Wikipedia:Announcements January 2002

Announcements for January 2002

January 31, 2002

New Scientist has an article about open source content that mentions Wikipedia: "'People like the idea that knowledge can and should be freely distributed and developed," says Sanger." The article (http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft/copyleftart.jsp) is free.

January 25, 2002

Wikipedia is now using a new PHP/MySQL-based software. Please read about the new features and report bugs. Updated search bookmarklets (http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/bookmarklet) are available.

January 17, 2002

Larry reports that the Stanford talk seemed to go pretty well and that he was, mercifully, treated gently.

A (press release-inspired) Software Dioxide (http://www.softwaredioxide.com/Channels/ConView.asp?id=6538) article seems to propose that coders use Wikipedia to compile a "Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge." Sounds good. Maybe they are referring to SWEBOK.

January 16, 2002

Larry Sanger will be speaking to the Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory as part of their colloquium[?] series; the talk can be seen here (http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/) and the text can be read here (http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia_and_why_it_matters).

January 15, 2002

Please help distribute Wikipedia's first press release (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/020115/latu099_1)! (Local copy)

January 14, 2002

Tomorrow is Wikipedia Day, and we're doing the press release tomorrow! Be ready!

January 9, 2002

Larry Sanger and Malcolm Farmer think it's virtually certain that Wikipedia has over 20,000 articles, and Malcolm thinks there's a 95% chance of over 21,000. So we're "officially" announcing 20,000 articles (on the front page). When we've tried to count pages using the ordinary procedure, with the old search engine, the process times out; but the last time Malcolm tried this when it worked, Dec. 22, the count of "comma pages" was 19,800, which indicates that now, 20 days later, we have certainly passed the 20,000 article mark.

January 8, 2002

A [http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia's_first_press_release--draft_for_comment draft press release] about Wikipedia (see Jan. 3 below) has been posted on Meta-Wikipedia. Please comment and edit. Note, we are looking for an appropriate quotation from one of our resident academics. :-) --LMS

January 7, 2002

Wikipedia t-shirts, anyone? Wikipedia has set up a CafePress (http://www.cafepress.com/) account, and once we upload a suitable design or two, anyone will be able to go in and get a Wikipedia t-shirt (for rather more money than we might want to spend, but CafePress does all the work, which is nice). Please see this Meta-Wikipedia page (http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia_T-shirts) to contribute designs or design ideas!

January 6, 2002

Status of the non-English Wikipedia pages:

• http://ja.wikipedia.com/ - Japanese - was vandalized and didn't seem to have any content to begin with.
• http://ca.wikipedia.com/ - Catalan - doing pretty good, nice content flow for a non-english page.
• http://ar.wikipedia.com/ - Arabic - not much content.
• http://zh.wikipedia.com/ - Chinese - not much content (I searched for "talk" and found 0 pages).
• http://dk.wikipedia.com/ - Danish - not any real content.
• http://nl.wikipedia.com/ - Dutch - doing suprisingly good! This is unusualy since Dutch isn't really a widely spoken language.
• http://de.wikipedia.com/ - German - doing real good.
• http://eo.wikipedia.com/ - Esperanto - doing real good.
• http://fr.wikipedia.com/ - French - doing fairly well, could use some more traffic.
• http://he.wikipedia.com/ - Hebrew - not any real content.
• http://hu.wikipedia.com/ - Hungarian - no real activity.
• http://it.wikipedia.com/ - Italian - Fair to midland. I guess it is on the low side and could use more activity.
• http://pl.wikipedia.com/ - Polish - low activity.
• http://pt.wikipedia.com/ - Portuguese - fairly high activity. Not too bad for Portugal.
• http://ru.wikipedia.com/ - Russian - low activity for a country like Russia.
• http://simple.wikipedia.com/ - Simple English - low activity. Perhaps we could start trying to transfer some of the most useful and widely used articles from the regular Wikipedia to here.
• http://es.wikipedia.com/ - Spanish - I see a nice effort here, but it looks like only a handfull of people are doing everything.
• http://sv.wikipedia.com/ - Swedish - low activity.
• http://af.wikipedia.com/ - Afrikaans - not much activity. One guy has done everything.
• http://no.wikipedia.com/ - Norwegian - virtually no activity.
• http://eu.wikipedia.com/ - Basque - virtually no activity. Once again, a single person has done everything.

January 3, 2002

Larry Sanger has been invited to speak on January 16 to the Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory as part of their colloquium[?] series [1] (http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/). Larry's topic is, probably, going to be what Wikipedia is and why it matters.

Wikipedia will probably do a press release announcing our first anniversary (January 15), breaking the 20,000 article barrier, and Larry's Stanford talk of the 16th (which will be webcast and locally televised). We hope the announcement of these events will create some nice publicity; it would be nice if we had to call out The Wikipedia Militia (which we can also call "The Wikipedia Welcoming Committee").

Wikipedia haiku (http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia_haiku) might be amusing.