Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-07-17/News and notes

Wikimedia Endowment transparency – a year on, nothing seems to have changed
The Wikimedia Foundation has long promised that the Wikimedia Endowment – held by the Tides Foundation and managed as an opaque, organisationally completely separate entity by a board led by Jimmy Wales – would soon be transferred to a financially transparent 501(c)(3) organisation. These promises date back to 2017 (see Signpost coverage this year and last year).

In April 2021, Endowment Director Amy Parker and Director of Development Caitlin Virtue again said on Meta:

A full year has now passed since that 501(c)(3) determination letter (pictured) was received in June 2022. Yet the money has still not been transferred. This means that another year will have passed without public reporting on the Endowment's revenue and expenses, as it is organisationally separate from the Wikimedia Foundation (its revenue and assets are not included in WMF revenue and assets) and the Tides Foundation does not provide any such reporting either.

In response to an inquiry on the Wikimedia mailing list, WMF Chief Financial Officer Jaime Villagomez recently posted the following update on Meta:

In addition, WMF CEO Maryana Iskander and WMF board member Nataliia Tymkiv said on the Wikimedia mailing list:

The Wikimedia Endowment holds a significant proportion of all the funds the public has ever donated to the Wikimedia cause. Yet it does not follow the same standards of transparency that apply to other parts of the movement. For example, it would be unimaginable for any WMF affiliate to ingest over $100 million over the best part of a decade without ever publishing audited accounts detailing revenue and expenses.

Why should the Wikimedia Endowment be different? – AK

Wikimania scholarships
The Wikimania Scholarship outcomes were recently published on the Wikimania site. According to the summary provided there,

This means that less than one in six scholarship applications was approved. To one editor, at least, this seemed a "paltry" amount of funding:

A WMF spokesperson responded by saying:

User:Sdkb seemed unimpressed. – AK

Gitz6666 unglocked
In a rare reversal, User:Gitz6666 had his global lock overturned after lodging an appeal with the stewards. Gitz6666 had been indefinitely blocked on the Italian Wikipedia in May, along with another user, and then had his account globally locked by an Italian steward.

The underlying dispute concerned a sociologist's Italian Wikipedia biography that had attracted press attention for its alleged unfairness (see previous Signpost coverage). – AK

Brief notes

 * New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator,.
 * Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement (beginning 17 July) is Religious philosophy. It will be followed the week after by Act (drama). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!