Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-01-27/News and notes

The article count on en-Wiki surpassed 6,000,000 at about 18:59 UTC on January 23. Due to the limitations of the software and the volume of article creations at about that time, it is impossible to determine exactly when the milestone was reached. The symbolic 6,000,000th article was decided by consensus to be Maria Elise Turner Lauder written by User:Rosiestep. She told The Signpost

Congratulations to Rosiestep and to all editors who contributed to the last million new articles.

Coffeeandcrumbs told The Signpost in detail how the symbolic article was chosen, saying it is impossible to exactly identify the 6,000,000th article. "We don't know if a redirect (with an old creation date) that was converted to an article or disambiguation page was what brought us over the threshold, or which of the new articles created that same minute was the one. Like in all things on Wikipedia, consensus should reign supreme and consensus determined that Rosiestep's article deserved recognition."

Fifteen articles which were created at 18:59 UTC on January were screened for quality. The entire decision process may be viewed at Wikipedia talk:Six million articles.

What can be said about six million articles? As usual, Wikipedia's editors provide the answer. A chance view of a user talk page told us:

"6 million is starting to get to be a serious figure, but only a tiny fraction of what is possible of course. A truly resourceful comprehensive encyclopedia in which every article is the highest possible quality is going to take hundreds of years without a doubt. I am certain that Wikipedia will still be around in 2100, even if this evolves into something like a 3D encyclopedia ... You never know!" –Dr. Blofeld

To which another editor responded:

"I keep marveling at how poor our coverage even of American topics is, and of course that's light-years better than our coverage of many other countries. If our American coverage is so spotty, imagine what that means for the rest of the world. We have a long way to go yet..." –Ser Amantio di Nicolao

Your answers and comments are requested in the comments section below.

Fourteen heritage sites, known collectively as Paris Musées, announced that 100,000 digitized files in its collections are now licensed CC-0.

Paris Musées, which holds many masterpieces, is the first Parisian institution to so license its public domain files. They can be downloaded in High Definition via a dedicated API. Wikimedia France (in French) has a formal partnership with Paris Musées and will help import images and data to Wikimedia commons and Wikidata.

The Creative Commons annual summit will be held from May 14–16 in Lisbon, Portugal. Proposals for presentations are due February 12. The overlap of Wikipedia's goal with those of CC, which provides Wikipedia with our free content licenses, is shown by the tracks for the presentations: "Creators of the Commons; Powering the Commons" (about tools, technology and communities); "Open Education and Open Scholarship"; "Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums"; and "Policy and Advocacy promoting the Commons".

Citizendium, one of Larry Sanger's failed encyclopedia projects, may be officially closing. Two of its four active editors have agreed that Citizendium "is simply not going to be a viable project as an encyclopedia." They wish to "deliberately wrap up this project by exporting any useful content to Wikipedia, closing the wiki to editing, posting an archived copy to the Internet Archive and directing possible readers there, and use remaining funds to secure the domain name for a long time with some small hosting overhead for a single landing page."

The Signpost recommends care in importing Citizendium articles into Wikipedia. WikiProject Citizendium Porting may be useful in these imports, but the WikiProject has been mostly inactive since 2010.

Brianboulton's obituary may be viewed here.

The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's four newest administrators who passed RfA this month:

• Wugapodes
• QEDK
• Nick Moyes and
• Ergo Sum