A long-awaited draft of version 2 of the GFDL was released yesterday. It mentions a GNU Wiki License which hasn’t yet been released.
If you know about the GNU Wiki License, please add to the page on my wiki about it. I’m keeping it on the wiki not this blog since there’s not much to say about it yet and a wiki is more easily updatable than a blog.
Some useful videos for wiki newbies…
Leo Romero has created three screencasts showing how to edit the Silicon Valley Commons wiki, a “community for service-oriented organizations and people engaged in good work for the Silicon Valley”. The wiki, hosted by Wikia, uses the same MediaWiki software that Wikipedia uses, so it’s a good introduction to editing Wikipedia and many others wikis too, not just Wikia. The first video will teach you how to create an article, format text, insert images, preview, and save.
An interesting video if you want to know more about Wikipedia itself, rather than how to edit it, is the lecture video from the Harvard Law School course “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion“. See the wiki for links to the 12th September lecture by Charles Nesson. Accompanying lecture notes are on the course’s wiki. The course is about is “the creation and delivery of persuasive argument in the new integrated media space constituted by the Internet and other new technologies” and is available to an “at-large” audience as well to Harvard students, with participation happening on the wiki, on blogs, and in Second Life.
Wikipedia’s deleted articles are usually junk, but I found an exception – it was an interesting article on email hacks, a non-notable neologism by Wikipedia’s standards, but still worth rescuing for the Internet Wikia. An email hack is defined as “an unconventional email address that uses the commercial at symbol (”@”) as the letter “a” in the construction of a email address title.”
It inspired me to buy the domain nge.la, which gives me the email address 
, which in theory can be read as “wikiangela”. a.nge.la also redirects to this site, but I have a feeling that many people wouldn’t even recognise it as a valid URL and would just think I was writing my name in a very odd way. Does that seem true or am I not giving people enough credit for recognising that not every domain ends in .com? :)
In less than two weeks the Wikimedia Board elections will end, and I’m starting to feel like it’s going to leave a big gap in my life. Not that there’s really any room for gaps. After all, one of my many reasons for resigning was that I wanted to spend more time on Wikia, but as much as I love Wikia, I don’t want all my time to be spent on one project. Of course, I’m still editing Wikipedia and other wikis, but it’s not always interesting enough and it’s definitely not making me feel useful enough. So, I need something else to fill up the small amount of spare time I’m have when I leave the Board. But what? Do you know of any interesting and useful projects that need some help but aren’t too time consuming? Let me know in the comments below or on my wiki.
How many wikis can you fit on one page appears to be the question Wired are going to end up answering as their interesting attempt at having a wiki-edited article about wikis is spammed to death by a hundred people each of whom want to make sure “their” wiki is linked to. After just over 200 edits, the article has 51 links (compared to 20 in the original) and this is after Kernigh boldly removed a huge chunk of text containing another 37 links. Wikispaces.com is linked 7 times, and Wikipedia.org is linked 5 times. I’d like for there to be some mention of Wikia in there, but only if there’s a way of that adding something to the article – something which would actually be useful or interesting to the reader – and not just as yet another “and here’s my favourite wiki” link.
Esquire’s attempt at something similar seemed far more successful – perhaps because it was only edited by Wikipedians who didn’t have a lot to promote, other than Wikipedia, which was the focus of the article anyway. You can see the results of that at “Improve this article about Wikipedia“.
If you have 400 edits on a Wikimedia project, please go and vote for my replacement on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Voting started yesterday and goes on until September 21st. There are 17 candidates in this year’s election, most of whom I’ve met and many of whom I would trust in this position, including two people that I’ve hired and one that I’ve dated :). The only person I’m publicly endorsing this year though is Erik. He has a great platform and is really what the Board needs right now. This is the third Wikimedia election, but the first one I’ve been able to watch rather than candidate for. The other two saw me and Florence being elected in 2004 and 2005.
I wish all the candidates luck and look forward to seeing the positive changes to the Foundation that I’m sure almost any one of them could bring.
The image shows 16 of the candidates (I couldn’t find one of Ross). It’s collated from various images on Wikipedia and elsewhere, so don’t assume it’s available under a free license. From left to right, the image shows:
Improv, Eloquence, Mindspillage, Kim Bruning
Oscar, Zuirdj, Charles Matthews, Kelly Martin
Arno Lagrange, Linuxbeak, Cimon Avaro, Evrik
AaronSw, Arnomane, UninvitedCompany, Alex756
Wikia
WikiChix