Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-21/News and notes

New cities join in run for Wikimania 2007
Several new cities had bids entered for Wikimania 2007. Alexandria, Taipei, and Orlando joined the list of running cities. No official bids have been submitted, though unofficial bids are being discussed for the above cities, along with Hong Kong, Singapore, Geneva, Istanbul, Chicago, Las Vegas, and bids for the United Kingdom and Australia.

Official bids are due no later than September 10th. A jury panel composed of the Wikimedia Foundation executive board, the organization team for Wikimania 2006, and Andrew Lih will convene to compose a shortlist of cities on September 15th, after which finalists will answer jury questions and finalize their bid. The final vote is scheduled for September 24th. More information can be found on Meta's Wikimania page.

New sidebar proposal
A proposal to redesign Wikipedia's sidebar has attracted the attention of users and programmers. The change would place an additional box between the search box and the toolbox, containing Wikipedia help pages, and would rearrange other links. Details are being discussed, after which Rob Church has offered to write the MediaWiki code necessary to make the changes work. User input is requested on the proposed changes.

Amendment to changing usernames proposed
An amendment to the current changing username process was proposed this week. The current policy states that accounts "can only be renamed to [another] account that does not exist [already]", meaning that people could not switch account names into one that had already been registered, even if the account had few or no edits. However, despite this policy, the demand for such user-name change has been high, and bureaucrats have been known to occasionally allow such requests. The proposed policy would make this official provided an attempt to contact the account is unsuccessful and the account has few or little edits with no recent activity.

Briefly

 * The French Wiktionary has reached 200,000 articles.
 * The Latin Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
 * The Malay Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
 * The Finnish Wikipedia has reached 75,000 articles.
 * The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 4,000 files.
 * The German Wikipedia has reached 450,000 articles.
 * The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles
 * The Albanian Wikibooks has reached 100 Wikibook modules.
 * The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 220,000 articles.
 * The Uzbek Wikipedia reaches 4,000 articles.
 * The Russian Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.
 * The Korean Wikipedia has reached 26,000 articles.
 * The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 20,000 registered users.
 * The Serbian Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.