Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-09-30/News and notes

The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the role of WMF-supported organizers recruiting volunteers to work on the projects is of critical importance to growing content and retaining contributors. To date, it says:

the path to organizing has been very organic, loosely supported by grant-making and the work of our affiliate network. But the Movement Strategy asks us to focus on Investing in Skills and Leadership Development and Identifying Topics for Impact. We need to get more deliberate about asking questions like:

• How are we inviting the next generation of editors and volunteers to our movement to help us address a universe of knowledge gaps?
• Are we creating clear pathways for organizers to gain all the skills or knowledge they need to champion the Wikimedia Movement well?

By mentoring and working with organizers over the last three years to understand campaigns around the world, the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation has learned how to help organizers design campaigns that bring in the next generation of contributors. We are going to share those lessons and experiences in an Organizer Lab (beta) focused on campaigns and organizing around “Topics for Impact”. Though we hope to expand to support other topics and themes in the coming years, the first cohort will be themed around a topic of rising interest across the movement: Climate Change and Sustainability.

The Organizer lab will be a 9-week online course running from late October to mid-December. For further details, see the Wikimedia blog post. – AK

The Wikimedia Foundation has launched a sound logo contest.

Take a note – from 13 September to 10 October 2022, everyone, everywhere is invited to help create a sound logo for the Wikimedia projects.

A sound logo is a brief collection of sounds, often between 2 and 4 seconds long. Sound logos have gained popularity with the rise of audio technology globally; the number of active voice assistant users has grown from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021. Wikimedia projects increasingly power other websites, search engines, and general knowledge queries on voice-assisted devices, but many listeners are not aware because the source of the information is not consistently identified. A sound logo is needed to help listeners identify when they are accessing trusted, verifiable knowledge from Wikimedia projects. In harmony with our values and as always curious to experiment and learn, we will have an open contest for the sound of all human knowledge and invite the world to participate.

– AK

Two seats were open in the Wikimedia Foundation's board, and there were six candidates. With a total of 5,922 votes in the election, the two candidates selected were Mike Peel (Mike Peel) and Shani Evenstein Sigalov (Esh77). During the end in round 5, Mike Peel had been elected with 1,995 votes. The second seat was decided in the final round, when Shani Evenstein Sigalov had gotten approximately 1,835 votes. – H

Check 'em – congratulations to NicoV, whose bot has achieved Wikipedia's 1,111,111,111 GET. An anonymous server kitty is claimed to have said "that's an awful lot of 1s in the same place, hopefully nothing similar will happen for about fifteen years when we expect to need the same number of 2s". The Mayor of Vayres, Gironde is probably unaware of the special status his commune has just acquired in the English speaking world. – W

In June and July of 2022, the Wikimedia movement released a community safety survey. This was to find out whether or not a user felt safe and comfortable contributing to Wikipedia. The question asked was:

In the last 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia?

The survey was sent to users on five different languages of Wikipedia: the English Wikipedia, the Farsi Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia and the Portuguese Wikipedia. The answers to choose from were "Yes," "No," and "I'm not sure." The results turned out to be that the unweighted results (there were two versions of responses: weighted and unweighted) on the English Wikipedia showed that 75.3% of Wikipedians felt safe and comfortable on Wikipedia, 15.9% of Wikipedians felt unsafe or uncomfortable, and 8.8% of them were not sure. The proportions of users feeling unsafe were somewhat higher on the Spanish (24.4%) and Portuguese (26.0%) Wikipedias. – H

In February a Call for Feedback was published by the Community Development (CD) team about a Leadership Development Working Group. The Call for Feedback was shared in 42 languages. The Call for Feedback was used to get feedback from the community on the meaning of "leader," the working group's composition, and the need for continued feedback. The Leadership Development Working Group recently published its leadership definition and invited feedback. – H

• New administrators: After a lengthy discussion at RfA whose close numbers prompted a bureaucrat chat to determine consensus, The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, ScottishFinnishRadish. There's also an interview with ScottishFinnishRadish in this month's issue.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Convent. Please be bold in helping improve this article!
• UCOC consultation: Conversation hour for Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines, North America and Western Europe, will be Monday, October 3, 21:00 UTC (your local time)
• Wikimedia Summit: WMF staff are currently still completing their report on the Wikimedia Summit, which took place in Berlin from September 9 to September 11. More in next month's issue.