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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-17/News and notes

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News and notes

News and notes

Single User Login to be tested

Developers are planning a pilot of the CentralAuth extension (better known as single user login); this pilot will be limited to administrators only.[1] (Note that this was accidentally enabled for a short time last week.)

The pilot is opt-in, and for the time being will only cause accounts with the same name and owned by the same user to be merged together into a single 'global account'; other existing users with the same name will not be affected. If and when the test takes place, administrators should note that setting a common email address or password on all accounts they own will help the merging process to identify which accounts are owned by the same user.

Even the full planned version of single user login itself does not do much more than associate accounts owned by the same user together, and allow a common username/password across all Wikimedia wikis; other similar features, such as crosswiki talkpage notification, are not part of the extension, although will become much easier to implement as a result of it.

Election Committee named

Last week, the Board of Trustees approved a resolution, announced on Saturday by Chairperson Florence Devouard, that named the Election Committee for the 2008 Board elections. The seven-member committee's membership includes:

The committee is "responsible for planning and maintaining virtually every aspect of the board election." One of the responsibilities of the Committee is planning the type of voting used in the election; in previous elections, some users have questioned the traditional approval voting method used, arguing for other voting systems instead. Other responsibilities include determining suffrage criteria, drafting election pages on the Meta-Wiki, and vote auditing.

Second Wikipedia podcast started

To supplement Wikipedia Weekly, comes NotTheWikipediaWeekly, a new podcast currently conducted weekly, via Skype. The latest episode features Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner.

Briefly




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  • WikiWorld
  • News and notes
  • In the news
  • Dispatches
  • WikiProject report
  • Tutorial
  • Features and admins
  • Technology report
  • Arbitration report

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