Archive:Press releases/Board Elections 2007

Wikimedia Foundation Announces Board Elections

June 27, 2007 — The Wikimedia Foundation will be conducting its Board of Trustees elections from June 28 until July 7, 2007 (UTC) in cooperation with Software in the Public Interest, Inc (SPI). Three successful candidates will be elected to the Board of Trustees for two-year terms, expiring in June 2009.

SPI has agreed to host the Wikimedia Board Election voting and also will be responsible for auditing the tally as a third party so as to ensure the neutrality of the forthcoming election. Michael Schultheiss, SPI Vice-President, will be responsible for server administration and the tally.

SPI was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1997 in the state of New York. Since then, it has become an umbrella organization for several free software projects including Debian, PostgreSQL, and Openoffice.org. For more information on SPI, visit http://www.spi-inc.org.

Editors from any Wikimedia project are eligible to vote provided that they have been a contributor to at least one Wikimedia project for three months prior to June 1, 2007 (as indicated by the date of the user's first edit), and must have completed at least 400 edits with the same account on the same project by June 1, 2007.

Biographies of each candidate are available in many languages. To view a biography of each candidate in English, visit: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007/Candidates/en . Other language versions are also accessible from that page.

To cast your vote, visit the Wikimedia project on which you are active, sign on and follow the instructions at the top of each page. If the instructions do not appear, please contact an administrator on that Wikimedia project and ask for assistance.

About us

About the Wikimedia Foundation 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 its wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the world's 10 most-visited websites. For a full list of projects, visit Our projects. All projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are collaboratively developed by volunteers using the MediaWiki software. Their content may be freely used, freely edited, freely copied and freely redistributed subject to the restrictions of that license.

About Wikipedia The goal of Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in history, is to create free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Anyone with Internet access is free to contribute by writing new articles and editing existing articles. Wikipedia was ranked the fourth most visited website on the internet in November 2008 according to comScore. Wikipedia started in January 2001, and currently offers over eleven million articles in over 260 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in English, with more than 2.6 million articles; followed by the German and French editions, each of which contain more than six hundred thousand articles. Nine other language editions contain 200,000+ articles, and more than 150 other languages contain 1,000+ articles. Wikipedia is entirely created and maintained by a community of active volunteers.

Press inquiries

Head of Communications Jay Walsh WikimediaFoundation.org blog.wikimedia.org +1 (415) 839 6885 x 609 jwalshwikimedia.org

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