Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-09-17/News and notes

News and notes

News and notes

Template standardization

This week, nearly all article message boxes were standardized with a consistent theme, and colors are based on the severity of each message. Multiple messages can also be stacked on top of one another, reducing the amount of screen space used when multiple notices are used. An example can be found below:

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.
This article or section lacks formatting.
Please wikify it as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style.
This article documents a current event.
Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

Discussion on the changes continues at the standardization talk page.

Editing pattern prototype released

Recently, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) released a research prototype called WikiDashboard that can visualize users' editing patterns on Wikipedia articles. The tool shows visualizations embedded in live Wikipedia pages to provide social transparency about who edits how many revisions on each Wikipedia page. For example, this link shows editing patterns on the Main Page, and this link shows Raul654's personal editing patterns. Release notes for the prototype can be found here.

Wikimania bidding ends Sunday

Wikimania 2008 bids must be completed by Sunday at 0:01 UTC; later Sunday, at 15:00 UTC, a public meeting with bidders will be held. The final jury decision will be made around October 6.

Briefly