Wikipedia has dropped a notch in a familiar ranking system, although the available information suggests that the reasons for this have little to do with Wikipedia's growth trends. Also, a glance at what projects different Wikipedias are working on.

Alterego reports that Google has made a major overhaul to its PageRank system, causing Wikipedia to fall back down a notch. Wikipedia, which first reached a PageRank of 9 at the end of May (see archived story), is now again at 8 (out of a possible 10). He notes that Google appears to show a much lower number of incoming links to Wikipedia, compared with the number of links as calculated by MSN. Minh Nguyễn suggests that Google's number may be after weeding out mirror sites that have used Wikipedia content to manipulate their own rankings.

Triddle, who recently started the WikiProject help desk (not to be confused with the Wikipedia:Help desk), is launching an effort to deal with the problem of double redirects. The project is intended as a place to coordinate the use and development of software tools related to Wikipedia. In addition to looking at double redirects, it has previously worked with Dmcdevit on the transwiki process. Note that now that moves are logged, it should be much easier to track down most of the situations in which double redirects get created.

Muriel Gottrop reports that on Sunday the Portuguese Wikipedia achieved a goal of having every article placed in a category. The process was aided by a tool written by Nuno Tavares that keeps track of still-uncategorized articles in real time. An attempt to verify this by checking random articles found no articles lacking categories, although a few new articles have been created since the report and still await categorization.

Although currently understaffed, the Arbitration Committee did open a new case last week and moved quickly to take preliminary action in the matter. However, the rest of the current arbitration cases remained in limbo as the arbitrators continue to deliberate. In other dispute resolution news, the idea of another variation on the mediation process has been floated.

On Tuesday, the arbitrators accepted a case brought by Ta bu shi da yu against Alfrem, arising from a dispute over the Libertarianism article. In light of continuing revert wars, the arbitrators issued a temporary injunction the next day banning Alfrem from editing the article.

Also on Tuesday, Snowspinner, who had previously launched the now-dormant Association of Member Investigations (see archived story), proposed a system he called Wikimediation. Described as "an experimental process", the proposal mixes elements of formal mediation with aspects of the requests for comment procedure.

Snowspinner indicated that he wanted Wikimediation to be less confrontational, emphasizing instead "friendly advice and constructive criticism on how to resolve an issue." Since the proposal discouraged its use merely as "a dry run" for arbitration, some people wondered if it was meant to be entirely separate from the existing dispute resolution system. However, Wikimediation would still count as an alternative method of dispute resolution, since use of such methods is strongly encouraged before resorting to arbitration.

This is one of several recent attempts to revitalize the dispute resolution processes that come before arbitration. The Mediation Committee has stepped up its activity since the addition of MacGyverMagic in June. In addition, MacGyverMagic has replaced Jwrosenzweig, who recently took a vacation from Wikipedia, as committee chairman, although Ed Poor has also helped with organization issues. In any case, the mediators have lately been more active in responding to requests for mediation. The requests for comments process has also received some relatively recent overhauls.