From now, I plan to write a report every week about the news, announcements, important essays and interesting stories of the project. I would like to give you a clear overview of Wikipedia. I hope you’re going to enjoy the first edition.

What to start with if not this brand new wonderful project: Planet Wikimedia. It’s a blog agregator which collects all the Wikipedia related posts and blogs to make it easier to follow the changes. You can request for inclusion here. This process leads to a peer-reviewed list of feeds. (They’ve added my blog’s wikipedia tag to the list, so this post is also going to show up there.)

Credential Verification? Jimbo Wales’ suggestion to avoid scandals like the recent one. I’m against the idea (if it’s totally voluntary, then I have no problems with that). Here you can read my explanation on the talk page.

The third part is about a great essay published recently. Wikipedia is a work in progress. We should never forget about it.

But wait… nobody said Wikipedia was ready to be used!… Somehow, we have taken what was originally blatant, and always a given – that the encyclopedia is incomplete and lacks consistent quality – and turned it into a problem… If we focus too strongly on how good the existing encyclopedia is, rather than on improving it, the project will become bogged down and the overall rate of improvement will slow.

So, if you rely on Wikipedia in its current state, that’s your problem. We’re not done with it, and we never said it would be any good – we only said it would be free. If you aren’t satisfied with it now, help improve it, or come back in another six years and take a look then. It’ll be better. We promise.

Source:Wikipedia

And then an other essay: 10 things you did not know about Wikipedia. Here is a short list:

• We’re not for sale.
• Our work belongs to everyone.
• We speak Banyumasan…
• You cannot actually change anything in Wikipedia…
• We care deeply about the quality of our work.
• We don’t want you to trust us.
• We’re not alone.
• We are only collectors.
• We’re not a dictatorship.
• We’re in it for the long haul.

Don’t miss the top 100 articles in Wikipedia! It massively helps us what kind of articles to improve the most (of course: list of sex positions, pornography, Battle of Thermopylae, sexual intercourse…).

And Wikimedia Commons’ Picture of the Year Award goes to…