Wikinews:Reports/October 2009

Wikinews Reports - Highlights of actions, events, and excitement on enWikinews for October 2009. I (SGN) managed to put together a fair amount of news, but I'm always looking for contributions from others. If you want to throw something in for next month (It can be anything Wikinews related), please stop by Reports ( http://enwn.net/Db3E ) and leave a note, or update the respective subpage.


 * October 9th @ 2300UTC - The new Main Page layout went live. The major changes include: introduction of a 5th lead, lead #1 becoming larger and more prominent, a clean 3 column layout.  http://enwn.net/h Discussion: http://enwn.net/eD5E
 * October 14th - Popular articles fritzed out and hasn't returned. It's place on the main page has been replaced with alternate content.  http://enwn.net/7695
 * October 20th - User:Millosh brought his VOA bot (User:Millbot-VoA) over from the Serbian Wikinews. After some testing and discussion, has gone live importing articles. Discussion: http://enwn.net/F1BC
 * October 20th - Vector skin became the default skin for Wikinews - Discussion: http://enwn.net/06aE Site notice: http://enwn.net/D2E8
 * October 30th - The enhanced (edit) toolbar went live. We got a little press too! http://enwn.net/8381
 * October 30th - "Around enWikinews" got renamed and found a new (more permanent) home at Reports http://enwn.net/Db3E
 * User:Brian McNeil is working to give a direly needed overhaul to the Newsroom. Demo User:Brian McNeil/Newsroom http://enwn.net/76aa
 * User:Amgine is writing the "Google News Site Map" extension in order to facilitate Wikinews getting back onto Google news.
 * The mailing list was mostly quiet with the exception of a thread about what do with Wikinewsie.org http://enwn.net/03fe
 * By popular complaint, enwn.net now supports a "preview" mode by appending a dash to the end of the URL. Example: http://enwn.net/h-
 * Enwn.net has been renamed to WMF4.me . The new more generic name is supposed to cater to the entire WMF audience, not just us. Don't worry though, enwn.net will continue to work.  Homepage: http://wmf4.me/ Identica: http://identi.ca/wmf4me Twitter: http://twitter.com/wmf4me
 * Bawolff's #wiktLookUp is working, and live on at least 6 WMF wikis and an unknown number of blogs. More information on the blog plugin: http://trunc.me/c943
 * New Administrators: 1, New Editors: 3

Also something very, very, very important. On November 8th, Wikinews turns 5 years old!! To celebrate, there will be cake! But only for those that help contribute to Story preparation/Wikinews turns 5 ( http://enwn.net/a1a2 ). It is a work in progress, and there is only 8 days remaining! Let's make this one heck of an article! (The abuse of the exclamation mark will continue until the article is done).