News and notes

News and notes

Wikimania papers due soon

The deadline for Wikimania 2006, to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 4 August to 6 August, is approaching. The deadline for proposals for workshops and tutorials is this Saturday, 15 April, and the deadline for abstracts for panels, papers, posters and presentations is 30 April. Both deadlines were extended earlier this year; for more information, see the call for participation.

Communications firm volunteers to help Wikipedia

Schwartz Communications has been volunteering its services to Wikimedia since last fall, according to the communications committee. Schwartz is a professional public relations firm that has over 175 clients and is currently the largest firm of its kind in the New England region. The company has created an account, User:Schwartz PR, which is shared by four of its employees: Emily Fisher, Jason Morris, Rob Skinner and Kate Hunter. The account is reportedly one of the first multiple-user, shared accounts allowed on the English Wikipedia.

Qwika marks milestone

Qwika, a search engine that specializes in wikis, announced that they had expanded their database with over 1,000 new wikis encompassing nearly 22 million articles. The search engine, which also searches Wikipedia, mainly added wikis from Wikia (formerly WikiCities).

Correction

The Wikipedia Signpost erroneously reported in last week's issue that the candidates with the highest seven percentages were chosen to serve in the Arbitration Committee elections for the French Wikipedia. Instead, the candidates who had at least 2/3 support ratio with the highest number of support votes were chosen.

Briefly