Good things come in threes
It's time to remember one of those English proverbs I leaned in high school: "Good things come in threes!"
1. After being enabled on the German language Wikipedia a few weeks ago[1], Flagged revisions is a hit. Over
255.000 content pages have been reviewed (a third of all content pages) by almost 3.000 users[2]. The in my
humble opinion Wikipedia with the highest quality content, now ensures that anonymous readers get to
read checked versions of content, reducing chances of innocent bystanders being confronted with all
kinds of pranks and filth. Great stuff.
2. Three days ago a shell user created a large number (15) of new MediaWiki wikis (Thanks Tim!)[3]. Many of
those in languages that did not have a Wikimedia project yet (9). Thanks to everyone who has taken and is
taking the time to make Wikimedia projects even more omnipresent. Imagine a world in which every single
human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
3. Last Tuesday, the illustrious "Bug 57" was finally closed[4]. Using multiple Wikimedia projects has
never been this easy before. Yay! for meta projects like Wikimedia Commons. Now where's that WYSIWYG
editor so that the learning curve does not have to be this steep[5]? I am putting a EUR 1000,00 bounty on the
first to get one working properly and approved by Brion before the end of 2008. Contact me for details if you
are serious about working on this. I am certain there are more people that would chip in for this[6] - and
MediaWiki needs it to stay an interesting wiki engine outside of the WMF projects.
4. As you may not know (who am I anyway), I am heavily involved in the MediaWiki localisation project, which
tries to make MediaWiki available in as many languages as possible. In the end of 2007 I formulated four
ambitious goals for the project[7]. By the end of the year, 120 languages should have a minimal
localisation (proper localisation for 'read only', back then 48 languages), 90 languages should have a
localisation for at least 90% of all MediaWiki messages (then 50), 50 should have a 90% localisation of
extension messages used by Wikimedia (then 11) and 20 should have a 65% localisation of all extension
messages supposed in the MediaWiki localisation project (then 7)[8]. In December 2007, I thought all of
those goals would be just or well beyond reach. Well, impossible really. Today the first of the
forementioned four goals was reached: 20 languages now have a 65% or more localisation of the 3,700
messages of the extensions supported by Betawiki. Translators for Esperanto and Vietnamese completed
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