Archive:Current events

April 2005

• U.S. Internal Revenue Service grants 501(c)(3) status to Wikimedia Foundation.

  The Wikimedia Foundation has finally been classified as a public charity and granted 501(c)(3) (tax exempt) status by the IRS. Donations to the Foundation are now tax deductible. We our qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers or gifts. The effective date of the exemption is June 20, 2003 (the date on which the Foundation was created) and the status is fully retroactive. Angela Beesley.

• The Board approves privacy policy.

  The Privacy policy on all Wikimedia projects was approved by the board at the last board meeting. It will be translated in all languages and made visible to users and visitors over the next few weeks. Florence Devouard.

• Yahoo! supports Wikimedia.

  The Wikimedia Foundation and Yahoo! announced on April 7, 2005 that they have reached an agreement by which Yahoo will provide hosting capacity to Wikimedia.

  Yahoo!'s donation is a gesture of support for the charitable goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, and does not imply any ownership of the content. Yahoo! does not expect Wikimedia to host advertisements in return for this support.Florence Devouard. Read the whole of press release

• Wikimania 2005 is waiting for you.

  Wikimania 2005, The First International Wikimedia Conference will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005. It will be an insanely good time. All contributors and fans of the Wikimedia projects are encouraged to attend. Find out more at http://wikimania.wikimedia.org Elisabeth Bauer

March 2005

• Wikiquote reaches 10,000 articles.

  As of March 25, Wikiquote has 10,000 articles in total, 21 months after its inception on July 2003.

  Other Wikimedia project milestones on March -- 100 articles: Sicilian Wikipedia, Ossetian Wikipedia, Berton Wikipedia, Polish Wikinews, Armenian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikiquote and Georgian Wikipedia. 1,000 articles: Thai Wikipedia.

• Wikimédia France launches officially.

  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

• Thank you for your generosity - first fund drive of 2005 a phenomenal success.

  After all sources were added together, we had brought in the equivalent of US$94,648.70 (26% more than our goal of $75.000). We reached this amount in 11 days. 21% of the total (15,254.66 Euros, or US$20,046.15) was via Wikimedia Deutschland. For detailed fund drive statistics, see Fund drives/2005/Q1.

  Thank you for your generosity. Daniel Mayer, Wikimedia CFO.

  More fund drive analysis.

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

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