Hello :-)

A new wiki website was set this morning : www.wikimedia.org.

This website will be the official site of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is meant to contain * Description of what the Wikimedia Foundation is (mission statement, history, board, general organisation, bylaws, other legal considerations etc...) * Information about the Foundation activity (such as board meeting report, agenda, budget, financial statements etc...) * Membership information (and in particular due system) * Donation system * Information on local chapters (the extent of it needs to be decided with the chapters themselves) * General information which will be easily available for press or any organisation or fundraising etc... : such as a condensed dozen pages, recalling history of wikimedia projects, short description and access to all projects, basic information in terms of figures (number of hits per day, number of pages, number of contributors... graphs), links to the most relevant references, global press releases * Relevant links for more information (for contact, mediawiki software etc...)

The site has two goals. First "internal" communication from the Foundation toward all editors (or members). Second, "external" communication from the Foundation to any potential donator or organism contacted for grants, or more generally speaking press. And of course, hosting of the dues and donation system.

A lot of the information is not really meant to be updated frequently (such as mission statement, bylaws), or will be edited by board members or officers mostly (such as board reports, financial reports). These informations need to be protected and the site will be low editing traffic since a good part of it will be static most of the time. Basically, the rule of thumb is that *any* information included in that website is approved by the board. For these reasons, access will be restricted to a limited number of editors. Currently me only :-) Cough. I'll fix accounts for Angela, Jimbo, Mav and one developer, as soon as I find time. We'll see for details later on.

Note : the *current* wikimedia web site is a mix of * html pages which are editable directly on meta, but are in html format on a wiki page. Though the concept is good, these pages are not very easily editable (that is okay for a couple of pages, but not really for dozens). Some of them are currently protected (for example bank statements are protected and already edited by Mav only). * pages which are available only by developers (any update of these pages require help from a developer, not for security reasons I understood, but just because wiki synthax does not always handle html synthax well). This is not very practical, and should be avoided if possible.

Hence the suggestion by Jimbo to set up a wiki, which was done this morning.

Now, obviously, some of the future pages on the website require input of many contributors. So most of these pages will be available on meta (actually, they will be started on meta), and they will be updated from time to time. I guess we will mostly begin with direct links.

Last point : we wish that this website be international because the Foundation is meant to exist for all contributors whatever their language, and because it is meant to become a quick, relevant and accurate resource for anyone looking for information about us. I *do not think* we should aim in covering something like 150 languages or more :-) but if rather quickly we could cover half a dozen langages, it would be great.

ant

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