Labs outage kills tools, self; news in brief: A more than usually severe outage Wikimedia Labs occurred after a massive database corruption implosion on June 17.
Labs outage kills tools, self: A more than usually severe outage ofWikimedia 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 theSignpost's publication, among other functions. For more details see this week'stechnology report.
Content translation: The Foundation's language engineering team published ablog post with an update on the sizable progress that has been made with the recently publishedcontent 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: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."
Milestones: TheBulgarian andDanish 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: Adiscussion of interest occurred on the foundation-l mailing list this week regarding whether or not Wikipedia's use ofCAPTCHA discouraged contributions from new editors. Anotherdiscussion occurred regarding the unusual nature of theoffice 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 theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science, including the prestigious journalScience,Taylor & Francis, which includes the subject collections Arts & Humanities and Biological, Environment & Earth Sciences, and the World Bank eLibrary, which includes publications from theWorld Bank. There are also French-language databases:Érudit,Cairn.info, andL'Harmattan.
Regarding Fabrice Florin's departure from the WMF: his stewardship of the Wikimedia blog is only his most recent role; before that, he was product manager for the notifications feature ("Echo") and the Media Viewer, among (I believe) a number of other products. -Pete (talk)00:06, 20 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
