Strategic planning, Wikipedia and scientists and more

News and notes

Strategic planning, Wikipedia and scientists and more

Strategic planning process announced, jobs posted

The Wikimedia Foundation is developing a strategic plan for the Foundation for the next three to five years. The process was announced in a Foundation Board resolution, and was then elaborated in messages posted to the Foundation-l mailing list. The process will officially kick off in July, and will involve a series of open working groups.

To support the strategic planning process, the Foundation intends to hire three new paid positions on short-term contracts: a Project Manager, a Research Analyst, and a Facilitator. These are all one-year contract positions, from July 2009 to July 2010, and they have now been posted on the Wikimedia Foundation site.

Society for Neuroscience calls on members to edit

The Society for Neuroscience, a professional organization for neuroscientists, has launched a Neuroscience Wikipedia Initiative and is calling on its members to contribute. The society released a 10-page contributor guide that summarizes how Wikipedia works and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of important neuroscience articles. The society is also trying to recruit content facilitators to lead the editing efforts in 12 different topic areas within neuroscience, based on the Neuroscience#Major branches section of the neuroscience article.

The Project Overview describes two phases of the initiative. In the now-active first phase, the society is recruiting contributors and will also "collaborate with the Neuroscience Information Framework, an NIH-funded initiative that developed NeuroLex". The second phase, scheduled to begin in the fall of 2009, will bring Wikipedia work into graduate and undergraduate neuroscience courses.

April policy updates

The monthly summary of Wikipedia policy and guideline updates is available for April. These include:

Briefly

A survey of scientists conducted by the Foundation and the Public Library of Science indicates that many scientists support Wikipedia, with 67.93% of respondents indicating support for large scale efforts to invite scientists to become Wikipedia contributors, according to the Wikimedia blog.
Members of Wikimedia Argentina visited the La Plata Museum on May 2 to write articles about museum themes and take pictures.
An RFC on an updated arbitration policy is currently ongoing.
Voting for the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest ended this week. While official results are still being tabulated, a page of unofficial results is available.