Archive:Notice Board

This page is for notices and reminders--memo-type stuff--to everyone working on this wiki. It's for administrative notices concerning day-to-day operations, important policy clarifications, requests, technical announcements, etc.

For news, use the Citizendium Blog.

Have questions? Ask here.

For discussion, use the Citizendium Forums.

For community-wide announcements, use Citizendium-L.

For announcements just to editors, use Citizendium-Editors.

For previous notices, see CZ:Notice Board/Archive.

April 23, 2007

I've registered eduzendium.org--try it out. --Larry Sanger 23:34, 22 April 2007 (CDT)

We've also set up the "TI" (Topic Informant) namespace. See Topic Informant Workgroup.

April 21, 2007

A penguin takes on all of Biology on behalf of the Computers Workgroup. Watch out!

What, the Computers Workgroup has an approved article? Yes, indeed, the first of many is now here in all its (his?) glory, da da DA DA....Tux. Congratulations!

April 20, 2007

Infant colic

Infant colic is shortly to be nominated (by me) for approval. Authored by User:Christo Muller, a physician experienced in the care of inconsolable infants, it is important that the article itself is not changed by edits, please, at this stage. HOWEVER, it needs eyes for copyediting and comments. As it is a sensitive subject that directly bears on the care of infants, I ask that these comments be put on the talk page. They will be addressed. Nancy Sculerati 07:17, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Editorial Council now in its infancy

The Editorial Council has just been kicked off. See CZ Editorial Council Members for a list of members; its wiki home will be at Editorial Council; the section of the Policy Outline that gives its (current!) governing rules is right here; and its mailing list archives are available (little there right now).

April 14, 2007

Pictures wanted - for series on normal infant and child development. For parents who are willing to let CZ publish their own pictures of their own children, we would appreciate pictures of babies smiling, holding things, and youngsters crawling, standing, and walking. Especially those -"first standing holding on" type shots. Crying infants for Infant colic who are between about 1 and 3 months of age also wanted. These pictures can only be used if uploaded with permission for CZ to use and a statement that says the pictures were taken by you (you have copyright). Thanks (and for those whose babies are the furry and four-legged (or feathered) we need pets, too! Nancy Sculerati 16:35, 14 April 2007 (CDT)

April 13, 2007

Servers are behaving badly. Looking into it.

UPDATE: Database server had a disk full problem. Fixes are in place. No data was lost. The database is doing an unscheduled vacuum at the moment as a sanity check. Site will be slow and sometimes unresponsive while the vacuum is running.

UPDATE: One web server was just behaving badly. Locke was taken out of rotation and had it's operating system upgraded inplace from CentOS 4.4 to CentOS 5.0. Locke will rejoin the rotation shortly after testing. Jason Potkanski 22:49, 13 April 2007 (CDT)

April 4, 2007

Thanks to many people hard at work on The Big Cleanup, the pages in our database that have been checklisted now number 721. That represents a lot of useful work; we're over a quarter finished, since the total number of pages to go through is about 2800, and not all of them are articles, so not all of them will be checklisted. This also means that we can get a rough idea of the breakdown of our articles. (The count is skewed to a certain extent by the fact that some people went through Jaap Winius' copious snake articles, which upped the count of "external" articles.) Anyway, 331 of the articles, or 46%, are nonstub articles, meaning they are over 100 words or so, and are not merely copied here from elsewhere. Only 232, or 32%, are marked as external articles, meaning articles that began life elsewhere (typically, Wikipedia) and have not been significantly changed since they were uploaded. We have been deleting these pretty aggressively.

• Anti Vandal changed not synced to reid properly, done so.

• Error searching for images and returning a database error was fixed by Greg.

• Textop.org wiki locked from spam.

• Creation of new testbeds on dev server for development use. Electrawn 01:21, 5 April 2007 (CDT)

April 3, 2007

• Anti Vandal extension modified to send a no-cache, must-revalidate header. Users blocked by the extension were ending up in squid's cache, causing genuine users to occasionally get blocked messages. Electrawn 03:39, 3 April 2007 (CDT)

April 2, 2007

Vandalism update

We just had our first vandal attack outside of our self-registration period. All the damage has been undone. The user account was made during our self-registration period--a "sleeper account." There's a chance there's a few more of these, so this evening, constables will be checking through our account list for bogus accounts. We'll also be deleting older, never-used accounts soon. It remains the case that vandalism has been exclusively the result of self-registration.

Technical update

• PHP Sessions are now shared between servers via NFS. Not the best solution, but problems with suddenly being logged out should clear.

• A Math/TeX rendering bug has been fixed and submitted to MediaWiki developers as a patch. As a side effect, servers are much more stable.

• A change was made to our anti vandal extension to enable it to work with our Squid proxy configuration. 403 errors claiming to be a "Major search engine bot" should disappear. Electrawn 01:18, 2 April 2007 (CDT)

April 1, 2007

We now have more articles than Wikipedia!

(April Fool!)

Well, if we keep creating very short articles, called "stubs," we will. Please, while it's all right to create a few stubs, particularly if you're committed to expanding them sometime soon, we would prefer that you focus on a smaller number of longer articles. It really does not do anyone good to have many very short articles. Stubs contain almost no information, and therefore not the information for which people might want to search; they "scratch the itch" of red links, when we would like that itch more fully scratched with a good article; they are a poor example to newer people, who follow the example by writing short articles of their own; and they are, arguably, a sign of vanity, because they merely add to the number of articles you've started!

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Congratulations to Petréa_Mitchell, who put the right workgroup category on the United States of America. Thank you.