Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-17/News and notes
{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-start|{{{1|Labs outage kills tools, self; news in brief}}}|By Resident Mario| 17 June 2015}}
- Labs outage kills tools, self: A more than usually severe outage of [https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20150617-LabsNFSOutage Wikimedia Labs occurred] after a massive database corruption implosion on June 17. The WMF's operations team restored it to working order with a backup made on June 9. The outage delayed the Signpost's publication, among other functions. For more details see this week's technology report.
- Content translation: The Foundation's language engineering team published a [http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/09/content-translation-tool/ blog post] with an update on the sizable progress that has been made with the recently published content translation extension: though still in beta for the foreseeable future the tool has made good progress so far, with over 5,000 translations completed to date.
- Wiki Ed quarterly reports: [http://wikiedu.org/ Wiki Edu] have published a batch of three quarterly reviews meant to "reflect on the work they’ve done ... [and] to share these accomplishments and goals with our stakeholders."
- Wikimedia Conference 2015 outcomes: [http://blog.wikimedia.org/author/maria-cruz/ María Cruz] of the WMF's "Learning and Evaluation" team (part of the Community Engagement department) and [http://blog.wikimedia.org/author/christof-pins/ Christof Pins] of Wikimedia Germany co-published a [http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/06/09/evaluation-helps-leaders-learn-together/ blog post] reflecting on the Wikimedia Conference 2015, the annual chapters' meeting that took place May 15–17 in Berlin. Many of the photos from the event have been uploaded onto Commons.
- Milestones: The [https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0 Bulgarian] and [https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forside Danish] Wikipedias both touched 200,000 articles this week. In the spirit of things, both have temporarily uploaded their own variants of the Wikipedia globe logo to celebrate the fact.
- Discussions of interest: A [http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/599832 discussion of interest] occurred on the foundation-l mailing list this week regarding whether or not Wikipedia's use of CAPTCHA discouraged contributions from new editors. Another [http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/599898 discussion] occurred regarding the unusual nature of the [https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=User%3ADamon+Sicore+%28WMF%29%40global&type=globalauth office locks] placed on the account of Damon Sicore, the WMF's vice president of engineering, who we are told is on two weeks' leave.
- Fabrice Florin to leave Foundation: Communications manager Fabrice Florin announced this week that he is soon to leave the Foundation "to spend more time with my family, focus on personal art projects and consult part-time on worthy causes". As the manager of the Wikimedia blog, Fabrice has served as an important community contact person at large at the Foundation.
- New databases: The Wikipedia Library has new database accounts available, donated by database companies for use by Wikipedia editors. The new English-language databases include the American Association for the Advancement of Science, including the prestigious journal Science, Taylor & Francis, which includes the subject collections Arts & Humanities and Biological, Environment & Earth Sciences, and the World Bank eLibrary, which includes publications from the World Bank. There are also French-language databases: Érudit, Cairn.info, and L'Harmattan.