Wikisource:News/2007-09-01

New bot and administrator, confirmation

 * Sherurcij was granted administrator access following a self-nomination. The discussion became the lengthiest since the English Wikisource was founded, and the first to pass without unanimity.
 * Zhaladshar's ZSBot was given a bot flag following a successful request. It is based on the DotNetWikiBot Framework and is primarily intended for page and category moves, and interwiki linking.
 * Politicaljunkie's administrator access is scheduled for confirmation over September.

Featured texts
August 2007's featured text: Cole's Old English Masters. John Opie, first published in Century Magazine in 1899, is a biographical essay about a painter who painted an author. Sir Joshua's day fashionable London was subject to all sorts of crazes. Some new comet shot across the sky each week. The "beautiful Misses Gunning," who were so successfully married, were not more of a furor than the beautiful Misses Jefferies and Blandy, who were so successfully hanged. (Read on or see all featured texts.)

September 2007's featured text: Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration is a statement by Siegfried Sassoon read to the British House of Commons on 30 July 1917 and printed in the London Times''. Due to his prominence as a decorated soldier, Sassoon did not face a court-martial and was instead ruled to be mentally ill and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital.'' I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of agression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. (Read on or see all featured texts.)

Statistics

 * Text units
 * French Wikisource reached 30,000;
 * Italian Wikisource reached 15,000;
 * Catalan Wikisource reached 1,000.

Unified login nears beta
The Unified login (previously single-user login) extension will be in "opt-in beta for actual logins over the next couple of weeks", said its main developer Brion Vibber. In the meantime, users can try a demo unification of their accounts at testwiki:Special:MergeAccount.

What is it?
 * Unified login is a long-awaited feature that allows a user to register a user name on all Wikimedia wikis, and share certain settings. A recent addition to the extension is the concept of a "home wiki", a user-selectable main wiki which defines shared settings.


 * The feature was first requested in August 2004. Unified login has been in quiet development by Brion Vibber, paid Wikimedia developer, for an unknown period of time. He discussed how it might work in the December 2005 Berlin roundup, uploaded implementation notes to the code base in April 2006, and it was the subject of a presentation at Wikimania in August 2006. In late November 2006, Brion announced a successful migration test and suggested that it might be implemented in January 2007 (see story); that deadline passed without comment. The feature has been substantially improved since that time.


 * Although little is known about the project, [MediaWiki:Youhavenewmessagesmulti|an interface message] suggests that detection of messages will eventually be unified as well (however, Brion notes that this will remain local at first). Brion comments in the implementation notes that user rights will remain local, so administrators will not have administrator access everywhere. User preferences will also remain local, although the email address will only need to be set and confirmed in one place.


 * Unified login is not intended to allow different user names on different projects. Users with multiple user names will not be able to unify their accounts, although this might be possible in later improvements.

Fixed bugs

 * Redirects now work with URL-encoded page titles (like " ").
 * Special:Protectedpages no longer lists the MediaWiki namespace as an option (pages in that namespace are automatically protected and cannot be unprotected).
 * The 'undo' feature no longer fails when using the URL parameter " ".

New features

 * Special pages
 * Bureaucrats can now leave a summary when renaming a user.
 * Links to blocked users' talk pages are now shown on the block log and on Special:Ipblocklist.
 * The image deletion confirmation page now accepts the URL parameter  for the deletion reason.
 * Special:Newpages now accepts the URL parameter to filter by a specific contributor (previously it was necessary to type the username in the form).
 * Keyboard shortcuts for user preferences and the upload link have been added, respectively 9 and s (for example, Firefox uses alt-shift-9).
 * Overwriting existing files are now distinguished in the logs from uploading new files with [MediaWiki:Overwroteimage].

Google provides text versions of public domain books
Google Books now provides plain text versions of its public domain works in addition to images. This provides a good source of texts for Wikisource with accompanying scans for proofreading.

Petition for US rule of the shorter term
The "Reclaim the Rule of the Shorter Term Petition" seeks to pass the Public Domain Enhancement Act in US Congress, which includes clauses such as acceptance of the shorter copyright term when a work is no longer copyrighted in its home country. For more information, see American non-acceptance of the rule of the shorter term.