Wikisource:News/2007-08-01

2007 board elections results
The 2007 Board of Trustees elections (see last month's coverage) have concluded. Eloquence and Mindspillage have renewed their positions on the board, and Frieda replaces the outgoing Oscar (see summaries of their candidate platforms).

The 2007 elections committee has opened a request for comment about the elections process to gather suggestions for the next elections scheduled for July 2008.

New hirings



 * Mike Godwin has been hired as the Wikimedia Foundation's General Counsel and Legal Coordinator. His tasks include handling routine legal needs, coordinating free legal help worldwide, and evaluating Foundation policies and procedures. The official announcement states that " Mike is an accomplished attorney with over 17 years of experience in legal policy development and advocacy concerning technology, privacy and the Internet. Most notably, he was the first Staff Counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to educating the public about civil liberties relating to technology, and acted as a defender of those liberties. He also served as Counsel to two Washington D.C.-based nonprofits, specifically Public Knowledge and The Center for Democracy and Technology. "
 * Sue Gardner will has been hired as a consultant and special adviser. Sue is tasked with assessing all aspects of the Foundation’s operations (from staffing to fund raising) and suggesting improvements. The official announcement states that " Sue comes to us from CBC.CA, the website of Canada’s national public broadcaster, and that country’s largest and most popular news site. Under her leadership as Senior Director there, CBC.CA more than doubled its audience size, and won dozens of international awards. Prior to running CBC.CA, she was a journalist for 10 years, writing for magazines and newspapers, and making documentaries and talk programming for media companies such as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio. "

Statistics
The French Wikisource has passed 2000 registered users.

Search engine upgraded
Special:Search has been upgraded. Although the upgrade has been implemented on the English Wikipedia, it is not yet active on the English Wikisource.
 * The search page now understands namespace prefixes. For example, searching for "Help:Contents" will search the Help namespace. Searching "All:Title" will search all namespaces, regardless of user preferences. Administrators can also create custom preferences by editing [MediaWiki:searchaliases] (documentation).
 * The score of a page, which affects sort order, now depends on how many other documents link to it.
 * Redirects no longer show up as individual entries, but increase the score of the targets. (Searching the title of a redirect should show the target page as the top result.)
 * Links from the top of the article (containing the notes) are given more weight in scoring, since they are assumed to give a short keyword-like description of the article.
 * Accents are now stripped during search ("Blasé" will match any variation like "Blase", "Blasè", et cetera).
 * It's now possible to search numbers.

New features

 * Special pages
 * Special:DeletedContributions (admin-only access) lists edits by a user that were deleted.
 * Special:ExpandTemplates now shows a preview of the text after expansion.
 * Special:Watchlist has a new 'View raw watchlist' feature, which allows users to edit their entire watchlists as text
 * When uploading an image, a preview of the selected license template is shown.
 * [MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist] allows local administrators to prevent the addition of a particular URL pattern in pages on Wikisource. It is related to Spam blacklist (a global list) and [MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist] (which overrides the global list).
 * The magic word  has been enabled on all Wikimedia wikis. It allows users to change the displayed page title, as long as the new title is a valid link to the page. For example, this can be used to lowercase the first letter (ie, "EBay" to "eBay").
 * JavaScript and CSS wiki pages (such as [MediaWiki:Common.css]) are now automatically rendered as syntax-coloured text.

Fixed bugs

 * Permanent links will no longer break if the page is renamed and the redirect deleted.
 * Timed redirects (such as the redirect to the last viewed page after logging in) have been removed for accessibility reasons.
 * The "rollback" link no longer appears for pages with only one revision (rollback failed in those cases).
 * The "(del)" link on image pages is now only visible to administrators.
 * The link syntax  (which links to a section on the parent page) now works correctly.
 * The  and   tags now accept inline CSS formatting (style=""), like HTML tags.