News and notes
Labs outage kills tools, self; news in brief
- Labs outage kills tools, self: A more than usually severe outage of Wikimedia Labs occurred after a massive database corruption implosion on June 17. The WMF's operations team restored it to working order with a backup made on June 9. The outage delayed the Signpost's publication, among other functions. For more details see this week's technology report.
- Content translation: The Foundation's language engineering team published a blog post with an update on the sizable progress that has been made with the recently published content translation extension: though still in beta for the foreseeable future the tool has made good progress so far, with over 5,000 translations completed to date.
- Wiki Ed quarterly reports: Wiki Edu have published a batch of three quarterly reviews meant to "reflect on the work they’ve done ... [and] to share these accomplishments and goals with our stakeholders."
- Wikimedia Conference 2015 outcomes: María Cruz of the WMF's "Learning and Evaluation" team (part of the Community Engagement department) and Christof Pins of Wikimedia Germany co-published a blog post reflecting on the Wikimedia Conference 2015, the annual chapters' meeting that took place May 15–17 in Berlin. Many of the photos from the event have been uploaded onto Commons.
- Milestones: The Bulgarian and Danish Wikipedias both touched 200,000 articles this week. In the spirit of things, both have temporarily uploaded their own variants of the Wikipedia globe logo to celebrate the fact.
- Discussions of interest: A discussion of interest occurred on the foundation-l mailing list this week regarding whether or not Wikipedia's use of CAPTCHA discouraged contributions from new editors. Another discussion occurred regarding the unusual nature of the office locks placed on the account of Damon Sicore, the WMF's vice president of engineering, who we are told is on two weeks' leave.
- Fabrice Florin to leave Foundation: Communications manager Fabrice Florin announced this week that he is soon to leave the Foundation "to spend more time with my family, focus on personal art projects and consult part-time on worthy causes". As the manager of the Wikimedia blog, Fabrice has served as an important community contact person at large at the Foundation.
- New databases: The Wikipedia Library has new database accounts available, donated by database companies for use by Wikipedia editors. The new English-language databases include the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including the prestigious journal Science, Taylor & Francis, which includes the subject collections Arts & Humanities and Biological, Environment & Earth Sciences, and the World Bank eLibrary, which includes publications from the World Bank. There are also French-language databases: Érudit, Cairn.info, and L'Harmattan.
Discuss this story