Archive:Current events

March 2005

• As of March 25, Wikiquote has 10,000 articles in total, 15 months after its inception.
• Recent Wikimedia project milestones -- 100 articles: Sicilian Wikipedia, Ossetian Wikipedia, Berton Wikipedia, Polish Wikinews, Armenian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikiquote and Georgian Wikipedia. 1,000 articles: Thai Wikipedia.

• Wikimédia France, the french chapter of Wikimedia, has been officially created and recognized as a non-profit entity. The chapter can now open bank accounts, be brought to courts by disgruntled trolls, and offer tax breaks to donors. A vote for membership fees has been completed. Amendments to the bylaws are being written for next month's General Assembly, at the end of the intiial 6-month transition period. -Nicolas Weeger

• Jimmy Wales asked for more developers at the FOSDEM 2005 conference in Brussels. As the opening speaker at the FOSDEM conference, Jimmy appealed to the development community for support in running the technical side of Wikipedia, and his remarks were published in several places last week. read more... -Michael Snow

February 2005

• On February 22, two circuit breakers blew, removing power from most of the Wikimedia servers and leading to the loss of all service for several hours, no editing for most of a day and slowness for a week. Full recovery of database robustness took the better part of a month. Uninterruptible power supplies could have reduced the effect of this incident (but not all power incidents; law requires an emergency power-off switch, which has caused outages for other sites, most notably for LiveJournal not long ago). Additional UPS systems will be used for key systems, fire code willing. -James Day

• The Foundation began its second global fundraising drive on February 18. It was planned to continue until March 11 or until the goal of 75,000 USD was reached. The fund drive was stopped after 11 days, but donations continued to come in, exceeding the goal by 26% once all were totalled up. Thanks to everyone who contributed! Details and daily breakdowns are available: Fund drives/2005/Q1.

• The Hebrew Wikipedia received an Honor Certificate from the Israeli Internet Society and the National Society for Volunteering in Israel, in honor of its voluntary activity on the Internet for the benefit of man and society. Check out the Honor Certificate Image (in Hebrew).

• The German Wikipedia reached 200,000 articles.
• The Japanese Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles.

• The Belarusan Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles.

• The Aragonese Wikipedia reached 100 articles.
• The Latvian Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles.

• The Italian Wiktionary reached 10,000 articles.
• The Russian Wiktionary reached 1,000 articles.
• The Hindi Wiktionary reached 1,000 articles.
• The Estonian Wiktionary reached 1,000 articles.

• German Wikibooks reached 200 books in 1300 chapters.

• The Wikisource reaches 10,000 pages with Japanese language document 北海道舊土人保護法, about a Japanese law.

• Polish, Portuguese, and Romanian editions of Wikinews are set up: See also Wikinews portal

January 2005

• Wikipedia celebrated its 4th birthday.

• The Portuguese Wiktionary reached 1,000 articles.
• The Limburgish Wikipedia reaches 100 articles.

• The Dutch Wikipedia reached 50,000 articles.
• The Hindi Wikipedia reached 1,000 articles.
• Simple English Wikipedia reached 2,500 articles.
• The Czech Wikipedia reached 5,000 articles.
• The English Wikipedia reached 450,000 articles on its 4th birthday.
• The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.

• The Hindi Wiktionary reached 500 articles.

• Dutch, French, Spanish and Swedish Wikinews were created.

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• See also Wikimedia Quarto, our newsletter.
• News till December 2004 are found on past events.