Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-14/News and notes

Please note that:
 * 1) This is only a trial and will need community consensus to be continued after that.
 * 2) Edits by autoconfirmed users are automatically approved except in some rare cases.
 * 3) The ability to review other users' edits is going to be granted liberally using automatically generated database reports.
 * 4) The editing process has not changed. An edit cannot be "rejected", besides being reverted as usual.
 * 5) Pending changes may be applied only in the same circumstances as usual protection, as determined by the protection policy, and will be limited to 2000 articles for the trial.

Pending changes goes live
The trial of the new pending changes system (see last week's Signpost coverage) will go live at 11pm UTC on June 15 (accompanying notes illustrated); the technical infrastructure was put in place on June 14 and will be switched on to start the trial. Details about the trial are available here.

A new help page, still in the process of being perfected, is here. Some diagrams explaining the terminology are here. Policy related to the new feature is described at Pending changes.

The announcement on the Foundation's blog tried to dispel possible assumptions that the feature represented a move towards tighter editorial control on Wikipedia, emphasizing its potential to replace existing page protection instead:
 * Over the next few days, English language Wikipedia users may notice a small change on some articles: a little magnifying glass where a lock once was. The icon, on the upper right corner of the article, represents an important step that Wikipedia volunteers have taken to open up articles that were previously protected from editing.

See also the Signpost's backgrounder on the history of the extension (An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions, August 2009) and other Signpost coverage dating back to 2006. This week's In the news notes some early media coverage published hours before the projected start of the trial. For a technical perspective on the upgrades, see this week's technology report.

First state-funded Wikipedia project concludes after three years
The very first publicly funded project to improve Wikipedia articles concluded recently on the German Wikipedia. It had been started three years ago with the goals of improving coverage of renewable resources (in German: "nachwachsende Rohstoffe", abbreviated "Nawaro") and recruiting external experts to contribute to Wikipedia. Due to its pioneering character, it received a fair amount of attention by international media at the time (see also 2007 Signpost coverage).

The project was funded by the Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe e.V. (FNR), a government agency concerned with renewable resources, with means from the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV). It was directed by the private-sector Nova-Institut. The German Wikimedia Chapter was a partner in the project.

Two longtime Wikipedians who had been employed in connection with the project, Achim Raschka and Denis Barthel, recently published a wrap-up in the Kurier (the Signpost's sister publication in the German Wikipedia). They concluded that the goal to improve content had been fully met – all in all, 557 articles were edited over the course of the project, 434 of which were started or substantially expanded by it. They expressed some disappointment regarding the goal of recruiting external experts as Wikipedia contributors: Although there had been considerable interest and much effort had been made to support such experts, few sustained contributions resulted. (To compensate, in 2009 members of Nova-Institut's own team became involved more directly in editing.) On the other hand, the project was very successful in motivating the German Wikipedia community: Two "Nawaro-Marathon" article drives were well attended, and the "WikiProjekt" founded at the start of the initiative is expected to remain active.

The FNR's total budget for the project seems not to have been published, but Wikimedia Deutschland, which employed a Wikipedian (Barthel) during the time – tasked with interfacing between the experts and the community and with assisting new authors – recorded 35,248.80 Euro in expenditure with respect to Nawaro in its 2007–2009 annual reports, in essence covered by project funds. At Nova-Institut, several employees were involved in the project, including Raschka.

Briefly

 * The team of four people hired to work on the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy initiative (funded by a $1.2million grant from the Stanton Foundation, which also financed the usability project) has been announced. They are Annie Lin, LiAnna Davis, Sage Ross (who recently departed as the Signpost's editor-in-chief; see last week's issue), and Amy Roth.
 * In a post titled Usability: Why Did We Move The Search Box?, the Wikimedia Foundation's user experience (UX) team addressed "[t]he single most frequently expressed concern about the changes we’ve made" in the recent modification of Wikipedia's user interface.
 * English language reports have recently been published by Wikimedia chapters Wikimedia Deutschland (March 2010, April 2010) and Wikimedia Sverige (May 2010), and by the Catalan Amical Viquipedia association (May 2010).
 * Following the "Backstage Pass" tour of Wikipedians at the British Museum (see last week's Signpost coverage), User:Witty lama (Liam Wyatt) has written a blog post summarizing the outcomes of the event, also mentioning the first submissions for the museum's featured article prizes: Backstage Pass and its achievements. He also gave an interview to Culture24 (a British website covering galleries, libraries, archives and museums): Talking GLAMs, the British Museum and low hanging fruit with Wikimedia's Liam Wyatt.
 * The log of the IRC office hour on June 11, 2010 with the Wikimedia Foundation's legal counsel Mike Godwin has been posted.
 * On June 14, Wiki Academy Israel 2010 took place in Tel Aviv.
 * Registration for Wikimania 2010 opened on June 14, less than four weeks before the start of the conference on July 9 (for previous Wikimanias, this interval was longer). Some additional information about accommodation was still forthcoming.