Wikipedia:Announcements

Got an announcement? Make it!

If your announcement might be of interest to the project as a whole (not just to the English edition of Wikipedia) then please place a copy of your announcement on the "Wikipedia News" page of our multilanguage discussion site.

Software status

The English Wikipedia is now running on the new database server / page server setup.
The following Wikipedia software features are currently disabled for performance reasons:

• Individual page access counters (temporary until tech solution found)
• Most wanted, orphaned pages, popular pages, short pages, long pages (temporary)

Current news

July 4th, 2003

The German Wikipedia http://de.wikipedia.org has reached an article count of 20.000 this night.

June 20, 2003

The existence of the Wikimedia Foundation has been officially announced by Jimbo Wales. [1] (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-June/004698) This is a nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, United States which is now the parent organization of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, the Sep11wiki, and the soon to be created (and yet unnamed) TextbookWiki project (see m:Talk:Science Hypertextbook project and [2] (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-June/004426)). It will, however, be some time before the Foundation will be fully operational and able to accept donations and grants.

June 19, 2003

Wikipedia is currently upgrading to "version 1.2 or later" of the GFDL. See Wikipedia:GFDL upgrade for a quick lowdown, or to ask questions.

June 15, 2003

For those who like to edit articles offline with a text editor, a new syntax highlighting file has been released for the popular open-source editor Vim. See Wikipedia:Syntax highlighting.

June 11, 2003

New analysis in Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth suggests that the English-language Wikipedia may actually be following the quasi-exponential growth model predicted and hoped for back in 2001. If this trend is real, a crude numerical model predicts that the English-language Wikipedia will pass the 1 million article mark in mid 2008. A clear test of this hypothesis should be available next year, when the model predicts a sharp divergence from linear growth.

June 10, 2003

Sun Microsystems starts Javapedia, a wiki encyclopaedia on Java, stating:

"Inspiration: the Wikipedia

Our model is the Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia being constructed online by volunteers". [3] (http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2003/06/10/javapedia)

The concept of wikipedia is spreading into the corporate world ...

June 8, 2003

Software changes:

1. There is a new feature called "oldest articles" (colloq. "ancient pages"). Currently this inevitably lists first all the imported articles from the phase I software that have not been edited yet ever since. Hopefully, as these become updated, this feature will allow us to systematically go through our old material and make sure it is in good shape and up to date.
2. Sysops will note that the page deletion feature now auto-pastes the content of pages that are smaller than 500 bytes into the deletion comment (only the first 150 characters). It also does so if the current revision is blanked and the previous revision contains text that can be pasted. The deletion feature now indicates if you are about to delete a page that has a history.
3. The page Wikipedia:Book sources is now used to generate the list of booksellers/catalogs when a user clicks on an ISBN number. This should make it possible to create such a list collaboratively, written from a neutral point of view.
4. It is now possible to link to an article history using [[PageHistory:Page name]] (e.g. PageHistory:Main Page), to a contributions list using [[UserContributions:User name]] (e.g. UserContributions:Rambot), and to a list of pages that link to a page using [[BackLinks:Page name]] (e.g. BackLinks:Fair use).
5. Cached pages sent to visitors who aren't logged in are now sent compressed if the browser supports it; this will lower Wikipedia's bandwidth usage (/stats/) a bit, and moderately speed page loads for people with slower connections. There may be incompatibilities with some browsers! Anyone having trouble with receiving garbage characters instead of nice web pages, please contact the development mailing list (http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l) with the exact browser version you're using.

More... (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english/4226)

June 7,2003

Wikipedia in Irish (http://ga.wikipedia.com/) has just started.

June 5, 2003

Swedish Wikipedia Main Page (http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huvudsida) get a new updated layout.

June 3, 2003

The English Wikipedia reaches 1,000,000 page edits since the software was upgraded on July 20, 2002.

June 1, 2003

Some members of two Delphi Forums have volunteered to let Wikipedia to use nearly 90 of their personal photos on flowers: Wikipedia:Plant photo collection I.

The English Wikipedia reached 130,000 articles (using the new criterion chosen by a project-wide vote that only articles containing at least one internal link are counted).

News Archives

2003

2002

2001