News and notes
Things bubbling along as Wikimedians enjoy their holidays
Wikimedia Incubator end-of-year report
Wikimedia Incubator has released its 2011 end-of-year report, its first ever. The Incubator hosts test versions of new Wikimedia candidates before they are moved to their own subdomain, and the page details the project's yearly activities:
- Site creations: 12 new language subdomains were created in 2011; the Rusyn Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Albanian Wikinews, Sanskrit Wikisource, Yakut Wikisource, Esperanto Wikisource, Greek Wikinews, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Arabic Wikiversity, Oriya Wiktionary, and the Northern Sotho Wikipedia were all created this year.
- Changes in policy: A policy on Wikimedian closings was formalized this year, as well as progress on the creation of Kichwa and Berber language versions, which must first surmount technical difficulties (neither have an ISO 639 standard code, which Wikipedia uses for its abbreviations).
- LangCom: The Language committee (LangCom for short) held its first real-life meeting in May of last year. Several LangCom members also attended the November Mumbai, India Hackathon, where they worked on Indic language improvements. An upcoming 2012 Languages Conference is in planning.
- Technical improvements: A WikimediaIncubator Extension was introduced this year, implementing a large number of improvements on Incubator test wikis in the backend.
Brief notes
- National Archives ExtravaSCANza: The National Archives is hosting a four-day "ExtravaSCANza" this week, on January 4–7, aiming to digitize and upload previously untouched records on spaceflight, women's suffrage, Chile, and battleships for both the National Archives' and Wikipedian benefit. This is the fourth such event organized by the NARA project, a major part of the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) Wikiproject. Several Wikimedians have organized to help sort the proceedings, and participants are encouraged to help.
- The Guild of Copy Editors: Following another successful year, the GOCE have published their 2011 Year-End Report. Highlights include the elimination of 1,000 articles from their bi-monthly drives.
- New administrators: No new administrators were promoted this week.
- Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this week: the Persian Wiktionary has reached 100,000 total pages, the Indonesian Wiktionary has reached 50,000 entries, and the Malagasy Wiktionary has reached 900,000 entries.
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