Archive:Past events

These are events around Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. See also current events.

2005

December & November 2005

• Wikipedia wins two Awards in Italy
  

  At the Premio WWW event of the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore Wikipedia was honored as "best website" in the category Education and Work. The free encyclopedia also received a special award from Il Sole 24 Ore in cooperation with the Italian ministry of Technology and Innovation. (elian, 14 December 2005)

• Wikimedia Foundation supporting non-profit medical research....
  

  The Wikimedia Foundation is supporting non-profit medical research by participating in the Folding@Home program, donating

computer-time on servers when these do not have any other work to do.

• • fah-web.stanford.edu
  • article.gmane.org

• A meeting of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of *:Trustees was held on irc on November 13, 2005
  

  Notes may be found at Meetings/November 13, 2005. (Florence Devouard, 27 November 2005)

• The Wikimedia Foundation is honored by a World Technology Award in Communications Technology
  

  This week, the Wikimedia Foundation was honored by a World Technology Award in communication, joining the ranks of other World Technology

  Network members. See http://www.wtn.net/2005/summit/ (Florence Devouard, 15 November 2005)

October 2005

• Wikimania 2006 will take place in Boston, USA
  

  After a very tight vote (5 to 4 and 1 abstention), Boston has been chosen to host Wikimania 2006, the second International Wikimedia Conference. All information about the location can be found on this page. We wish to thank all participants for the work they have put into their bids, and especially the supporters of Toronto whose city made it to the shortlist. Definite dates and agenda to be confirmed shortly. (Delphine Ménard, 22 October 2005)

• Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership
  

  1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition software will be linked from the English Wikipedia Tools page. Please see the press release and discussion for more information. (Florence Devouard, 20 October 2005)

• Vote over the creation of a new project: Wikiversity
  

  The Wikiversity project, which currently resides on Wikibooks, has started a vote to move to wikiversity.org, which currently hosts a near-dormant German Wikiversity project. The vote will last until November 1. Wikimedia Foundation board of Trustee will have the final decision over the creation of that new project after the community gave its opinion (a two-thirds majority and board approval is required to start a project beta period). The potential project was presented at the Floss Workshop in September by Florence Devouard. (User:Anthere)

• End of fall fundraising
  

  The Wikimedia fundraising drive ended late Thursday, with the final tally of $243,930 USD, more than 20% over the initial goal. A decline in donations was noticed over the last third week, with relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in the spotlight, however, donations still came pouring in from all over the world. A minor edit war resulted at some point when the administrators of the English wikipedia argued over whether linking to the Red Cross or other charities from the fundraising sitenotice was prudent, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The argument ended when Jimbo Wales removed the links, and ordered other users not to add it back.

  The 3 weeks long fundraising drive started on August 19, aiming to pay in particular for the significant m:server costs, which have risen dramatically recently. Next fundraising should probably be expected at the end of 2005. (Florence Devouard)

• New Chief Research Officer
  

  James Forrester has been appointed to the position of Chief Research Officer by Jimmy Wales. The exact nature of the role is in the process of being changed; initial discussions can be found on Meta. (Angela Beesley, 12 October 2005)

• New license for Wikinews
  

  The Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License [CC-BY 2.5] was the favored license in the recent poll at meta:Wikinews/Licensure Poll. 31 people supported the license, which was an 82% supporting vote; including over 87% of the Wikinewsies who voted. Many other options had few voters. Of the options with more than 12 voters, the GFDL was supported by 21% of voters, and Wikinews License 0.2 by 60% of its 17 voters (64% of Wikinewsies).

  CC-BY 2.5 has now been agreed upon by the Wikimedia Foundation to be the new license for all existing and future versions of Wikinews. Any edits made previously remain public domain - only new edits will need to be under this Creative Commons License.

  The license can be read at creativecommons.org (that page links to other language versions of the license, and the full legal code). (Florence Devouard - 8 October 2005)

• A very successful fundraising : $243,930 USD raised
  

  The third quarter 2005 fund drive was held from Friday 19 August to Friday 9 September 2005 (2005.08.19 – 2005.09.09). The primary goal was to raise US$200,000 (Yahoo! Currency Converter) to meet income requirements in the third quarter 2005 budget. More information can be found at Fund drives/2005/Q3. (Florence Devouard)

• Boston and Toronto shortlisted as host cities for Wikimania 2006:
  

  After a long debate from the jury to chose among 4 excellent propositions, namely Boston, London, Milano and Toronto, the shortlist for host cities for Wikimania 2006 comprises Boston in the US and Toronto in Canada . The second round of deliberations will elect the host city for the conference in mid-October. (Delphine Ménard), 5 October 2005

September 2005

• New Wikimedia Foundation appointment

  Danny Wool has accepted the offer of a job at the Wikimedia Foundation to be the Executive Assistant for the foundation. This job will primarily entail removing work from me so that I (Jimbo Wales) can better focus on the parts of my job that I am best at.

  Danny has extensive experience in the nonprofit sector and has been our (volunteer) grant co-ordinator for some time. I have worked with Danny on many projects and we are an excellent working team with a fine personal relationship.

  It is envisioned that Danny's staff role as my assistant will be temporary as he comes in and sets up professional systems for our work and begins to look for a replacement Executive Assistant (sometime within a year, depending on the flow of events) so that he can focus more and more over time in writing grant proposals.

  This page has a very cursory look at the position. (Jimmy Wales) 19:50, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

  See also. current staff

• Database crash
  

  The disc subsystem on Adler, one of the two main database servers, crashed a week ago, decreasing our database power. It has been fixed and re-synced, restoring most of the power. We currently have issues with the other main database server, Samuel, but hope to resolve them soon. Three new database servers have been ordered and should be deployed within two or three weeks. (Domas) 08:33, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

• New servers - 15 September 2005
  

  In the past few days, we have set up a few Squid servers on the newly installed Yahoo! cluster in Seoul, South Korea. They have started serving requests from several Asian countries last night, as can be seen on our stats (yellow = yahoo, blue = florida, green = amsterdam, purple = paris)

  Work is underway to experiment with using the remaining boxes in the Yahoo cluster as Apache/mediawiki application servers, to offload the Florida cluster and make things more redundant. As this will create many complex problems and management overhead, we are not sure if and when

that situation will be used in production.(Mark Bergsma) 08:33, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

• Chapter Coordinator appointed
  

  To keep in touch with the current local chapters and help the creation of new chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation has appointed Delphine Ménard as chapter co-ordinator. The position, defined during a board-local chapters meeting during Wikimania 2005, includes the following tasks: working with the Chief Financial Officer on financial matters concerning the chapters, and acting as a liaison between the Foundation Board and local chapters by ensuring information flow. (Florence Devouard, 14 September 2005)

August 2005

• Fundraising drive begins
  

  The Wikimedia Foundation and all its projects are growing at a rate faster than we ever dreamed. To meet our needs for this quarter alone, the Wikimedia Foundation needs your help to raise $200,000 in our first fundraising drive in six months. See Fund drives/2005/Q3 for feedback. (Angela Beesley)

• Budget for the third quarter of 2005 released for public scrutiny
  

  Daniel Mayer published the last approved budget on 14th of august. The total amount of the budget is $198,000.00, 63% of this amount being dedicated to hardware. The next main expenses are planned for hosting costs (8%), and a financial reserve (10%). The Chief Technical Officer will now be employed full-time, and the board is looking for a Hardware assistant as well as an Executive assistant. (Anthere)

• Chief Research Officer resigns
  

  Erik Möller, the Chief Research Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation has submitted his resignation to the Board, stating that fruitful collaboration is no longer possible due to personal differences and a fundamental disagreement about the nature and scope of the role. (Angela Beesley)

• Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference
  

  Wikimania 2005 was held between August 4 and August 8. This was the First International Wikimedia Conference and was attended by around 400 Wikimedians. See the official Wikimania site at wikimania.wikimedia.org for more information. (Angela Beesley)

July 2005

• Wikimedia Board of the Trustees election 2005.

  After two weeks' of voting, from 28 June to 11 July, the Wikimedia Board of the Trustees has seen its two user representatives re-elected with a large margin, in an election involving over 1400 active Wikimedia project contributors. The final results of the 2005 elections to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees are as follows, along with the number of votes received:

  • Angela (Angela Beesley) - 1044
  • Anthere(Florence Nibart-Devouard) - 823
  • Sj (Samuel Klein) - 487
  • Cimon avaro (Jussi-Ville Heiskanen) - 374
  • Arno Lagrange - 306
  • Francis Schonken - 178

  Congratulations to both of the re-elected representatives, and the other candidates, who all made a strong showing and brought many important issues to the forefront.

  The Elections Officials wish to thank everyone who voted in the elections, noting that they found no evidence of fraud after a week's review, and wish the new Board a successful and productive two years. Danny and Datrio

June 2005

• Annual meeting of Wikimedia Deutschland.

  On Sunday 26th June, 2005 Wikimedia Deutschland held its annual meeting at the c-base in Berlin and elected its new board. Kurt Jansson, Arne Klempert, Henriette Fiebig and Elisabeth Bauer were confirmed in their positions as executive board members, additional members are Patrick Danowski, Dirk Franke, Nina Gerlach, Martin Haase, Christian Thiele und Jakob Voß. The protocol of the meeting (in German) can be found here. (Elian)

• At the Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, Germany, Wikimedia and the KDE project announced a cooperation.

  Wikimedia will develop an API which will allow developers to integrate Wikimedia content in their programs. In his keynote on the 23rd of June at Linuxtag, Jimbo Wales presented first examples of Wikipedia content integrated in the KDE applications AmaroK and the Wikipedia offline reader Knowledge which is currently developped. Read more... (Elian)

• Wikimedia Italia, the Italian chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, has been formed on Friday 17th June, 2005,

  in Canino by 18 wikimedians (some photos are available on here).

  The day after they had their first assembly, which confirmed their first board:

  • Frieda, president
  • Snowdog, vicepresident
  • Gac, councilor
  • M/, councilor
  • Sbisolo, councilor   (Frieda Brioschi)

• Wikimedia servers gets a new facility

  On June 7, 2005 (UTC), Wikimedia cluster was moved to another facility, as there would be more space. The newer facility is better designed and in the same city of former one, in Tampa, Florida. Moving had to be done all at once, with all network and servers turned off and moved across the street. It took nearly 11 hours from 07:00 UTC, 03:00 at the local time. Domas Mituzas

• New appointements on the Foundation team

  On the 25th of June, Jimbo Wales has announced the appointement of the following people on official positions within the Foundation organigram
  

  • Chief Financial Officer : DanielMayer (renewal)
  • Chief Technical Officer (servers and development): Brion Vibber
  • Hardware Officer: Domas Mituzas
  • Developer Liaison: Jens Frank
  • Chief Research Officer: Erik Möller
  • Grants Coordinator: Danny Wool
  • Press Officer: Elisabeth Bauer
  • Lead Legal co-ordination: Jean-Baptiste Soufron
    

  As Jimmy Wales best put it, the board encourages these people to work closely with, and even helps to formulate committees within Wikimedia. These appointed positions do not have any special power within any of those groups, but serve as a point of contact to the Board, and to the community, to ensure that information is flowing between all concerned parties within their own fields of xpertise. The appointment is a reflection of the work these people are already doing in these areas, and should not be seen as a disincentive to others to become involved. Florence Devouard

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, Breton 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.

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

• Two benefactors: Lounsbery Foundation grants us 40,000 USD. Lost Oasis hosts three of our servers for free in Paris. See Benefactors and report on Wikimedia Quarto for further information.

• On January 15, Wikipedia celebrated its 4th birthday. English Wikipedia celebrated this day with its 450,000th article.

• Other significant milestones of Wikimedia projects reached on January 2005 are as following: 100 articles: Limburgish Wikipedia, 500 articles: Hindi Wiktionary, 1,000 articles: Portuguese Wiktionary, Hindi Wikipedia, 2,500 articles: Simple English Wikipedia, 5,000 articles: Czech Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, 50,000 articles: Dutch Wikipedia, 450,000 articles

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

• Several wikimedia projects set multilingual portals.

2004

December 2004

• All Wikimedia project has been powered by MediaWiki1.4beta
• A completely rewritten spam filter has been incorporated into MediaWiki, which blocks URLs containing certain domains and words. The new filter comes with a greatly expanded blacklist, derived from the publically available Wikiblacklist (now moved to [1]).
• All Wiktionaries became unaccessible because its domain name was expired. The problem was solved on December 17 and Wiktionary regained its connectivity.

• The Polish Wikipedia reached 50,000 articles.
• The Russian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• The Hindi Wikipedia reached 500 articles.
• The Latvian Wikipedia reached 500 articles.
• The Romanian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• With the Romanian milestone, 20 Wikipedias now contain over 10,000 articles. Wikistats has up-to-date size comparisons.
• The Indonesian Wikipedia reached 5000 articles.
• The Sicilian wikipedia reached 100 articles.

• Croatian Wiktionary reached 100 entries.
• Galician wiktionary reached 10,000 articles.

• The Japanese Wikiquote reached 100 articles.
• Chinese Wikiquote reached 100 articles.

• German Wikibooks reached 1000 chapters (in 124 books).

• The English Wikinews project has left the demo stage and now resides at http://en.wikinews.org - more languages will follow soon.
• The German Wikinews project started at http://de.wikinews.org.

November 2004

• In Rotterdam the first Wikipedia Symposium was held. It was a great success, with over 40 people present, among which were three trustees, Jimmy Wales, Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart Devouard.

• Wikipedia.org is the 172nd most visited site on the Internet according to Alexa.com.

• The English Wikipedia reached 8.00 average edits per page, suggesting increasing quality even with increasing quantity.
• The English Wikipedia has over 1 million total pages (over a third are legitimate articles).

• The Greek Wikipedia reached 2,500 articles.
• Italian Wikipedia reached 30,000 articles.
• Korean Wikipedia reached 5000 articles.
• Kannada Wikipedia reached 100 articles.
• Italian wiktionary reached 1000 articles.
• Swedish Wikipedia reached 50.000 articles.
• Catalan wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• Ukrainian wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• The Swedish Wikipedia became the world's seventh biggest wiki, by page count.

• The Portuguese Wiktionary had reached 500 articles.
• The English Wiktionary reached 50,000 articles.
• The Dutch Wiktionary has its 1000th word in the Dutch language. There are 7129 articles and 233 languages.
• The Gujarati Wiktionary reached 100 articles.

• The Polish Wikiquote reached 500 articles.

• The English Wikibooks reached 5,000 modules.

October 2004

• We have exceeded our goal of raising 50,000 dollars in two weeks. Thanks to all who donated!
• The location of Wikimania 2005 was determined to be Frankfurt am Main.
• The French chapter had its inaugural meeting ([2]) in Paris and via the Wiki and IRC and elected its board members.
• Vala, a user of the Italian Wikipedia, graduated in sociology with a thesis on Wikipedia. She graduated "summa cum laude". This is the first time in Italy that a thesis on this subject has been discussed.

The 1000th WikiCommons file

• Images on Wikimedia Commons can now be linked to like local images.

• Wikipedia.org's daily Alexa rank hits 218 - a new record.[3] See m:Wikipedia.org is more popular than....
• There has been a huge spike in traffic over the last two days leading to slower than normal load times. Our previous Alexa ranking record was 349 on September 22nd; we climbed to 260.

• The Southern Min Wikipedia reached 500 articles.
• The Finnish Wikipedia reached 10 000 articles (Press release in Finnish)
• The Lithuanian Wikipedia reached 1000 articles.
• The Norwegian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles (Press release in Norwegian)
• The Sanskrit Wikipedia reached 1,000 articles.
• Bulgarian Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles.
• The Polish Wikipedia reached 40,000 articles.

• The Hindi Wiktionary reached 100 articles.
• ウィクショナリー, the Japanese Wiktionary, has passed 1,000 words.

• WikiCommons reached 1000 uploaded files (mostly images, but also over 100 sound fragments and 1 movie).

September 2004

• The Foundation begins a two week Fundraising drive with the aim of raising $50,000.
• Publication of the Foundation Wikimedia, Inc Newsletter: Wikimedia Quarto

• Wikipedia reaches a total of one million articles across all languages. See the international press release.