The Signpost

News and notes

Government stubs, Suriname exhibit, and more

Expanded coverage of municipal governments

Every five years, the U.S. Census Bureau performs the Census of Governments, a nationwide survey of American government at all levels, including local-level and special purpose governments, like housing, stadium, and parking. Two editors from WikiProject Pennsylvania, Dthomsen8 and Blargh29, proposed using a bot to create stubs for about 1,700 municipal authorities in Pennsylvania. Even though this was to be a Pennsylvania specific endeavor, it was thought that this could be the first step to creating stubs for every special purpose government in the United States.

However, consensus developed at the Village pump against such an article-creating bot. Instead, the data from the Census of Governments was used to create Pennsylvania county-specific lists of these municipal authorities. For instructions on how to manipulate this data to get lists created quickly, see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pennsylvania#Lists of municipal authorities.

President of Suriname visits WMF-partnered museum exhibit

One of the images from the exhibition

The 10 August edition of The Signpost reported that the Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam had partnered with WMF Netherlands and the Open Progress Foundation to hold a collaborative exhibit about the cultural history of Suriname. Suriname is the smallest sovereign state in terms of area and population in South America. The country is the only Dutch-speaking region in the Western Hemisphere that is not a part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. According to the Tropenmuseum's official Twitter feed, President Ronald Venetiaan of Suriname visited the museum to see the exhibit this past weekend.[1] First Lady Lisbeth Venetiaan came to the Tropenmuseum last Saturday and was so impressed that she returned with her husband the following day. The Suriname exhibit at Tropenmuseum is the first time a Wikimedia chapter has collaborated with a major museum to hold a joint exhibit.

Edit count

Rich Farmbrough became the first user to pass 500,000 edits on Wikipedia [2], with over 68,000 edits this month alone (many made with AWB). Rich Farmbrough has been one of the top three contributors to Wikipedia by edit count for around three and a half years, dipping only once to fourth place in that time. The Wikipedian with the next highest edit count currently, Rjwilmsi, has made over 360,000 edits (again many with AWB).

Usability study update

The second user study has been posted by the Wikimedia Usability project. The study included 8 in-person interviews about editing Wikipedia, focusing on the effectiveness of the beta interface changes the usability project has made so far. The full report including videos is available on the usability wiki.

Briefly

Milestones

This week in history


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-23/News_and_notes