The Wikimedia Foundation has released its latest report card for the movement's hundreds of sites. The WMF has published statistics about the sites since 2009, but only recently have these been expanded in scope and depth to provide a rich source of data for investigating the movement and the world it serves. Dutch-born Erik Zachte is the driver of the WMF's statistical output, and he writes that the report card and accompanying traffic statistics comprise "enough tables, bar charts and plots to keep you busy for a while".
This week's Report is dedicated to answering our readers' questions about WikiProjects. The following Frequently Asked Questions came from feedback at the WikiProject Report's talk page, the WikiProject Council's talk page, and from previous lists of FAQs.
The Signpost interviewed prolific featured content creator and former Signpost "featured content" report writer Crisco 1492 about ? and Indonesian cinema. ? was the "Today's featured article" for 1 April 2013. 1 April is popularly known as April Fools' Day in many countries.
Numerous Wikimedia Commons editors have chimed in on the Wikimedia Foundation's deployment of a new feature to its mobile website. Allowing anonymous users to register and upload pictures for use in an article, the feature was placed prominently at the top of Wikipedia articles in multiple languages.
This week, we felt the world tremble in the presence of WikiProject Earthquakes. The project was started in May 2008 to deal with articles about earthquakes, aftershocks, seismology, seismologists, plate tectonics, and related articles. While the project has seen success building 14 Featured Articles, one A-class Article, and 21 Good Articles, a fairly heavy workload remains, with a relative WikiWork rating of 4.94. WikiProject Earthquakes maintains a portal, a list of open tasks, a popular pages listing, and an article alerts watchlist.
Last Friday, the Wikimedia movement awoke to news that one of their number—Rémi Mathis, a French volunteer editor—had been summoned to the offices of the interior intelligence service DCRI and threatened with criminal charges and fines if he did not delete an article on the French Wikipedia about a radio station used by the French military.
The arbitration committee is looking for expertise in Argentina and the Spanish language for a case involving former Argentinean president Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877).
The deployment of phase 2 of Wikidata to the English Wikipedia, originally scheduled for 8 April but delayed due to technical problems, may be rescheduled again as the result of community resistance.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,390 last month to 10,444 on March 27th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 97 is ahead of WP:GM who have 75. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,208 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Lua
Another change to the software last month sees the introduction of Lua for coding of templates. Those of you who edit templates may come across this with the introduction of the "#invoke" statement. The code is held in the new namespace of Module that was created for this purpose. One of the first places to show the change is the search screen that now has options to search the Module or the associated Module talk namespaces.
The use of Lua is expected to improve the speed of loading of pages with a large number of complex templates. The heavily used complex templates are being targeted for early conversion to use Lua. {{Coord}} and {{cite}} family of templates are among the first to receive attention. If you see any problems when conversion is made then report them to Technical Village Pump or to the talk page of the module involved.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The April 2013 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
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→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 07:19, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
