Motto shop

Yes, that's right, second post in one day. There will be a third soon. :) You may have heard that the Motto of the Day project on Wikipedia has been working great these days. In the past, we often had redlinks in random mottos. Not anymore! This is because we have lots of mottos. The mottos go all the way to September, which is quite impressive - a few months ago we were still having emergencies all the time.

To celebrate, the most active user on the Motto of the day project, pjoef, has decided to reward everyone for their work. He proposed, on his talk page, that a barnstar be given to every MOTD user who has edited lately, as well as to several contributors that have not edited for a while. The idea was supported by most contributors and Simply South, the most experienced active contributor, gave the barnstar in behalf of the entire project. This brought a smile to a lot of MOTD contributors!

Then, a very active contributor, Hi878 (who is most famous for coining the word 'e-hesitate'), started posting some ideas to improve the overall efficiency (and awesomeness) of the MOTD project. They are located here (permanent link). As you can see, other contributors have also added their own ideas there. There are currently 15, some closed, but there might be more soon! What are you waiting for? Go and comment!

Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, the changes. So, apart from all that, there is a very major change to the MOTD project. As you can tell from the header of this post, it's the Motto Shop. What the motto shop basically does is to make mottos that a user can live by on Wikipedia. The motto is made by MOTD contributors. The idea was originally proposed by Belugaboy, was accepted by the MOTD community, and is now in use. Hi878, mentioned above, created most of the pages related to the project, except for the preloader. Several people have asked for a motto. The first one was HJ Mitchell, an admin of the English Wikipedia. Congratulations, HJ!

Note: if you are one of the users mentioned in this post and you feel that I should not mention you here, please contact me immediately through my Wikipedia talk page. I will not link there because if you are really one of these people, you should know who I am.

DYK!

An article I had recently created, Manufacturing in Hong Kong, is now on the main page for DYK. Once that period is finished I will write all about it on a fresh blogpost. For now, let's just guess how many people will look at it!

New barnstars and Wikibooks versions

A user called Antonu has proposed some new versions of barnstars at WikiProject Wikipedia Awards (permanent link) . Kind of awesome, but the old barnstars have character... Once I saw that I was pretty disappointed to see that I wasn't the first to comment. :) Anyway, since the thing has project-wide impacts, I put a new section at the proposals village pump (it probably gets MUCH more attention than RfCs) to attract people to that discussion.

A lot of !votes have been cast, with around half on each side. Some say the new ones look like cheap plastic, while others find them smooth and shiny. Some are concerned about the size of the barnstars as they may look terrible when scaled. Some think that it's not helpful to produce bitmap barnstars as they are not scalable. Some think that the new barnstars suit the new vector skin. I still haven't made up my mind yet; I'll try next time I give out a barnstar.

Anyway, so a user decided we could use both. Yes, that's right, both. Those who prefer the old ones can use the same old templates, while those who like the new ones can add |alt to the end so the new barnstar can be used. For example, {{The Anti-Vandalism Barnstar|Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua|alt}} will produce the new version of the RickK Anti-Vandalism Barnstar.

I have informed the English Wikinews as well as the Chinese Wikipedia about the change. Wikinews is less concerned, with only one Wikinewsie popping over to enwiki to comment. The Chinese Wikipedia community is in favour of the new ones. According to a Wikipedian there, he has already been bold and adapted some of the new barnstars.

Not long after this happened, a Wikibookian proposed (permanent link) using barnstars at Wikibooks. Last year, I'd proposed the same thing though it didn't past. Interestingly enough, there was already a Wikibooks award that had been awarded twice! Anyway, there has been a short discussion and the WP barnstars page has been trasnwikied over to Wikibooks. I have drawn a medal with Inkscape and proposed it. Whether or not it will be adopted still takes time to decide.