This year, the term of 4 (four) Community- and Affiliate-selected Trustees on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will come to an end [1]. The Board invites the whole movement to participate in this year’s selection process and vote to fill those seats.
The Elections Committee will oversee this process with support from Foundation staff [2]. The Board Governance Committee created a Board Selection Working Group from Trustees who cannot be candidates in the 2024 community- and affiliate-selected trustee selection process composed of Dariusz Jemielniak, Nataliia Tymkiv, Esra'a Al Shafei, Kathy Collins, and Shani Evenstein Sigalov [3]. The group is tasked with providing Board oversight for the 2024 trustee selection process, and for keeping the Board informed. More details on the roles of the Elections Committee, Board, and staff are here [4].
Here are the key planned dates:
May 2024: Call for candidates and call for questions
June 2024: Affiliates vote to shortlist 12 candidates (no shortlisting if 15 or less candidates apply) [5]
June-August 2024: Campaign period
End of August / beginning of September 2024: Two-week community voting period
October–November 2024: Background check of selected candidates
Board's Meeting in December 2024: New trustees seated
Learn more about the 2024 selection process - including the detailed timeline, the candidacy process, the campaign rules, and the voter eligibility criteria - on this Meta-wiki page, and make your plan.
Election Volunteers
Another way to be involved with the 2024 selection process is to be an Election Volunteer. Election Volunteers are a bridge between the Elections Committee and their respective community. They help ensure their community is represented and mobilize them to vote. Learn more about the program and how to join on this Meta-wiki page.
Best regards,
Dariusz Jemielniak (Governance Committee Chair, Board Selection Working Group)
[5] Even though the ideal number is 12 candidates for 4 open seats, the shortlisting process will be triggered if there are more than 15 candidates because the 1-3 candidates that are removed might feel ostracized and it would be a lot of work for affiliates to carry out the shortlisting process to only eliminate 1-3 candidates from the candidate list.
The Wikimedia Foundation will switch the traffic between its data centers. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster.
All traffic will switch on 20 March. The test will start at 14:00 UTC.
Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.
You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.
You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Wednesday 20 March 2024.
If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.
Other effects:
Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
We expect the code deployments to happen as any other week. However, some case-by-case code freezes could punctually happen if the operation require them afterwards.
This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes before this operation happens. Please share this information with your community.
WMF GLAM report: Learn to upload to Commons with OpenRefine and get up to date on the International Museum Day, GLAM CSI, WiLMa Network, and WikiWorkshop
I am writing to you to let you know the voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open now through May 9, 2024. Read the information on the voting page on Meta-wiki to learn more about voting and voter eligibility.
The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is a global group dedicated to providing an equitable and consistent implementation of the UCoC. Community members were invited to submit their applications for the U4C. For more information and the responsibilities of the U4C, please review the U4C Charter.
Please share this message with members of your community so they can participate as well.
Albania report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024
Australia report: New images from Central Australia on Wikimedia Commons, Library Science WikiProject students edit Wikipedia & 1Lib1Ref in Australia and New Zealand
Sign up for the language community meeting on May 31st, 16:00 UTC[редактиране на кода]
Hello all,
The next language community meeting is scheduled in a few weeks - May 31st at 16:00 UTC. If you're interested, you can sign up on this wiki page.
This is a participant-driven meeting, where we share language-specific updates related to various projects, collectively discuss technical issues related to language wikis, and work together to find possible solutions. For example, in the last meeting, the topics included the machine translation service (MinT) and the languages and models it currently supports, localization efforts from the Kiwix team, and technical challenges with numerical sorting in files used on Bengali Wikisource.
Do you have any ideas for topics to share technical updates related to your project? Any problems that you would like to bring for discussion during the meeting? Do you need interpretation support from English to another language? Please reach out to me at ssethi(__AT__)wikimedia.org and add agenda items to the document here.
You can find the details on this page, as well as the ways to give your feedback from today until the end of the day on June 23, 2024, anywhere on Earth.
You can also share information about this with the interested project communities you work with or support, and you can also help us translate the procedure into more languages, so people can join the discussions in their own language.
Hi everyone! We are the Wikimedia Foundation Web team.
We work on making it easier to read Wikimedia projects as part of the objective "Reading and media experience" of the current year’s annual plan. To achieve this goal, we have introduced the "Accessibility for Reading" beta feature. It adds a menu which works on the Vector 2022 skin and allows logged-in users to choose different font sizes and color schemes based on individual needs.
The menu introduces a new Standard font setting. It slightly increases the size and height of the font. It was selected based on multiple sources. You will find more information on this in the section "About the new Standard font setting".
What will change
We are now ready to make the new Appearance menu available for logged-out and logged-in users.
At the same time, we will also make the Standard option the new default for logged-out users only.
If no breaking technical issues are found, we plan on making this change within the next two weeks.
Later, this menu will also include the option to select dark mode, which for the time being will remain a beta feature. For more information, check out our project page.
About the menu
The new menu will allow logged-in and logged-out users to set preferences for:
Text size and line height (available now as a beta feature): Users will be able to choose between the Small (current default), Standard (recommended for better accessibility), and Large options. Selecting an option will change both the font size and line height of the text.
Dark mode (available now as a beta feature): Users will be able to choose to see the site in night mode on a permanent basis, or select an "automatic" setting which will set day or night mode based on the device or browser preferences.
Content width (previously available as a toggle button): We have moved the content width toggle from an icon at the bottom of the page to a labeled radio button in the new menu. It will work exactly the same as the toggle. The previous toggle button will no longer be available.
This menu has been tested as a beta feature by logged-in users across wikis as well as in user testing with readers. Based on the findings of these tests, we changed the menu to improve discoverability and ease of use, and to accommodate gadget compatibility.
The menu will appear to the right of the page, immediately under the Tools menu if that has been pinned. Unlike the Tools menu, the Appearance menu is pinned by default, but can be unpinned. Once unpinned, it collapses under an icon at the top of the page.
About the new Standard font setting
The "Small" option is the current default. We will be changing this default to "Standard" for logged-out users, while keeping "Small" as the default for logged-in users. The "Standard" and "Large" options were built and tested based on the following:
Academic studies and recommendations for the best average font size for the majority of readers. These recommendations stated that our current size is too small for the majority of people to read comfortably. This means that on average, people read more slowly, strain their eyes while reading, or have difficulty clearly seeing the text. Increasing the font size by default improves these issues for all users, including users who might not have sufficient time to spend adjusting a setting via the appearance menu or browser. Information density is also important, which is why we wanted to increase font size without sacrificing information density. We have achieved this by changing not only font size, but also line height and paragraph spacing.
Designs submitted by more than 630 Wikipedians from across 13 wikis of different languages, scripts, and sizes. The majority (~450) of these users opted for a font size that was larger than the default. "Standard" represents the average of the most popular cluster of responses (15-20 pixels). "Large" represents the need for an even larger option, as represented by the cluster of sizes between 21-26 pixels. You can read more on how we included volunteers in the process and landed on these options.
Beta feature usage showed that the majority of users who interact with the feature at least once opt for a font size that is larger than the current default.
Our works so far and next steps
Logged-in users will remain with the "small" setting for the time being as their default, but can change to any other setting at any time. In a few months, we will study how many logged-in users switch to standard and start a conversation on whether it makes sense for logged-in users to make the switch as well. From the early data from the beta feature, 55% of sessions who interacted with the feature chose to use a setting that was standard or larger.
If you'd like to help, we have a few simple requests for you:
Try out the new menu. Is anything confusing? Do you understand all the labels and how the menu works?
Try out the small, standard, and large sizes, the color schemes, and the width toggle. Reach out to us if you notice any bugs, or have questions or concerns.
Thank you again to everyone who participated in this process and much appreciation to the candidates for your leadership and dedication to the Wikimedia movement and community.
Over the next few weeks, the U4C will begin meeting and planning the 2024-25 year in supporting the implementation and review of the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines. Follow their work on Meta-wiki.
Albania report: Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Kruja; Traditional Albanian food photography competition
Brazil report: Open licensing guide from Midiateca Capixaba; Activities in Rio de Janeiro; First batch from LabDOC; New batch from NeuroMat; Hercule Florence photowalk
Czech Republic report: International discussion on the role of media and new GLAM partnership on the horizon
India report: Digitization concludes for Behar Herald and a digitization workshop held for libraries in Maharashtra
