Wikimedia Foundation providing "Answers"

The Wikimedia Foundation is testing a potential new communication system intended to provide a central address to which community members who need assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation or who have questions about the Foundation or its activities can reach out and find answers. This system is being unrolled on a trial basis to test its efficiency and usefulness to communities. What happens to your question will depend on what type of question it is. Many questions are general interest, and answers to these are being posted to wmf:Answers. Some issues will not be general interest, but may require attention from specific staff members or contractors. These will be forwarded to the appropriate parties. Questions that should be answered by community may be forwarded to the volunteer response team. The Wikimedia Foundation does not control content on any of its projects and can't help with content disputes or unblock requests, and they are not the place to report general bugs or to request features (that would be Wikimedia's Bugzilla). If you have questions for or about the Wikimedia Foundation, you can address them to answerswikimedia.org. Please review wmf:Answers/Process for specific terms and more information.

Wikibooks/Wikisource Triage

On 1300UTC, 2011-09-28, Wikimedia Foundation's bugmeister will be holding a triage in #wikimedia-dev (webchat link) to meeting is to discuss and prioritize issues on the Wikibooks/Wikisource projects within Bugzilla, raise awareness in the WMF so we can try to be more supportive, and coordinate volunteer developer's efforts so they will be more effective.

If there are issues in bugzilla or elsewhere that you think it is important that we cover, please add it to the etherpad.

New terms of use proposed

A document defining new terms of use for Wikimedia wikis has been proposed. There will be a 30 day comment period before the draft is proposed to the Wikimedia board of Trustees. The full announcement is on the foundation-l list by Geoff Brigham, the Wikimedia Foundation's General Counsel, and the draft is at m:Terms of use.

Personal image filter referendum results announced

The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the Board of Trustees, held a vote to determine whether members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of images strictly for their own accounts. The numerical results to the six statements are discussed at m:Image filter referendum/Results/en. The Personal Image Filter Referendum Committee will continue to review and analyze the free-text comments, and will issue a final report once this task is complete.

Personal image filter referendum

The Wikimedia Foundation, at the direction of the Board of Trustees, will be holding a vote to determine whether members of the community support the creation and usage of an opt-in personal image filter, which would allow readers to voluntarily screen particular types of images strictly for their own accounts. The referendum is scheduled for 12-27 August. You can read more about it at m:Image filter referendum/en and particularly m:Image filter referendum/FAQ/en.

Proposal to grant QuiteUnusual Bureaucrat rights

A request has been made on the requests for permission page in the Reading Room to grant QuiteUnusual Bureaucrat rights. You are invited to express your opinion on this proposal there.

Five-year strategic plan

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced its publication of the five-year strategic plan.¹

The purpose of this plan is to chart a direction for the Wikimedia movement to carry us into 2015, clearly articulating our key priorities:

• To stabilize Wikimedia's technical, financial, and organizational infrastructure
• To increase participation
• To improve quality
• To increase reach
• To encourage innovation

We'll know we have been successful when we:

• Increase the total number of people served to 1 billion
• Increase the amount of information we offer to 50 million Wikipedia articles
• Ensure information is high quality by increasing the percentage of material reviewed to be of high or very high quality by 25 percent
• Encourage readers to become contributors by increasing the number of total editors per month who made>5 edits to 200,000
• Support healthy diversity in the editing community by doubling the percentage of female editors to 25 percent and increasing the number of Global South editors to 37 percent

Quiz extension

The community has approved the installation of the Quiz extension, allowing for the creation of interactive true/false, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank questions, complete with scoring, explanations of answers, and support for images. Find out how to implement this in your book at Help:Quizzes. Since Wikibooks is not paper, this represents a step toward taking greater advantage of the Wikibooks platform.