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

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News and notes

Board resolutions, fundraiser challenge, traffic report, ten thousand good articles, and more

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 3,760 responses. 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.

The number of good articles surpassed 10,000 this week.

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

The Wikimedia Italia "introduction to Commons" video. Note: captions only display on Commons.

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