Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-02-08/News and notes

Commons reaches 6 million, takes up new servers


Commons hit six million files last week, with the mass upload of images from the Geograph website. Geograph is a site containing about 1.5 million CC-by-SA-2.0 licensed images of the British Isles. The Isles are divided into squares of 1 × 1 kilometre (0.62 × 0.62 mi), and the goal of the project is to get at least one photograph of every square. More than 250,000 of these images have been uploaded.

According to Mike Peel of Wikimedia-UK, one of these images—a picture of sailing on Ullswater in the Lake District—became the six-millionth file on Wikimedia Commons.

This milestone comes less than five months after Commons hit five million files. In response to this rapid growth, the storage space on Commons was recently tripled, according to a recent blog post by Erik Möller, deputy director of the WMF.

In the post, which discusses the "virtuous circle" in which cultural institutions upload freely licensed content to the Commons, Möller highlighted other recent large uploads of collections, and noted two toolserver scripts by Magnus Manske that track usage of Commons files: Glamorous, which tracks where files are used within the Wikimedia projects, and Amalglamate, which tracks comparative collection usage data over time (starting 12 January).

BLP taskforce begins
The Biographies of Living People taskforce starts work 8 February with part one, board recommendations and proposal. This will run for two months, with the second half on community focus, beginning in April. The project has a global focus, and encourages worldwide participation in discussion.

More information can be found on the Strategy wiki page.

April developer meetup
Another MediaWiki developer's meetup will be held in Berlin 14–16 April, just before the annual meeting of the chapters. Wikimedia Deutschland will again host the conference. According to the post, "all MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, Gadget hackers, and other people interested in the technical side of Wikimedia projects" are welcome. Last year's developer meetup was also held in conjunction with the chapters' meeting.

Briefly

 * WikiCup report: According to WikiCup judge, we are halfway through Round I of the WikiCup 2010. About 64 of about 135 competitors have fewer than 50 points, so Milburn's advice is to get some "creative ideas to erase your writer's block" and to just go at it!
 * A new Facebook group celebrates the approach of one billion Wikimedia edits.
 * The Chapters Committee has issued a call for more members; applications are due 22 February.
 * River Tarnell has been contracted as the first paid sysadmin for the toolserver by Wikimedia Deutschland.
 * Wikimedia's discarded servers have been donated to three non-profit organizations: Drupal, Open Street Map, and Sugar Labs.

Milestones

 * The Yoruba Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
 * The Ukrainian Wikisource has reached 3,000 text units with Мамаїзм ІV.
 * The Sorani Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
 * The Portuguese Wiktionary has reached 120,000 articles.
 * The Kyrgyz Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
 * The Korean Wikipedia has reached 125,000 articles with 강광배 (Kang Kwang-Bae).
 * The Lithuanian Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles with Degėsių piliakalnis, a Lithuanian hill fort.
 * The French Wikipedia has reached 900,000 articles.
 * The Simple English Wikipedia has reached 58,000 articles.
 * The Malayalam Wiktionary has reached 25,000 entries.
 * The Japanese Wiktionary has reached 50,000 articles.

This week in history

 * 2005: the Main page is indefinitely protected
 * 2006: Five users desysopped by Jimbo Wales, as part of the "great userbox war"
 * 2007: Brad Patrick leaves as interim executive director, search begins for a new one
 * 2008: Wikipedia use in journalism explored
 * 2009: About Wikipedia's April Fool's main page