Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-03-09/News and notes
Commons, conferences, and more
Commons reaches 4 million files
Commons reached 4 million files on March 4, 2009, less than eight months after it reached 3 million. This makes Wikimedia Commons currently the fastest growing Wikimedia project.
The 4 millionth file is an image of mountains near Masca in the Canary Islands, and was uploaded by Kallerna. The photo is released into the public domain.
In December and January, Commons received a significant boost from the Bundesarchiv project, in which nearly 100,000 donated images were uploaded. Commons reached 2 million files on 8 October 2007 and 3 million on 16 July 2008.
Developer meetup planned for April
A MediaWiki developer meetup is planned for April 3-5 in Berlin. According to the project page, the meetup is for anyone "who works on MediaWiki, writes extensions, builds bots, writes scripts for the toolserver, or is otherwise interested in the technical aspects of Wikimedia." The event will be run as a barcamp, with a loose schedule.
The meeting will be in parallel with a Wikimedia Foundation Board and Chapters meeting.
Attendees are asked to pre-register by March 20th; details are here.
Wikimania bidding cities
The bidding cities for Wikimania 2010 have been announced; they are Amsterdam, Gdańsk and Oxford. The next stage is a month-long period where bids may be improved; this will be followed by a public meeting on March 30 and a two-week judging period by the Wikimania jury.
New usability team members and testing
Naoko Komura, leader of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative, has announced that three new people have joined the usability team: Arash Boostani, Parul Vora and Trevor Parscal. Boostani is formerly of Genentech, and joined the project as Senior Software Developer. Vora was formerly a designer at Yahoo! and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, and brings user interface design experience to the team. Parscal is a current member of the Wikimedia tech team, who is transferring to the usability team as software designer. The usability team is also currently interviewing for a second software designer position.
Usability testing as part of the Usability Initiative is also now underway. According to Komura, a CentralNotice (image) aimed at recruiting Wikipedia readers in San Francisco for the tests has been running this week, and in-person and remote testing will occur on March 24, 25 and 26. The target audience of testers are Wikipedia readers who have little or no experience in editing articles. The banner is displayed within the range of 1:400 to 1:100 page views, and is set to be disabled on March 12.
Flagged revisions proposal
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
Although discussions about potential trials of the flagged revisions extension have essentially ground to a halt, Jimbo Wales has indicated on his talk page that he is "shopping a very premature proposal around", with "[n]ews to come soon." This follows Wales's request in January that flagged revisions be enabled based on a straw poll showing 60% support for a vaguely defined trial; developer Brion Vibber indicated that it would not be enabled "before working out some very specific parameters for the test first" (see earlier story). A number of potential trials were outlined following the events in January, but no single dominant proposal has emerged for evaluation.
Briefly
- The Wikimedia Foundation has released a video called "Inside Wikimedia", highlighting the people and work of the Foundation. Links to the video are in a WMF blog post.
- The basic structure of the Chemistry Manual of Style has been ratified; this gives a guideline for chemistry-related articles, which can be applied as articles are assessed.
- On March 5th, the Pontic Greek Wikipedia was created, resolving an open request. Pontic Greek is spoken by about 324,000 people.
- The total number of Featured Articles, Featured Lists, and Good Articles passed 10,000.
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