Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-09-10/News and notes

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News and notes

News and notes

Two-millionth article created

On Sunday, the two-millionth English article was created. It is unclear at this point exactly which article was the 2,000,000th article although El Hormiguero was declared by consensus to be the 2,000,000th article. The Wikimedia Foundation is expected to make an official announcement soon, after reviewing the database logs in a search to find the true 2,000,000th article. As of Saturday afternoon, the Wikimedia Foundation has not conclusively found the true 2,000,000th article.

Finnish Wikipedia to select Arbitration Committee

On August 30, the Finnish Wikipedia discussion in regard to creating an Arbitration Committee was completed, with about 91% of the users supporting it. The committee is called Välityslautakunta ("Arbitration Board"). Now, the first elections are soon coming up; candidacy opened September 3 and is open until September 17, and the elections go from September 17 through October 1.

Media statistics released

Using data from the now-discontinued external ogg player (see related story), Greg Maxwell compiled usage statistics for Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora videos. The top five most-played media files were:

  1. Image:Ejaculation Educational Demonstration.OGG (Ejaculation), 338,155 plays.
  2. Image:Wilhelm.ogg (Wilhelm scream), 192,219 plays.
  3. Image:Blonde stag film.ogg (Pornography silent stag film), 41,038 plays.
  4. Image:Tacoma Narrows Bridge destruction.ogg (Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse), 35,231 plays.
  5. Image:STH reverse.ogg (Supposed backmasking in Stairway to Heaven), 30,286 plays.

The raw data is available here.

Also this week, nearly 100 classical cello recordings by John Michel were uploaded, after Raul654 asked Michel to release them under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.

Vicipedia

File:Vic-ipedia.jpg
Three Victoria College students wearing Vicipedia t-shirts

Victoria College in Toronto, where SimonP studied, did something rather neat and Wikipedia related. Each year, they have a different theme for orientation week, and this year's was named "Vicipedia" (Victoria College is generally referred to as "Vic"). They had a number of Wikipedia related events, and every first year student at the school spent the week wearing shirts with a parody of the Wikipedia logo on the front and a random Wikipedia utility on the back (such as the community portal or featured articles). For one of the events, due to SimonP's well publicized links to Wikipedia, he was invited back to participate in a trivia contest against teams of first years. The official site for the event can be found here.

Briefly