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[edit] Progress

[edit] Progress in general

We've seen 58 new articles started since the last report, which give us a grand total of 2,933. I figure we'll hit the 3,000th article milestone by the end of March or early/mid-April (to coincide with the Wikitravel Collaboration Confabulation).

[edit] New contributors

DE has 69 new users since the last report, which give us a grand total of 1,194 users.

[edit] Focus since last report

Phil and I have been developing a few new templates, which we've put into use, see Wikitravel_Shared:Travellers'_pub#New_Templates.

[edit] Focus during the next month

I'm not sure, we've been accomplishing so much stuff that I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I'm going to investigate the idea of a Collaboration of the Month too, since some articles could definitely use the work, but since our community isn't as large as en:'s we'll probably prefer a month to a week so that users may be come and go as the please and still help out on a monthly collaborative project.

[edit] Special issues

[edit] The Evil Word on de:

As many of you know since last year there is a fork of the German Wikitravel called "WikiVoyage". So far we have more users than they have and even more new users every week. But, as soon as a new user starts to get more involved with Wikitravel he sooner or later discovers an evil word, maybe on a discussion page or on a user's page: Kommerzialisierung. I have no idea, how the literal translation commercialization sounds, but if you talk about something being commercial in German, that means, it is made only to allow the owner to squeeze out every single cent that might be possible, even if he or she has to sell the soul, the mother, father or children of the project.

So if the new user reads this word and in the next sentence that there is a non-commercial project called WikiVoyage, he does not think about what kommerziell really means and what advantages it might have to work on an international project with a company in the back paying for the servers, bandwidth etc. He only thinks "I do not want my work sold on summer clearance sale! Why should I work for someone earning money, when I can work for a non-commercial project?"

So we have attempted to explain to every user what Kommerzialisierung means. We have tried to do this very often, but it really does not feel good to tell someone "Well, there is this company, they want to place ads on WT, but we have no idea how this will look like. We have asked them, but they still we haven't heard anything, sorry." Who would believe that? A multi-million dollar company buying the domain for a wiki community and not expressing it's thoughts with the community? No one believes that.

So, unfortunately I have to say that until IB puts its cards on the table we will lose each and every engaged user to WikiVoyage. We are still more established so we have lots of anonymous edits and by far more new users. But sooner or later we will loose this advantage. And de: will suffer.

Flip666 ^writeme! • 18:16, 7 March 2007 (EST)

Discussion moved to the Talk Page.

[edit] Conclusion

Improving.

[edit] Comments

Looking forward to hear about the new templates. I like how you guys handle the article templates, with automatic pagename on top and the whole interwikis and stuff already in place. We'll probably copy that for pt: one day. Thanks for the report. -- Ricardo (Rmx) 19:30, 6 March 2007 (EST)