The Signpost

News and notes

Elections, Wikimania, masking and more

Board of Trustees elections

2021 WMF Board elections timeline

Fourteen candidates have thrown their hats into the ring for the four vacant seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The winning candidates will serve three-year terms. As of press time, you have one more day to submit your candidacy.

You may also submit questions for the candidates, or endorse or comment on others' questions through June 29. So far 40 questions have been submitted.

The diverse group of candidates includes four women, one current board member, and three Africans. About a dozen nationalities are represented.

The elections were cancelled last year while plans to redesign the Board were in progress. Voting will be held August 4–17 with eligible voters casting single transferable votes.

Virtual Wikimania August 13–17

Wikimania, the annual conference hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, will be a virtual event this year for the first time in its 15-year history.

Submissions for presentations are now closed, with almost 300 submissions received. Registration will open soon.

Masking IPs proposal

The WMF is starting to make its proposal to mask IP addresses more concrete. WMF Legal has stated that this type of proposal must be implemented for legal reasons, though the WMF is still gathering evidence and opinions on how best to implement it. Be sure to see the talk page for the most recent community feedback.

Another very long, and somewhat disorganized, discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 3#IP Masking Update seems to have significant support for simply banning IP editing if the IP masking is put into effect.

Board chair steps down, becomes WMF consultant

María Sefidari, Raystorm, has stepped down as chair of the WMF Board of Trustees. It was then announced on a Wikimedia mailing list that she would become a paid consultant. The reaction on the mailing list, starting with Chris Keating, was "flabbergasted". Michael Maggs, Philip Kopetzky and others joined in saying that it looked like a conflict of interest and a general governance mistake that the WMF would never allow WMF affiliates to get away with.

There is now also a discussion at The Village Pump (WMF), under the heading Self-Dealing on the WMF Board.

Brief notes


+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

An Office Hour has been scheduled for tomorrow June 29 at 15:00 UTC to discuss the issue of María Sefidari's paid consultancy position. For further details see the relevant page on Meta. --Andreas JN466 11:06, 28 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Banning unregistered/IP editing is just wrong. 04:02, 29 June 2021 (UTC) TOA The owner of all ☑️

That's not what's being discussed. --BDD (talk) 17:59, 29 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@BDD and Jayen466: No, but apparently it's what pt.wikipedia.org did last year. Be interesting to hear the outcomes from that change, once they've had time to distill all of the collected data.
Surprised the revert rate for IP edits here on enwiki is as high as 27.4%, though. Yikes. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 05:10, 2 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Whoops! Sorry — I pinged Jayen466, instead of The owner of all like I should've. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 05:14, 2 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-06-27/News_and_notes