Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-03-02/News and notes

News and notes

Stewards, Wikimania bids, and more

New stewards confirmed

After the 2009 steward elections, Cary Bass of the Wikimedia Foundation announced that nine new stewards have been confirmed: Meno25, Erwin, Kylu, Laaknor, Mike.lifeguard, Leinad, Dorgan, Alexanderps, and Mardetanha. The new stewards come from a variety of projects and languages, including Arabic, Dutch, English, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Persian.

Wikimania bids due

Bids for cities to host Wikimania 2010 are due on March 7. Further information may be added to bids after they are submitted (until March 30), but no new bids may be submitted after this date. Bids should be posted to the bid page, bearing in mind the judging criteria. Any questions may be directed to this year's Wikimania Jury or posted on the Wikimania-l mailing list.

Free content in Norwegian

The Store norske leksikon, the second-largest Norwegian-language encyclopedia (after the Norwegian Wikipedia), made its online version free from February 25. The encyclopedia will also begin to accept user-submitted content, which will be reviewed by experts and added as appropriate. See the official website and this Foundation-l post.

Wikipedia data sets available

Amazon released its new Public Data Sets, which include two different subsets of Wikipedia data: structured data from DBpedia and a processed English Wikipedia dump from Freebase. The data sets (computer files having a record organization) are hosted for free as part of Amazon EC2. (See related New York Times article.)

Briefly

As part of the Wikimedia usability initiative, any user may nominate an extension to be considered as part of the usability initiative's survey of extensions. A software extension is a computer program designed to be incorporated into another piece of software in order to enhance, or extend, the functionalities of the latter.
There is currently an open volunteer position for an OTRS coordinator; details are on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki.
There is also an open position for a communications intern in the San Francisco WMF office.