Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-07/News and notes

News and notes

Call for candidates continues

The elections for the Board of Trustees continued this week with more Wikimedians declaring their candidacy. Potential candidates have until 28 August to sign-up. There are currently seven candidates: Arno Lagrange, Cerejota, Cimon Avaro, Improv, Kelly Martin, Linuxbeak, and Nicholas Turnbull. Several candidates, including Jeffrey Merkey (User:Gadugi), who is currently blocked on the English Wikipedia, also withdrew their candidacies this week.

Number of removed FAs reaches milestone

The number of featured articles to lose FA status reached a milestone last week. Wikipedia was de-featured on 2 August, making it the 200th former featured article. Articles are de-featured if they no longer meet the featured article criteria. Despite the featured article criteria gradually becoming more stringent, the number of featured articles has been rising inexorably since the status was created in January 2004 from the previous "Brilliant prose" page. There are now over 1,000 featured articles (the Signpost reported on the 1000th FA in June).

Proposed projects

Two projects were proposed this week: SpeedWiki, a place where advice on how to accomplish a certain task in a quick and efficient manner would be posted, and Wikibibliography. Wikibibliography aims to collect book and published information into one comprehensive reference and guide.

Logo votes close

Votes closed on proposed logos for both the Incubator Wiki and the Test Wiki. The vote for the Test Wiki logo resulted in a Wikipedia logo with inverted colors and "Test Wiki" underneath in red font. The Incubator vote, meanwhile, was for the variant of the "meddie egg" logo chosen in the previous vote. The horizontal variant of the logo was chosen.

Correction

Last week's issue erroneously reported that the Swahili Wikipedia was the first African-language Wikipedia to reach 1,000 articles. The Afrikaans Wikipedia has already reached over 1,000 articles. Afrikaans, while of Indo-European descent and considered a Low Franconian language, is a language spoken primarily in Africa. The Afrikaans Wikipedia currently has about 5,500 articles.

Briefly

The English Wikipedia has reached 1,300,000 articles.
The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 29,000 articles.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The Occitan Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
Lingua Franca Nova, a non-Wikipedia Wikilexicon noted on Meta's List of Wikipedias page, has reached 500 articles. This makes it the 4th largest online lexicon of any planned language.
The Min Nan Wiktionary has reached 2,000 articles.
The Georgian Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
The Belarussian Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
The Kannada Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
The Sundanese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
The Portuguese Wikiquote has reached 3,000 articles.
The Lombard Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.