Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-05-15/News and notes

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News and notes

By Flcelloguy, May 15, 2006

Jimbo Wales attends Time 100 Gala

Wikipedia founder and president Jimbo Wales recently attended the gala for the The Time 100 most influential people held on Monday, May 8. Wales was described as "a champion of Internet-enabled egalitarianism" by Time, which sponsored the list and gala (see archived story). A video of the event by Rocketboom is available.

Wikimedia chapter formed

On Sunday, May 14, the Swiss Wikimedia chapter was officially formed in Olten. Twelve people were in attendance at the ceremony, where Ilario Valdelli was named president of the chapter. The group's first event will be "Swiss Wikipedia Day 2006", planned to be held in Zürich. The chapter becomes at least the seventh chapter of Wikimedia, joining Wikimedia Deutschland (Germany), Wikimédia France (France), Wikimedia Italia (Italy), Wikimedia Polska (Poland), Wikimedia Србије и Црне Горе (Serbia and Montenegro), and Wikimedia UK.

Brion Vibber gives presentation

Wikimedia Chief Technical Officer and developer Brion Vibber gave a presentation as part of the Google TechTalk series on April 28. In the 55-minute speech, Vibber discussed the MediaWiki software that Wikipedia uses and how the site has handled increased traffic since its beginnings. "Brion reviews past and future directions for Wikipedia's software and hardware, and how modern buzzword technologies could power and simplify the wiki world," Google summarized. "Brion Vibber has worked on MediaWiki and Wikipedia's servers for four years, watching over its frightening growth from thousands to millions of pages, from dozens to thousands of hits per second." The entire presentation is available online at Google Video.

The presentation drew the attention of several blogs, including one by Greg Linden, who commented on Wikipedia's technical structure.

Wikipedia moves up in Alexa rankings

Wikipedia has recently moved up in Alexa rankings, which tracks the popularity of websites globally based on the number of visits and pagehits. Now ranked number 16, Wikipedia has surpassed Google UK, which is now ranked 17. Among the websites ranked higher than Wikipedia are: Yahoo! (ranked number 1); Google (ranked number 2); Baidu (ranked number 4), the Chinese search engine that recently opened Baidu Baike, a controversial Chinese wiki-encyclopedia (see related story); MySpace (ranked number 6); eBay (ranked number 8); and Amazon (ranked number 14).

Good articles

The number of "Good articles", a selected group of articles with a less stringent process than featured articles, has reached over 1000 articles, surpassing the number of featured articles. The project is intended to be the stepping stone for articles to featured status; articles that become featured are removed from the list of "good" articles. The project, however, has been both criticized and lauded since its inception for the general concept of a level of articles before featured status and for its easiness to nominate and de-nominate articles.