[Please translate this announcement into other languages.]
Wikipedia's roots in the more conservative Nupedia project are reflected by many in-depth discussions we've had over the years about quality assurance, filtering, and labeling.
In her "4 wishes for the year 2007" [1], Wikimedia Foundation Chair Florence Devouard also identified "reliability" as a key goal for the Wikimedia Foundation. Today we're taking two small steps towards that goal:
* the launch of http://quality.wikimedia.org/ as a portal targeting readers and volunteers to summarize key information about current quality initiatives, combined with http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiquality as a more in-depth description of our plans,
* the opening of wikiquality-l as a mailing list for related discussions: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiquality-l
Notably, these pages describe our current plans with regard to the "FlaggedRevs" extension, a MediaWiki extension developed by Aaron Schulz and Jörg Baach (with financial support from Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.) which makes it possible to identify revisions of articles that are known to be of a certain quality, and to change the default view based on that information.
The public beta of this feature (initially on dummy websites, i.e. not production environments) will begin as soon as a security review of the current code has been completed (expected later this month). In the meantime, please give your feedback on the quality.wikimedia.org portal, add translations, and subscribe to wikiquality-l to join future discussions about the specifics of any particular initiative.
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/4_wishes_for_year_2007
Sincerely, Erik Möller Board member, Wikimedia Foundation
wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org