Wikis World/2023-08

Hello and happy ten months of Wikis World! Kunal is travelling at the moment, which means that I (Taavi) get to write this month's monthly update.

As of 2023-08-13 we're up to 141 users, up from last month's 135.

This month saw the arrival of an official Wikimedia Foundation Mastodon account in the form of @wikimediafoundation@wikimedia.social. Their introduction post was getting quite a bit of attention which unfortunately seemed to somewhat slow down Wikis World too (presumably via the related @wikipedia toot). The moderation policy of wikimedia.social is still a bit unclear, but as a reminder we do frequently enforce Wikis World rules and unfortunately had to issue quite a few instance and individual remote user suspensions relating to the @wikimediafoundation introduction posts.

It seems like the Mastodon developers are planning to introduce a federated full-text search engine to the software. That feature is still in active development so the details might change, and we also don't have an Elasticsearch instance configured so it would not be available on our instance, but as always please be aware that other instances might have features not available on Wikis World that make it possible to find your posts in ways you did not expect.

This month has several conferences ongoing with some presence from the Wikis World mod team, so come say hi if you want an invite or have any questions. I'm writing this from the airport on my way to Wikimania, and I've heard that there will be others at DebConf and at CCCamp.