Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-21/News and notes

News and notes

Fundraiser update, milestones and more

Fundraising update

As the Wikimedia Fundraiser enters its seventh week, a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales banner is being displayed across all projects, including non-Wikipedia projects, which have not had banners for the majority of this fundraiser. The appeal from Wales, which links to a short letter and donation page, is doing well; the first day of the appeal led to the highest donation day in Wikimedia history, with $430,893 donated.

In addition to the daily fundraiser statistics, a new link on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki shows the performance of the individual fundraising banners by day. The banners have markedly different results from one another; Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving, noted on the Wikimedia blog that one banner based on a donation comment ("I couldn’t ignore that banner at the top of the site anymore... I use Wikipedia far too often to ignore the need!") did better than any other banner before the appeal from Wales started running.

Also last week, there was discussion over a fundraising banner that featured Craig Newmark of Craigslist on both the Village Pump and the Foundation-l mailing list, with some questioning whether this banner was advertising for Craigslist. The notice, which raised around 740 donations on December 15, is no longer running.

Briefly

Voting is now ongoing (until December 31) for a new Wiktionary logo. The logos were originally proposed between May and July of this year. If no logo receives a majority of votes, a runoff will be held in January.
The 2nd Chinese Wikimedia Conference will be held on 26–27 December 2009 in Macau. Links for more information, in Chinese, are available here
Priyanka Dhanda joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Code Maintenance Engineer; she will work in the San Francisco office with the development team.
The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy is requesting public comment on public access policies for the published results of federally funded scientific and technical research.

Milestones

The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 400,000 articles.
The Portuguese Wiktionary has reached 80,000 articles.
The Acehnese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
The Simple English Wikipedia has reached 57,000 articles for the second time in 2009 after a mass deletion of Stubs.
The Estonian Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
The Estonian Wiktionary has reached 35,000 articles.
The Ido Wikipedia reaches 18,000 articles, with Maro di Marmara.
The German Wikibooks has reached 15,000 bookpages.
The Quechua Wikipedia has reached 11,000 articles.
The Sardinian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
The Spanish Wikinews has reached 5000 articles.
The Bashkir Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.