Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-19/News and notes

Wikimedia Conference ends, Foundation to expand into India and Brazil
From 14 to 18 April, the Wikimedia Conference 2010 (WMCON) was held in Berlin, Germany. It consisted of a Developers' Workshop (14–16 April), a Chapters meeting (16–18 April) and a Board of Trustees' meeting (17–18 April).

At the conference, Sue Gardner presented plans for an international expansion of the Wikimedia Foundation. According to a 16 April article (in German) by Heise News, the Foundation plans to open offices in India and Brazil early next year, followed by a third one in an Arab country.

The many presentations at the Developers' Workshop (preliminary schedule) included several about usability topics, and one about the first results of the flagged revisions study commissioned by Wikimedia Germany (see last week's Signpost coverage).

The air travel disruption after the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption had a major impact on conference attendees. On Sunday, Wikimedia Deutschland called for volunteers among local Wikipedians to support about 20 international guests stranded in Berlin after the end of the conference. In an effort to apply the customary problem-solving process of MediaWiki development to the geophysical situation, Bug 23223 was created.



Brooklyn Museum uploads to Wikimedia Commons
On 12 April, the Brooklyn Museum in New York City announced that it will be "Cross-posting the Collection to Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive". In a test run, BrooklynMuseumBot has already uploaded images of nine public domain paintings. More than 9000 other images are queued for upload on Commons, whereas on the Internet Archive, the museum is not just uploading all its "no known copyright" images, but also those licensed under a non-commercial Creative Commons license (which is not accepted on Commons).

Shelley Bernstein, the museum's Chief of Technology, said that the institution intends to benefit from the collaboration by importing metadata that has been added or changed on the wiki back to the collection. She recalled some of the difficulties that were encountered in last year's Wikipedia Loves Art project ("This was a project that simply didn’t scale").

Wikiprojects and Google.org to collaborate in translation project
The Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Medicine Wikiprojects have announced an article translation project with the charitable foundation Google.org. This project aims to address the lack of accessible medical information in languages used in the developing world, by translating articles from the English Wikipedia and transferring them to smaller Wikipedias, such as the Swahili Wikipedia.

In its initial stages, the project will aim to improve a core set of articles on important medical information and neglected diseases, using article reviews provided by professional medical writers. Later, once a set of interested editors have been recruited in the English Wikipedia, Google.org will try to recruit native speakers who can use translation software developed by Google to transfer the English articles. This effort will follow the lead set by Google's recent Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, which aimed to expand the Swahili Wikipedia in a collaboration with three African universities (see Signpost coverage).

Good article nominations backlog elimination drive successful
Following the conclusion of the GA Sweeps in March 2010, the April 2010 GAN backlog elimination drive has accomplished its goal to reduce the number of outstanding GA nominations to below 200 – 12 days before the scheduled end of the drive. As of 00:00 19 April 2010, 512 good article nominations have been reviewed since the beginning of the drive, with 379 of them passed, 67 failed, and 68 placed on hold according to the list of completed GANs by the participants. By comparison, 330 GANs were reviewed in the previous GAN backlog elimination drive in February–March 2009. Some other statistics:


 * The drive started with 463 outstanding GA nominations; it is currently down to 146.
 * The WP:GAN page was at 110KB in size on 1 April. That page has almost been cut in half at 60KB.
 * At the beginning of the drive (see this GAN report from 31 March), the longest waiting times for a GA nomination were about 13 weeks. The longest waiting times are currently two weeks.
 * 60 Wikipedians have volunteered in this current drive and have reviewed at least one good article nomination – almost twice as many as in the previous drive in Spring 2009.



Briefly

 * As part of the Malayalam Wikipedia Meetup 2010, the Malayalam Wikipedia has released 500 selected articles on a CD-ROM. This is the first time in India that a Wikipedia in a local language has released its articles for offline usage.
 * On Friday, 16 April 2010 the Wikimedia projects passed a total of 1 billion edits, as measured by the edit counter. There was some disagreement about the exact time of day, as the counter does not include the ca. 300,000 edits on MediaWiki.org.
 * The UX (formerly Usability) team reported on some user feedback from the 5 April switch to the new "Vector" skin on Wikimedia Commons, and invited testing of a still experimental template folding feature.
 * Sue Gardner announced that Philippe Beaudette (currently Facilitator for the Strategic Planning initiative) will become the Wikimedia Foundation's "Head of Reader Relations", a newly created position intended as an "advocate for readers inside the projects and within the staff", involving OTRS and other areas.

This week in history

 * 2005: Wikimedia Foundation granted tax exemption
 * 2007: Historian detained after his Wikipedia article is vandalized
 * 2008: Student arrested after making threats on Wikipedia article
 * 2009: PARC researchers study Wikipedia's content coverage by topic