Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-10-05/News and notes

News and notes

News and Notes summary headline

Liquid threads test goes live

Full story: LiquidThreads in Beta

On Friday, Wikimedia contract developer Andrew Garrett announced an open beta test of David McCabe's LiquidThreads extension, described as "a next-generation discussion system for MediaWiki". The extension, originally developed as a Google Summer of Code project, replaces talk pages with a full-featured forum system, facilitating more organised and effective discussion.

Article Incubator launches

Wikipedia:Article Incubator, a space for the development of new articles with potential, has been launched by User:Fritzpoll and User:GTBacchus. The aim of the incubator is to save articles from deletion if they show the potential to meet Wikipedia standards. It is suggested as a better solution than userfication as it allows collaborative editing and improvement to continue, and avoids issues over ownership where there are multiple contributors.

User:Fritzpoll says: "We have two major problems around good-faith new articles that aren't up to our standards: the need to get them out of the mainspace and the desire not to bite new editors. The Article Incubator should help with both and we'll take articles from any venue where it is deemed appropriate: CSD, PROD, AfD, AfC, etc." The project is currently looking for more editors to help develop incubated articles.

Briefly

A transcript of this week's staff office hours chat with Rand Montoya, WMF Head of Community Giving, is now posted. Montoya answered questions regarding the economic downturn, improving the geographic tracking of donations, and the impending November 2 launch of the Annual Fundraiser.
Liam Wyatt of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast has posted the first part of a farewell interview with outgoing Chief Technology Officer Brion Vibber.

Milestones

The Armenian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The Serbian Wikinews has reached 15,000 news reports, overtaking the English Wikinews to become the largest Wikinews version (by number of articles).

This week in history

3 October 2005: Speedy deletion of copyright violations approved
3 October 2005: The English Wikipedia reaches 750,000 articles
1 October 2007: RSS feed for RecentChanges added to all pages

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5 October 2009 (all comments)

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Seeing a photo credited to a "Gerbil" on the Nobel Prize site is very amusing. :) Rockfang (talk) 07:03, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I think we can expect to see the resignation of the German and the abolition of the Spanish ArbComs having an effect here. There's been considerable controversy generated this year by the en ArbCom. The current governance model is failing. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:30, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I agree that in policy discussion it can be very useful to examine the experiences of other projects in analogous matters. However, it also has to be said that there exist considerable differences between arbcoms on different projects. In the article I already alluded to the late founding of the German arbcom. And it seems that at least the "lack of authority" concerns would apply less here on en:. To to quote Tinz, a longtime admin on de: (and member of the Wikimedia Foundation's ombudsman commission): "[On the English Wikpedia] they have arbcom problems which are very different from ours (my impression: The arbcom institution is recognized by the community as an authority, has much more power than the Schiedsgericht ever had, but a few individual members cause petty scandals every now and then)."[1]. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:02, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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