Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-11-20/News and notes

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News and notes

By Flcelloguy and Khukri, November 20, 2006

15 e-Primers donated to Wikibooks

The Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (website), a United Nations Development Programme, announced the donation of 15 e-Primers to Wikibooks this week. By releasing the e-books, which all deal with Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, the same license in which all Wikimedia Foundation projects (except Wikinews) are developed under, the Programme is allowing the books to be freely updated and improved. Nine of the books are in the Programme's series on "Information Economy, Society and Polity", and the other six are in a series concerning "Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)". Wikibooks was chosen because of the potential for collaboration, as well as the existing "quality control", policies and guidelines, as well as the free content license used.

Upcoming changes to user page warnings

Over the coming weeks, editors may notice that the user page messages and warning templates are changing. The WikiProject user warnings has started a program to harmonise the existing templates. Their objective is to create a simple structure to which current and future messages and warnings will adhere.

These messages are, for a lot of editors, their first actual interaction with the Wikipedia community. There are currently just short of 300 user templates, ranging from the ubiquitous test messages to messages about behaviour and format suggestions. Technical and wording changes will bring this number down to roughly 100, although redirects will ensure that old templates still work.

The project is currently run by six members, with another 40 willing to help out, and they are always looking for editors willing to participate. If you are not familiar with the project, visit the project page, and if you have some spare time over the coming months please lend a hand.

Briefly

• The French Wikisource has reached 20,000 pages
• The Azeri Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
• The Quechua Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Hindi Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The Czech Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 38,000 edits.
• The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 edits.
• The Kurdish Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Zazaki Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Bavarian Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 170,000 articles.
• The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia has reached 1,000 registered users.
• The Norman Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 registered users.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 20,000 registered users.
• The Armenian Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
• The Icelandic Wiktionary has reached 3,000 entries.

Also this week: China reblock — Contest winners — News and notes — Press coverage — Features and admins — Technology — Arbitration