Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-06-04/News and notes

Editors want 60% of Foundation funding put to technical issues
The fifth release of finding from last December's editor survey (see previous Signpost coverage) sheds light on the communities' level of interest and participation in Wikimedia entities, and on how editors feel donated funds should be allocated.

The sample of nearly 7,000 editors believed that 60.5% of Wikimedia Foundation expenditures should go into technical areas, comprising operations (26.7%, blue), stakeholder-specific software improvements targeting new editors (13.6%, red), seasoned contributors (10.4%, green), and Wikipedia's readers (9.8%, violet).

Issues which are widely debated in the ongoing Wikimedia finance reform process, such as investing in community work in the Global South (5.3%) and grants to Wikimedians and other non-profit groups (5.4%), are well behind in participants' priorities. Comparing the findings on Wikimedia entities as such with the finding of the earlier survey from April 2011 points to a persistent lack of interest in getting involved in entity affairs. The number of survey participants who have never voted for the WMF's board of trustees remains close to 90%, and 47% (45% in April 2010) have never heard of the process in which the community picks three of the ten board members. Performance ratings for entities suffered a slight downturn (the foundation received 6.95 out of 10, down from 7.33 in 2010; and the chapters 6.04, down from 6.15), as well as the self-rating of the community (6.75, down from 7.4).

Awareness of chapters' very existence remains low: 45% of the responding users couldn't say if there was a Wikimedia chapter in their country, although the Signpost notes that the proportion of "don't knows" may have been much lower if editors in countries without a national chapter had been excluded.

Commons Picture of the Year: still time to vote in first round
Editors are voting on the Commons:Picture of the Year 2011 to choose the best featured photos over the past year in a two-round contest. The annual contest, run by a volunteer committee, is now in its sixth year. Last year's first round covered some 800 files in 17 categories from 2010.

This year, 599 photographs are in the running. All have been selected as featured pictures and have remained on Commons during 2011. While there are still 17 categories, their structure has been slightly modified. Several category descriptions have been expanded, and panoramic nature views is now a category in its own right.

The first round of voting – to determine the 32 candidates with most votes across the categories for the final competition later this year – runs until June 7; every user who has established their account before 1 April 2012 and made more than 75 contributions on a Wikimedia wiki with SUL is eligible to take part.

In brief

 * Wiknic 2012: Preparations for the annual Great American Wiknic, scheduled mainly on and around June 23 this year, are under way. Additionally, there will be a Wiki World's Fair event on July 7 on Governors Island in New York Harbor. International volunteers will attend and then travel to Washington, D.C., for Wikimania.
 * Core Contest 2012: The winners of this year's core contest, aiming at the improvement of important articles, are announced. The first prize went to Ecosystem, improved by Guettarda, and Middle Ages, by Ealdgyth, took the second prize.
 * IPv6 day: Preparations for IPv6 day on June 6 are under way on Meta. The announcement, for the scheduled day, states that the WMF will aim to fully enable the new internet protocol version on that day, if no problems come up in preliminary tests.
 * Fundraising agreements 2012-13: Draft agreements on how to handle the funds processing of annual fundraiser donations by the Wikimedia chapters in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK have been published on meta.
 * New administrator: The Signpost welcomes our newest administrator, the Signpost's own Crisco 1492, who writes the "featured content" report for us each week. In real life he is a Canadian student studying Indonesian literature in its namesake country. He is planning on becoming an English teacher there after he graduates.