Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-01-30/News and notes

Call for Feedback regarding the upcoming Board of Trustees election
A Call for Feedback on the upcoming Board of Trustees elections was launched by the Wikimedia Foundation and is open until 16 February 2022. Unlike previous Calls for Feedback, this discussion incorporates community feedback from 2021, replacing Board-suggested proposals with key questions from the Board of Trustees sourced from the feedback about the 2021 Board of Trustees election with the hope of inspiring collective conversation and collaborative proposal development. There are three questions regarding diverse representation, expectations for candidates, and affiliate participation. Interested editors can participate on Meta. – E

Administrator cadre continues to contract – more
The Signpost special report "Administrator cadre continues to contract" in 2019 noted that the number of active administrators had dropped below 500 for the first time. Since then, the numbers have continued falling and have not risen above 500 in the last six months. Another milestone was set in September 2021: the number of active administrators was under 450 for most of the month. By January 1 this year, the number had "recovered" to 469. – B

Whither WMC User Group?
When we last heard from the (non-recognized) Wikimedians of Mainland China User Group they were planning on creating a "hard fork" of zhwiki, the largest Chinese-language Wikipedia and a project of the WMF. The WMC hard fork encyclopedia was expected to copy current articles from zhwiki and then independently edit from there. Several zhwiki admins and other users had been blocked by the WMF, leading up to the fork. An anonymous source, claiming to be a spokesperson for WMCUG, has informed The Signpost that their encyclopedia has now copied 600,000 zhwiki articles and has about 50 regular editors. Editors must be approved by the managers of the project and their numbers are soon expected to rise to 75-100. A new large commercial partner is expected to join the project within days and will guarantee their minimal financial needs and community independence. New text will be freely licensed CC BY SA 4.0. None of this information could be independently verified. – S

Brief notes

 * Universal Code of Conduct development: The last meeting of the Universal Code of Conduct development team was last week. The theme this time was procedure for enforcement of the policy, or policing violations. The Signpost expects to report on their final report after it is completed next month.
 * Steward elections: The 2022 Steward elections will open for voting on 07 February 2022, 14:00 (UTC).
 * Community Wishlist Survey: The Community Wishlist Survey voting phase is open until February 11. This survey is the process where communities decide what the Community Tech team should work on over the next year.
 * New Affiliations Committee members: The Affiliations Committee has officially appointed Camelia Boban as Chair, Jeffrey Keefer as Vice-Chair, Houcemeddine Turki as Secretary, and Suyash Dwivedi as Treasurer, for a one-year term.