According to VampWillow on the wikitech LiveJournal community and the notes at the Server admin log, the server failure on Monday February 13 was caused by the physical hard disk failure on the "zwinger" server in Florida, one of Wikimedia's oldest machines. This caused problems throughout the server farm, and many servers had to be rebooted and relinked to the farm. This happened after 11pm GMT, and techs from U.S. West Coast and Australia (amongst others) were up throughout the middle of their nights to fix the problem.

Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

• 7 February — Watchlist redlinks automatically cleaned up.
• 9 February — Interwiki map protected; a vandal had used it in a minor javascript exploit.
• 9 February — Emergency CAPTCHA enabled to stop a vandalbot.
• 13 February — Downtime occurs due to a disk failure.

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.

The Arbitration Committee closed six cases this week, including the high-profile case against participants in a pedophile userbox wheel war. (see related story)

A case against Beckjord was closed on Tuesday. As a result, Beckjord has been banned for one year. After this ban expires, Beckjord is subject to probation, personal attack parole, a one-account limit, and a ban from editing articles relating to the paranormal. Beckjord, whose full name is Jon-Erik Beckjord, was accused of using Wikipedia to promote his beliefs regarding Bigfoot and other paranormal phenomena, as well as using numerous sockpuppets as well as personal attacks and incivility.

A case against EffK was closed on Tuesday. As a result, EffK has been banned for one year. After this ban expires, EffK is to be indefinitely banned from all articles relating to the Roman Catholic Church, as well as any other articles he may disrupt, at the discretion of any administrator, for any period of time up to and including three months. EffK had posted "original research" regarding the Catholic Church, and had made personal attacks against other users.

A case against participants in a pedophilia userbox wheel war was closed on Friday. A full story can be found here.

A case against Reddi was closed on Saturday. As a result, Reddi has been placed on probation and revert parole, allowing him only one revert per article per week. Reddi was accused of edit-warring and disruptive editing on science-related articles.

A case against Freestylefrappe was closed on Sunday. As a result, Freestylefrappe has been desysopped, with the ability to reapply at any time. Freestylefrappe had been accused of improper blocking, abuse of administrative status, personal attacks, and failure to communicate with other users.

A case against Ruy Lopez was closed on Sunday. As a result, the case was closed, and merged into an appeal of a prior arbitration case against VeryVerily.

Cases were accepted this week involving Lapsed Pacifist (user page), bible verses, and editors on Shiloh Shepherd Dog. All are in the evidence phase.

Additional cases involving users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, Leyasu (user page), Instantnood (user page), Boothy443 (user page), and Dyslexic agnostic (user page) are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving VeryVerily (user page), Tommstein (user page), Zeq (user page), Theodore7 (user page), KDRGibby (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, users RJII and Firebug, Sortan (user page), and Carl Hewitt (user page) are in the voting phase.

No motions to close are on the table at this time.