A message from the editor
Welcome to the September edition of The Daily Edit. You may have noticed that there are a lot of big changes in this issue. The Daily Edit was always hard to manage. Ever since I became editor-in-chief, I knew that there would need to be a lot of hard work. The first issue was fantastic. There was that excited feeling that I sometimes get when something good happens. However, the issues that followed weren’t so good. The newsletter was originally going to have six sections in each issue. However, in the second issue, there were only four. I think that this is because people were excited about a new project and wanted to contribute to it but ended up abandoning it. I can’t blame those people however, as I sometimes have that mentality (nobody’s perfect). For some reason, the issue after that had seven issues. I don’t understand how that happened, but you’ve got to admit that the content wasn’t that great. Then came August - a disaster. I was in a forest for a good part of the month with no internet access and when I came back, I found that no content had been created at all. I realised that The Daily Edit wasn’t going to be created and published without its editor. The issue was abandoned.
The Daily Edit had always had its complications right from the beginning with the fact that scary transclusion is cached. I realised that the newsletter needed a new look. For this reason, starting with this issue, there will be the following changes:
- The biggest change of all is that The Daily Edit is now only one page. This means that there is just the simple process of clicking the ‘edit’ button and none of the previous complications.
- The links at the bottom of the screen have been changed slightly.
- The Newsroom has now become a discussion area for the stories in the month’s Daily Edit. Talk:The Daily Edit remains discussion for The Daily Edit as a project.
- There will be no deliveries from now on. There is no need and the bot was never reliable.
Another note, a lot of people have been asking me why this is called ‘The Daily Edit‘. Well, the fact is that the project’s creator, sannse, said that this is “for people who edit daily”. However, I think that this name should be changed since it’s misleading as the newsletter only comes out once a month. Let’s have a little poll shall we? –Leon Byford (editor-in-chief)
<>
Do you want a new name for The Daily Edit?
Please vote below or
click here to see the results.
There were 26 votes since the poll was created on 05 Sep 2007 19:12:21 UTC.
TabView
On 17 August, a new extension was announced. TabView allows you to create tabbed pages where you just click on the tab to switch the content. This uses JavaScript to transclude the content from another page. The syntax is as follows:
<tabview id="ID (optional)" title="TITLE (optional)">
TAB NAME|?title=PAGE NAME&action=render
TAB NAME|?title=PAGE NAME&action=render
TAB NAME|?title=PAGE NAME&action=render
[...]
</tabview>
There are two other parameters that can be added for each entry:
- Cache content?
- Active tab?
These are both true/false.
Administrators
On 9th August, Zizanzu requested adminship. However, the request was closed one month later on 9th September with no supports.
IRC RC
The time has finally come when we now have the long awaited IRC RC! #rc gives all changes to all Wikia while #cvn-wikia shows possible vandalism.
Title blacklist
The new title blacklist means that if you try to save a page that is listed, you are stopped. This should help decrease vandalism and spam.
There were an amazing 80 new wikis in 14 languages created last week! We’re still gathering wikis on the greatest games and added 27 new gaming wikis last week. If you’re not a gamer, there’s also travel, shopping, beer, music, movies, literature, education, and more… see new wikis this week for the full list.
Some of the most active new wikis include Myth Drannor, City Building games, Iceburg Inc. gaming community, Space Cowboy Online game, Basketball, Trapped in the Closet, Monster in My Pocket, l33t, The Sith Council, and Cthulhu.
50 wikis were created this week. See new wikis this week for the list.
One new gaming wiki I want to give a special welcome to is Guildopedia, the Dofus Guilds wiki. Guildopedia will soon reach the milestone of 1000 articles and decided this week to move to Wikia! This is a great complement to Wikia’s Dofus wiki which has more than 6000 articles in the English version alone and thousands more in eight other languages.
Visit the list for the other 49 new wikis, including wikis in Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, Frisian, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish!
The 50 Parties Wikia was created by Jimmy Wales and Heather Ford at Wikimania as a place for Wikians, Wikimedians, and Creative Commoners to plan joint parties. Visit the wiki to get involved.
For more new wikis, view the list at new wikis this week.
Jeremie Miller, head of Wikia’s Search project, posted an overview of the project’s vision today.
Wikia Search will enable search to become a part of the Internet’s infrastructure. Building on Atlas as an
open protocol, search can become a fully distributed and interoperable world-wide community. All of the participants can interact openly and in any role where they believe they can add value to the network.
A search engine can be constructed from many independent entities serving different roles instead of one monolithic system.
There are three primary roles within Atlas:
- Factory - Responsible to the content.
- Collector - Responsible to the keyword.
- Broker - Responsible to the searcher.
Read Jeremie’s post to find out more and join the new Wikia Altas mailing list to get involved in this radically different search ecosystem.
Creator of Jabber is hired by Wikia
Jeremie Miller, creator of Jabber, has been hired by Search Wikia to help create an open-source, community powered search engine.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikia wants to create a search engine with a wiki concept. He said that search is “currently broken” and with Wikia Search, results will be editable making the service more reliable. For example, in normal engines, results are often filled with spam which the user doesn’t want.
Miller has been working on a standard protocol that search-related projects could use as a collaboration tool. Wales expects an “extremely alpha” version of Search Wikia to be available by the end of the year. “So we’re quite a ways until we have a consumer search project,” he said.
Shun Fukuzawa joins the Community Team
Shun Fukuzawa (Yukichi), a contributor to the Japanese Wikipedia has joined the Community Team this month. Shun has been involved with the open source communities and so has a lot of experience.
Features
This month’s featured article is Fifth Battle of Installation 03 from Halo Fanon at the Halo Fanon Wikia. It takes you to 28 October 2552 in a timeline-style battle. The structure of this article is very interesting as you get to see different things happening in different places at the same time.
Admins
Dantman has been made an administrator on Wikia Central.
ComTeam interview
This month, Jack Phoenix asks Datrio what he thinks of Wikia.
So, welcome everyone! Thanks for joining us on this interesting interview. Today I’m interviewing Datrio, a member of Wikia’s Community Team.
Jack Phoenix: So, Datrio, how long have you been working for Wikia?
- Datrio: Let’s see… I started as part of the Wikia technical team around October last year, during the Wikia All-Hands Meeting in February this year we’ve decided I would be better as a member of the oh-so-fabulous Community Team, so I moved there.
Jack Phoenix: What’s your typical day in Wikia like?
Read the rest of the interview here…
In the news
Technology report
RandomImage: The RandomImage extension has been installed meaning that you can add a random uploaded image on a page.
Search web links: Special:Linksearch allows you to view external links to a specified domain name. It can be used to find spam links.
Image caching: In the Wikia-l mailing list, Matthew Silvey said:
- “We have a new web caching service that will speed up page load time [...] The downside is that there will be a slight delay in updating images for the next day or two. You may see up to two hours in delay between when an existing image is changed and when you can view it. We are hoping to have this reduced to a few minutes quickly.”
Other: There has also been work on the skins and search feature. The slate and smoke skins should be available soon.
Featured Wikia Design
Creatures Wiki is known for its well-made site design. Here are a few of the interesting bits of customization the Creatures community has performed on their wiki. Read more…
