Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-01-11/News and notes

News and notes

Wikimania 2011, Flaggedrevs, Global sysops and more

Wikimania 2011 bidding opens

The bidding process to select the location for Wikimania 2011 has begun. Tentative bids can be listed on Meta. New cities can be listed until February 8; after that date, no new bids will be accepted. Bids then have nearly two months, until March 29, to finalize their information. Directions for listing a bid are on meta.

Bids will be judged based on the criteria for this year by the Wikimania Jury. Current bids in the running can be viewed on the Bids page.

FlaggedRevs update

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Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
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William Pietri, who was hired by the Foundation as a part-time project manager for implementing flagged revisions on the English Wikipedia (see previous stories for background), recently posted a blog post about the current status of flagged revisions.

The post notes that several technical changes need to be made before implementing the per-page settings requested for the English Wikipedia. The post also lists the developers working on the project, how to keep up with the status of flagged revisions, and notes that the team will likely be able to estimate a release date in mid-January. The flagged revisions testing and demonstration site is at Wikimedia Labs.

Wikinews writing contest

Wikinews is sponsoring a Writing Contest that will begin on January 25, 2010 and finish on April 18, 2010. All editors are welcome; newcomers are requested to not contribute original reporting for their first few articles until they become familiar with Wikinews. A detailed point system for articles submitted during the 12-week contest is described on the contest page. Prizes will be offered to the winners.

Global sysops

A new global user group, Global sysops, has been proposed and is currently being voted on. The user group is proposed to include highly trusted users with a strong track record of cross-wiki contributions, who would be given sysop privileges on small wikis that have less than ten administrators. Larger wikis could opt into and smaller wikis could opt out of the system if they wished. According to the proposal, in addition to the standard tools, they would have the ability to globally block IPs, but would use these tools only in urgent cases of abuse, or for non-controversial maintenance. They would have no editorial control over content or the local community. The new role would differ from the current steward class in that their powers would be more limited. The global sysop would not have any access on the English Wikipedia (except for global block effects), as it is too large of a wiki.

Voting

All members of the Wikimedia community who meet all of the following criteria are invited to vote on the global sysops proposal:

  • Must have a registered account
  • Account at least 3 months old
  • 150 edits on at least one project

The vote will run from 00:00, 1 January 2010 (UTC) to 23:59, 31 January 2010 (UTC), after which time a non-partisan review will be undertaken and the results enacted.

At the time of publication, there were 984 votes in favor and 264 against, along with many comments.

Wikimedia Report Card

The Wikimedia Report Card has been updated for November 2009. The statistics summary shows that trends from earlier this year largely prevailed in recent months: the number of unique visitors across all Wikimedia sites continues to rise steadily and rapidly, while overall editing activity is roughly holding steady and the influx of new editors is slowing slightly. The rate of uploads to Wikimedia Commons continues to increase, particularly the rate of video uploads.

Briefly

Milestones

The German Wikipedia celebrates the first million articles.
The Hebrew Wikipedia celebrates 100,000 articles.

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