Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-30/News and notes

Tropenmuseum donates 35,000 images to Wikimedia Commons
The Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam has donated 35,000 images about Indonesia to Wikimedia Commons. Volunteers are invited to help categorize the material. High resolution selections will also be available upon request for digital restoration. Editors who are interested in doing restorations can contact Durova.

The Tropenmuseum's partnership with Wikimedia projects received coverage in two national radio broadcasts in the Netherlands last week. The broadcasts (in Dutch) are available online.1 (35:45) 2 (15:50) A separate video presentation in English by Tropenmuseum representative Susanne Ton is provided below.



The continuing collaboration between the Tropenmuseum and Wikimedia is expected to bring more donations in the future. The museum has more than 100.000 images about Indonesia alone, but the focus has been on releasing images that will be most relevant for use in Wikipedias and other projects. The Wikimedian restorationist community is also involved in determining which material is released, with the possibility of the Tropenmuseum creating high-quality scans of specific images that make good candidates for restoration.

New book-class released, WikiProject Wikipedia-Books looking for volunteers
On 23 October 2009, WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, PediaPress, and the Version 1.0 Editorial Team discussed the best way to monitor Wikipedia-Books (collections of articles that can be downloaded electronically or ordered in print, not to be confused with Wikibooks; see previous story). As a result, a new WP 1.0 assessment class was created: the book-class.

This book-class would permit individual WikiProjects to monitor the various books that fall in their scope, and thus oversee merges, renaming, deletions, and so on, by tagging the talk page of individual books with the projects banner (with book). WikiProjects that are interested in adopting the book-class can do so by adding yes to their project's class mask (see how-to guide), or by contacting Headbomb if they are unfamiliar with the procedure.

WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is also looking for volunteers to join the WikiProject and help convert Good topics and Featured topics into books, as well as participate and create discussions about all things related to Wikipedia-Books.

For more about Wikipedia-Books, see Books and Help:Books. For pages that need to be tagged by WikiProjects, see Category:Wikipedia books (community books). To create a Wikipedia-Books, click on "create a book" in the print/export box on the left side of your screen.

Article assessments milestone
In other article assessment project news, just over two million articles on the English Wikipedia have now been assessed for their level of quality. This number doesn't count articles more than once, even if there have been multiple assessments; there have been over 5,000,000 assessments done. Assessment levels are recorded in WikiProject templates on an article's talk page. One caveat to article assessment counts is that ratings do not update themselves: if the quality of an article changes, only a human editor can re-assess the article and change the assessment.

The assessment counts are part of the Version 1.0 project, whose goal is to produce offline versions of core, quality Wikipedia content for use in various settings. The project has so far had two CD and DVD-based releases of articles.

When counting assessments, the current bot uses the rating of the first project to assess the article. According to User:CBM, there is a new bot under development, which takes the "highest" rating for each article, which is more likely to be what people expect. The old bot is more or less frozen in its current state; the only changes I want to make to it are for bug fixes. The beta version of the new bot will be publicly announced in December.

Assessments are typically done by members of WikiProjects, although any editor can make or change an assessment. (In the case of the "stub" category, sometimes assessments are done by a bot). Assessments are to be based on a set of standardized assessment grades: Stub, Start, C, B, GA, A and FA. According to the project page, "Quality assessments are fairly standard across all projects, but priority/importance are evaluated relative to the project's own priorities." There are over 1500 WikiProjects participating in quality assessments; a list can be found here.

Fundraiser holds steady in third week
Donation statistics for the last two weeks of the 2009 Wikimedia fundraiser show the rate of donation roughly holding steady, with donations coming in at a faster rate than in previous years. According to the fundraiser timeline, new methods to attract donations, including email solicitation of past and prospective donors, may be initiated in the coming weeks. The tentative schedule indicates that the fundraiser will go through five phases before ending in early January. In 2008, a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales stimulated a dramatic boost in donations late in the fundraiser; something similar is planned for December in this fundraiser.

Milestones

 * The English Wiktionary reaches 1,500,000 entries with the Latin verb ingeminō.
 * The Hebrew Wikisource reaches 30,000 text units.
 * The Interlingua Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.