News and notes

News and notes

One million Wiktionary entries

Wiktionary, a sister project of Wikipedia, has exceeded a total of 1,000,000 entries in all languages. An unofficial press release cited that the project has seen extraordinary growth since its inception in December 2002, and since then the free dictionary has been started in nearly 150 languages. In addition, the total number of edits in all Wikimedia projects surpassed 150 million.

Modified privacy policy goes into effect

Changes to the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy became effective on Saturday, July 1. The changes, which were approved by the Board of Trustees in June, mainly reflect the use of CheckUser, with the major change providing that people with access to CheckUser can view a logged-in user's IP address "in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a wiki page by you or by another user with the same IP address."

Translation newsletter released

The promotion and translation subcommittee, part of the communications committee, released their first newsletter this week. Temporarily dubbed "The Babylonian", the monthly newsletter will serve to coordinate translation of news, press releases, and notices, and bring together promotional efforts, such as poster designs.

Medical wiki proposed

A medical dictionary wiki was proposed recently, with the goal of providing a comprehensive medical resource. The advocates of the proposal admitted that the project would have a controversial legal status, as law prohibits anyone from giving medical advice except for medical professionals. However, the proponents argued that "[the project] would be retelling medical advice from legitimate sources" instead of giving medical advice.

Voting began on a new logo for the Incubator Wiki, a place where projects can be developed and tested before launch. As of press time, there are four logos proposed, with one logo having the vast majority of votes. A vote is also ongoing on whether the name should be "Wikimedia Incubator" or something else.

Briefly

+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
----

The Babylonian #0

Welcome to issue 0 of The Babylonian (temporary name), the WMF promotion & translation subcommittee update from the month of June. Thanks to all who cooperated on the latest translation burst; including press releases, FAQ, and sitenotices.

i. Requests ii. News iii. Thank yous iv. About this update

Requests

/* New WMF privacy policy */

(on meta).

from every Wikimedia wiki page.

/* Wikimedia Executive Director FAQ */

/* Wikimania site translations */

  • Main Page:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania/Main_Page_2

  • Now available in : English, Japanese
  • Other pages and messages are also requested for translation. See

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania

You can find other translation requests on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests

/* Fund drive banner campaign */

  • Ideas for a text banner campaign for the next fund drive are requested.

This is a new idea that might work with or without a banner server (more easily with; Amgine has been pushing for this)

  • See

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_ideas#Banner_campaign


News

 * You can now send translation related email to the Promotion 

& Translation subcommittee; our address is translator (at) wikimedia (dot) org. IRC contact is also available on irc://freenode.net/#wikimedia-translation

 * There are efforts to produce web-banners for Wikimedia projects in many 

langugaes, that websites can subscribe to to support the projects; text notices about wikiprojects and events, small images, &c. You can suggest or link to suitable banner images or text on meta.

 *: New ideas for ads of all sorts are welcome; there are occasionally 

groups who wish to provide free advertising space for Wiki[pm]edia, and it would be nice if they did not always have to make their own ads, but could also choose among existing ones (including ads in their audience's language). See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ads

 * There is increasing needs for help in this area, we as always invite 

other Wikimedians to participate; english competence is preferable, but not required. If you are interested in promotion or translation activities, you may want to give a look to our pages on meta -- our parent communications committee and its subcommittees:

 *: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee
 *: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_subcommittees
 * Wiki[m|p]edia needs good poster designs; the latest comes via Catherine 

Munro : www.cafepress.com/brightplaces.62248324 Ideas for variations on the theme, and translations of it (perhaps into a more familiar poetic form in each language) as well as quite different types of posters, are welcome.

 *: See also the Poster design group, where you can leave comments.


Thank yous

In June, we had a burst of translation requests: a press release on the appointment of WMF General Council and interim Executive Director, the FAQ about the latter's office, two Wikimania updates, and the latest Board-approved version of the Wikimedia privacy policy.

There are no proper words to describe your contributions and thank everyone: there are too many people and too many works to list in short. For example, the sitenotice translation for Wikimania: from its release in one language, within 24 hours, there were 21 language versions of the sitenotice, and in the end close to 30. The French team are quick starters, and have begun to prepare their version for the latest notices within a day; good team work was shown too, among the Spanish translators with their careful translation processing with several reviews and corrections; localisation efforts on the Wikimedia Foundation site by Vipuser from the Chinese Wikipedia...

Your vigorous involvement continues to empower other contributors looking for this information!

On these updates

  • This is a newsletter of the Promotion & Translation subcommittee. Its

content is released into the public domain. It is temporarily called The Babylonian; after the mutlilingual nature of sharing and promoting the projects. Other name ideas are welcome!

  • Its editors are subcommittee members, contributing as individual

volunteers. Submissions or notes about related initiatives are welcome on the talk page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Communications_subcommittees/PT

  • Editors of this issue : Aphaia, Sj



       

The Signpost · written by many · served by Sinepost V0.9 · 🄯 CC-BY-SA 4.0