Template:News-en/2007-12

Japanese Wikipedia awarded with nationally famous "Web of the Year" 2007 The Japanese Wikipedia won for the second time the "Web of the Year"-award Grand Prix from Yahoo! Japan. "Web of the Year" is a nationally famous award in Japan. Also today, the Japanese Wikipedia celebrated 450,000 articles. (26 December 2007)

Wikis Go Printable New open source technology will bring content from Wikipedia, WikiEducator, and other wikis to the world of paper The Wikimedia Foundation today announced a partnership that will make it possible to obtain high quality print and word processor copies of articles from Wikipedia and other wiki educational resources. The development of the underlying open source software is supported by the Open Society Institute (www.soros.org) and the Commonwealth of Learning (www.col.org), and led by PediaPress.com, a start-up company based in Germany. Read more (13 December 2007)

Wikimedia Foundation improves performance and reduces costs by peering at AMS-IX Direct interconnection with hundreds of networks in Amsterdam The Wikimedia Foundation, the international non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, and the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) have joined forces for “the good of the Internet.” As part of this joint program, AMS-IX will give Wikimedia a Gigabit Ethernet connection at no cost, which will enable Wikimedia to deliver up to 10,000 requests per second directly to hundreds of other networks, including many major internet service providers. Read more (12 December 2007)

Analysis Indicates that German Language Wikipedia Better than Brockhaus Online The German language version of Wikipedia is better than Brockhaus, Germany's commercial encyclopedia, according to an analysis commissioned by Stern Magazine. The popular German publication hired WIND research institute to compare 50 articles from Wikipedia and the Brockhaus online encyclopedia based on their 15 volume edition. On a scale where 1 is the best and 6 is the worst, Wikipedia's average rating was 1.7, while Brockhaus average rating was 2.7. Read more (6 December 2007)

Sue Gardner Hired as Executive Director

The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the appointment of Sue Gardner as its Executive Director, effective immediately. Gardner has worked with the Foundation since July 2007, when she was brought in as a consultant and special advisor to the board of trustees. Prior to joining Wikimedia, Gardner was head of CBC.CA, the website of Canada’s national public broadcaster, and that country’s largest and most popular news site. Read more (6 December 2007)