Earlier today Jan-Bart de Vreede, the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees announced some significant changes to how our Foundation’s Board is structured - including details about length of terms for serving and how the Board appoints roles internally.

These changes stem from discussions that took place during the Board’s first meeting in our new San Francisco offices in April 2008. A Q&A, diagram, and the original announcement from Jan-Bart are available to help describe the changes.

Some of the significant elements of the restructure:

• there are now four ’specific expert’ seats
• a ‘community founder’ seat has been established
• the chapters can now select two seats as well.
• with the three community-elected, that brings the total to ten seats

I’m sure we’ll hear more in the coming months as the board gets closer to its full roster of seats. I suspect this was a pretty big task for the Board to bring about. We’ll be looking forward to seeing the results!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Wikipedia in a book? That’s right! I know it may not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Wikipedia but our mission at the Wikimedia Foundation is make all human knowledge accessible to everyone, and that includes bringing that knowledge to the offline world.

Wikimedia Germany (the German Wikimedia chapter) spent a lot of time and energy pulling this project together and was able to get the weight of publishing powerhouse Bertelsmann behind the project. Furthermore, they helped Bertelsmann to understand and support our mission because the GFDL would require Bertelsmann to contribute the changes back to Wikipedia. This makes this a unique endeavor in the publishing world and could be considered a success just for getting this off the ground.

Here is a quick summary and the main stats of the book project:

Title: The Wikipedia Encyclopaedia in one volume (”Das Wikipedia
Lexikon in einem Band”)
Size: 993 pages
Illustrations: approx. 1,000
Keywords and definitions: approx. 50,000
Index: WIKIPEDIA’s most frequently accessed keywords
Content: Abstracts/first paragraph of the online-edition; countries
given with basic key facts
Format: 17 x 24 cm
Get-up: Hardcover, four-colour
Target retail price (VAT included): EUR 19.95
Publication date: Autumn 2008

The book is only in German for the German market but we will be watching this innovative project closely because…who knows? You can’t change the world unless you push the limits and try to break existing paradigms. Much of the credit for this arrangement belongs to Mathias, Arne and everyone involved with the German chapter - they did all the hard work. Danke!

Time to celebrate with some schnitzel and a large Dunkel (or an Apelsaft, if you prefer)!

Kul Wadhwa, Head of Business Development