A job opening for a "storyteller" was posted to the Wikimedia Foundation's web site last week, defining the new position as follows: "The movement storyteller will work with members of Wikimedia communities to teach Wikimedia readers about the world behind the content they rely on everyday." Replying to comments on the Foundation-l mailing list, Chief Community Officer Zack Exley clarified that "there is one important purpose of that job that may be a bit hidden in between the lines: For this position, I'm looking for someone who can help free us from dependence on 'The Jimmy Letter' in fundraising", by making the donation appeal letters from other community members more effective. (On the other hand, their banners – the first step in leading a reader to making a donation, with the letter being the second – already "got similar, sometimes slightly better, click rates as the Jimmy banners". Exley said that a detailed analysis of the fundraiser is in the making.)
A new page about Wikimedia Fellowships has been set up on Meta, reflecting recent clarifications (Signpost coverage) about the program, which was started last year and "offers the chance for volunteers from the projects, academics, and industry professionals to work with the Wikimedia Foundation in a new way."
On the official Wikimedia blog, the "first Virtual Community History Fellowship" program was announced, which during the summer will pair graduate students with community members from Wikimedia projects to write historical accounts of these projects (at the moment, focus is on the Tagalog, Italian, Armenian, Belarusian, Polish, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Cantonese and Chinese Wikipedias).
Two other summer fellowships for quantitative and qualitative research do not appear to have been posted by the WMF in a public venue, but were revealed last week (the deadline was March 7th) on the Wiki-research mailing list by an independent academic who called them "well-paid". One of them was to gather a small team of PhD graduate students from disciplines "involving large scale data analysis", for work on "developing a community analytics platform to gain a better understanding of [the Wikimedia Foundation's] contributors and readers." The qualitative research internships were offered to "PhD candidates or people who have completed Masters degrees in history, other humanities fields, anthropology and other social sciences", whose task will be "to understand better why the active editor base is not replenishing itself at the same rate it used to – and to present data that can help our communities figure out what to do about it".
In other news, the contracts of Community Associates Christine Moellenberndt [1] and James Alexander [2] have been extended.
The second edition of This Month in GLAM, a newsletter on Wikimedia collaborations with cultural institutions, has been published on the Wikimedia Foundation's Outreach wiki. Among various other items covered previously in the Signpost, it records the following events for February:
Discuss this story
Whoa! New skin!
Er, somehow I totally missed the announcement that there would be changes taking effect today, including moving the "edit" tags left. BTW, the edit tag for "Lead" section is taking me to the first section of the body instead. Are they working on this bug? -- Ssilvers (talk) 20:19, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]