Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-08-14/News and notes

The Wikimania 2024 conference in Katowice, Poland, had events taking place from 7 August to 10 August. Many programs as well as the opening and closing ceremonies were live-streamed, and can currently be viewed on the WMF YouTube channel. There are also plenty of media available on Wikimedia Commons.

The Sustainable Development Goals continued to be a particular focus of Wikimania through many related sessions. Wikimedians for Sustainable Development is one such group which maintains this interest by recruiting submissions and organizing networking among projects.

Wikimania 2025 was recently announced to be in Nairobi, Kenya. Wikimania 2026 will be held in Paris, France. – S, Bl, AK

After the Movement Charter ratification vote last month from the affiliates and individual voters, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) and Charter Election Commission (CEC) published all comments submitted during the vote. This involves 65 comments from Affiliates and 447 individual comments, though no summary of the same is yet available.

After the WMF Board of Trustees (BoT) chose to not ratify the current draft of the Movement Charter, it is not currently clear what the future steps for the Movement Charter are. The charter was previously covered by The Signpost in the issues published on 22 July, 4 July, and 8 June.

One of the three proposals passed by the BoT in lieu of the Movement Charter was the Product and Technology Advisory Council, with members selected by the WMF. This council will comprise 16 members including 8 volunteers, one of whom is guaranteed to be from English Wikipedia. Applications are open till 16 September. – S

• New email address for reporting undisclosed paid/COI editing: To deal with reports of undisclosed conflict-of-interest or paid editing, where reporting such editing on-wiki would lead to posting another editor's personal information without their consent, editors can now send reports to paid-en-wpwikipedia.org. These reports are handled using the volunteer response team (VRT) system by members of the CheckUser and Oversight teams, or by specially-appointed administrators. Reports may be sent to the Arbitration Committee for review at their discretion; for example, a credible report involving an administrator should be referred there. For more details see WP:COIVRT.
• Barkeep49 resigns from ArbCom: Last month, Barkeep49 resigned from the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) to focus all his energy on the U4C. This brings ArbCom to 10 active and 3 inactive members.
• Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin: The WMF published the latest issue of the Wikimedia Foundation bulletin. Of note are a blog post about Dark Mode in Wikipedia, a consultation about WikiProjects across various projects, and a message from WMF CEO Maryana Iskander.
• New user groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of the newest Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Wikimedians of Singapore User Group, the WikiMedistas Wayúu and the Wikimedia Community of Togo User Group.
• Annual reports: Kashmiri Wikimedians User Group, Wikimedia Community User Group Côte d’Ivoire.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Social experiment. Please be bold in helping improve this article! Next week's Article for Improvement (beginning 19 August 2024) is Keygen.
• Admin numbers up slightly: The number of active admins is up slightly from the low point of 430 active admins, 30 June-1 July, to an average of 435.4 for the month of July.