The Signpost

News and notes

New WMF hire, new stats, and more

Project manager for Bookshelf project

It was announced October 7 that Marlita Kahn was hired for a one-year contract as Wikimedia's project manager for the Bookshelf project, which aims to create reference materials and short how-to manuals about the projects. Kahn is an experienced project manager, who was most recently at Design Media. She will report to Frank Schulenburg, WMF head of public outreach.

Statistics available

A public "Wikimedia Report Card" of key metrics produced by Erik Zachte is now available for August 2008-August 2009. The statistics cover measures of reach, including unique visitors, page requests, and rank in web properties; content, including Commons files, articles, new articles per day, and edits; and community, including New Editors Per Month, active editors, and very active editors. The statistics on content and community are from Zachte's own Wikistats, while the statistics on visitors and rank is from Comscore. Meeting targets for reach and participation is one of the conditions for $500,000 of the recent Omidyar grant, although these targets are not public (see previous story).

Zachte described the statistics and the detailed charts available on his blog.

Main article: Bing search

Bing.com, the Microsoft search engine, is offering "Bing Reference", a way to search "enhanced Wikipedia articles." Results come from a locally-hosted copy of the Wikipedia article database and from Freebase.

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