Wikipedia has risen into top 25 most popular sites on the web, according to Alexa Internet [1]. At press time, the site's rank was 23rd, passing such sites as CNN.com and Go.com. It is also number one on Alexa's list of reference sites, finally surpassing the My Yahoo portal; it passed Mapquest in June of last year.

Proposed deletion is in a trial period this week, after discussion about the idea. The system allows uncontested deletions to be deleted after five days, bypassing AFD. If a deletion is contested by removing the "proposed deletion" template, it will usually be put to AFD then to determine community consensus. Many users worry that good articles will be deleted, but over fifty contributors promised to review the list of proposed deletion requests (generated automatically) to make sure that this does not happen.

A new competition for bringing articles to higher standard was launched at Wikipedia:Article assessment this week. Articles within a selected weekly topic (which are neither stubs nor featured articles) are rated on several criteria, and the article with the highest rating is selected as the winner. The first topic is Natural disasters.

A public opinion survey continues about the usefulness of user conduct requests for comments at Wikipedia:User RFC reform.

• The Bosnian Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 17,000 articles.
• The Greek Wikipedia has reached 2,000 registered users.
• The Yiddish Wikipedia has reached 700 articles.
• The Estonian Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
• The Interlingua Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Korean Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
• The Welsh Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The Venetian Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles and 50,000 total pages in the database.
• The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.