The Wikimedia Foundation Mid-Year Financial Statements (covering the period 1 July through 31 December 2009) are now posted to the WMF website. An FAQ replying to questions has also been posted.
According to Veronique Kessler, posting on Foundation-l:
The upshot is: The Wikimedia Foundation's financial situation continues to be strong; we have met our overall revenue goal for the year and projections say that we will exceed plan by about 50%. Expenses were underspent at the beginning of the year but are catching up and we project expenses to be close to the original plan, maybe a little higher.
A Request for comments on the implementation of Community de-adminship is currently ongoing.
A heated discussion was held recently about the status of flagged revisions on the mailing list Foundation-l.
Following the discussion, Jimmy Wales started a poll in his userspace about "whether we should ask the Foundation to simply turn on flagged revs in the form that the Germans use it."
For six hours on 2 March, the "Did You Know" section on the main page presented a fake biography manufactured as a breaching experiment by one of the writers of the "On Wikipedia" blog, as part of their examinations of BLP issues. (Last month, the Signpost reported on their survey among the subjects of 26 randomly selected BLPs.) Jimbo Wales commented: Fascinating and sad. I'm really proud of some aspects of the saga, and obviously not at all happy with others.
Phase II of a Request for Comment on Biographies of Living Persons (BLPs) was closed this week. The Wordsmith originally closed the RfC, but his closure was reverted by Coffee, as he felt that The Wordsmith was too involved to close the RfC. Father Goose nominally re-closed the RfC, affirming The Wordsmith's earlier closure.
The close found a consensus that a PROD-like system be created to deal with unreferenced BLPs. The Wordsmith also found consensus that mass deletions of the sort that precipitated the RfC (see archived story) were discouraged, as well as any automated deletion of old unreferenced BLPs or speedy deletion of new ones. Finally, he suggested that the details of the PROD-like process be finally crafted within two weeks of the closure; that a message be sent to all active WikiProjects urging them to participate in cleanup; and that a taskforce be created to organize efforts of clearing the backlog. The Sticky Prod Workshop was created to hammer out the final details of the BLP PROD process.
In the past month:
Discuss this story
Re: the fake DYK: Perhaps BLPs should undergo a particularly thorough review at DYK and only be accepted if two reviewers agree. -- Ssilvers (talk) 02:18, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If people are going to make fake newspaper scans, then there's nothing we can do without multiplying our manpower by 1000. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 17:28, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
On the WMF budget
The news item is for the midyear budget and notes the time period covered, however the quote that follows uses the vague year and isn't apparent if it refers to the same time period or the 2009 year or the fiscal year. I think it would helpful to make that clear. -- Banjeboi 19:31, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]