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25 April 2011

News and notes
Survey of French Wikipedians; first Wikipedian-in-Residence at Smithsonian; brief news
In the news
Low-hanging fruit and sustainability; Qwiki on iPad; sceptic critic; brief news
WikiProject report
WikiProject Somerset
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The best of the week
Arbitration report
Request to amend prior case; further voting in AEsh case
Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
 

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2011-04-25

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250

What is: Semantic MediaWiki?

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More articles

Over time, a large number of extensions (over 1500) have been written for the MediaWiki software on which Wikimedia wikis and other sites are based. A small percentage of these (approximately 80, in fact) are enabled on Wikimedia wikis. Today's What is? section looks at Semantic MediaWiki (official site), a package of extensions that are not currently enabled on Wikimedia wikis.


Semantic MediaWiki (shortened to SMW) allows those writing an article to use tags like "[[Has population::82,060,000]]" to allow automated tools to understand the answers to these sort of questions. In practical terms, many such tags would be included in infoboxes. Once it's there, a new breed of maps, calendars and graphs can be generated from it, and the data can also be passed on to third party users easily and in a machine-readable format.

Several hundred wikis do use the software, however, and there have long been calls to deploy it to at least some of the Foundation's wikis. Several SMW developers were invited to give presentations at the WMF's "Data Summit" in February (Signpost coverage). Though developers at the WMF are not yet satisfied that SMW can scale to meet the demands of the many millions of users Wikipedia and other WMF wikis get (Deputy Director Erik Möller recently called it "still a big heap of 'untrusted code' ... that we're not prepared to host on our main cluster yet"), many will undoubtedly be interested to see how SMW adoption progresses over time.

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Opinion


2011-04-25

Survey of French Wikipedians; first Wikipedian-in-Residence at Smithsonian; brief news

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/In focus


2011-04-25

Request to amend prior case; further voting in AEsh case

The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases and closed no cases. One case is currently open.

Open case

Voting has continued during the week as to which proposals will form the final decision. More votes are likely to be made in the coming week.

Closed case

On 21 April 2011, YMB29 (talk · contribs) requested that the Committee lift the topic ban that was imposed on him at the conclusion of the case. YMB29 is currently banned from editing articles about the Soviet Union and former Soviet Republics, and all related articles, broadly construed, for a period of no less than 6 months. As of 00:05 of 25 April no motion has been passed. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-25/Humour

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