User:Mindspillage/sandbox/stories

Wikia upgrades to 1.6
Jason Richey, Wikia technical staff, has begun upgrading Wikia to MediaWiki 1.6. Originally scheduled to take place on April 3, the upgrade had been delayed in order to work out some problems that began to appear, but all wikis are now running the newer version.

The earliest to be upgraded were, , , , , , , , , , , , , , and. On April 10, the rest of the sites followed suit.

MediaWiki 1.6 adds several new features, including SVG support and a page protection level that allows sysops to protect pages from edits by new or unregistered users (called "semi-protection" on Wikipedia, which has had the feature for a few months). You can see more features at the MediaWiki 1.6 info page.

Please report any problems from the upgrade at upgrade bugs and we will try to have them fixed as soon as possible.

Power outage leads to hours of downtime
On Sunday, April 9, the colocation facility where Wikia's servers are hosted lost power, leading all wikia sites to be down for several hours. Wikimedia's sites hosted at teh same facility, including Wikipedia, were also down.

The cause of the outage was a one of the circuit breakers between the generators/UPS and Wikia's servers failing. Staff at the datacenter came in to restore service as soon as possible, and are now investigating the reason for the failure.

Thanks for hanging on while this happened! You can get status updates or just chat with other Wikians in real-time in the Wikia IRC channel on FreeNode. If you don't have an IRC client or that link just doesn't work for you, try accessing the channel through the web at irc.wikia.com.

LOST Wiki is April's featured Wikia
The wiki is the Featured Wikia for April! The LOST Wiki is a comprehensive database of information relevant within the world of LOST. The wiki contains pages and pics for EVERY character ever seen or mentioned on the show, as well as a summary of their activities. Also included are summaries for every episode, connections between characters, a timeline of events, pages for companies, organizations, locations, items, mysteries, and other things related to the show.

The LOST Wiki was started on December 9, 2005 and currently has over 570 articles and is rapidly growing.

LOST Wiki got 19 full votes to be the Featured Wikia.
 * notes from founder, other editors

New Wikia

 * Descriptions of 10-15 newest Wikia

Call for writers
The Wikia [whatever] wants you!
 * combine with "letter from the editor" message?

Writers wanted to help build this into a community paper to detail happenings all around Wikia. What's happening on your wiki? Write a column, submit a news brief, or just leave a link to something interesting happening on your favorite Wikia for someone else to cover, and it'll be in the next Wikia [whatever]!

Wikia in the news

 * describe and link to press about Wikia/individual Wikis
 * : Corante, March 29
 * : CNET, March28
 * : Siliconbeat.com, March 30

Around Wikia

 * Briefs on interesting happenings
 * Milestones: anniversaries, article counts

Wikia starts AdWords campaign with Muppet Wiki
"We need your help building a complete guide to the Muppets!"

Google for Muppet Wiki&mdash;or related terms&mdash;and you might just see that along the right side of your screen. Wikia is rolling out AdWords to try to bring more traffic to the sites, and Muppet Wiki, February's Featured Wikia, was chosen to be the first subject.

Muppet Wiki was launched on December 5, 2005 by Toughpigs and has over 8,400 articles.

Ideas
Mailing list, RSS feed, spot on sidebar?