Usability, 15M articles, Vandalism research award, and more

The Usability Project, initially funded by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, will be extended indefinitely as a "user experience" (UX) program. The current round of usability work is still in progress—including a much anticipated option to collapse confusing template markup while editing—but at the conclusion of the grant period Naoko Komura and Trevor Parscal will stay on as permanent Wikimedia staff. In the announcement on the Wikimedia blog, Erik Moeller said the move was prompted by the Wikimedia Foundation's recent fundraising success.

The article count across all Wikipedias has passed 15 million articles. This follows the milestone in which the Russian Wikipedia reached the half-million article mark.

The Pan 2010 Lab has published a call for participation on a project to detect online plagiarism and vandalism at Wikipedia. An award of 500 Euros will go to the winning entry. The lab is scheduled to be held as part of a conference to be held in September in Padua, Italy.

• A new Wikimedia scorecard with statistics about visitors and traffic has been posted.
• The WikiSym Call for Papers is closing on 7 March.
• A call for proposals for the Wikimedia track at the Open Knowledge conference is now open.
• Right-to-left support is now enabled for the mobile Wikipedia interface.

• 2005: Wikipedia has a power outage
• 2006: Trouble with office actions
• 2007: Daniel Brandt wheel war
• 2008: Brockhaus announces last print edition
• 2009: Books extension enabled

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• "...a call for participation on a project to detect online plagiarism and vandalism at Wikipedia" Does this mean we're going to see a rise in vandalism for research purposes? Wonderful. ALI ^{nom nom} 21:35, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• "The Pan 2010 Lab has published a call for participation on a project to detect online plagiarism and vandalism at Wikipedia." - I think technological development in this area is an absolute necessity for the continued tenability of the project as a whole. Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations has compellingly demonstrated that plagiarism caught early is dealt with easily, while plagiarism caught late can result in a devastating sinkhole of lost contributions and lost productivity to thousands of articles. Props to Yahoo Research for promoting this. Dcoetzee 22:58, 3 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
• Usability Project to become permanent – I hope this doesn't mean the Usability Beta becomes a permanent beta and thus is never installed as the default. R. S. Shaw (talk) 06:30, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• from what I read in the link, it is 2 distinct tasks : "plagiarism detection" (at large, not dedicaced to wikipédia) ; and "Wikipedia vandalism detection". the Yahoo! Research award will go to the plagiarism detection project. DarkoNeko x 12:22, 4 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]