Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-03-30/News and notes
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
Encarta encyclopedia to be discontinued
New tech hire
On March 23, Brion Vibber announced that Frédéric Vassard had been hired for the Wikimedia Foundation technical staff. Vassard will be working with "operations, monitoring, and documentation of our servers."
Flagged revisions polls nears end
The ongoing poll on the Flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal is set to end on April 1. The compromise proposal currently has around 82% support—and has been falling gradually from an early level about 88%—with over 300 votes so far. In addition to those who oppose any form of flagged revisions, the proposal has been opposed by some who argue that it is essentially toothless with regard to biographies of living people. It is yet to be seen whether Jimmy Wales will present his own compromise proposal to apply some form of flagged revisions to such biographies, as he indicated he would before the current proposal gained momentum.
New donation of 250,000 images
Mathias Schindler reports the imminent "release of some 250,000 images from the
FAC rolls out uniform subpage system
As of April 1, a new system will be used to create nomination pages for
- Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Article/archive1
- Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Article/archive2
- etc.
This will avoid problems associated with the old system of moving pages and updating links. Further information is available
Briefly
- In-person and remote usability tests occurred on March 25 and March 26; Naoko Kumura of the Wikimedia usability team stated that results would be released within a few weeks.
- The Military history Wikiproject election for project coordinators ended on March 28.
- After the first IRC bid meeting was held on March 29, Wikimania 2010 bids are open for comment and questions (on the bid talk pages) until April 12.
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