Wikimediauk-l September 2008

wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org

42 participants
68 discussions

Results of Wikimedia UK board election
by joseph seddon 01 Oct '08

01 Oct '08

On behalf of British community and the election committee, I would like to thank all those who participated in this election. The committee apologises for the delay in getting these results out. Internet access and real life resulted in time not being readily available this weekend and hence the lateness. In total, 27 members of the British community voted in the election, therefore, to reach the 50% requirement, 14 votes in favour of a candidate were required. 5 candidates will head the initial board for Wikimedia UK and be responsible for its set up. Due to only 5 candidates reaching the required 50% vote the board the board will consist of those people. The board members are as follows: KTC AndrewRT CFP Warofdreams Mike Peel. I would like to wish the best of luck to all those who will be responsible, whether board members or not, for making Wikimedia UK a fully functional and successful chapter . In time, feedback will be passed onto the board before the next elections to hopefully improve this process. User:Seddon @ en:wiki Election committee _________________________________________________________________ Make a mini you and download it into Windows Live Messenger http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/111354029/direct/01/

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Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Results of Wikimedia UK board election
by Mickey Conn 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

I'm delighted to have been elected and to be part of a board which I believe can make Wikimedia UK 2.0 a reality - more than that, a big success - and will work to ensure that this happens to schedule and in a way which encourages wide participation. Thank you to everyone who voted, who has expressed an interest in the project, or who stood for the board. I hope that everyone will remain involved and will participate in the elections scheduled to be held once the organisation is up and running. I'd also like to thank the election committee for their prompt and diligent administration of the election. If anyone would like to ask me any questions or put their views to me, at any point, please e-mail me at this address, or contact me through my Wikipedia talk page. Finally, I intend to stick by the pledges I made when standing for election. Please feel free to hold me to account if you believe I am doing otherwise! Mickey Conn

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Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Wikipedia for Schools (trademark and press)
by Andrew Cates 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

Jay, Sorry for the delay in replying to this which was a mixture of technical and life. I think we need to start moving on press releases etc. Here was last year's quote form Anthere: Florence Devouard, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, said: "The Wikimedia Foundation aims to encourage the development and distribution of reference content to the public free of charge: this project is an excellent example of free resources being offered to a particular audience which we warmly encourage, and are proud to support." The 2008 Schools Wikipedia is now available for general viewing at http://schools-wikipedia.org and will be available for download and on DVD in two weeks time (so we can pick up final bugs). I appreciate we won't use it but I attach Alexa's traffic graph of "online only" schools wikipedia traffic versus "entire" citizendium traffic :). Our draft press release, mainly based on last year (numbers to be confirmed) coinciding with the availability by download was going to be: ================================= SOS Children UK, in coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, have released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools on DVD, a complete update on the previous Wikipedia for Schools. The Selection DVD, which may be freely copied in entirety, has the content of a 20 volume encyclopaedia - with 30,000 pictures, 20 million words and articles on 5,500 topics, all of which have been hand checked and selected from Wikipedia, and sorted by curriculum topic. The Wikipedia for Schools is run on school intranets for security or in remote locations in the developing world where Internet access is a problem. It has been distributed throughout the world by other charitable groups such as the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa, the "hole in the wall" charity to rural India, local governments, local SOS Children offices and individual wikipedians. SOS Children estimate that the schools selection has several million offline users, but also more than 7000 human visitors a day to the online copy at http://schools-wikipedia.org , making it by far the most popular "checked" version of Wikipedia. Dr Andrew Cates, CEO of SOS Children (and himself a Wikipedia administrator) said: "Wikipedia just gets better and better as a resource for schools. All the articles have been reviewed and updated since last year, 600 of the weakest ones we have removed and 1600 new articles have been added. This year for the first time we have included some "portal pages" which give a broad overview of topics and for the first time the community have written articles on topics (e.g. Portal:Early Modern Britain) specifically at our request based on the National Curriculum. We are delighted with the success of the project and warmly thank both SOS Children and WIkipedia volunteers for their hard work." SOS Children is best known as the world's largest orphan charity (UK Charity No. 1069204) but is also a very large educational charity running 192 schools with 91,000 pupils in the developing world. See www.soschildren.org The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a US non-profit charitable organisation 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. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 10 most visited websites in the world. Summary points: The selection is organised around National Curriculum subjects The articles have been cleaned up and checked for suitability for and usefulness to children Website: http://schools-wikipedia.org ; Available for free download at xyz This Selection aims to correct criticisms made of Wikipedia as a school resource: the Selection has been screened; the Selection cannot be vandalized; children cannot "meet" adults there; there are no very explicit articles or content. (The most detailed article is Birth Control , which has been kept technical and neutral). offline access can be easily arranged Note: The Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a separate project from the awaited 0.7 Release Version of Wikipedia, although they share technology and volunteers. The Selection for Schools has fewer articles than expected from the 0.7 Release Version (which does not used manual checking of articles) but larger pictures, and a schools-related indexing system.It is entirely free, and has no commercial advertising. Contact: David Gerard, UK media contact, Wikimedia Foundation: wp(a)davidgerard.co.uk, +44 7733 223584 Andrew Cates, CEO, SOS Children UK: andrew(a)soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589 Elizabeth Rodgers, Press Officer, SOS Children UK: elizabeth(a)soschildren.org, +44 1223 365589 Retrieved from "http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/SOSChildrenUK2007"

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Contacting the new board?
by David Gerard 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

I expect that my and Alison's phones will continue to ring with WMUK-related queries for quite some time - once you're in the media directories, it seems you never leave ;-) If any of you have phone numbers you don't mind the world knowing, those would be useful for passing on as phone contacts! We're talking about a pretty low volume of calls (to me, anyway) - it's not burningly urgent or anything. (Email forwarding is easy. But lots of the people who call don't appear to use it when they have a phone to hand.) In my experience, making my phone number public (it's 07733 223 584, for those who can't be bothered looking it up) hasn't led to a flood of nutters. I get hardly any nutter calls. Some are press, lots are people wondering how to get into Wikipedia or with problems with their article or asking to reuse an image. I generally let it go to message when I'm at work. - d.

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Results
by Andrew Turvey 26 Sep '08

26 Sep '08

When should we expect the results to be announced? Voting closes at 23:59 on Saturday - will it be announced shortly after or next morning, or later? Just wondering if I should to stay up late that night! Andrew

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Notifying electorate of vote
by Thomas Dalton 24 Sep '08

24 Sep '08

Has anything been done to let people that have put their names down for membership know that the vote has started? If someone familiar with AWB or similar could go through and add a message to everyone's talk page, it would be good. I don't think we can expect everyone to be either on this list or watching the meta page.

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Banking options
by peterc＠cix.compulink.co.uk 24 Sep '08

24 Sep '08

Hi all, I happen to be temporary treasurer of an organisation that has just been registered as a charity today. The full time director has recommended the Charity Aids Foundation as the way to go on banking with HSBC as the best option of the normal banks. Unfortunately he cut and pasted the wrong info into his email, but the eventual treasurer of WMUK v2 might want to investigate. Peter

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We can't afford solicitors
by Thomas Dalton 23 Sep '08

23 Sep '08

Ok, it's official, solicitors charge way too much (anyone particularly surprised?). I've just got a rough budget from a solicitor specialising in charities and for them to have a "light touch involvement" in us getting registered with the appropriate authorities will cost "between £1200 to £1500 (plus VAT)" (given their hourly rates, that comes to about 6 hours work, God knows how they call that "light touch" - it's just a few modifications to the models and a couple of forms!). I think we'll have to do it ourselves, hope we don't make any particularly serious mistakes and just find someone to witness it (which is what WER did, I believe - it seems the only way).

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(no subject)
by jonathan cardy 23 Sep '08

23 Sep '08

Regards Jonathan Cardy dahsun(a)yahoo.com

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Notifying electorate of vote
by Andrew Turvey 21 Sep '08

21 Sep '08

Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton at gmail.com wrote: Has anything been done to let people that have put their names down for membership know that the vote has started? If someone familiar with AWB or similar could go through and add a message to everyone's talk page, it would be good. I don't think we can expect everyone to be either on this list or watching the meta page. ==== I think that's a great idea. I've drafted a message at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_UK_v2.0#Message_encouraging_p…, Please feel free to amend. I suggest we go and subst it onto the userpage of everyone who's signed up - will only take a few minutes even without AWB. Andrew

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Wikimediauk-l September 2008