MyWiki:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/News and notes

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{{Wikipedia:Signpost/Template:Signpost-article-start|Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more |By Phoebe and Sage Ross|16 February 2009}}

Update on German Wikipedia Flagged Revisions

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Series/Flagged Revisions}} As of 16 February 2009, the German-language Wikipedia has completed its first pass on flagging every article (with just a few dozen recently created unreviewed articles). Of these articles, 99.47% have their most current revision reviewed. Since reaching completion of flagging all existing articles, the backlog of out-of-date reviews has shrunk considerably, from about 14,000 last week to less than 4,600 now. The oldest out-of-date revision is now only about 6 days old (down from 17 – 21 days), and this has been decreasing over the past few days. Editors hope to maintain a maximum backlog of 5 days in the future. A review statistics tool for monitoring German Wikipedia's progress is available here.

Image restoration leads to new discovery

In the course of restoring a public domain photograph of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre—one of many high-quality scans freely available from the United States Library of Congress website—Wikipedian Durova discovered something that had gone unnoticed by curators: four dead bodies, barely visible before restoration, in the foreground of the image. The Library of Congress staff is updating their records to reflect the discovery. Durova reports their reply:

“ Upon viewing the high-res TIFF file we made of the file, the human remains are quite visible, indeed. Thank you very much for contacting us regarding this image, and for your interest in our collections. You can imagine that among a collection of 14 million items here, there are a lot of secrets waiting to be uncovered! ”

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  Unrestored version: mislabeled scattered debris of camp in Library of Congress bibliographic notes.
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  Restored version: four human remains in foreground partially wrapped in blankets.
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  Detail from restored version: a face in profile, hand at right.

CSD:T1 repealed

One of the Criteria for Speedy Deletion, T1, has been recently repealed. The T1 criterion was for speedy deletion of "Templates in Template: namespace that are divisive and inflammatory." The T1 criterion has a long and interesting history related to the "userbox wars" of 2006; the criterion was added in the wake of this debate and was used for deleting several userboxes, though it continued to be controversial. Today, templates for deletion have a separate deletion page (TFD); templates may be nominated there for deletion.

Recent Changes Camp

RecentChangesCamp is being planned for February 20 – 22 in Portland, Oregon. The conference is an unconference focused on wikis, including wiki technology and communities. The conference has been an annual event since 2006; it is hosted by various members of the wiki community. Along with Wikimania and WikiSym, it is one of three ongoing annual wiki conferences. Everyone in a wiki community or who is interested in wikis is welcome to attend the event. To find out more, visit the RecentChangesCamp wiki.

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-article-comments-end|Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16|2009-02-08|2009-02-23|News and notes}}