Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-22/News and notes
News and notes
Wikipedian Robert Braunwart dies
Robert Braunwart (
Lawsuit filed to determine which state official edited Wikipedia
Two Associated Press journalists sued officials of the U.S. state of Arkansas, in response to the denial of a Freedom of Information Act request to determine which state computers had been used in various Wikipedia edits. According to the article, one edit removed controversial information about former Governor and current Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, while another reverted vandalism in current governor Mike Beebe's article.
New image tool to supplant current tools
The Free Image Search Tool (FIST) is the successor to both WatchFlickr and MissingImages. The new tool will look for free images for articles (manual list, categories) or to replace non-free/placeholder images. It currently uses
- Flickr (what WatchFlickr did)
- For a given article, it follows language links to find images (what MissingImages did)
- Direct Wikimedia Commons search
- The GIMP-SAVVY archive (PD images from USGov)
- EveryStockPhoto.com (Creative Commons BY and BY-SA images)
More image sources will be added in time. There is also a JavaScript tool that adds FIST links to the toolbox for articles (find images for this article), images (replace this image with a free one), and categories (find images for the articles in this category).
WatchFlickr and MissingImages have been turned off and redirected to FIST.
Private Eye gets regular Wikipedia column
Small analysis shows new users unlikely to have edited
A very small statistical analysis performed by checkuser Raul654 showed that very few new users had previously edited an article from the same IP address. In response to a question on Slashdot, Raul654 sampled ten recent users from the new user log. Of these ten, only one had edited prior to registering. No data was released on whether the users made any edits after registering. The study draws from a small sample, making its margin of error relatively high.
Briefly
- Discussion is ongoing at Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2007 regarding the upcoming Arbitration Committee Elections. Current plans are for the elections to start on Monday, December 3, with candidates being accepted starting on November 1.
- indexI've been working on for a while."
- A collaboration called "Gnome Week" is ongoing through Sunday; this collaboration aims to clear various backlogs, and clean up articles in need of help.
- The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
- The Polish Wikinews has reached 6,000 articles.
- The Luxembourgish Wikipedia has reached 18,000 articles.
- The Tagalog Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
- The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 90,000 articles.
- The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages has reached 500,000 edits.
Discuss this story
The Free Image Search Tool thing
Hmm, it says the user acount has been deactivated. Dit it exceed it's bandwidth allowance after beeing advertised here or something? --Sherool (talk) 18:16, 26 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]