The deadline for Wikimania 2006, to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 4 August to 6 August, is approaching. The deadline for proposals for workshops and tutorials is this Saturday, 15 April, and the deadline for abstracts for panels, papers, posters and presentations is 30 April. Both deadlines were extended earlier this year; for more information, see the call for participation.

Schwartz Communications has been volunteering its services to Wikimedia since last fall, according to the communications committee. Schwartz is a professional public relations firm that has over 175 clients and is currently the largest firm of its kind in the New England region. The company has created an account, User:Schwartz PR, which is shared by four of its employees: Emily Fisher, Jason Morris, Rob Skinner and Kate Hunter. The account is reportedly one of the first multiple-user, shared accounts allowed on the English Wikipedia.

Qwika, a search engine that specializes in wikis, announced that they had expanded their database with over 1,000 new wikis encompassing nearly 22 million articles. The search engine, which also searches Wikipedia, mainly added wikis from Wikia (formerly WikiCities).

The Wikipedia Signpost erroneously reported in last week's issue that the candidates with the highest seven percentages were chosen to serve in the Arbitration Committee elections for the French Wikipedia. Instead, the candidates who had at least 2/3 support ratio with the highest number of support votes were chosen.

• The Malayalam Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Italian Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
• The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
• The Irish Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 35,000 articles.
• The Cornish Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Corsican Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The Macedonian Wikibooks has reached 100 Wikibook modules.
• The Latin Wikipedia has reached 1000 registered users.
• The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
• The Occitan Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Luxembourgish Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
• The Hungarian Wikibooks has reached 500 Wikibook modules.
• The Greek Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
• The Slovak Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
• The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 200 articles.