Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-10-11/News and notes

Board resolutions
The Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has adopted three resolutions and one vote at its meeting on October 8:
 * "Five-year targets": Noting that the strategy project (Signpost coverage) was "nearing conclusion", the Board adopted the summary targets for the five-year plan. (According to the April meeting minutes, it had been planned to review the full plan at last week's meeting, too. According to the Foundation's August report - see below - a professional writer had been hired to help "distilling the material on the strategy wiki into a high-level document that could easily be shared with Wikimedia partners and supporters", followed by some vetting and refining, in order to present the strategy document at last week's meeting.)
 * Wikimedia fundraising principles: The Board established four general principles about Wikimedia's fundraising, concerning the maximization of public support, legal frameworks, transparency and donor privacy, and maximizing participation beyond financial contribution. (See also the Foundation's invitation to become involved in the preparation of the upcoming fundraiser, reported below, and last week's Signpost coverage: "German chapter remodeled to meet Foundation requirements")
 * "Trustee terms and evaluation": After the July meeting had heard recommendations by the Board's Governance Committee - aided by the Omidyar Network - about terms and evaluation of Board members, accompanied by "robust discussion" (see Signpost coverage), the Board now accepted part of the committees recommendations, namely to extend the term of appointed Board members to two years, and asked the committee to develop further detailed recommendations until the end of the year.
 * "Movement Roles October 2010": In this vote, the Board "approves the direction" of the recently formed "Movement Roles" working group (see earlier Signpost coverage: October 4, September 27, etc.), and "encourages all interested parties, particularly chapters and other stakeholders" to become involved in the process. The vote has been interpreted as a formal approval of the group's draft proposal.

The minutes for the meeting have not yet been published.

Fundraiser update: the 'Beat Jimmy' challenge
The Fundraising team has been measuring reactions to new slogans over the last 10 weeks, in preparation for the 2010–11 fundraising drive starting on 8 November. A page detailing the results of these preliminary banner tests has been set up, indicating that the majority of donations have been generated – as in previous years – by Jimmy Wales' personal appeal.

In response, Head of Reader Relations Philippe Beaudette and the wider Fundraiser team have announced a challenge to editors: find the banner that will beat Jimmy. Beaudette explains:

"There's no doubt about it: the appeal from Jimmy Wales is a strong message. We've tested it head-to-head against other banners, and the results are unequivocal - especially when you also compare its performance last year and the year before.

But nobody wants to just put Jimmy up on the sites and leave him up for two months!"

Wikimedia also organized a donor survey, inviting 20,000 individuals from the much larger international Donor group, who contributed less than $1000 between 1 November 2009 and 30 June 2010. They were invited to participate in a 29-item survey of about 70 questions, conducted in August 2010, which attracted. The tech team have also been making progress with two new tools; geotargeting and a simplified, one-step donation process.

Foundation report for August
The Wikimedia Foundation Report for August 2010 has been published. Apart from highlighting several developments that have been already covered in the Signpost, it contains a statistics update: Collectively, the Wikipedia projects received a total of 373 million unique global visitors during August, marking a 3.7% monthly increase and 21.4% increase over the past year. Page requests reached 13.4 billion, a drop of 1% from the previous month but still a 23.9% increase on the previous year. One hypothesis for the unusually large drop – greater than the expected seasonal drop in traffic during the northern summer – is that the 2010 World Cup in South Africa may have been responsible for drawing attention from Wikipedia. Starting from August, traffic levels are returning to expected levels. The monthly report card for August is available here.

Visitors to the Foundation in August included James Gosling (known as the father of the Java programming language) and historian Timothy Garton Ash.



Ten thousand good articles
In a major milestone, the English Wikipedia reached 10,000 good articles this week. Good articles are required to be well written, well researched, complete, accurate, as well as following Wikipedia guidelines. Although they are not as "well written" as Featured articles, they are nonetheless an important standard.

According to GimmeBot, the 10,000th good article is Ministry of Finance (Soviet Union), an important governmental office of the former Soviet Union. Editors are sharing their congratulations on the talk page. As of 9 October, about 1 in 343 articles is a Good article, and 1 in 230 is a good or featured article or featured list. According to GA reviewer Geometry guy:

"Although good articles still represent less than one percent of the encyclopedia, it is an amazing achievement to bring the number of GAs to this level while also maintaining scrutiny of quality for individual articles. (Please keep contributing to WP:GAR to ensure that weak GAs are improved or delisted.)"

Briefly

 * Introduction to Commons videos: Wikimedia Italia has released, on Commons and YouTube, a video introducing users to Wikimedia Commons. The video has English subtitles, and explains how to upload pictures to Commons. It covers project goals, sourcing, the upload page, how to register, the copyright process, OTRS, discussion and the help desk, featured image processes, and donating to the Wikimedia Foundation.
 * IRC Office hours: The log for the 5 October IRC office hour with Zack Exley, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Community Officer, has been posted. Issues covered included the meaning of his job title, page-editing statistics published by Erik Zachte that reveal a disparity between Global North and Global South (see earlier Signpost coverage), the 2010 fundraiser campaign, Exley's social background and standing, the internal organization of the Wikimedia Foundation, and where local chapters fall on the hierarchy.
 * Wikipedia and trust: Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has posted an entry on her personal blog titled "People trust Wikipedia because we tell them not to". Inspired by a joint talk of Timothy Garton Ash and Tobias Wolff, she discusses how the various cleanup tags are used to indicate required improvements on Wikipedia pages, saying that "people know they can trust it not to be aiming to manipulate them – to sell them something, either a product or a position. Wikipedia is just aiming to tell people the truth, and it’s refreshingly honest about its own limitations."
 * Research consultant hired: Diederik van Liere has been hired by the Foundation as a research consultant. He will work on research involving user trends and change patrolling tools.
 * Wiki Loves Monuments: The Wiki Loves Monuments image contest by Wikimedia Nederland has received 12,227 pictures on the Commons and 274 on Flickr, by 235 participants . As part of the project, 7,854 objects were covered; Wikimedia Nederland now has images for about 20,000 rijksmonuments, a third of the total number of 60,000.
 * Wikipedia-logo-v2-ru-600k-articles.pngRussian Wikipedia reaches 600,000 articles: The Russian Wikipedia reached 600,000 articles this week with the creation of Конти, Даниеле, an Italian football player, at 17:21 Moscow Time. The 500,000 threshold was reached on 25 February 2010 (see Signpost story), and this new jump represents the creation of 100,000 articles in 7 months and 13 days. The Russian Wikipedia is currently the sixth-largest, and has more than 500,000 registered contributors. This milestone follows competition between the Italian and Polish Wikipedias for fourth place, and the reaching of the one-million mark by the French Wikipedia two weeks ago. See also "From Russia with love and squalor: an overview of Russian Wikipedia," a presentation at Wikimania 2010 by Mstislavl.
 * On-wiki marriage proposal: Dutch Wikipedia contributor Cumulus this week proposed to fellow Wikipedian Rododendron on her talk page, with a photo of a homemade sockpuppet. Fifteen tense hours later, Rododendron replied...

This week in history

 * 2005: The French Wikipedia loses its most prolific contributor, aged 31
 * 2006: Erik Möller, now Deputy Director of Wikimedia, joins the Board of Trustees; commercial article creation firm MyWikiBiz is blocked
 * 2007: Jimbo gets endless emails from Wikipedia-using students; the first WikiProject Report reviews Biography
 * 2009: New search engine Bing launched dedicated Wikipedia search features