Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-12-27/News and notes

A sad milestone for English Wikipedia

 * For deeper background, see "Administrator cadre continues to contract" from the July issue, or other items in the Reforming RfA series.

This December, for the first time since the list was established in its current form in 2014, the tally of active administrators has been under 500 for the entire month. It does not appear likely to rise above 500 again, unless there is a major change in trend.

sent us this commentary on the request for adminship process:

Turkish Wikipedia block lifted
Just before we went to press, the Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled the block of Wikipedia in Turkey invalid. We will have to cover the full implications of this in more detail in a future issue. Suffice to say that we (Wikipedians) think that it is important for people to be able to access our content, and the fact that a national court agreed is significant. To our knowledge, this is the first time any court has found there exists a constitutional right to read Wikipedia specifically.

Brief notes

 * New language: Sakizaya Wikipedia (szy.wikipedia.org) launched in November. The Sakizaya people are one of sixteen Taiwanese tribes recognized by the Council of Indigenous Peoples. One of the prerequisites for the new wiki was the January registration of an ISO 639-3 language code for Sakizaya by SIL International.
 * Administrators:
 * The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, (December 2); and  and  (December 23). All had approvals above 90%. Adminship was procedurally restored to, , and  (a bureaucrat). This year saw a total of 22 new sysops by RfA compared to only 10 in 2018. 22 new sysops in one year is below replacement levels, but the highest annual total since 2014.
 * Angusmclellan passed away in November. He is missed.
 * Edgar181 was desysoped by |Arbitration Committee motion.  and  both requested the voluntary removal of their admin rights while NCurse and Matthewedwards were dysysopped under inactivity rules in December.
 * Article milestone: The English Wikipedia will reach six million articles by January 15, according to our estimate. Previous milestones were noted in last month's news and notes.
 * Wikispecies milestone: In early December, Wikispecies exceeded 700,000 articles. Good work: its editors created the last 100,000 pages during about 13.5 months.