Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-08-03/News and notes

News and notes

WMF elections, strategy wiki, museum partnerships, and much more

Voting continues for Wikimedia Board elections

Voting is continuing in the 2009 Board of Trustees elections for the Wikimedia Foundation. Voting will continue until August 10th. Questions can still be asked of the candidates. Philippe Beaudette, a member of the Elections Committee, reported on August 3rd that nearly 1200 votes had been cast thus far. (see previous story)

Voting in the English Wikipedia CheckUser and Oversight elections is also continuing, until August 10th. (See previous story).

Strategic planning wiki, call for proposals opens

A new wiki for the strategic planning process, strategy.wikimedia.org, was opened last week. It includes a Call for Proposals about what projects or directions the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia movement should take on; anyone is invited to submit a proposal. This proposal process is tentatively scheduled to run through October. Information about the strategic planning process, including the various stages of the project and background, is also included on the wiki. The project planners are also holding weekly IRC office hours on the Freenode #Wikimedia channel.

The Wikimedia Strategic Planning process is a year-long process designed to get wide community involvement in setting the direction of the Wikimedia Foundation over the next five years; the process aims to deliver a "vision paper" for the Wikimedia movement generally, and a five-year strategic plan for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Two Dutch museums partner with WMF

The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and Spaarnestad Photo of Haarlem are partnering with WMF to provide content. The Tropenmuseum plans to upload some 100,000 images about Indonesia to Wikimedia Commons and in preparation will upload first a smaller collection about Suriname. Spaarnestad has plans to upload an undisclosed number of files. Gerard Meijssen (User:GerardM), who heads the Open Progress Foundation, has been instrumental to the progress, working in cooperation with the WMF Netherlands chapter.[1][2]

PD-Art petition

An off-wiki petition has been started, which Wikipedians who are UK residents or British Citizens (irrespective of their residency) are invited to sign. Using the e-petition facility on the 10 Downing Street website, it calls for a review of the copyright status of exact reproductions on 2 dimensional works of art—the same area in which the National Portrait Gallery has recently found itself entangled with the WMF. If there are more than 500 signatures, the Prime Minister's office are obliged to reply. The petition has not at the time of writing been formally endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. More details.

Wikimedia UK denied charity status

Wikimedia UK—the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in the United Kingdom—has been denied charitable tax status by HM Revenue and Customs, according to a report from Charity Finance dated June 2009. The chapter reportedly plans to appeal the decision.

Briefly

The Usability Initiative team blogged about the upcoming usability release "Babaco", which will include a number of new features.
The Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant of $40,000 for the purchase of new database servers for the Toolserver.
Cary Bass (Bastique) has begun maintaining a Wikipedia organization page on Facebook, where users can sign up as fans and comment on recent Wikipedia-related news.
Video of Jimmy Wales' keynote at the Wikiconference NYC last week is now available. More videos will be posted shortly.
The Wikimedia Australia GLAM conference is now fully subscribed, with 170 attendees; Liam Wyatt has posted a list of the attending organizations.
Wikimedia Mobile is looking for multilingual users to translate the mobile interface on translatewiki.net.
A new edition of English Wikizine, number 113, came out this week.

Milestones

The Latin Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles with the creation of ‎Magninovilla.
The Galician Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
The Erzya Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

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