Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-03-06/News and notes

Wikipedian Caroline Thompson passes away
Caroline Thompson, a Wikipedian who primarily edited articles relating to quantum mechanics, died on 8 February, according to her family. The cause of death was cancer. Thompson, who had written papers on the subject while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, had edited sporadically in recent months, last editing on 10 January.

French Wikipedia reaches 250,000 articles
Following the millionth English article on 1 March (see related story), the French Wikipedia reached a quarter-million articles on Saturday. The milestone article was John Anglin, an American who escaped from Alcatraz Island in 1962. This article was translated from the subject's article on the English Wikipedia. At press time, the article had received just four edits.

Wikipedia's Alexa rank rises to 20
Alexa reports that Wikipedia's three month traffic ranking is 20th, an all-time high. Meanwhile, the daily traffic rank spiked upward to 12th on Sunday, a new high, surpassing the mark of 14th back in January. Wikipedia has recently surpassed CNN.com, Go.com, AOL.com, and the BBC in traffic, and seems likely to pass Blogger.com in the near future.

Fair use image policy reconsidered
After administrator Ta bu shi da yu deleted a series of TIME cover images due to what he considered improper fair use claims, discussion has occurred over his actions, and whether they were appropriate. Ta bu shi da yu has proposed an amendment to the fair use policy, which would eliminate the need to notify an uploader that their image does not comply, and would reduce the length of time before deletion from 7 days to 24 hours. The proposed amendment is currently open for comments on its talk page.

CheckUser policy explained
Arbitrator Raul654 recently clarified questions regarding CheckUser and the Arbitration Committee's policies regarding giving the tool to non-arbitrators. Raul654 explains that "some arbitrators are opposed to giving it to any non-arbitrators; others, like me, feel that there are a few special cases that giving checkuser access to a non-arbitrator would be a good idea." They do agree, however, that a system for requesting CheckUser similar to requests for adminship would not be desirable, due to the large volume of requests likely. Raul654 stressed that if the Committee were to grant access to non-arbitrators, it would only be granted to a few users.

Tip of the day to return in April
Wikipedia's tip of the day project, which was placed on hiatus in 2004, will be started again on 20 April, 2006. New tips are being prepared, and relevant archived tips from its initial run will be re-used.

Briefly

 * The English Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 articles. (see related story)
 * The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
 * The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 18,000 articles.
 * The Yiddish Wikipedia now has 4,000 total pages.
 * The French Wikipedia has reached 80,000 registered users.
 * The Korean Wikipedia has reached 21,000 articles.
 * The Estonian Wikipedia has reached 1,000 registered users.
 * The Danish Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
 * The Macedonian Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.