Wikinews:Water cooler/miscellaneous/archives/2012/February

14 pound baby!!!!!?????
It's a little stale now........I heard on a local radio station (tonight) that mom is a graduate of LeTorneau University in Longview, Texas.........not too far from my town (although I'm pretty sure she lives in another state now).......man, we missed that one!! Yowza!Bddpaux (talk) 03:50, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Wikinewsie.org moving hosting
After one last irksome problem with Godaddy, I'm moving the wikinewsie.org domain's hosting to another provider &mdash; based in Amsterdam.

New hosting will mean new email accounts, so please make sure you clean out what's on Godaddy. The good news is the new host, ITEC, offers mailing list support. So, there will be a wikinewsie.org list (at long last). Plus, the email accounts use SpamAssassin.

Initially, you'll probably see a couple of hours outage as DNS is re-pointed; you may lose some emails during this changeover! Once switched, I will start setting up accounts for people on the new host. You will still be able to download email from Godaddy, but new emails will come in to the new accounts.

I'll post another update once the site has transitioned. At that point, I can start switching over emails. Something is bound to break, so when it does contact me on brian dot mcneil at o2 dot co dot uk. --Brian McNeil / talk 16:20, 1 February 2012 (UTC)


 *  Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 16:23, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The Godaddy email store won't go away immediately (read, you've about a month to sort shit), but new emails will come in and need retrieved from a new server. --Brian McNeil / talk

Facebook: only comments, not new posts
Hi all: In "Posting Ability", I've unchecked "People can write or post content on the wall". That way, people can still comment on our (the admins) posts, but not start their own. I feel this is the only easy way for us to keep the spam to a minimum. -- Zanimum (talk) 00:11, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I s'pose. But did you see the spike in readers/likes when I complained :P --Brian McNeil / talk 19:59, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

After the Deadline
I'm not usually one to encourage editing in a word processor but, I went digging for a grammar checker to put into OpenOffice.

I found this, and it does rather a good job with a fair number of issues, particularly the vexatious passive voice. --Brian McNeil / talk 20:01, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Wikinews Importer Bot
w:User:Wikinews Importer Bot appears to be broken atm. Blood Red Sandman (Talk)   (Contribs) 17:26, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I left a message with the Bot operator, at w:User_talk:Misza13. -- Cirt (talk) 19:21, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Sounds like we're gonna need a new bot operator... Any volunteers from our end? Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 11:53, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Okay,… Ich bin der Roboter. I'll see what I can do with the code for it. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:20, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Apparently now pending at w:Wikipedia:Bot_requests. has said he could help. -- Cirt (talk) 15:02, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

No new articles relating to energy and the environment.
It seems that Category:Energy and Category:Environment have not had any new articles for a number of months. It is not as if there is no news on the topics! What is happening here? Alan Liefting (talk) 09:21, 20 February 2012 (UTC)
 * If you wish to see news on a given topic, feel free to write it. Having said that, I can think of a recent article I'll be adding to the former category. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 11:44, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Language Log
Facts and fables. As usual with Language Log, the comments make interesting reading. --Pi zero (talk) 16:48, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

WikiNews makes a video...
flag

This is interesting. Upon my daily sift through Google News for agencies that might post our articles, I came across this (A video from WikiNews...no not us): http://vimeo.com/35988111 It was posted on another site: http://www.vhx.tv/644528 I don't know who made the video. All I know is this poses a potential threat to us. I don't know enough about copyright laws in regards to the use of Wikipedia's project names or the use of logos. Regardless, this is not good and quite frankly kinda scared me a little. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 19:35, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Copyright law does not apply regarding logos and project names; trade-mark law, on the other hand, does.
 * I have emailed the first address I found at vimeo (their DMCA takedown one) and asked if they can help resolve this amicably. The email is CC'd to legal @ the WMF; perhaps, at long-last, they might take up our issues over nonsense like wikinews.com. That little point needs a WIPO case to get the domain, and is precisely the strong message needed here. --Brian McNeil / talk 20:15, 27 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Similar done with VHX. One would assume that the individual responsible for these instances of the mark being abused will hear from both. I would be unsurprised if the content is taken down as a proactive response from vimeo and VHX.
 * On the 'odious' situation surrounding wikinews.com, does anyone feel like drafting a WIPO filing? The domain has gone from showing a "coming soon" message &mdash; at which point the owner claimed they would "do something soon" to a parked ad-laden cash-in on the name. Those are generally trivially taken down and the domain redirected. --Brian McNeil / talk 20:30, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd start with a friendly email to the chap: info@shap-art.com in case this was just a sample exercise, and not really a plan to usurp en.wikinews.org :) -- Fuzheado (talk) 20:37, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I've emailed xem, and pointed out the site has been online since 2004. But, registered trade-marks must be defended; so, there are limitations on how 'friendly' any email can be.
 * I've also asked legal @wmg dot org to pursue wikinews.com, if need-be, through WIPO. It used to be owned by someone who set it up just as discussions on creating wikinews.org were closing; they've let it lapse, and it's a ad-trap. That'd never stand 10 minutes inspection from WIPO. --Brian McNeil / talk 21:40, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Seems like an innocent mistake. I contacted him and he said:

Hey Andrew!

It's just a student concept me and my partner came up with. We tried to find a way to help Wikipedia collect donations, it was a brief for a student competition. but we never heard about your project before- seems like we're not the only ones who had that idea. ... please accept our apologies, we really didnt know about your website. We thought it would be a great idea to do something like this, but you guys pulled off exactly what we wanted to do.


 * Seems like no harm no foul. But you may want to followup and (nicely) ask to take it down simply to avoid confusion. -- Fuzheado (talk) 21:43, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Did so. They emailed me directly saying they're taking it down. Gave me the opportunity to be more friendly, again extend an invite to take part, and suggest getting contacted about a trade-mark would be an excuse to show the work as part of their portfolio with an amusing anecdote associated. --Brian McNeil / talk 21:47, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

For my sins, I'm doing some of the cleanup. Vimeo were very prompt to respond asking for the mark registration number. I've replied that the creator is taking it down, so no further action required. --Brian McNeil / talk 22:21, 27 February 2012 (UTC)