This week, we welcome in a new weekly series, written by Sj. "Meetups and Newsworthy International Assemblages" (M.A.N.I.A.) will focus on Wikimania-related news in the months leading up to the event. Thanks to Sj for taking the time to write this feature.

I'd also like to note that the Signpost is always looking for writers, both for certain features and for stories about current Wiki-events. If you're interested, please leave me a note on this article's talk page.

As always, thank you for continuing to read the Signpost.

— Ral315

Over the weekend, power problems caused the majority of Wikimedia projects to be unavailable for part of a day. The problem, traced to a technical failure at the Florida colocation center, hit on Sunday and took a little over six hours before service could be restored.

On 9 April at 19:19 UTC, the majority of Wikimedia sites, including the English Wikipedia, became unavailable due to the outage. Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber soon reported that "PowerMedium had some sort of network and/or power outage for about an hour. We've been working on getting things back online since power and network became available again." He later clarified that "an 800-amp breaker in the main PDU failed".

Developers along with colocation center staff continued working to restore service, making sure that things could operate normally again. Service was restored at 1:33 UTC on 10 April, after six hours and 15 minutes of downtime. Vibber reported that some of the servers came up with bad clocks when power was restored, so some users might have seen watchlist entries reflecting incorrect times.

During the outage, the #wikipedia IRC channel was flooded with users seeking an explanation, peaking over 1000 people at one point. Rob Church reported that the developers had to set the #wikimedia-tech channel (devoted specifically to technical discussions about the servers) to moderated status in order to be able to work effectively and not constantly be interrupted by the same questions.

A similar power failure at the colocation center occurred in February of last year, with a smaller equipment failure following in March.

The SOS Children's Villages charity, which operates in 125 countries around the world, announced on April 6 that it has handpicked just over 2000 Wikipedia articles and prepared a free downloadable zip file that fits on a single CD. The articles are on an assortment of topics the organization deems to be of interest to children 8 to 15 years of age, including a number of featured articles. Some articles have been shortened, and all have been edited to remove links to articles outside the scope of the project. The statement does not indicate whether the project is pressing and distributing CDs itself, or is simply making the files available for others to do so.

The CD includes information on the GNU Free Documentation License, and refers the reader to Wikipedia page histories for more information, but does not include actual author information. Andrew Cates, one of the people involved in this project, last produced static snapshots of Wikipedia in 2004.

The deadline for Wikimania 2006, to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 4 August to 6 August, is approaching. The deadline for proposals for workshops and tutorials is this Saturday, 15 April, and the deadline for abstracts for panels, papers, posters and presentations is 30 April. Both deadlines were extended earlier this year; for more information, see the call for participation.

Schwartz Communications has been volunteering its services to Wikimedia since last fall, according to the communications committee. Schwartz is a professional public relations firm that has over 175 clients and is currently the largest firm of its kind in the New England region. The company has created an account, User:Schwartz PR, which is shared by four of its employees: Emily Fisher, Jason Morris, Rob Skinner and Kate Hunter. The account is reportedly one of the first multiple-user, shared accounts allowed on the English Wikipedia.

Qwika, a search engine that specializes in wikis, announced that they had expanded their database with over 1,000 new wikis encompassing nearly 22 million articles. The search engine, which also searches Wikipedia, mainly added wikis from Wikia (formerly WikiCities).

The Wikipedia Signpost erroneously reported in last week's issue that the candidates with the highest seven percentages were chosen to serve in the Arbitration Committee elections for the French Wikipedia. Instead, the candidates who had at least 2/3 support ratio with the highest number of support votes were chosen.

• The Malayalam Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Italian Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
• The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
• The Irish Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 35,000 articles.
• The Cornish Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Corsican Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The Macedonian Wikibooks has reached 100 Wikibook modules.
• The Latin Wikipedia has reached 1000 registered users.
• The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
• The Occitan Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Luxembourgish Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
• The Hungarian Wikibooks has reached 500 Wikibook modules.
• The Greek Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
• The Slovak Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
• The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 200 articles.

As reported last week, Encyclopædia Britannica took out ads in several major English-language newspapers to dispute the Nature comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia (see archived story). A scan of the ad is available in the article "Another round: Britannica versus Wikipedia" at The Institute for the Future of the Book. The article, by Ray Cha, concludes:

In the end, [...] the Nature article in question has a marginal relevance to the bigger picture. The main point is that Wikipedia works amazingly well and contains articles that Britannica never will. It is a revolutionary way to collaboratively share knowledge. That we should give consideration to the source of our information we encounter, be it the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, Nature or the New York Times, is nothing new.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, a newspaper for university faculty and administration, published "'Encyclopaedia Britannica' Assails Article That Put It on a Par With Wikipedia" (subscriber only) on April 7. It provided an overview of the dispute, and said of Wikipedia:

Wikipedia has generally steered clear of the fight and has simply updated its site to include the latest salvos between Nature and Britannica. Wikipedia is not in competition with any traditional encyclopedia, according to its Web site, and has corrected all of the errors identified by Nature. "A strength of Wikipedia in general is its transparency," its site said.

The Repository in Canton, Ohio published a long overview article called Wikipedia: Local read, covering the pros and cons of the increasing use of Wikipedia by high school students.

The Search Engine Journal blog posted a short blurb titled "How To Link Spam Wikipedia", linking to the observations of blogger Peter Davis at "Wikipedia and Link Spammers - A “How-to” Guide".

The Washington Post reports that Wikipedia traffic was up 275% between February 2005 and February 2006 in their article "New Trends In Online Traffic".

The Guardian has an article on Wikipedia, "A thirst for knowledge".

After this weekend's down time, Lifehacker.com published "Google School: Search a web site when it’s down", a guide to using the Google to search a cached version of Wikipedia. Lifehacker has published many other articles about Wikipedia in the past.

Seventeen users were granted admin status last week: Prodego (nom), TigerShark (nom), Hoary (nom), Circeus (nom), Proto (nom), Kungfuadam (nom), Mdd4696 (nom), Kusma (nom), Mark83 (nom), Heah (nom), Can't sleep, clown will eat me (nom), PS2pcGAMER (nom), Pschemp (nom), ProhibitOnions (nom), Royboycrashfan (nom), Fang Aili (nom), and Tawker (nom). Can't sleep, clown will eat me's nomination received a record 246 support votes, breaking BD2412's record of 183 support votes.

Nine articles were promoted to featured status last week: AIDS, Australia at the Winter Olympics, Gerald Ford, The Catlins, Hong Kong action cinema, Nostradamus, Mount Rushmore, National Anthem of Russia, and Rush (band).

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: New England Patriots, History of Limerick, Katie Holmes, Lothal, Thomas Pynchon, Kakapo, and Antarctica.

Two articles were de-featured last week: Frankfurt School and Medieval literature.

Five lists reached featured list status last week: Tallest structures in Paris, Swimming World Swimmers of the Year, List of municipalities of Portugal, List of Arsenal F.C. players, and List of Formula One drivers.

One list was de-featured last week: List of United States House committees.

The latest portal to reach featured status is Portal:India.

Seven pictures reached featured picture status last week:

• 
  Woolworth Building
• 
  Lockheed SR-71
• 
  Toda hut

• 
  Pirate
• 
  Hummingbird
• 
  New York City

• 
  Chicken

Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

• 3 April — Bugzilla IRC bot back online
• 6 April — Additional internal wikis added
• 7 April — Indonesian Wikipedia article count updated due to subst-related bug
• 8 April — OTRS alias added for press contact
• 9 April — Network power failure results in outage
• 9 April — External storage replication error found, fixed
• 10 April — Server time error results in incorrect timestamps, fixed
• 10 April — Additional replication errors fixed
• 10 April — Wiki search down (not fixed at press time)

The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week.

A case against Lapsed Pacifist was closed on Tuesday. As a result, Lapsed Pacifist was banned indefinitely from articles relating to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Lapsed Pacifist had made POV edits in these articles. Lapsed Pacifist ceased editing in February upon acceptance of the case.

Cases were accepted this week involving Messhermit (user page) and Jacrosse (user page). Both are in the evidence phase.

Additional cases involving Terryeo (user page), Aucaman (user page), Marcosantezana (user page), users DarrenRay and 2006BC, FourthAve (user page), Locke Cole (user page), editors on Depleted uranium, and Agapetos angel (user page) are in the evidence phase.

Cases involving Lou franklin (user page) and editors on Bible verse articles are in the voting phase.

Motions to close are currently on the table in cases involving ZAROVE (user page) and users in a userbox-related edit war.

A motion to formally ban Lightbringer for sockpuppetry currently has 6 support votes with no opposition.