Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-17/News and notes

Single User Login to be tested
Developers are planning a pilot of the CentralAuth extension (better known as single user login); this pilot will be limited to administrators only. (Note that this was accidentally enabled for a short time last week.)

The pilot is opt-in, and for the time being will only cause accounts with the same name and owned by the same user to be merged together into a single 'global account'; other existing users with the same name will not be affected. If and when the test takes place, administrators should note that setting a common email address or password on all accounts they own will help the merging process to identify which accounts are owned by the same user.

Even the full planned version of single user login itself does not do much more than associate accounts owned by the same user together, and allow a common username/password across all Wikimedia wikis; other similar features, such as crosswiki talkpage notification, are not part of the extension, although will become much easier to implement as a result of it.

Election Committee named
Last week, the Board of Trustees approved a resolution, announced on Saturday by Chairperson Florence Devouard, that named the Election Committee for the 2008 Board elections. The seven-member committee's membership includes:


 * Arria Belli, French Guiana
 * Daniel Bryant, Australia
 * Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild), Canada
 * Jon Harald Søby, Norway
 * Kwan Ting Chan (KTC), Scotland
 * Mark Ryan, Australia
 * Philippe Beaudette, United States

The committee is "responsible for planning and maintaining virtually every aspect of the board election." One of the responsibilities of the Committee is planning the type of voting used in the election; in previous elections, some users have questioned the traditional approval voting method used, arguing for other voting systems instead. Other responsibilities include determining suffrage criteria, drafting election pages on the Meta-Wiki, and vote auditing.

Second Wikipedia podcast started
To supplement Wikipedia Weekly, comes NotTheWikipediaWeekly, a new podcast currently conducted weekly, via Skype. The latest episode features Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner.

Briefly

 * As of press time, the final decision on the host city for Wikimania 2009 had not yet been made.
 * Keilana was successfully nominated to the Mediation Committee; a current nomination for Wizardman looks likely to pass.
 * The Russian Wikipedia has reached 250,000 articles.
 * The English Wiktionary has reached 750,000 entries.
 * The Belarusian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
 * The Spanish Wikinews has reached 3,000 articles.
 * The Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
 * The Central Bicolano Wikipedia has reached 200 articles.
 * The Kazakh Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.