News and notes

Wikimedia hiring

In addition to the Chief Program Officer and positions for the Stanton Usability initiative (which include two software developers and an interaction developer), the Wikimedia Foundation is also hiring a System Administrator. This position will work out of the San Francisco office. For more, see the job openings page on the Foundation wiki.

Chapters

Two local Wikimedia Chapters were approved in January: Wikimedia New York City and Wikimedia UK. Wikimedia New York City is the first local chapter in the United States, and serves the Northeastern United States. Wikimedia UK serves the United Kingdom; it is being reconstituted. With these two chapters, Wikimedia Australia no longer has the sole claim to chapter representation of English Wikipedia and other English-language Wikimedia projects.

New project: Epistemia

Two Wikipedia contributors, Thomas Larsen and Richard Austin, recently announced the public launch of a new encyclopedia project called Epistemia on the WikiEN-L mailing list. The project, which can be found at epistemia.org, is a wiki-based encyclopedia that, according to Larsen, aims to provide an alternative to "the negativity of the participatory culture that has developed on Wikipedia" and "the lack of consistent adherence to the conventional quality expectations associated with professional scholarship" on Wikipedia. Although these goals are similar to Citizendium's aims, Larsen stated that they hoped to run the project without implementing Citizendium's "overly-restrictive mechanisms". The new project is licensed under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.

Anthere gets knighted

The French National Order of Merit has been awarded by President Sarkozy of France to Anthere (Florence Devouard). She received the rank of knight as "chair of an international foundation" (the Wikimedia Foundation). You can read more at Devouard, knight in the French National Order of Merit.

Wikipedian chosen as a volunteer of the year in Estonia

Estonian Wikipedian Andres Luure was one of fifteen individuals recognized for volunteering in Estonia for 2008. Country-wide volunteers of the year have been chosen in Estonia since 2005. Out of sixty nominees for the 2008 award, a committee consisting of representatives of media, the public sector, and others chose fifteen volunteers to be rewarded. Luure was recognized for his contributions to Wikipedia. Andres has been active in the Estonian Wikipedia since March 2003; he has the top edit count on the project. Estonian Television carried a live broadcast of the ceremony on December 7, 2008, with President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves in attendance.

Briefly

There is currently a survey about whether to increase the protection level of Biographies of Living People (BLP)s. This would affect a large number of articles: as of January 17, Category:Living people passed 333,333 articles (300,000 were reached on September 7, 2008).
The 2009 Steward elections and reconfirmation will begin on Meta on February 1. Candidates may nominate themselves until January 25.
According to the Wikipedia article traffic statistics page, the article on Barack Obama received almost a million page views on January 20, the day of his inauguration.
Milestones:

Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 100,000 articles.
The Egyptian Arabic (Masry) Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 22,000 articles.
The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages has reached 2,000 users with automatically created global user User:Kaio-ken x10.
The Piemontèis Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.


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- New wiki encyclopedia project, Epistemia—either a dedicated story or part of News and Notes.

Blatant self-promotion and completely non-notable. Every attempt by the creator, Thomas H. Larsen, to have this project linked to in the Community Portal has been reverted, even going back so far as to when the project was referred to as Wikipendium. Both the Community Portal and the Signpost are designed to highlight issues that are notable and relevant to the Wikipedia community. Epistemia is neither. --Cryptic C62 · Talk 02:44, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Blatant self-promotion" and "completely non-notable"? Epistemia is not yet notable, but it is of relevance and interest to the general community (at least in my humble opinion), especially in light of the reasonably positive reception on the WikiEN-L mailing list. A News and Notes entry would probably be most appropriate, though, especially since the project is very small at this time. – Thomas H. Larsen 05:58, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I see Phoebe's mentioned it at User:Phoebe/signpost012409. At any rate, I'll let her decide what is appropriate and what's not. A comparison to Scholarpedia and Veropedia is inaccurate, though. – Thomas H. Larsen 06:00, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I see no need for another Wikipedia hate site, nor for it to be advertised here. At alas, I'm not a writer for the Post. §hep • ^Talk 06:12, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

As I'm sure Thomas Larsen will tell you, Epistemia is hardly intended as a Wikipedia hate site. I don't think it merits a separate article, but I think it's worth mentioning in News and notes, just as the Signpost has covered other wiki projects that attempt to overcome flaws of or fill niches unfilled by Wikipedia. But you're certainly welcome to write for the Signpost, Shep.--ragesoss (talk) 06:29, 22 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Epistemia is hardly a Wikipedia hate site—consider it an encyclopedia that aims to address Wikipedia's many flaws. – Thomas H. Larsen 00:56, 24 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I was away when the above was discussed. 1) I think any fork of the English Wikipedia is notable enough for a note in News and Notes, when it's done with intent and addressed to the community, as I think it's interesting to see how our community treats forks over time. 2) I wish that the mention of scholarpedia, veropedia, et al had stayed in; regardless of what you think of them, Thomas, they are other encyclopedia projects that have used a Wikipedia model or content. I'm looking at the situation holistically here. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 07:39, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

oh, and ps. -- the phrasing "New wiki encyclopedia project, Epistemia—either a dedicated story or part of News and Notes" was just a note to myself on the draft page to include it somewhere! And shouldn't be taken as more than that. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 07:43, 26 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome to add them back; I won't do so, though. The trouble is that Scholarpedia and Veropedia are completely different from Epistemia in many ways: Scholarpedia invites editors, Epistemia doesn't specifically do so; Veropedia takes Wikipedia's best content and copyedits it, Epistemia doesn't specifically do so either. Comparisons to Wikipedia and Citizendium are significantly more appropriate in my opinion.

Thanks for writing about Epistemia. – Thomas H. Larsen 00:06, 27 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Barack Obama page views

This tool does not count redirects as I understand it. You have to add page view for each redirect to his page to get the true total.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 08:41, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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