Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/News and notes

Wikimedia Board Elections now open
Candidates are now being accepted for the 2009 Elections for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. Prospective candidates can review the prerequisites and information about being on the Board, and then submit their candidacy as outlined on that page. The deadline for submitting candidacies is July 20, 2009. A list of the candidates so far can be viewed on Meta.

This year, there are three slots open for community elected representatives to the Board; the three open seats are those of Ting Chen, Kat Walsh and Domas Mituzas (see graphic).

The Wikimedia Board oversees the Wikimedia Foundation, helping to provide strategic guidance; detailed responsibilities are in the Wikimedia board manual.

Wikimedia Foundation annual plan released
The 2009-2010 Foundation Annual Plan and associated FAQ has been posted to the Foundation website. The plan increases planned total spending to $9.4 million in 2009-2010, $8.1 million of which will be on "core operational spending" and $1.3 milion of which will be on "non-recurring priority projects," including the strategic planning process (identified as the key initiative of this year), the bookshelf project and communications campaign. This is compared to projected spending of $5.3 million in 2008-2009 (and $3.0 million in spending in 2007-2008).

According to the plan, the increased spending will go toward nine new permanent staff (including three new technical staff and a technical project manager, three program staff and two fundraising development positions), and four temporary positions (three for strategic planning and one for the bookshelf project). The other new expenses will include an office move to larger quarters in San Francisco; more bandwidth and servers; a communications campaign and bookshelf project to produce educational materials (see last issue for job posting); grants to chapters; and the collaborative strategic planning process. This last item is projected to cost $700 thousand, according to the FAQ, but is a one-time expense.

To account for this additional spending, revenues are projected to increase to $10.6 million, from projected 2008-2009 totals of $7.4 million. This total amount includes a buffer of $1.2 million of planned contingency revenue. Increased growth is primarily projected in small (<$10K) donations and an additional projected $1.3 million in earned income.

The plan contains a Board resolution approving the budget which according to Veronique Kessler, Foundation CFO, was unanimously approved by the entire Board.

Google Image Search introduces free license search option
Google Image Search recently introduced an option to search images by license. Under the "advanced search" tab, you can now choose to filter your results by "usage rights". The choices are: "not filtered by license," "labeled for reuse", "labeled for commercial reuse," "labeled for reuse with modification," and "labeled for commercial reuse with modification." According to the Google blog, the search will look for images tagged with Creative Commons licenses, but "your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain." Images from Wikimedia Commons do show up on the license-restricted searches.

WikiProject Citizendium porting
A WikiProject has been formed to port content from Citizendium to Wikipedia, now that the licenses of the two projects are compatible. According to the original project proposal, content only from Citizendium's "approved articles" will be imported. Reaction on the Citizendium forums has been mixed.

Webcite broken, fixes underway
WebCite, a popular on-demand web archiving service referenced by Wikipedia over 20,000 times, went down for a server upgrade on June 24th. WebCite is currently "on-line" but a few things were broken in the upgrade and it is currently not working properly - for example, returning error messages or blank pages for most previous archives. ThaddeusB has been in contact with Gunther Eysenbach throughout the process and would like to assure the community that efforts are underway to fix the broken links. In the mean time, please do not remove, or otherwise attempt to fix, "broken links" to webcitation.org. See this discussion for more information.

New thesis about Wikipedia
Felipe Ortega released his PhD thesis on Wikipedia, entitled Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis, which compares the top 10 language editions of Wikipedia. According to a message from Ortega on the mailing list wiki-research-l in February, "[the thesis] presents a complete study of the activity of logged authors, articles and talk pages, evolution in time of distributions of key parameters (diff. authors per article, articles per author, revisions per author/article, etc.). It also offers a more in-depth study of the inequality of contributions by logged authors, and also for articles. Likewise, it presents a complete survival analysis to examine the average lifetime of Wikipedia contributors...Finally, we already examine some very basic metrics for quality."

Briefly

 * The number of Good articles passed 7,000 this week.
 * Wikizine #111 was released, covering community goings-on; and a new edition of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, covering the Usability project, was also released.
 * A proposal for the "Advisory Council on Project Development" was released; see related story in TROLL.
 * Registration for Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires (26-28 August) is now open.