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Basselpedia; WMF Board of Trustees appointments

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By Lane Rasberry and Evad37
One of the group photos from Wikimania 2017 in Montreal

Death of Bassel and celebration of his life

Bassel, 1981-2015

Bassel Khartabil, a Palestinian Syrian open-source software developer and Wikimedia content contributor, has been confirmed as dead by his wife as of 31 July 2017. From the Wikimedia Foundation blog, "Bassel was a leader, advocate, and member of many open culture communities; he had a pivotal role in the development of the open source movement in the Arabic-speaking world. In addition to his advocacy for and contributions to Wikimedia—many of which were made anonymously—he was project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, a friend of the Global Voices community, a free software advocate and contributor to Mozilla, the founder of Aiki Lab hackerspace in Damascus, and much more."

Bassel had been arrested on 15 March 2012 and held in detention until September 2015 when his communication was cut and the Syrian prison system ceased communication about him. The Wikimedia community and others participated in a campaign asking #WhereIsBassel. The recent announcement confirmed that Bassel was missing because he had been executed outside of any legal process for activities including his engagement with Wikipedia and similar educational projects. A close friend of Bassel's remarked to Wikipedia that Bassel continually hid his on-wiki editing history and accounts for fear of his safety, so Wikipedians cannot review his work history.

At Wikimania 2017 in Montreal an Editathon for Bassel celebrated his life. There was also a Basselpedia Party at which attendees shared what they knew of Bassel and discussed his work and the circumstances of his death. Many media outlets reported on Bassel's death. Wikipedia participants wishing to demonstrate condolences may edit the Wikipedia articles about Bassel and his work, read FreeBassel.org for news on next steps, or take action as they deem respectful in his memory. B

Board of Trustees appointments

On 11 August 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees confirmed the appointments of three community-selected trustees: María Sefidari and Dariusz Jemielniak (both reappointed), as well as James Heilman, former Trustee (controversially removed December 2015, see previous Signpost coverage). Christophe Henner and María Sefidari were reappointed as Chair and Vice Chair respectively. Terms for the community-selected Trustees last for three years. E

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Odd to see the Cebuano wikipedia crossing the 5 million article mark, seeing as it has 20 million speakers and only 178 editors. Looks like they have a bot ([1]) churning out articles on cities and plants and animals; does anyone know why they seem to be the only wiki that is doing so? --PresN 15:25, 6 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some of the articles need a bit more work. StAnselm (talk) 21:28, 6 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Other wikis aren't doing so because it's a terrible idea. All Ceb Wiki is doing is turning a bunch of low-quality uncurated databases into massive numbers of Wikipedia stubs that will never be maintained (and many of which contain bogus information). 99% of the articles on Ceb Wiki should be nuked. Kaldari (talk) 23:25, 7 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. And whoever maintains www.wikipedia.org apparently agrees, since even though it is second in terms of number of articles, it isn't one of the ten circling the globe, in fact there are two languages Chinese and Portuguese that have less than a million articles are in the grouping. (Waray is treated the same way, the globe has 10 of the top 12 wikipedias by articles, but Waray and Cebuano have less than active 200 users, with the smallest number of other users among the top 12 being Vietnamese with 1800-ish. Naraht (talk) 18:51, 8 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
This speaks to the damage the WMF has caused by making the number of articles the unit of analysis. It is not progress to simply have more articles. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:07, 9 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Naraht, the portals sort projects by usage rather than article count, since 2008: see m:Project portals. (Portals are run by the community and according to community standards, although right now they're hostage of a sub-standard WMF process.) --Nemo 06:09, 13 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.
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