Hi all,
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is considering an amendment to
the Bylaws to add term limits and adjust the term lengths. You can see the
proposed change here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_bylaws/June_2015_-_Ter…
Please share your comments on the talk page. The proposal will be available
for two weeks before the Board votes on the amendment.
Best,
Stephen
--
Stephen LaPorte
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
*NOTICE: As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and ethical
reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community
members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more
on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*
Hello everyone,
After three great years working at the foundation, the time has come to say goodbye.
I will be leaving WMF at the end of June, to spend more time with my family, focus on personal art projects and consult part-time on worthy causes.
I would like to thank all the community and team members I have had the pleasure to work with over the years. It has been an honor to serve our movement together — and to help our contributors share free knowledge with each other and the world.
I’m particularly grateful to Katherine Maher and our WMF communications team for being such wonderful collaborators. I really enjoyed working with them to manage and edit the Wikimedia blog, help grow our team and publish some great stories together, to celebrate the heroes of our movement.
Going forward, WMF's Juliet Barbara will manage the Wikimedia blog, in close collaboration with Ed Erhart. As many of you know, Ed is the former editor-in-chief of the Wikipedia Signpost and has now joined our team for the summer. I've worked with him for nearly a month now and find him uniquely qualified for this project. Starting today, please contact them directly with any questions about the blog (they are Cc:d on this message).
After June 30, you can reach me at <fabriceflorin(a)gmail.com> — or follow me on Twitter ( @fabriceflorin ) or on my blog ( http://fabriceflorin.com ).
The last three years have been an incredible experience for me, and I am grateful for all that I have learned from so many of you. You’ve been an inspiration to me and I have many fond memories of our time together. I wish you all the best with the next chapter of the Wikimedia movement and can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with next.
Best regards,
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Movement Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)
Dear all,
The Wikimedia Foundation has an Audit Committee that supports the Board in
overseeing financial, accounting, and risk reviews. This includes
reviewing the WMF's annual financials and tax return, its annual
independent audit, and its risks analysis.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Audit_Committee
We are forming the committee for 2015-16, and looking for volunteers from
the community. Members serve on the committee for one year, from July
through July. An audit of the past year's financials is carried out
August-September, the WMF files its U.S. tax return in April, and publishes
its annual plan in June.
Time commitment is roughly 20 hours over the course of the year. Reviews
are done through 3-4 conference calls. The primary requirement is
financial literacy: experience with finance, accounting or auditing.
If you are interested in joining the committee for the coming year, email
me at *sj* at *wikimedia.org <http://wikimedia.org>* with 'Audit Committee'
in the subject, your CV, and thoughts on how you could contribute.
Sam
--
@metasj +1 617 529 4266
Yes I agree an example of what Wikipedia would look like if this
regulation passed is an excellent idea. Could we base it on the geo
tags?
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
Starting July 2015 I am a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation
My emails; however, do not represent the official position of the WMF
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com
Hi.
This op-ed by Andrew Lih appeared in today's New York Times. I'm sending
it here in case anyone is interested in reading or discussing it. I
enjoyed the piece; congrats to Mr. Lih on getting this published!
MZMcBride
----
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html
Can Wikipedia Survive?
By Andrew Lih
June 20, 2015
WASHINGTON — WIKIPEDIA has come a long way since it started in 2001. With
around 70,000 volunteers editing in over 100 languages, it is by far the
world’s most popular reference site. Its future is also uncertain.
One of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the
dominant personal computing device. A recent Pew Research Center report
found that 39 of the top 50 news sites received more traffic from mobile
devices than from desktop and laptop computers, sales of which have
declined for years.
This is a challenge for Wikipedia, which has always depended on
contributors hunched over keyboards searching references, discussing
changes and writing articles using a special markup code. Even before
smartphones were widespread, studies consistently showed that these are
daunting tasks for newcomers. “Not even our youngest and most
computer-savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease,” a 2009
user test concluded. The difficulty of bringing on new volunteers has
resulted in seven straight years of declining editor participation.
In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than
60 editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in
editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes
struggled to promote even one per month.
The pool of potential Wikipedia editors could dry up as the number of
mobile users keeps growing; it’s simply too hard to manipulate complex
code on a tiny screen.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia’s operations
but is not directly involved in content, is investigating solutions. Some
ideas include touch-screen tools that would let Wikipedia editors sift
through information and share content from their phones.
What has not suffered is fund-raising. The foundation, based in San
Francisco, has a budget of roughly $60 million. How to fairly distribute
resources has long been a topic of debate. How much should go to regional
chapters and affiliates, or to groups devoted to non-English languages?
How much should stay in the foundation to develop software, create mobile
apps and maintain infrastructure?
These tensions run through the community. Last year the foundation took
the unprecedented step of forcing the installation of new software on the
German-language Wikipedia. The German editors had shown their independent
streak by resisting an earlier update to the site’s user interface.
Against the wishes of veteran editors, the foundation installed a new way
to view multimedia content and then set up an Orwellian-sounding
“superprotect” feature to block obstinate administrators from changing it
back.
The latest clash had repercussions in the election this year for seats to
the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees — the most influential
positions that volunteers can hold. The election — a record 5,000 voters
turned out, nearly three times the number from the previous election — was
a rebuke to the status quo; all three incumbents up for re-election were
defeated, replaced by critics of the superprotect measures. Two other
members will leave the 10-member board at the end of this year. Meanwhile,
the foundation’s new executive director, Lila Tretikov, has been hiring
developers from the world of open-source technology, and their lack of
experience with Wikipedia content has concerned some veterans.
Could the pressure from mobile, and the internal tensions, tear Wikipedia
apart? A world without it seems unimaginable, but consider the fate of
other online communities. Founded in 1985, at the dawn of the Internet,
the Well, the self-proclaimed “birthplace of the online community
movement,” hosted an influential cast of dot-com luminaries on its
electronic bulletin board discussion forums. By 1995, it was in steep
decline, and today it is a shell of its former self. Blogging, celebrated
a decade ago as pioneering an exciting new form of personal writing, has
decreased significantly in the social-media age.
These are existential challenges, but they can still be addressed. There
is no other significant alternative to Wikipedia, and good will toward the
project — a remarkable feat of altruism — could hardly be higher. If the
foundation needed more donations, it could surely raise them.
The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes —
the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to
protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in — and to
design a mobile-oriented editing environment. One board member, María
Sefidari, warned that “some communities have become so change-resistant
and innovation-averse” that they risk staying “stuck in 2006 while the
rest of the Internet is thinking about 2020 and the next three billion
users.”
For the last few years, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives
and other world-class institutions, libraries and museums have
collaborated with Wikipedia’s volunteers to improve accuracy, quality of
references and depth of multimedia on article pages. This movement dates
from 2010, when the British Museum saw that Wikipedia’s visitor traffic to
articles about its artifacts was five times greater than that of the
museum’s own website. Grasping the power of Wikipedia to amplify its
reach, the museum invited a Wikipedia editor to work with its curatorial
staff. Since then, similar parternships have been set up with groups like
the Cochrane Collaboration, a nonprofit organization that focuses on
evidence-based health care, and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
These are vital opportunities for Wikipedia to tap external expertise and
enlarge its base of editors. It is also the most promising way to solve
the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors; in
2011, less than 15 percent were women.
The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a
whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness
that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making
meaningful reforms.
No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into
the hands of so many — a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence
of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of
websites is worth saving.
---
Andrew Lih is an associate professor of journalism at American University
and the author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies
Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia.”
I agree with Jane that it is great that one of us gets to write in the NY Times. But I would slightly disagree with Andrew. Yes smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, and for smartphone users Wikipedia is a broadcast medium not an interactive one. That's not great, especially for those languages where Wikipedia is far less written than in English. But I'm not seeing this as an existential threat. I'm sure the WMF has some clue full people trying to make the site as mobile friendly as possible, I'd put money on the smartphone industry trying to cram yet more PCfunctionality into their hardware, I know that the smartphone generation are capable of doing things with their phones that I can barely comprehend - and that the kids growing up with smartphones will be more proficient still; and whilst we are seeing PC and Laptop sales fall, an element of that is market stabilisation and commodification - why worry that PC sales are falling if that just means people are replacing their PCs less frequently?
If ownership of PCs was falling, people were moving all their internet activity to the smartphone, and Wikipedia was pretty much the only bit of the Internet left behind when you migrate to smartphone, then I would be worried.
As it is I just see this as a change to the environment we are in, a change that makes things more difficult for us, but not one that threatens our survival.
Regards
Jonathan
>
> Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2015 11:59:25 +0200
> From: Jane Darnell <jane023(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] "Can Wikipedia Survive?" op-ed
> Message-ID:
> <CAFVcA-GGPdA6m8V=imteQNEnn6zCdF0hiG73hej5dERT8z=v_Q(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> What I absolutely *love* in this piece is that it's by our own GLAM-Wiki
> podcast host Andrew Lih and it's in the New York f***ing Times! Yay!
>
> Plus I totally agree with his lead point, which holds for all languages: "One
> of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the dominant
> personal computing device." If I had to pick the one thing that would stop
> me editing Wikipedia projects, then yes, this *is* that thing. Though I
> truly love Wikidata and I do feel strongly about the Gendergap, I agree
> with him and feel that the biggest threat to the Wikiverse is the demise of
> the desktop.
>
>
Pinging Mark H. in the Multimedia Team to ask about the feasability of
Jane's clever suggestion.
Pine
On Jun 22, 2015 12:21 AM, "Jane Darnell" <jane023(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Actually, considering how effective the blackout was for SOPA, I think
another action based on the most prominent images we stand to lose would be
in order. So the take on the London Eye and maybe some popular buildings,
art and bridges in Euro-FoP countries? I don't know if you could rig a java
script to flag these with a red lightbox that links to the Commons page,
but that would probably be more effective than any other lobbying efforts
On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 12:39 AM, Sam Klein <sjklein(a)hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 8:47 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Are WMF and the European affiliates allowed to lobby regarding this
> issue?
> >
>
> The WMF could lobby or support lobbying on such an issue. It is eligible
> to spend up to $1M per year tax-free on lobbying. But I don't believe it
> has directly engaged in anything of the sort, since the SOPA action.
>
> Sam
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Dear all,
On behalf of the Affiliations Committee, I am honoured to announce the
renewal of the recognition of Wikisource Community User Group as a
Wikimedia User Group. They have been working hard this past year and it
is the Affiliations Committee's opinion that they meet the criteria for
having their user group status renewed indefinitely, starting the date
of publication of the resolution.
Congratulations!!!
1:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Resolutions/Renewals…
--
"*Jülüjain wane mmakat* ein kapülain tü alijunakalirua jee wayuukanairua
junain ekerolaa alümüin supüshuwayale etijaanaka. Ayatashi waya junain."
Carlos M. Colina
Socio, A.C. Wikimedia Venezuela | RIF J-40129321-2 |
www.wikimedia.org.ve <http://wikimedia.org.ve>
Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Affiliations Committee
Phone: +972-52-4869915
Twitter: @maor_x
Now all previously http URLs redirect to https.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page also still mentions the old
http address that now redirects.
What is the new purely http API address?
I need to know the hit of https on various processes.
Yuri