Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/News and notes

Usability Project to become permanent
The Usability Project, initially funded by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, will be extended indefinitely as a "user experience" (UX) program. The current round of usability work is still in progress—including a much anticipated option to collapse confusing template markup while editing—but at the conclusion of the grant period Naoko Komura and Trevor Parscal will stay on as permanent Wikimedia staff. In the announcement on the Wikimedia blog, Erik Moeller said the move was prompted by the Wikimedia Foundation's recent fundraising success.

Global Wikipedias reach 15M articles
The article count across all Wikipedias has passed 15 million articles. This follows the milestone in which the Russian Wikipedia reached the half-million article mark.

Yahoo Research sponsors investigation into plagiarism and Wikipedia vandalism
The Pan 2010 Lab has published a call for participation on a project to detect online plagiarism and vandalism at Wikipedia. An award of 500 Euros will go to the winning entry. The lab is scheduled to be held as part of a conference to be held in September in Padua, Italy.

Briefly

 * A new Wikimedia scorecard with statistics about visitors and traffic has been posted.
 * The WikiSym Call for Papers is closing on 7 March.
 * A call for proposals for the Wikimedia track at the Open Knowledge conference is now open.
 * Right-to-left support is now enabled for the mobile Wikipedia interface.

This week in history

 * 2005: Wikipedia has a power outage
 * 2006: Trouble with office actions
 * 2007: Daniel Brandt wheel war
 * 2008: Brockhaus announces last print edition
 * 2009: Books extension enabled