Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-05-28/News and notes



Upcoming conferences in the US and India
Meta reports that WikiConference USA 2016 is set for the three-day weekend of Friday, October 7 to Monday, October 10, 2016 in San Diego, California, hosted by the Southern California Wikimedians with assistance from other Wikipedia groups across North America. Conference organizers include User:DrMel and User:Pharos. Originally, Seattle had been considered as a site, with the Cascadian Wikipedians assisting, but they chose to focus on potentially hosting in 2018.

Other upcoming Wikimedia conferences include 2016 GLAM Boot Camp, set for June 14–16, 2016 at the National Archives in Washington DC., site of 2015 WikiCon USA. Organizers are Wikimedia DC and the National Archives. Immediately following is the 2016 Wikimedia Diversity Conference on June 17 and 18, at the same location and with the same hosts. This is the annual international conference on diversity in the Wikimedia movement.

WikiConference India 2016 will be hosted by Chandigarh Group of Colleges, Landran (Mohali) on 5, 6, and 7 August 2016. Scholarship applications for WikiCon India 2016 can be made until May 31; for details see the related Wikimedia blog post.

Wikimedia's May Metrics and Activities Meeting
A video of the Wikimedia Foundation's May 2016 Metrics and Activities Meeting is available on Commons and YouTube. In the introductory address by product manager Danny Horn, Roan Kattouw was congratulated for his seven years' service, and Pats Pena, Maggie Dennis, Daniel Zahn, and Katie Horn for their five years' service to the WMF.

Community update starts at 3:06, with a roundup of the recent FDC recommendations and new trustees, "learning days" at the recent Wikimedia Conference, the Europeana Art History Challenge, the MENA Artists Month (a Guggenheim collaboration with several parts of the Wikimedia movement, on contemporary artists in the middle east and north Africa), and the Ibero-American culture translation challenge,

News on Wikipedia starts at 8:35, including information on the increasing popularity and influence of Wikipedia's breaking news stories, and the extraordinary statistics on the sudden cascading of hits on the English Wikipedia's article upon Prince's death, which senior analyst Tilman Bayer estimated at 810 per second at one point, and an average of more than 500 views per second, and a total of more than 200 edits, in the first hour after his death; there were some 800,000 views of the WMF's social media posts about Prince. Editorial associate Ed Erhart spoke about the intersection of real-time events, Wikipedia's readers, and Wikipedia's editors (15:10–16:42).

Metrics starts at 18:30: among the key messages are that there are 530 million views of Wikimedia sites per day (generally holding steady over the past three years, with a loss of 2%), 55.1% on desktop (down 18 percentage points), 43.6% on mobile web (up 27 points), and 1.3% on apps. About 75.5% of views are from the global north.

Wikipedia Education Program updates start at 25:55. A brief Q&A starts at 32:29, with several questions relayed from IRC by James Forrester, senior product manager. 

Brief notes

 * New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator,.
 * Last chance to vote for the Commons Picture of the Year: Voting closes at 23:50 UTC on 28 May. The Signpost will be reporting on the results of the competition.