Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Wikimania 2006

Report from Wikimania 2006

The following was copied from the talk page. Maurreen 16:42, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

And then archived here. Walkerma 01:21, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

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I thought I should summarise some of the information on Wikipedia 1.0 that I picked up while at Wikimania 2006.

I gave a presentation on Friday afternoon that summarised what's going on here at the English 1.0 project – nothing unknown to people at the project. I emphasised Core Topics project, the SOS Children's CD, Work via WikiProjects (incl. the bot assessments), Version 0.5 and the Torrent work. Afterwards there were questions, including one from someone connected with the One Laptop per Child project, though it sounds like their space for articles is very limited.

I was delighted to meet User:Kirill Lokshin from this project as well as others from other language 1.0 projects. I managed to have a working dinner on Friday with User:Polimerek (another chemist!) who not only oversees the Polish FAs, but is organising a DVD release of around 250,000 Polish articles in his spare time! Then on Saturday I had dinner with Emmanuel, who is starting work on a French release. His interest is in the software for presenting the static content. On Sunday all four of us got together for lunch, along with Florence from the Foundation, to share ideas. We plan to set up a page soon off m:Special_projects_subcommittees/Static_content to continue this interwiki collaboration.

Polish DVD

See this report. The approach adopted by Wikimedia Polska was to work with a publisher, Helion SA, from the start. As with the German DVD, they chose to start with all the articles, then remove those with cleanup tags and the like. A script then worked through an editor whitelist and tagged articles by those editors as "good". There remained 130,000 articles, and these were passed over to the publisher, who has hired 13 editors to check 100 articles per day for 100 days (13 x 100 x 100 = 130,000). Those 13 paid checkers are actually supported by around 35 non-paid volunteers, active Wikipedians, who were accepted to join the project on the basis of their "good" contribution to Polish Wikipedia. The checks are of course pretty cursory, but anything dubious is removed. They should have the articles ready by October 2006 for release shortly afterwards.

French Wikipedia 1.0

Work here is just starting, but they are keen on collaborating. Emmanuel may be able to help us with software to make things look nice for the user. His portal strips out the sidebar and other things that are not useful in offline releases.

Responses to our work

The thing that seemed to attract most interest was our scheme of assessments assisted by the bot. Even among the English Wikipedians some were unfamiliar with the work. I chatted with Kurt (Janssen???) from the German Wikipedia, and he seemed interested in the bot, as was Emmanuel, so Oleg may get some requests from other language wikis.

Stable versions

It was announced by Jimmy Wales in his opening plenary speech that the German Wikipedia will be testing Stable Versions of articles very soon. If successful on de then it should come here shortly afterwards. Brion is doing some work on the software to make it work nicely. From what I understand it does this by allowing registered editors with over X edits to tag a version as "stable" (aka "unvandalised") and this version will be the one that comes up from a Google search or wikilink. It isn't a fork, it's just like any other version from the article history. If you click the edit tab, then you get the latest version to edit. As Jimbo pointed out, this may allow more pages to be unprotected, since most users will only see the unvandalised version of the article. This feature is important for this project, as it will make it much easier for us to locate usable versions of articles.

Overall I came away from the conference exhausted but inspired. I was also impressed that 115 countries were represented! If other attendees think I've misunderstood or missed any topics please amend this as needed. Walkerma 07:40, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Glad to see the progress. Maurreen 07:46, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Other releases

Webaroo has released WP or parts of it. And One Laptop Per Child plans to include a snapshot.