Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-05-25/News and notes

Two Wikimedia Foundation board members picked
On 22 May, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees announced the selection of two Wikimedians to fill the chapter-selected seats on the board. Pending formal approval by the board, these community seats will be held by Michael Snow, who currently holds a temporary appointed seat and is Chair of the board, and Arne Klempert, who is new to the board.

The Board of Trustees was restructured and expanded last year, with plans to have a ten-member board. According to the new structure, half of the board would be chosen by the community&mdash;three seats by election, and two chosen collectively by the local Wikimedia chapters&mdash;with an additional board-appointed "Community Founder" seat reserved for Jimmy Wales and four "specific expertise" seats to be chosen by the board. However, no process was specified for choosing the chapter-selected seats, so only now have the chapters made their choices.

From the announcement: Arne Klempert is Head of Digital Communications at IFOK, a German consulting firm. He is one of the founders of the German chapter. He was involved in the development of Wikimedia Deutschland first as vice-chair and then as Executive Director, until September 2008.

Michael Snow has served on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation since December 2007, and was chosen in July 2008 to be its chair. Michael is a lawyer and has been involved in Wikimedia for many years as Head of the Wikimedia Communications Committee and creator of the Wikipedia Signpost, amongst other roles.

Flagged revisions update
Wikimedia Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber gave a short update on the prospects for implementing a flagged revisions trial, which the community approved at the beginning of April in the form of "Flagged protection and patrolled revisions":

Quick update:


 * Yes, we do plan to roll out an English Wikipedia test setup for Flagged Revs.


 * There's not yet a fixed schedule for it, but I'd like to see it up and running in production before Wikimania. :) [August]


 * Right now we're running round tidying up general things, getting the 1.15 release set up, and prepping to get our live sites updated to development trunk -- nice things are afoot like a total upgrade to the preferences backend which Werdna has done, yay!


 * As we get back up to speed, we'll want to coordinate w/ Aaron to confirm that we've got a configuration planned and that it'll look good, and get that test config on en.labs.wikimedia.org and test.wikipedia for a while before we roll it to en.wikipedia.

I'd also like to see folks ponder a bit on the final terminology for things -- we'd also like to roll out the Drafts extension (for saving your in-progress edit page in the background so you can return to it if you accidentally close it or your browser crashes), but Flagged Revs also uses the 'draft' terminology sometimes. We want to make sure we're not going to be looking too confusing having both of those things in the system.

-- brion

Wikinews features Eurovision interviews
During this year's Eurovision contest, Wikinews conducted a "Eurovision special," interviewing 13 past contestants, 6 of whom were past winners. The project also got freely licensed photos of the singers when possible. According to User:Mike Halterman, who conducted the interviews: For my final interview set (with eight singers), I had countering systemic bias in mind. Half of the eight interviewed in the final piece are from Eastern Europe or the Caucasus (Tajci is from Croatia, Marie N is from Latvia, Ani Lorak is from Ukraine and Sirusho is from Armenia). Also, the interviews with the final eight in the series were translated into nine different languages (Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian), another first for Wikinews in terms of sheer cross-wiki collaboration and translation. Since unlike on Wikipedia, Wikinews has a "newsworthiness" time limit of only a few days, and the interview sets were VERY large, this was a big feat for all involved.