Since 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, selected staff, and chapter delegates have met for the Wikimedia annual conference in Berlin, Germany. This year's installment was held over the weekend of March 30 to April 1, after more than six months of tense relations between the board and chapters over governance and fundraising issues, including notions of pursuing the Foundation's goal of extending Wikimedia’s reach into the “global South” by reforming the distribution of Wikimedia funds. The board came to conclusions on finance, new organizational models and standards, and transparency.

Wikimedia Foundation transparency

The board unanimously agreed to publish how each of its members votes on proposed resolutions, reinstating a practice that was abandoned without discernible reason in December 2009.

Wikimedia “entity reforms”

Several resolutions emerged that define or improve the standards of Wikimedia movement committees and best practices for Wikimedia movement organizations. The role of the Chapters Committee was re-defined more broadly and it was asked to take on the additional role to look after new kinds of movement entities such as user groups, theme-specific entities, and sub-national Wikimedia organizations (Amendment to the ChapCom rules, Affiliations Committee resolution, New Models) according to the Wikimedia affiliation model principles. Additionally, the Board approved a Board Governance Committee charter to formalize the duties of one of its own committees.

To better fit the new models, the Chapters Committee is to become the Affiliations Committee, whose charter will have to be presented by the Chapters Committee to the Board of Trustees by June 15, 2012. The new committee-to-be as well as the new entity forms were recommended by the Movement Roles working group, which itself was dissolved in Berlin and whose topic is subject of a Signpost-interview this week.

Finance resolutions

The board approved two resolutions on the highly contested issue of finance, declaring basically a moratorium on the topic until 2015, while limiting the payment processing by chapters on Wikimedia project sites such as the English Wikipedia to the Foundation itself and under conditions to the four already processing chapters (France, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK). At the same time, the board asked the Foundation staff to come up with a new volunteer-run Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), which shall handle all funds the movement receives through Wikimedia sites, by June 30.

While basically maintaining the status quo on fundraising, the resolutions nevertheless constitute a change of current procedures, since they significantly separate fund processing from money distribution and the introduction of the FDC. Thereby, the board, while making changes such as limiting and re-defining chapter processing, mainly followed the recommendations of executive director Sue Gardner.

Chapter affairs

On the chapter front, the weekend saw a major decision taken: to establish an entity, called Wikimedia Chapters Association, to improve and coordinate the activities of the chapters. The charter of the new organization, highly contested with 17 amendments, issues postponed until post-Berlin and with discussions by far exceeding the scheduled sessions, will establish a council to legislate, and a paid Secretariat to execute. Additionally, the council has to appoint auditors to ensure proper conduct. The participating chapters elected Tomer Ashur, the Chairman of Wikimedia Israel, as interim Secretary General, leading a team of four that takes care of the practical process up to the first council meeting at the upcoming Wikimania in Washington D.C. in July. A proposal for a similar organization had been made on December 11 2009 in the course of the strategic planning process by Pharos (today President of Wikimedia New York City):

“

The Wikimedia movement should establish an International Wikimedia Chapters Network, for the purpose of increasing communication, cooperation and representation, both among the chapters and between the chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation.

”

but met with objection on January 31 2010 by Delphine Ménard (today Treasurer of Wikimedia Germany):

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I am not sure I understand this proposal. Or rather, the way I understand it, I am rather worried at the results it can yield in the longer run. Reading the (short) discussion, I understand that the proposal aims at looking at organizing the chapters around a "central" kind of piece, which would take care of ensuring communication, collaboration, making decisions etc. However, the way the recommendation is phrased, it seems to me that the task force proposes that the network of chapters be a separate entity from the Foundation, i.e. we'd have the chapters on one side (organized, say, à la Greenpeace), and the Foundation on the other. I have studied a bit the governance and structural models of international organisations, and there are none where I have seen two "central pieces" or "international pieces" (formal or informal) or whatever you want to call them. As such, I am interested to understand better where the Foundation stands were there to be a "network of chapters" as per your proposal. Am I reading this wrong, or is the "network of chapters" meant to develop among chapters and chapters only? I can imagine a "Wikimedia network" developing and increasing communication, cooperation and representation, not a "chapters network" that seems not to fully integrate the Foundation, but rather develop as a counterpart to it."

”

The topic of the ongoing process of selecting the two chapter-appointed members of the 10-strong Board of Trustees was also discussed, with representatives from a majority of the chapters participating in a straw poll on the slate of eight candidates for the seats as an early part of the decision-making process. The chapters have until May 15 to come to consensus on who to put forward.

Other topics and way forward

Additionally, sessions were held on content-related topics such as library outreach and Wiki loves monuments. Most topics discussed or decided in Berlin are expected to lead to follow up-debates on how to implement or develop them further. Decisions on issues such as the Funds Dissemination Committee, the Wikimedia Chapters Association, and the transformation of the Chapters Committee into the Affiliations Committee are scheduled to be finalized mid-2012.

This week saw a press release by Wikimedia Deutschland on the topic of their latest pursuit, Wikidata. The newest addition to the Wikimedia Foundation family tree, Wikidata aims to be "a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike...[that will] allow for central access to the data in a way similar to what Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files." With the potential to be the first Wikimedia family expansion in six years, the initial construction of Wikidata, if successful, would be the largest project a single chapter has ever undertaken.

So, how will it work? According to its current technical description, development will proceed in three stages. The first, expected to end by August of this year, will overhaul the language system by providing a central interwiki repository. The second, to finish by December, will use a similar method to standardise the content of infoboxes, allowing editors to add and use the data within the framework and allowing smaller wikis to share in localised versions of this data for their own infoboxes. Finally, the third stage of development will see the automation of list and chart creation based on Wikidata data, at which point Wikimedia Deutschland plans to hand over operation and maintenance to the Wikimedia Foundation itself, hopefully by March 2013.

In addition to the obvious internal benefits of the project, the Wikidata team has been keen to stress the benefits of a central data repository that could surpass existing Wikimedia-scraping data wiki dbpedia, attracting numerous donors in the process. One half of the €1.3 million raised (equivalent to US$1.87 million) will come from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, a supporter of long-range activities that have potential to accelerate progress in the development of artificial intelligence. A further quarter is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, in the hopes that it will be an "easy-to-use, downloadable software tool for researchers, to help them manage and gain value from the increasing volume and complexity of scientific data." Google provides the last quarter of funding, stating that "[our] mission is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful."

The money raised has been used to hire a team of eight developers (plus four support staff). The development team itself will be led by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology alumni Dr. Denny Vrandečić and Dr. Markus Krötzsch, the two co-founders of the Semantic MediaWiki project. Vrandečić stated on the foundation-l mailing list that although support staff have been in place for several weeks, the development team itself will first come together on Monday; following Wikimedia Deutschand's credo, he expressed his hope that "in the future we will be communicating about Wikidata much more, as the development is finally starting." Indeed, according to its timeline, previews will be presented as soon as feasible, probably in May or June, as a way to engage community discussion. In July, the team hopes to present at Wikimania 2012 on the topic of language links and to give updates on the project. Community communications will be handled by dedicated manager Lydia Pintscher, who has already introduced a communications roadmap. Look forward to an interview with Pintscher in next week's Signpost!

• Justin Bieber RfA unsuccessful: This year's April Fools' festivities continued a rich Wikipedian tradition, with a raft of frivolous and off-colour blocks, requests for adminship, and nominations for deletion. The Main Page continued the project's venerable tradition of arch and misleading characterisations of its showcased content, with pigeon photography as the featured article, a host of amusingly unedifying did you know? hooks, and historical events (including Edible Book Day) served with a dollop of nonsense. The inevitable rancour from those less humorously inclined saw the thwarting of efforts to banish Jimbo Wales on his own command and either delete or bestow upon fellow co-founder Larry Sanger the august honours of an accountcreator flag, and spilled out into a host of ANI discussions (1, 2 and 3), and prompted the perennial village pump proposal to ban the ritual celebration of the wiki's wilder side. The candidate's participation in the April Fools pranks pushed the result of Mabdul's RFA from an unclear 75% to a failed 68% during the last half day before closure.
• Teahouse Project update The Teahouse project has released its latest metrics, indicating among other things that emailed invitations continued to enjoy success in attracting guests.
• Triage and Feedback development continues apace Work continues locally on the New Page Triage initiative, encouraged by the active engagement of WMF community liaison Oliver Keyes. Editors continue to sign up for the newsletter and provide feedback, and the developing team holds regular office hours, for which the latest logs are posted at Meta. Discussion on the latest iteration of the Article Feedback Tool continues at Article Feedback Tool/Version 5, also with active engagement by Keyes, who has presented an evaluation of feedback for the community's consideration.

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