Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-21/News and notes

Fundraising update
As the Wikimedia Fundraiser enters its seventh week, a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales banner is being displayed across all projects, including non-Wikipedia projects, which have not had banners for the majority of this fundraiser. The appeal from Wales, which links to a short letter and donation page, is doing well; the first day of the appeal led to the highest donation day in Wikimedia history, with $430,893 donated.

In addition to the daily fundraiser statistics, a new link on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki shows the performance of the individual fundraising banners by day. The banners have markedly different results from one another; Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving, noted on the Wikimedia blog that one banner based on a donation comment ("I couldn’t ignore that banner at the top of the site anymore... I use Wikipedia far too often to ignore the need!") did better than any other banner before the appeal from Wales started running.

Also last week, there was discussion over a fundraising banner that featured Craig Newmark of Craigslist on both the Village Pump and the Foundation-l mailing list, with some questioning whether this banner was advertising for Craigslist. The notice, which raised around 740 donations on December 15, is no longer running.

Briefly

 * Voting is now ongoing (until December 31) for a new Wiktionary logo. The logos were originally proposed between May and July of this year. If no logo receives a majority of votes, a runoff will be held in January.
 * The 2nd Chinese Wikimedia Conference will be held on 26–27 December 2009 in Macau. Links for more information, in Chinese, are available here
 * Priyanka Dhanda joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Code Maintenance Engineer; she will work in the San Francisco office with the development team.
 * The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy is requesting public comment on public access policies for the published results of federally funded scientific and technical research.

Milestones

 * The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 400,000 articles.
 * The Portuguese Wiktionary has reached 80,000 articles.
 * The Acehnese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
 * The Simple English Wikipedia has reached 57,000 articles for the second time in 2009 after a mass deletion of Stubs.
 * The Estonian Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
 * The Estonian Wiktionary has reached 35,000 articles.
 * The Ido Wikipedia reaches 18,000 articles, with Maro di Marmara.
 * The German Wikibooks has reached 15,000 bookpages.
 * The Quechua Wikipedia has reached 11,000 articles.
 * The Sardinian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
 * The Spanish Wikinews has reached 5000 articles.
 * The Bashkir Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.

This week in history

 * 2005: Nature study published, Semi-protection policy passes
 * 2006: Time Magazine chooses "you" as person of the year, featuring SimonP
 * 2007: Erik Möller resigns Board position, becomes deputy director of WMF