[Foundation-l] quality.wikimedia.org and wikiquality-l launched

[Erik Moeller]

[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