The best road to progress is freedom's road. - JFK
Florida
WMF bites the bullet on affiliation and FDC funding, elevates Wikimedia user groups: In a bold move, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has announced a major change in policy concerning affiliated groups in the worldwide movement, and FDC funding levels to eligible chapters and thematic organizations over the next two years. Both decisions were published last Tuesday after considerable post-meeting consultation with the FDC and the Affiliations Committee (AffCom). The core of the first decision is
Wiki-PR's half-step dance: Wiki-PR, the company extensively covered by the Signpost due to its paid advocacy in defiance of the English Wikipedia's policies, has rebranded itself as Status Labs Image Management. They appear to have much more of a Google-centered search engine optimization approach, though they still offer "Wikipedia Consulting" services. Intriguingly, they devote two sentences to the issues that ultimately caused them to be site-banned: "Our team helps you follow Wikipedia’s best practices for editors with a financial conflict-of-interest. We never directly edit Wikipedia, but we help you ensure your Wikipedia page is 100% factually accurate and up-to-date." Of further concern is their direct promotion, that they "can help you get into other language Wikipedias, too." (Editor's note, 20 January 2015: it has come to our attention that there is more than one company named "Status Labs". We are exclusively referring to Status Labs Image Management, a public relations firm with offices in Austin [Texas], New York City, and São Paolo, and not any other extant organization, like Status Labs Inc..)
Finnish police investigate Wikipedia: In a developing story, authorities in Finland are investigating the Finnish Wikipedia for a fundraising banner that was placed on the site. Unusually, Finland's Money Collection Act requires individuals to apply for and receive a permit before soliciting donations. While it is unclear whether Finland would have jurisdiction over the Wikimedia Foundation, which is based in the US, their email was sent to wikifi-adminlist.wikimedia.org, the mailing list of the Finnish Wikipedia's administrator's core. This has been forwarded to the Foundation, whose legal team is investigating. A response is due by 21 February.
US copyrights up for discussion: The US Copyright Office has called for public comments on orphan works, which are copyright-protected with the rightsholder either unknown or uncontactable. The Copyright Office is looking for legislative solutions on how to deal with these, which would possibly include a new ability to mass digitize them. There is a potential to push for more: in an email notifying the Advocacy Advisors mailing list, Ryan Kaldari expressed his desire for the Foundation to use the opportunity to "push for U.S. adoption of the 'rule of the shorter term', as this would solve our URAA problems on Commons and free millions of orphan foreign works in the U.S."
IEG: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its initial conclusions from round one of the Individual Engagement Grants program, which focuses on individuals with experimental ideas that have measurable online impact. An accompanying blog post states, "Grantees ... were clear about their goals, eager to engage with the community to understand their needs and priorities and willing to take risks and experiment in search of pragmatic and scalable solutions. They incorporated experts and mentors into their process to build platforms that are larger than any one individual."
Wiki Education Foundation: Frank Schulenburg, who was the Wikimedia Foundation's senior director of programs, has been named executive director of the Wiki Education Foundation (press release and Q&A).
Libraries and Wikipedia: Wikipedians Jake Orlowitz and Patrick Earley have published an opinion article in the Library Journal's technology section, the Digital Shift. The piece trumpets the Wikipedia Library's significant gains in the last year, which include the first Visiting Scholars program (at George Mason University) and an agreement with OCLC to create an app that will "remotely connect a library user on a third party site, like Wikipedia, to a full text source just by affiliating the user’s IP address with a library’s proxy resolver, once a match on the article citation is made." While this statement alone raises a frightening number of privacy concerns, Orlowitz and Earley had OCLC agree to "build in whatever privacy protections Wikipedia desires to insure that any sharing of editors’ information with a third party such as a library or university would be fully disclosed and opt-in only."
Discuss this story
The pushback on the mailing list was heavy, but I imagine there is a silent group of less chapter-focused editors who aren't too bothered by this (if they paid much attention to this type of stuff; many are busy editing articles). Some of the comments on the mailing list don't seem quite right - for example, it's not clear to me that user groups cannot have incorporation and bylaws, but rather that they are not required to. II | (t - c) 16:04, 13 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]
One thing I don't understand is why it is considered impossible to be an effective non-profit organization without incorporating in Europe? There are tons of effective non-profits in the US that aren't incorporated. In fact, most non-profits here start off as being non-incorporated for a few years first before incorporating. There are even some U.S. non-profits that have been around for decades and still aren't incorporated. Is this claim really accurate or an exaggeration? Kaldari (talk) 23:42, 14 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]