Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2005-10-17/News and notes

Checkuser proposal
A proposal to give users checkuser permissions in a way similar to RFA is currently in a straw poll voting period.

New European Union collaboration
Discovering a lack of information on Wikipedia about the European Union and its institutions, Wikipedia user The Minister of War proposed a new collaboration dedicated to improving EU-related articles. The project was announced on the European Union WikiProject, and was quickly expanded into a full collaboration project. The collaboration will choose a new article fortnightly to improve; currently Eurobarometer is the article under improvement.

Article rescue contest
The "article rescue contest", modeled after Danny's contest, continues this week. The goal is to salvage articles nominated on AFD that otherwise would get little attention, and that merit an article. Entries can either be rewrites of kept articles, or recreations of deleted articles with significant new information. The deadline for entries is 23:59 UTC on 22 October.

Wikiversity vote continues
The Wikiversity project, which currently resides on Wikibooks, started a vote on 15 September to move to wikiversity.org, which currently hosts a near-dormant German Wikiversity project. The vote will last until 1 November. Currently, the vote is about 69% in favor of the project (a two-thirds majority and board approval is required to start a project beta period).

Briefly

 * The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.
 * The Vietnamese Wikipedia now has well over 2,000 registered users.
 * The Neapolitan Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
 * The Latvian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
 * The Kurdish Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
 * The French Wikipedia has reached 175,000 articles.
 * The Portuguese Wikipédia has reached 80,000 articles.
 * The Alemannic Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
 * The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
 * The Russian Wikipedia has reached 35,000 articles.
 * The Chuvash Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.