Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-02-06/News and notes

Two Arbitrators granted CheckUser rights
Two newly-elected Arbitrators were granted CheckUser rights this week; in addition, the Arbitration Committee is also considering giving the rights to a non-member. Morven and Sam Korn join seven other current and former Arbitrators and developers with the access, which allows the user to check another user's IP address and match usernames used by that IP. The total number of people with CheckUser access is now nine.

Meanwhile, the Arbitration Committee is soliciting community opinion on giving CheckUser access to Curps, an administrator, contingent on him setting an e-mail address in his profile.

Wikimania open for submissions
The second annual Wikimedia Conference, or Wikimania, announced its call for participation last Friday. Submissions for papers and other presentations are being accepted over the next few months. The deadline for proposed workshops and tutorials is 30 March; abstracts for panels, papers, posters, and presentations should be received by 15 April. Wikimania is scheduled to be held August 4-6 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Deletion process goes live
A new deletion method began this week. Proposed deletion, as it was dubbed, involves letting editors flag an article for deletion. If no one objects and removes the tag within five days, administrators may then delete the article. Otherwise, if someone disputes the proposed deletion, the article may either be improved or be taken to articles for deletion. As of press time, the process had gone live, with over 100 articles already tagged. Community reaction was generally positive, although several people objected to both the proposal and the beginning of usage of the system.

New criterion for speedy deletion added
A new criterion for speedy deletion was created this week. Originally added by Sannse, it stated that templates which were "divisive and inflammatory" could be speedily deleted. The criterion received implicit approval from Jimbo Wales; he reverted the removal of the criterion. The criterion is most likely intended for controversial userboxes (see related story), which are currently created in the template namespace.

Requests for adminship reform discussed
A proposal to reform requests for adminship (RfA) was started this week. Created by bureaucrats Ilyanep and Linuxbeak, the proposal includes implementation of a discussion period, suffrage requirements and candidate requirements, and emphasis on providing diffs and discussion. Although the two bureaucrats initially suspended RfA to test the new proposal, it soon resumed after several users objected. Discussion on the issue continues.

Chair of Clerk's Office resigns
Kelly Martin resigned from her position as chair of the Clerk's Office this week. The former Arbitrator said in her resignation that "It is obvious that the community, for its own inscrutiable reasons, is unwilling to accept the services I am willing and able to provide. I have no doubt that I have the trust of Jimbo and the Arbitration Committee itself. However, it's evident that the community has no intention of allowing me to provide any service of an administrative nature to Wikipedia without having to deal with endless sniping." The position vacated by Martin is now vacant, although only former Arbitrators may fill the position.

Featured content milestones, changes
Raul654, current featured article director, announced that the number of people subscribed to the daily-article-l list, which sends out the featured article via email, had reached 9000 people. In addition, all the informational featured pages, such as featured articles, featured lists, featured pictures, and featured portals, were redesigned for a "sleek new look". Finally, all featured articles were tagged with featured article this week, which produces a small star in the upper right hand corner of the article that links to the list of featured articles. All featured lists were similarly tagged with featured list, which adds a star that links to the list of featured lists.

Briefly

 * The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 100,000 pages.
 * The Tamil Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
 * The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
 * The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 18,000 articles.
 * The Russian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.
 * The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 25,000 pages.
 * The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles with Peszternye.
 * The Luxembourgish Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles.
 * The Greek Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles.
 * The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 2,000 uploaded files.
 * The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
 * The English Wikipedia has reached 950,000 articles.
 * The German Wikipedia has reached 350,000 articles.
 * The Japanese Wikipedia has been awarded the 11th AMD Award, Digital Contents of the Year '05, Best Writer prize by Association of Media In Digital.
 * The Breton Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
 * The Albanian Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.