Microsoft Encarta, the second most popular English-language Internet encyclopedia, is being discontinued and taken offline on 31 October 2009. According to the updated FAQ, "the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past." Although it never had as high a reputation as Encyclopædia Britannica for its articles, Encarta rose to prominence in the 1990s on the strength of its multimedia content, including tens of thousands of illustrations and hundreds of videos. However, in recent years Wikipedia has left Encarta a distant second among online encyclopedias; according to a recent Hitwise analysis, Wikipedia attracts 96.7% of encyclopedia web traffic, compared with 1.3% for Encarta.
On March 23, Brion Vibber announced that Frédéric Vassard had been hired for the Wikimedia Foundation technical staff. Vassard will be working with "operations, monitoring, and documentation of our servers."
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
The ongoing poll on the Flagged protection and patrolled revisions proposal is set to end on April 1. The compromise proposal currently has around 82% support—and has been falling gradually from an early level about 88%—with over 300 votes so far. In addition to those who oppose any form of flagged revisions, the proposal has been opposed by some who argue that it is essentially toothless with regard to biographies of living people. It is yet to be seen whether Jimmy Wales will present his own compromise proposal to apply some form of flagged revisions to such biographies, as he indicated he would before the current proposal gained momentum.
Mathias Schindler reports the imminent "release of some 250,000 images from the Deutsche Fotothek under Creative Commons cc-by-sa 3.0 and its subsequent uploading to Wikimedia Commons." A joint press conference with Wikimedia Germany is expected soon. This follows Wikimedia Germany's late 2008 success in securing almost 100,000 images from the Bundesarchiv.
As of April 1, a new system will be used to create nomination pages for featured article candidates. Under the new system, modeled after articles for deletion, all nominations will be automatically created in standard subpages with the following form:
This will avoid problems associated with the old system of moving pages and updating links. Further information is available here.
Discuss this story