Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-29/News and notes

A search for the Foundation's new Treasurer has begun. The position became open earlier this month as Trustee Michael Davis resigned from the position. Davis's term on the board expires on December 1, and Davis has elected not to seek a new, board-approved term. The person selected by the board would serve a one-year term as board member (renewable every year, subject to approval of the board), and handle the duties of Treasurer, including reviewing annual budgets and audits, providing financial advice to the board, and potentially working with the bookkeeper and staff to implement financial procedures and systems. Candidates, among other requirements, must understand American nonprofit accounting procedures, have an accounting or other financial designation, such as a CPA, CFA or CA, and have previously served as a treasurer on another non-profit board for at least five years. Applicants can contact the Foundation by e-mail, at <treasurer-search AT wikimedia DOT org>, for more information.

The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continued this week. In the first seven days of the fundraiser, about 8,280 people had donated, and the Foundation had raised about US$212,000.^[1] This amount is slightly less than the $261,000 donated during the first seven days of last year's drive. Interestingly, only three contributions of $1,000 or more have been recorded so far during this drive; during the last drive, 20 contributions of $1,000 or more were recorded, discounting two large contributions that appeared to have been mailed independent of the fundraising drive. Last year's drive, however, began during the holiday season, which may explain decreased giving so far.

A proposal to close the Volapük Wikipedia received an unusual amount of attention this week. The Wikipedia is the 15th largest Wikipedia by article count, and reached 100,000 articles last month. However, the nominator, Rosentod, noted that the language has a very low number of speakers (the English Wikipedia gives an uncited count of 25-30 speakers worldwide), and many of the language's articles were written by a bot. In fact, the project has only 286 users (117th most users among all Wikipedias). Others argued that the project was growing, with a few new users making edits, and should not be deleted. They also noted that the project was much larger than, and in some cases had more active contributors than, other Wikipedias that had not been closed. The discussion has been ongoing since September 21, but recently gained much more attention. Currently, 36% of voters support its closure, up from the 28% who supported its closure a week ago, but well below consensus to delete. The discussion is set to close on Monday.

Meanwhile, a proposal made in May 2006 to close the Simple English Wikiquote is set to close on Saturday. The proposal is split almost evenly between those supporting closure and those opposing it.

Thursday was the first event in a lecture series entitled "Wikipedia: The Democratization of Knowledge or the Triumph of Amateurs?" at Eastern Michigan University. Historian Marshall Poe (author of an earlier substantial article on Wikipedia in The Atlantic Monthly) gave a presentation entitled "Wikipedia: Academia's Friend or Foe?" A reporter with The Ann Arbor News had a brief interview with Poe regarding the talk and series. Future speakers in the four-part lecture series are Larry Sanger, Andrew Keen, and Kat Walsh.

As of 27 October 2007, the Wikipedia ads project reached one hundred ads. The project, started by Gurch (talk · contribs), draws attention to certain aspects of Wikipedia, such as adminship, policies and guidelines, and WikiProjects, when users add the images to their userpage. The banners made by the project were originally called "Qxz ads", as the template resided in the userspace of Qxz (talk · contribs), an alternate account of Gurch (talk · contribs), but was later moved to the template namespace. Miranda (talk · contribs) uploaded the 100th ad to Wikimedia Commons; the 99th ad was created later. To add the Wikipedia Ads template to your userpage, you can put the text {{wikipedia ads}} on it. If you want someone to create an ad for a project or page, Persian Poet Gal and Andrew Hampe are accepting requests.

• The English Wikipedia has reached 3,000 good articles.
• The Romansh Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Rwandan Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Hawaiian Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Asturian Wiktionary has reached 2,000 entries.
• All Wikisources together have reached 300,000 text-units.