K P wrote:
On 8/31/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Why is that that women seem to drift away from editing proper, to deal with more "organization" matters ? Less bullshit probably. Less agressivity. Smaller groups where people know each other. Hard to say. But in the organization proper, I would say there is no mysogyny. If you want to join and help, there is a LOT to do :-)
Ant
I have no idea what the Foundation is or the organizational structure of anything, and was really just talking about en-Wikipedia. I edit on a few other Wikipedias, the Polish and Spanish ones on occasion, but they're different.
I like editing, doing research in the sciences. It's something I've done for a living on and off for much of my life, and it enhances what I do now for a living, which consumes so much time, I can barely function, so I'm an unlikely candidate for volunteering in organization. When I have extra time one day, I'll look around and see who's who, what's what in the upper echelons. Thanks for the note.
KP
In its simplest and most obvious role, the Foundation (aka Wikimedia Foundation, aka wmf) is the organization operating Wikipedia.
More precisely: The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home and http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions (though I should update some parts...)
What are volunteers involved in ? * Helping with the press (interviews, working on press kits etc...) * Participating in conferences * Organizing conferences (such as Wikimania) or various colloques, or simply wikimeets * Helping with fundraising (one is planned in roughly one month from now) * Helping with the software * Servers and network * setting up CDs or DVDs or wikireaders of content * scanning old books
Etc...
There are other skills, more specialized, that volunteers can provide. For example, helping on the audit committee (we are in the middle of the audit for operations between june 06 till may 07 - I expect audit outcome will be published in one month or so).
The latest hot topic of the organization was Wikimania 2007 (http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)
The hot topics of the moment are * Audit 2007 * Wikimania 2008 bid and selection * Fundraising 2007 * Budget (very internal, should be approved in october 07) * For several chapters, some colloques are being organized (eg, Wikimedia France in october on quality issues, Wikimedia Netherlands in october on education issues)
There are other things to do :-)
ant