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/
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
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"
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.
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
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.
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
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).
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