Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-02-01/From the editor

As Eugene Eric Kim explains in his column this week, the Wikimedia strategic planning process is developing a five-year plan for where the Wikimedia Foundation will try to take the projects and where the communities might try to take the projects beyond the remit of the Foundation. But at the same time the strategy project suffers the same problem as many of Wikipedia's sister projects: strategy.wikimedia.org feels much farther than one click away.

One possibility for keeping the Wikipedia community more closely connected to the strategy process is to cover it regularly in the Signpost. This will require a writer familiar with the Strategic Planning wiki (or willing to become so). If you are interested in covering a strategy beat for the Signpost, please drop by the newsroom and let us know.

As Sue Gardner noted in her recent strategy letter to the Wikimedia trustees, the Wikipedias are the flagship projects and will continue to get the greatest share of Foundation attention and resources&mdash;making the outcome of the strategy project especially important for Wikipedians. Gardner also noted one important aspect of the "Wikimedia movement" in which the Foundation will not get involved: public policy. Advocacy for free culture and free software, open access to knowledge and cultural resources, copyright reform, web standards, and other issues important to much of the Wikimedia community will be left, as they have been, to local Wikimedia chapters and individual Wikimedians. The Signpost could be a useful venue to keep Wikimedians in the loop on significant developments in the broader free culture movement and the information policy arena; if you are interested in covering this regularly for the Signpost, let us know, or share your ideas on the suggestions page.

And as always, the Signpost welcomes new (or returning) writers for other areas as well. The greatest needs are for more help with "News and notes", "In the news", the "Sister projects" report, as well as the "Discussion report"&mdash;or just ask and we can put you to work on something that suits you.