On 5 April, it was announced that the remaining vacant seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees had been filled last month by Bishakha Datta, an Indian journalist and filmmaker who leads a Mumbai-based nonprofit organization that "focuses on conveying women's perspectives in culture and the media". Michael Snow, the board's chair, wrote:
Datta is the first Board member from India. Her term will end in December 2010.
In an interview with Indian business newspaper Mint, Datta explained some of her objectives as a Board member.
The Arbitration Committee has determined that there is a need for additional oversighters and checkusers to improve workload distribution and ensure complete, timely response to requests. Experienced editors are invited to apply for either or both of the Oversight or CheckUser permissions. Current holders of either permission are also invited to apply for the other. The last day to request an application is 10 April 2010. For more information, please see the election page.
The tradition of "reverse" April fools' jokes on Wikipedia's main page – statements which are designed to appear made-up but are factually accurate – was continued this year. For example, the featured article of the day was wife selling ("a traditional English practice for ending an unsatisfactory marriage"), and the featured image was an ad for a dietary supplement that promised to help customers concerned about their figure to "get fat".
As TheDJ observed on his blog, many readers, including journalists,
Before the current custom was established, the main page had featured actual hoaxes on 1 April, leading to considerable controversy (see 2005 Signpost coverage).
On the software side, the long-standing goal to rewrite the MediaWiki parser "in a more friendly and accessible implementation" was achieved on 1 April by porting it to the LOLCODE programming language.
On the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, Erik Möller drew attention to two recently created introductory videos about Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Italia produced a video guide to Wikipedia (in Italian); it is available on the Italian Wikipedia, or a smaller version on Commons. It is also on Youtube with subtitles in English and Spanish. The text of the video is available here for translators who wish to translate into their own language.
The second video, "How To Create a Wikipedia Article", was produced by Howcast.
More videos are available at Commons:Category:Instructional videos on using Wikipedia, including two introductory videos produced in 2008/2009 by Wikimedia Deutschland.
Discuss this story
A P.S. about the next Board meeting: Foundation:Meetings still lists no past or planned meetings since last November (the page was last edited on 29 October 2009), but a few hours before I wrote that the date of the next meeting hadn't been published yet, someone from Wikimedia Germany indicated that it will be held on April 17-18.
Minutes are usually published for each meeting, but it seems none have been written for the meetings held after last August.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:58, 7 April 2010 (UTC) fixed link HaeB (talk) 19:05, 18 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The "Howcast" intro to WP is just soooo professional. Well done, whoever produced it. The English subtitled translation to the Italian vid on WP needs a little tightening up. Tony (talk) 11:59, 9 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]