From 14 to 18 April, the Wikimedia Conference 2010 (WMCON) was held in Berlin, Germany. It consisted of a Developers' Workshop (14–16 April), a Chapters meeting (16–18 April) and a Board of Trustees' meeting (17–18 April).
At the conference, Sue Gardner presented plans for an international expansion of the Wikimedia Foundation. According to a 16 April article (in German) by Heise News, the Foundation plans to open offices in India and Brazil early next year, followed by a third one in an Arab country.
The many presentations at the Developers' Workshop (preliminary schedule) included several about usability topics, and one about the first results of the flagged revisions study commissioned by Wikimedia Germany (see last week's Signpost coverage).
The air travel disruption after the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption had a major impact on conference attendees. On Sunday, Wikimedia Deutschland called for volunteers among local Wikipedians to support about 20 international guests stranded in Berlin after the end of the conference. In an effort to apply the customary problem-solving process of MediaWiki development to the geophysical situation, Bug 23223 was created.
On 12 April, the Brooklyn Museum in New York City announced that it will be "Cross-posting the Collection to Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive". In a test run, BrooklynMuseumBot has already uploaded images of nine public domain paintings. More than 9000 other images are queued for upload on Commons, whereas on the Internet Archive, the museum is not just uploading all its "no known copyright" images, but also those licensed under a non-commercial Creative Commons license (which is not accepted on Commons).
Shelley Bernstein, the museum's Chief of Technology, said that the institution intends to benefit from the collaboration by importing metadata that has been added or changed on the wiki back to the collection. She recalled some of the difficulties that were encountered in last year's Wikipedia Loves Art project ("This was a project that simply didn’t scale").
The Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Medicine Wikiprojects have announced an article translation project with the charitable foundation Google.org. This project aims to address the lack of accessible medical information in languages used in the developing world, by translating articles from the English Wikipedia and transferring them to smaller Wikipedias, such as the Swahili Wikipedia.
In its initial stages, the project will aim to improve a core set of articles on important medical information and neglected diseases, using article reviews provided by professional medical writers. Later, once a set of interested editors have been recruited in the English Wikipedia, Google.org will try to recruit native speakers who can use translation software developed by Google to transfer the English articles. This effort will follow the lead set by Google's recent Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge, which aimed to expand the Swahili Wikipedia in a collaboration with three African universities (see Signpost coverage).
Following the conclusion of the GA Sweeps in March 2010, the April 2010 GAN backlog elimination drive has accomplished its goal to reduce the number of outstanding GA nominations to below 200 – 12 days before the scheduled end of the drive. As of 00:00 19 April 2010, 512 good article nominations have been reviewed since the beginning of the drive, with 379 of them passed, 67 failed, and 68 placed on hold according to the list of completed GANs by the participants. By comparison, 330 GANs were reviewed in the previous GAN backlog elimination drive in February–March 2009. Some other statistics:
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