Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-23/News and notes

Arbitration Committee starts "Clerk's office"
The Arbitration Committee introduced the idea for a clerk's office to help lighten the workload for arbitrators. The proposal calls for a small number of clerks, headed by a former arbitrator, to review evidence and write opinions. Clerks would have write-only access to the arbitration mailing list, to allow them to send comments to the arbitrators. The process is still in planning stages.

Main page
Proposals for a new main page design are currently being voted on.

Living people category endorsed by Wales
Jimbo has endorsed the creation of Category:Living people to aid in the improved cleanup of vandalism and libel which could be hurtful to living persons. He countermanded early attempts to list the category at Categories for deletion, and encouraged the development of processes (both human-powered and automated) to make the category most useful for its intended purpose. A suggestion to rename the category to Category:* (asterisk) to make it more flexible and less obtrusive to casual readers was made by Kappa;  discussion on the possible renaming is ongoing at Categories for deletion.

Czech Wikipedia starts Arbitration
The Czech Wikipedia has created its own Requests for Arbitration page, and taken its first case, against Vít Zvánovec. Six arbitrators were selected in an election ending on 16 January.

Briefly

 * The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
 * The Lojban Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
 * The Cebuano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles after falling short of the mark earlier in the week.
 * The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 175,000 articles.
 * The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 17,000 articles.
 * The Venetian Wikipedia has reached 50 articles.
 * The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 16,000 articles.
 * The French Wikipedia has reached 225,000 articles.
 * The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.
 * The Yiddish Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.