Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-02-27/News and notes

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News and notes

By Michael Snow, Catherine, and Ral315, February 27, 2006

English Wikipedia reaches 1,000,000 users

The English Wikipedia reached 1,000,000 users on Monday, just a few days before the anticipated 1,000,000th article. The millionth user is believed to be Romulus32, though it is not easily possible to find the exact user with complete certainty. Jimmy Wales however has noted that such a stat is really insignificant, due to inactive and sockpuppet accounts.

Wikimania seeking volunteers

Wikimania organizers this week called for volunteers to join the Program Team for the 2006 conference, scheduled for August 4–August 6 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Team members will help reviewing proposed presentations, inviting speakers, and coordinating other aspects of the conference program. A call for participation from potential presenters was also distributed recently; deadlines for initial submissions are March 30 and April 15, depending on the nature of the presentation.

German chapter makes plans

The German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation held its annual meeting last Saturday in Frankfurt at the site of the original Wikimania conference. As the organization is growing and having to deal with various pressing matters, such as litigation or partnerships to redistribute Wikipedia content, it was concluded that more professional support is necessary. Over the course of the year, the chapter will look to open a physical office and hire an experienced executive to run it. According to Kurt Jansson, one of the chapter's two chairpersons, "The needs of the organization have become so broad and complex that volunteer leadership alone is no longer enough to address them." The chapter reports that it now has about 250 members.

Integration of 1911 Britannica finished

The list of 1911 Encyclopedia topics has been thoroughly examined and edited by a devoted team from WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles, who have verified that Wikipedia now has an article or proper redirect for every single article which appeared in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the content of which is now in the public domain. On the project page, Alba took pride in "declaring the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica to be, at first draft level, merged into Wikipedia."

A new project has begun at WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1911 verification to ensure that all 1911 material has been properly updated to the 21st century.

New tools

Henna has taken over the maintenance of the Vandal Fighter tool, a spin-off of CryptoDerk's VandalFighter.

Ask.com has revamped their search page, removing the Ask Jeeves interface and including Wikipedia results. A ZDNet report states "the new tools also include encyclopaedia search, for the US version of the site, that displays direct answers from Wikipedia and others at the top of the results page."

A new third-party search mechanism called Qwika is in development; it aims to provide searchable machine translation between different Wikipedia languages.

Most-edited user talk pages

Upon a request by Raul654, Gmaxwell created a list of the top 100 most edited user talk pages (Note - a user's edits to his own talk page are not counted). Not surprisingly, the page most edited was Jimbo Wales' talk page. The other four talk pages in the top 5 were those of Tony Sidaway, Curps, Cool Cat and Mistress Selina Kyle.