Archive:Current events

Portuguese Wikipedia reaches 50,000 articles.
On 21 May the Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles. The 50,000th one is Sé de Viseu.

Wikimedia site down on May 13
On May's Friday the 13th power supply troubles knocked majority of Wikimedia servers. As all of database servers had dual power supplies, they were the only ones to survive the crash. Though, main network switch, core file server and nearly all web and cache servers failed to function. Proper site recovery took more than one hour, with some resulting side effects (some hardware needs replacement). Domas Mituzas

The French Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles.
On 20 April 2005 the French Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles 7 months after the 50,000. Other significant milestones of April 2005 are as following: 1,000 articles: Vietnamese Wikipedia, 5,000 articles: French Wiktionary, Galician Wikipedia, Neo-Norwegian Wikipedia, 25,000 articles: Chinese Wikipedia.

Board election of the French chapter.
On 22 April 2005, Wikimedia France elected its new board. Sitting on the French board now are: Anthere, Jastrow (secretary), Meanos, notafish, Ryo (president), Sam Hocevar, Shaihulud (treasurer), Soufron, Yann. Florence Devouard.

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

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.

The second issue of the Wikimedia Quarto was released.
Wikimedia Quarto, covering the last quarter of 2004, was released last Saturday, March 19. The Wikimedia Quarto was begun in September 2004 as the official newsletter of the Wikimedia Foundation. For this issue, Quarto editor-in-chief Samuel Klein tracked down Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, founder and chairman of w:en:Creative Commons, for an exclusive interview. In a whirlwind session, Lessig talked about copyright, copyleft, barriers to free culture, legal pitfalls for Wikipedia, and fighting the good fight. Florence Devouard.

Wikimedia server was down for several hours on 17 March.
On 17 March there was read only service for several hours after a disk drive used for logging on the master database server became full. Monitoring tools showed combined space for all drives and the last human check of that drive alone showed apparently sufficient space available. Improved montoring and larger disk drives are being obtained. James Day

More downtime analysis.

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.