Archive:Current events
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End of fall fundraising
The Wikimedia fundraising drive ended late Thursday, with the final tally of $243,930 USD, more than 20% over the initial goal. A decline in donations was noticed over the last third week, with relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in the spotlight, however, donations still came pouring in from all over the world. A minor edit war resulted at some point when the administrators of the english wikipedia argued over whether linking to the Red Cross or other charities from the fundraising sitenotice was prudent, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The argument ended when Jimbo Wales removed the links, and ordered other users not to add it back.
The 3 weeks long fundraising drive started on August 19, aiming to pay in particular for the significant m:server costs, which have risen dramatically recently. Next fundraising should probably be expected at the end of 2005. (Florence Devouard)
New Chief Research Officer
James Forrester has been appointed to the position of Chief Research Officer by Jimmy Wales. The exact nature of the role is in the process of being changed; initial discussions can be found on Meta. (Angela Beesley, 12 October 2005)
New license for Wikinews
The Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License [CC-BY 2.5] was the favored
license in the recent poll at meta:Wikinews/Licensure Poll.
31 people supported the license, which was an 82% supporting vote;
including over 87% of the Wikinewsies who voted. Many other options had few voters. Of the options with more than 12 voters, the GFDL was supported by 21% of voters, and Wikinews License 0.2 by 60% of its 17 voters (64% of Wikinewsies).
CC-BY 2.5 has now been agreed upon by the Wikimedia Foundation to be the new license for all existing and future versions of Wikinews. Any edits made previously remain public domain - only new edits will need to be under this Creative Commons License.
The license can be read at creativecommons.org (that page links to other language versions of the license, and the full legal code). (Florence Devouard - 8 October 2005)
A very successful fundraising : $243,930 USD raised
The third quarter 2005 fund drive was held from Friday 19 August to Friday 9 September 2005 (2005.08.19 – 2005.09.09). The primary goal was to raise US$200,000 (Yahoo! Currency Converter) to meet income requirements in the third quarter 2005 budget. More information can be found at Fund drives/2005/Q3. (Florence Devouard)
New Wikimedia Foundation appointment
Danny Wool has accepted the offer of a job
at the Wikimedia Foundation to be the Executive Assistant for the
foundation. This job will primarily entail removing work from me so
that I (Jimbo Wales) can better focus on the parts of my job that I am best at.
Danny has extensive experience in the nonprofit sector and has been our (volunteer) grant co-ordinator for some time. I have worked with Danny on many projects and we are an excellent working team with a fine personal relationship.
It is envisioned that Danny's staff role as my assistant will be temporary as he comes in and sets up professional systems for our work and begins to look for a replacement Executive Assistant (sometime within a year, depending on the flow of events) so that he can focus more and more over time in writing grant proposals.
This page has a very cursory look at the position. (Jimmy Wales) 19:50, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
Boston and Toronto shortlisted as host cities for Wikimania 2006:
After a long debate from the jury to chose among 4 excellent propositions, namely Boston, London, Milano and Toronto, the shortlist for host cities for Wikimania 2006 comprises Boston in the US and Toronto in Canada . The second round of deliberations will elect the host city for the conference in mid-October. (Delphine Ménard), 5 October 2005
Database crash
The disc subsystem on Adler, one of the two main database servers, crashed a week ago, decreasing our database power. It has been fixed and re-synced, restoring most of the power. We currently have issues with the other main database server, Samuel, but hope to resolve them soon. Three new database servers have been ordered and should be deployed within two or three weeks. (Domas) 08:33, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
New servers - 15 September 2005
In the past few days, we have set up a few Squid servers on the newly installed Yahoo! cluster in Seoul, South Korea. They have started
serving requests from several Asian countries last night, as can be seen on our stats (yellow = yahoo, blue = florida, green = amsterdam, purple = paris)
Work is underway to experiment with using the remaining boxes in the Yahoo cluster as apache/mediawiki application servers, to offload the
Florida cluster and make things more redundant. As this will create many complex problems and management overhead, we are not sure if and when
that situation will be used in production.(Mark Bergsma) 08:33, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
Chapter Coordinator appointed
To keep in touch with the current local chapters and help the creation of new chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation has appointed Delphine Ménard as chapter co-ordinator. The position, defined during a board-local chapters meeting during Wikimania 2005, includes the following tasks: working with the Chief Financial Officer on financial matters concerning the chapters, and acting as a liaison between the Foundation Board and local chapters by ensuring information flow. (Florence Devouard, 14 September 2005)
Fundraising drive begins
The Wikimedia Foundation and all its projects are growing at a rate faster than we ever dreamed. To meet our needs for this quarter alone, the Wikimedia Foundation needs your help to raise $200,000 in our first fundraising drive in six months. See Fund drives/2005/Q3 for feedback. (Angela Beesley)
Budget for the third quarter of 2005 released for public scrutiny
Daniel Mayer published the last approved budget on 14th of august. The total amount of the budget is $198,000.00, 63% of this amount being dedicated to hardware. The next main expenses are planned for hosting costs (8%), and a financial reserve (10%). The Chief Technical Officer will now be employed full time, and the board is looking for a Hardware assistant as well as an Executive assistant. (Anthere)
Chief Research Officer resigns
Erik Möller, the Chief Research Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation has submitted his resignation to the Board, stating that fruitful collaboration is no longer possible due to personal differences and a fundamental disagreement about the nature and scope of the role. (Angela Beesley)
Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference
Wikimania 2005 was held between August 4 and August 8. This was the First International Wikimedia Conference and was attended by around 400 Wikimedians. See the official Wikimania site at wikimania.wikimedia.org for more information. (Angela Beesley)
- News before July 2005 are found on past events.
Other news
- announce-l, home of the "Wikizine" e-mail newsletter.
- Wikimedia News. Cross-project news, primarily project milestones.
- Goings-on. More cross-project news.
- Server admin log. Technical software/hardware news.