| (Swedish) WikiLurv Editing Drive! |
[30 Jun 2009|01:43pm] |
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As some of you may know, yours truly is the founder/administrator of WikiLurv, WikiFur's Swedish sister wiki. Earlier this month, I made a post to the Swedish furry forum I run, as well as to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) swefur. It didn't quite occur to me to post here as well at first, but hey, better late than never, eh?
I am offering a free, as-of-yet-undecided-but-probably-art (at my prices this would be at least a $20 value) prize to at least one editor on WikiLurv who edits at least five articles in the time period June 1 through August 15. The person will be chosen by me determining who is eligible and then picking names out of a hat (or a jar, or whatever other container I happen to have handy), or possibly writing a numbered list and rolling dice.
The catch? This prize will only be offered if WikiLurv has at least 250 articles at midnight, August 15 (or whenever I first remember/have time to check after that).
Do you know anyone proficient in Swedish who might be interested? Let them know! Are you that someone? Come on over, and invite your friends along! We have zounds of wanted articles, and you are more than welcome to translate content from WikiFur!
In order to reach the goal, we need a little less than two new articles per day. Progress is tracked every Monday on the original post about the drive (Swedish, though). Any questions, I'm here to answer!
-Alexandra
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| WikiFur Search gets interlanguage upgrade |
[21 Jun 2009|02:50pm] |
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As the non-English WikiFur projects don't contain all the topics covered in English, users searching them often have to repeat their search on the English version - or leave unsatisfied.
( Now there's a better solution . . . )
If you often search WikiFur, consider also adding WikiFur Search to your browser. Just go to the main or search page for the language you want, then click the down arrow next to your browser's search box and add WikiFur as a default. (For Opera, see here)
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| Wikia and WikiFur licensing: to clear up confusion |
[18 Jun 2009|02:29am] |
If any users of the English WikiFur have noticed talk page announcements posted this Thursday regarding Wikia's exclusive switch to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license this Friday, we would like to inform all users that WikiFur is already mentioned as an opt-out candidate, as we have already switched to a dual-licensing scheme involving both the CC-by-SA and the GFDL as of the last week.
The English WikiFur is already slated for resettlement onto non-Wikia servers owned by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) timduru by the end of the year (the last and largest WikiFur project to do such), and, as stated in an earlier post by greenreaper, all WikiFur subprojects will retain the dual-licensing scheme for the foreseeable future on the new servers.
(Cross-posted from my LJ, since it was supposed to be posted here)
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| Scheme-relative URIs break a lot of things |
[08 Jun 2009|01:24am] |
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Peter Chilvers - Machinery - Creatures 2 |
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As part of an overly-obsessive quest for efficiency, WikiFur's interlanguage links and wikistats use scheme-relative URIs, e.g. //ru.wikifur.com/. Yeah, that's a real URL. Check out rfc3986 ยง5.4:
Within a representation with a well defined base URI of
http://a/b/c/d;p?q
a relative reference is transformed to its target URI as follows.
...
"//g" = "http://g"
So far, this has broken:
* MediaWiki, which assumed anything starting with a slash is relative to the current site (resulting in links like http://ru.wikifur.com//es.wikifur.com/wiki/WikiFur)
* Firefox, which ignored a scheme-relative <base> tag on a deeply-buried stats page (not really a bug, as <base> specifies absolute URIs, but other browsers accept it)
* At least two web crawlers (Cuil and DotBot), which went looking for articles on the stats server . . . I'm curious to discover its next victim! In other news, the WikiFur logo is almost 50% smaller thanks to a little messing around with the GIMP's index mode tool (inspired by Russian administrator Shnatsel's creation of a modified logo for our test wikis). Wireshark helped find the optimal size to fit into two packets. It's a useful utility, along with Firebug and YSlow.
But why bother when it was just 5Kb to start with? Even with caching, the logo is loaded almost 1000 times a day. It'll be ten times that once English is moved over - a difference of over 20MB a day. And it makes the user experience that much faster - especially for those thousands of miles away. On a big website, every little helps.
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| Four languages migrated to wikifur.com; RAM upgraded to 4GB |
[06 Jun 2009|03:36pm] |
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Dr Bombay - S.O.S. (The Tiger Took My Family) |
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I am pleased to announce the migration of the German, French, Czech and Portuguese WikiFur projects to wikifur.com, along with a doubling in server memory. Existing editors of these projects should be able to login as normal, although you should reset your email address and preferences, as they cannot currently be imported.
The new hosting is ad-free, has been thoroughly tuned for performance, and offers many new features, including:
* Breadcrumbs - a navigation tool to encourage category exploration (example)
* Abuse filter - encourages positive contributions by catching common mistakes (or vandalism) before it's saved
* An integrated Java chat that goes #wikifur for those without IRC clients
* Multi-category search - ever wanted to know what fursuiters are also webmasters, or find conventions started in 2004 outside of Alberta? Now you can.
* Our own media pool, allowing images to be shared across all wikifur.com sites, just like Wikimedia Commons
* A translation link for logged-in users whose language is different to that of the wiki
My thanks to Timduru for his tireless help with the server. The hosting costs him a lot, and also hosts services like Fursuit-TV, the Funday PawPet Show, and the Fursuit Database, so please consider chipping in! I'd also like to congratulate the Russian and Spanish WikiFur projects, who helped us work out the kinks while building impressive sites of their own.
Will English be joining the others? Yes! But not just yet - we still have a few things to do to ensure a smooth transfer. For now, please check your links and bookmarks go to en.wikifur.com/wiki/Article. And if you don't have any, why not make a few? (You can also use wikifur.com/Article look up an English article.)
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| WikiFur server upgrade this week |
[04 May 2009|11:46am] |
Timduru is upgrading WikiFur's host server to FreeBSD 7.1 this week, which is likely to cause a few minutes of downtime for sites hosted on wikifur.com (probably on Friday-Saturday).
See the status page for updates; WikiFur is j8.
Edit: The upgrade is now complete. As a bonus, we also have slightly newer versions of Squid and MySQL.
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| Upcoming dual-licensing with CC-BY-SA 3.0 |
[12 Apr 2009|07:00pm] |
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Edit: Wikimedia has confirmed the change for June 15.
As noted in previous posts, Wikipedia's parent organization Wikimedia is considering a licensing change to dual-licensing with CC-BY-SA 3.0, which is permitted by version 1.3 of the GFDL. Voting is in progress and I encourage regular Wikipedia editors to participate.
WikiFur is also under the GFDL, and I believe we should make a similar change. It makes it easier for third parties to reuse WikiFur content, under a familiar license, and without the baggage (copying the license) required by the GFDL.
Like Wikipedia, it makes sense for WikiFur to switch as a whole in order to preserve the ability to translate between projects. This change will therefore take effect simultaneously across all languages. Our partners WiliLurv and TurriWiki are separate projects, and must therefore make their own decisions.
I intend to make this change when Wikimedia does, or in any case before August 1. If you have any questions or objections, now is the time to speak up! Check Wikimedia's Q&A first, as they may already have been answered.
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| Technical Difficulties |
[31 Mar 2009|11:20pm] |
Earlier today some of you may have noticed an inability to load any of Wikifur's pages. All you may have seen is a blank white html page with a title being the URL of the page you tried to visit.
Thankfully at the time of this posting, the Wiki is once again accessible. The cause of this downtime is explained as problems in Wikia's back-end servers.
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| On the new Chinese WikiFur |
[06 Mar 2009|07:37pm] |
Is it in Vernacular Chinese (the government-sponsored, Mandarin-oriented Chinese) or in the other varieties of Chinese writing?
Oh, and congratulations to dbfox, OmegaCyberDragon and Kakurady for setting up this most recent lingual edition of WikiFur today. Hope to see news about, say, conventions being planned in Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Also, maybe this is a stepping stone to, say, a Japanese-language WikiFur that can bring in the kemono fandom from the Japanese Wikipedia?
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