User:Angela

I have been a Wikipedian for over two years and am currently standing for re-election to the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia.

I mostly contribute to the English Wikipedia, Meta, Foundation wiki, Wikimania wiki (http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/), and Grants wiki (http://grants.wikimedia.org/). I've made over 50,000 edits across 270 Wikimedia projects. Around 80% of those were to the English Wikipedia. A large part of what I've done over the past year involves communication, within the Board, within the projects, and externally, rather than edits to the wikis. I intend to continue doing this, by detailing all board meetings[1] (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings), presenting Wikimedia projects at conferences[2] (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conference_reports/FLOSS,_South_Africa_2005), communicating with the community[3] (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_agenda/Open_questions) in order to make decisions which reflect community opinion, responding to the hundreds of queries the board receives in OTRS[4] (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS), and making external contacts[5] (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/BBC).

Outside of Wikimedia, I am the Vice President of Wikia, I manage the Wikicities project, and I am on the Advisory Board of Ourmedia (http://ourmedia.org). I previously worked as a test developer and educational researcher in the UK. I am currently living in Berlin with my partner, Erik.

Elections for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, 2005

If re-elected next month, I aim to

• maintain Wikimedia's charitable aims,
• secure a stable financial and legal future for the project,
• respect and maintain our core principles of neutrality, civility, freedom and openness,
• encourage participation in the Foundation through committees and local chapters,
• develop new fundraising ideas and avoid dependence on any one source of income,
• seek sponsorship and external collaboration without losing our independence,
• maintain focus, not launch projects too early, and consider software changes prior to launching them,
• expand and encourage peer review and distribution of all content, especially distribution in less developed countries.

The future of the projects lies with the communities involved, and I hope to enable and guide those communities towards growing the smaller projects, content validation, distribution and publication, promotion, improving external contacts, better integration of the sister projects with each other, licensing issues, improvements to the GFDL, moving Wikinews out of beta, expansion into audio formats, and ensuring the projects are easily and globally reusable and that all their software needs are met.

If you have any questions about my candidacy to the Board, please ask me at User:Angela/Election questions 2005.

Wikimedia Foundation
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Wikimedia	Wikipedia	Wiktionary	Wikibooks	Wikinews
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Wikisource	Commons	Wikiquote	Wikispecies	Meta

Wiki-Roles

Alongside updating articles and carrying out Wikipedia maintenance, I have various roles across the projects. I am an admin on the English, Simple English and Korean Wikipedias and formerly on Latin, Arabic and Wikisource. I have steward access which allows me to set up new Wikimedia projects with admins and bureaucrats. As a member of the mediation committee, I am interested in dispute resolution, sources of conflict and ways of reducing incivility and Wikistress. I am often involved in policy issues, though I'm not sure the ability to recite all of the candidates for speedy deletion is anything to be proud of. :)

I have had a very minor involvement in MediaWiki development. My contributions to MediaWiki 1.3 included edit summaries in diff pages and a variable that allows blocked users to email a sysop more easily. Prior to 1.3, I added the disclaimers link which appears in the alternative skins. I had shell access in order to look after the Wikimedia Foundation website (http://wikimediafoundation.org/) before it became a wiki. I am responsible for AngBot, a deletion robot.

Wiki-Beliefs

Not a subscriber to the anti-wiki idea that anonymous users should not be allowed to edit, I believe that Wikimedia benefits from its open editing policies, and that all newcomers should be made to feel welcome. If I were to categorise myself, I would say I am more of an eventualist than a deletionist, partly because our editing procedures don't suffer the same weaknesses of our deletion system. I do not believe that Wikipedia is at a stage where it needs editors or referees, though I would like us to be able to offer users the option of viewing a stable validated version of the encyclopedia. I do not think copyright paranoia should be ignored and prefer to seek alternatives to supposedly fair use images. I am anti-instruction creep, though probably guilty of causing it.

Wiki-Aims and Interests

Since being elected to the Wikimedia Board, my to-do list has moved away from articles towards looking into fundraising, grants, and developing plans for Wikimedia membership.

I have edited over 100 of the 300 Wikimedia projects and I am interested in finding ways of increasing ties and a spirit of collaboration between these different projects and languages. I am also keen to expand the range of Wikimedia projects and support, in particular, the development of the Wikimedia Commons, Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org/), Wikiversity, and Wikijunior.

The development of local chapters is something that I take a keen interest in and I've attended meetings in Paris and Berlin where the French and German chapters were discussed. I hope for a British Wikimedia chapter to be founded this year.

Seeing the German WikiReader has made me keen to see more of these produced and I feel we need to focus on distribution more this year, both for print and DVD versions of Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Wiki-Hopes

My long term hope for Wikimedia is continued growth and development, not only of articles, but also of the international community, whilst still respecting and maintaining our core principles of NPOV, Wikiquette, and the free and open nature of the content. I want Wikimedia to become a household name, for reliable, trustworthy and high quality content which is universally accessible. I want Wikimedia to be a credible foundation with a secure long term future.