [4]
Then in December 2012, Adam B Morgan proposed for the Maintenance of the Month a relaunch the newsletter.[5] This led to an additional 27 issues[6] until it fell off in July 2015.
Until this issue, there have been no known publications of Wikisource:News since.
Notes
- ↑ See "WikiProject Validate reaches five members" for more on this topic.
- ↑ Pathoschild, 08:03, 4 March 2006 (UTC); "
There have been a lot of changes occuring on Wikisource recently, and not everyone has the time or interest to keep up with the discussions. I think it'd be a good idea to create a Wikisource News service in the spirit of the Wikipedia Signpost.
" Link: Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2006-03#Wikisource_News - ↑ As well as notably, Zhaladshar who has the distinction of being the first user registered on Wikisource.
- ↑ Billinghurst, 13:12, 6 January 2016 (UTC);
We are truly good transcribers, though not the best communicators.
Link: Special:Diff/6049667#Inactive? - ↑ AdamBMorgan, 13:11, 4 December 2012 (UTC); "
Wikisource:News has been dormant for a while and relaucnhing it has been suggested. We need to decide how it will work from both a technical and organisational perspective. This project will also need volunteers to act as newsletter editors and possibly others to assist in running the newsletter.
" Link: Wikisource:Maintenance of the Month/Newsletter relaunch - ↑ Exactly 27 more issues.Spooky.
Xover nominated to be admin
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Shakespeare enthusiast Xover was recently nominated to be an admin for English Wikisource. They have been on contributing to the project since 2015.[1] On 17 August 2016, they had been granted the autopatroller user right.
As of the time of writing, Xover has had 4,228 edits to Wikisource with an impressive 85.7% of that being to the Page namespace.[2] Recently, though, they have been increasing their involvement in Wikisource. Only three months into the current year, Xover has almost doubled their previous year's contributions.
| Year | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | 211 | 284 | 489 | 1,113 | 2,104 |
Beyond that, Xover is also a longtime Wikipedian. On English Wikipedia, they have nearly 20,000 edits and been granted the pending change reviewer right.
Xover did not be immediately respond to an inquiry left on their talk page in connection to this story.
Notes
- ↑ According to CentralAuth, Xover has had their account attached since 14:53, 22 August 2008 and had a first edit on 18:35, 10 July 2011. They had regularly started to contribute after 19:51, 10 September 2015.
- ↑ According to XTools as of 2019-03-31 17:28.
- ↑ Generated using XTools on 2019-03-31 17:15
Year 2011 with 13 edits excluded.
Administrator confirmations for April 2019
[edit]An administrator has been reconfirmed for March 2019:
- Mukkakukaku (talk • contribs)
(Discussion <ongoing)
Three administrators are having their confirmation discussions in April 2019:
- Charles Matthews (talk • contribs)
- Phe (talk • contribs)
- Prosfilaes (talk • contribs)
This story was updated on 12:56, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
Wikisource — A Wikipedia project
[edit]This story is a republication of "Wikipedia — A Wikipedia project" which originally ran in the the Wikipedia Signpost. It has only been edited to fix internal links, and the original story with complete attribution can be found here.
The Wikimedia Foundation is conducting a community consultation on the Wikimedia/Wikipedia brand. In particular, the rebranding project proposes:
- Using Wikipedia as the central movement brand rather than Wikimedia.
- Providing clearer connections to the sister projects from Wikipedia to drive increased awareness, usage and contributions to all movement projects.
- Retaining Wikimedia project names, with the exception of Wikimedia Commons which is recommended to be shortened to Wikicommons to be consistent with other projects.
- Exploring new naming conventions for the Foundation and affiliate groups to use Wikipedia rather than Wikimedia.
- Considering expository taglines and other naming conventions to reassert the connections between projects (e.g. “______ — A Wikipedia project”).
So far, most people in the discussion object to usurping the Wikipedia brand (a portmanteau of wiki + encyclopedia) and plastering it over projects which are not encyclopedias, like wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki + dictionary), creating a weird Wiktionary, a Wikipedia project tagline, when Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Other projects also feel that they have strong identities of their own, such as Wikinews, which is not affiliated with Wikipedia. Broad consensus is that rebranding other Wikimedia projects as "Wikipedia projects" is both inaccurate, and creates more confusion than it solves.
Other aspects of the rebranding efforts are less opposed, with several suggestions aiming to establish more effective brands for Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, the Wikimedia Foundation, and MediaWiki.
WikiProject Spotlight: WikiProject Validate
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The Czech Republic and Slovakia just celebrated their 100th anniversary being independent from Austria-Hungary.
WikiProject Validate (sometimes known as WS:WPV in reference to the shortcut) is a recently formed WikiProject to get more works in Category:Index Proofread "green"[1] meaning validated. An important milestone for the project was the celebration of their fifth participant.[2]
WS:WPV has also almost completely validated the 132-page work Bohemia's case for independence by late President of Czechoslovakia Edvard Beneš (As of time of writing, it is the current featured task). The work was proposed for validation by Jan Kameníček, a resident of the Czech Republic,[3] on the WPV Noticeboard.[4] All that remains for the transcription project is to validate the remainder of Pages 53 to 75 and Pages 95 to 106. It has been the featured task since January 2019.
Only a few days ago, Wikisource Administrator Beleg Tâl posted on the WikiProject's Noticeboard suggesting a merger with Wikisource:Validation of the Month.[5] The discussion remains ongoing with few users having weighed in so far (link).
The first to weigh in was WikiProject Validate participant MJL, who did not disagree with the proposed merger. When asked for further comment, MJL responded, "I am really happy with the work that we have all done so far, but I do think that it would be good long term for us to be featured in Template:Collaboration or something else on the main page. That could make validating works a lot easier."
The future of the WikiProject as well as the implications of the potential merger remain unclear.
Notes
- ↑ As one could see in Help:Page status, validated works in Wikisource have their status displayed in green, so a page that's green has been validated (hence the nickname).
- ↑ At time of writing, it is now up to six.
- ↑ That is according to his userpage.
- ↑ Jan.Kamenicek, 17:28, 25 October 2018 (UTC); "
As Czechia is celebrating the 100th anniversary of independence from Austria-Hungary, I suggest to validate the following works:
" Link: Wikisource:WikiProject Validate/Noticeboard#Comment from Jan Kameníček
* Bohemia's case for independence (transcription project) - ↑ Beleg Tâl, 13:16, 27 March 2019 (UTC); "
It seems to me that the community would be better served if both community-validation efforts were working in tandem. WS:VotM is a spin-off of WS:PotM; see Wikisource talk:Proofread of the Month#Validation of the Month logistics.
" Link: Wikisource:WikiProject Validate/Noticeboard#Merging with Wikisource:Validation of the Month