Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-06-04/News and notes

The Wikimedia affiliates have announced their selection of the two affiliate-selected trustees they recommend every two years to the WMF board: Frieda Brioschi from Italy and Patricio Lorente from Argentina will start their new terms from the first board meeting after 1 July. The board has determined that for the first time since this system began in 2008, not only chapters but thematic organisations should vote for whom to recommend to the board. This change did not include user groups, of which there are an increasing number. A resolution of the chapters and the one thematic organisation was passed in March, governing the conduct of the 2014 election.

Announcing the result, Chris Keating set out the mechanics. In step 1 of counting in the preferential single transferable voting system, one of the two incumbents, Patricio Lorente, won more than 50% of the vote (15.5 of 27 votes), and was declared a winner. In step 2, Anders Wennersten from Sweden was eliminated, and his second-preference votes were redistributed to the two remaining candidates; this left Frieda Brioschi with more votes than the other two incumbents, and a final total of 17 votes of 27, bringing her over the 50% mark after Alice Wiegand from Germany was eliminated in step 3. Remarkably, only 27 of the 41 eligible affiliates voted.

Frieda Brioschi was born in 1976 and by profession is a computer scientist—specifically a digital communications consultant who works on "tech projects, web strategy, community creation and management, [and] social media". She has presented three TEDx talks: two about Wikipedia, and one about lateral thinking applied to problem solving. She was a co-founder in 2005 of the Italian chapter, an administrator or bureaucrat on several Italian-language sites, and an OTRS admin.

Patricio Lorente was born in 1969 and has qualifications in philosophy and law. He has extensive professional experience in social development cooperation, particularly with NGOs, and in university management. Since 2004 he has served in the administrative management of La Plata University, the second-largest university in Argentina. His first two-year term as a chapter-selected trustee, as they were then known, is coming to an end.

In brief

 * Ukraine: The Ukrainian chapter has turned five, the latest in a series of achievements for the Ukrainian wing of the Wikimedia movement—despite ongoing unrest that borders on civil war and claimed the life of Ihor Kostenko, a prominent editor. The Ukrainian Wikipedia celebrated its tenth anniversary on 30 January and crossed the 500,000 article rubicon on 12 May.
 * Beta Android app: The Wikimedia Foundation has released a beta version of its upcoming new Android app. New features include keeping track of what the user has recently viewed, an interactive table of contents, and perhaps most importantly to regular editors, the ability to edit articles directly from the app.
 * Toolserver death imminent: The Toolserver, a Wikimedia Germany-run project that has provided useful scripts to Wikimedians since 2005, will be [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-June/072463.html shut down] on 30 June. Its role in the movement has been taken over by Wikimedia Labs.
 * UK wants advice from Wikipedians: The UK's Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, has started a new initiative—the Commission on Digital Democracy—so Parliament can learn how they "can use technology to better represent and engage with the electorate, make laws and hold the powerful to account." Wikimedia UK and a British think tank are spearheading a project to encourage participation from the Wikimedia community.
 * Wiki Loves Pride: The Wiki Loves Pride 2014 campaign has begun. It will run through the month of June, including a multinational edit-a-thon on or around 21 June.
 * Wikidata Game: A new [//tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/ game] that eases editing of the Wikimedia Foundation's newest sister project, Wikidata, has taken the site by storm. According to the game's creator, as of 3 June "643 players have made an astonishing 352,710 decisions through the game, many of which result in improving Wikidata directly, or at least keep other players from having to make the same decision over again."
 * WikiConference USA: A major conference was held from 30 May to 1 June in New York City, with around 250 Wikipedians and members of the public in attendance. The first two days had scheduled sessions, while the third was in an unconference format. The German Wikipedia's Kurier described the highlights as "the view from Jake Orlowitz on the future of the Wikipedia Library, an analysis by Sara Marks  on the impact of Sarah Palin interviews to the article about Paul Revere (for background see a blog post from the New York Times), a report by  on serving as the first Wikipedian in Residence at an American university, as well as the presentation of journalism professor Andrew Lih, in which Andrew explained how his students in a course at the American University in DC have partnered with museum and archive staff to put on edit-a-thons [and other events]." In addition, Sumana Harihareswara's opening keynote was singled out for its brilliance. Further insights are available from Wikipedia Weekly, which hosted four shows during the conference. Future US conferences are being planned on an annual basis.