Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-07-28/News and notes
News and notes
Chinese Wikipedia (mostly) unblocked
The Chinese Wikipedia has been unblocked within most, if not all, of China, along with other websites such as the BBC, likely in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which begin on August 8. Sensitive topics, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, remain blocked, however.
Wikipedia.org reorganised
On August 1, the top ten Wikipedias in the Wikipedia.org portal were reorganized, following a poll on Meta. It used to be arranged by the number of articles a Wikipedia has, but is now arranged according to the number of visitors each Wikipedia has.
This led to quite a few changes within the top ten Wikipedias themselves, but only one language was actually replaced among the ten; the Dutch Wikipedia (467,000 articles) was replaced by the newly-unblocked Chinese Wikipedia (200,000 articles).
The result of the third question in the poll concerns whether or not there should be some kind of clue about the visitor’s preferred language (as “determined by the browser, OS or IP”), and if so, how that should be implemented. The poll was definitely in favour of having some sort of clue, but the type of clue has not yet been determined. The type that got the most votes was the one about replacing the last language of the top ten with the language of the local user.
Briefly
- NASA and the Internet Archive, in a combined effort, opened NASA Images, a repository for public domain satellite images.
- David Shankbone posted a blog entry detailing the process he used to obtain photographs and interviews with famous article subjects, including Al Sharpton and Augusten Burroughs.
- The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
- The Norwegian Wiktionary has reached 10,000 articles.
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