Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-07-24/Interwiki report

Status and community news
As of Sunday, 23 July 2006, the German language Wikipedia contained about 434,350 articles. Of these, 830 articles (approximately 1 in 520) are considered Exzellente Artikel (the German Wikipedia equivalent of featured articles) and 1,460 (approximately 1 in 300) are considered Lesenswerte Artikel (the German Wikipedia equivalent of good articles). In addition, 203 images are considered Exzellente Bilder (the German Wikipedia equivalent of featured pictures). Since Sunday 16 July, 8 articles have gained "featured article" status (Austrian film history, Mumme of Brunswick (a kind of beer), Hellenism, Brugg, Hemma von Gurk, Rurik expedition, Palais Strousberg and Motor cortex) and 20 articles have gained "good article" status, and two pictures (shown below) gained "featured picture" status.

In an effort to improve the illustration of Wikipedia, an image contest is being held through the month of July and still has one week left to run. Over 800 pictures have been submitted in five categories so far, confronting the five elected jury members with lots of review work.

The German Gesprochene Wikipedia (Spoken Wikipedia) project saw a revival, with many newcomers submitting audio files. Wikipedians from Berlin started to work on an audio sightseeing guide for the Berlin Bus Nr. 100, whose route connects many important spots like Alexanderplatz and the Reichstag.

Recently, meetings of the German community took place in Berlin, Karlsruhe, Nuremberg and Brunswick. The Wikipedians from Frankfurt went to a barbecue evening on Friday 21 July. The WikiProject Philosophy met for the first time in real life in the small town Moers. The six participants discussed strategies to improve the quality of core articles and made plans to merge the project into a larger editorial department for arts & humanities in general.

Press
The last week showed a few press articles about Wikipedia and related subjects. The most noteworthy example was the title story "Du bist das Netz! ("you are the (inter)net!") of the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel which started and ended with mentioning Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and the community events. In the same issue, communication scientist Norbert Bolz talked in an interview about the erosion of expert knowledge, mentioning Wikipedia as an example for doxa - "Meinungswissen" (opinion knowledge) produced by the masses - in contrast to episteme - scientific knowledge generated by the academic world.

The monthly business magazine Capital mentioned Wikipedia briefly when introducing its audience to the wonderful new world of the "web 2.0", where people create content for free.

On 21 July, Torsten Kleinz wrote about internet related crime in the internet in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He mentioned an ongoing debate at the wikide-l mailing list about a privacy complaint from a former Wikipedian over automatic analysis of "Special:Contributions" data.

The University of Halle sent out a press release on Friday 21 July on an ongoing scientific project by Daniela Pscheida M.A. to investigate the communication of knowledge within the internet. Pscheida intends to analyse Wikipedia articles for her thesis. The project is planned to end in March 2008.

A couple of news sites mentioned PediaPress, a project of the German company "Brainbot" to offer Wikipedia text on a print-on-demand solution. PediaPress.com is offering users to select articles from the (currently only English language) Wikipedia. Prices range from about €12 up to €18. The project does not use the Wikipedia trademark and tries to comply with the GFDL.