Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-12-26/News and notes

News and notes

Stewards appointed

Following the conclusion of the steward elections last week, the Board of Trustees promoted all 12 candidates who had met both the criteria of having at least 30 support votes and an 80% support ratio. Only three of the 15 candidates in the election - Lar, Mzlla, and Taxman - did not reach those criteria and were not promoted, although each of them had at least 75% support. The appointments were first announced by steward and Board member Oscar van Dillen. Of the 12 newly-elected stewards, four had unanimous support: Dbl2010, Redux, M7, and Effeietsanders; six had above 90% support: Shanel (98%), Pathoschild (97%), Guillom (95%), Bastique (91%), Drini (91%), and Darkoneko (90%). The remaining two successful candidates were Cspurrier and MaxSem, who garnered 87% and 84% support, respectively. A tabular summary of the election is also available.

As of press time, it was not immediately clear if any current stewards would lose their status. Although most stewards had no opposition or negative comments, several stewards did have users opposing their status at the confirmation page. The process of confirmation was detailed as having "the current and newly elected stewards... consider complaints left on this page, and choose to remove stewardship as necessary taking into account both the comments left by community and their own perspective and understanding of the job." Van Dillen, when asked about the issue, commented that the re-confirmation was "a matter for the stewards/community to decide, and not [an issue] for the board."

Fundraiser continues

The Wikimedia Foundation's fundraiser continued this week; as of press time, over US$341,000 had been raised. This amount does not include matching funds donations raised last week.

Milestones

After the Maltese Wikipedia surpassed 1,000 articles this week, two milestones were reached. First, all Wikipedias in official languages of the European Union now have 1,000 or more articles each. There are presently 20 official languages of the European Union, although three more languages will be added after 1 January, 2007. Each of the Wikipedias in all 23 languages now have greater than 1,000 articles each. Maltese is the official language of Malta and is spoken by approximately 370,000 people. The Maltese Wikipedia also became the third Wikipedia of a Semitic language to reach 1,000 articles; the Amharic Wikipedia became the fourth-such Wikipedia to reach the milestone soon after. The largest of the Semitic languages by number of speakers are Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, and Tigrinya. Each of the first three now have over 1,000 articles each, although the Tigrinya Wikipedia only has seven articles as of press time.