Philippe (WMF)

"Have you ever skied at Jackson Hole in Wyoming?

Well, there is a sign at the top of the mountain that is both enthralling and terrifying:
'Our mountain is like nothing you have skied before!
Give this mountain the special respect it demands!'
Wikimedia is that mountain."

-- Stu West, WMF Board, in discussing Wikimedia Strategic Planning

On Wiki

I am the Head of Reader Relations for the Wikimedia Foundation. My role is to represent, on the staff, the voice and needs of the vast majority of the users of Wikimedia projects: the readers who rarely or never edit. I can be reached via email at philippe wikimedia.org or on my meta talk page. In my volunteer capacity, I can usually be found on en:Wikipedia or meta, where I am an elected administrator. I am also, by virtue of my job, a bureaucrat on the Wikimedia Strategic Planning wiki.

I was a member of the election committee for the Board of Trustees in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

You can find me on en:Wikipedia as Philippe as a volunteer, or as Philippe (WMF) in my staff role. On IRC, my username is usually Philippe.

Follow me on identi.ca and Twitter! My username is philippewiki in both places.

My "I wonder" section

I wonder why the number of male vs. female users is so disproportionate.

Resource: Ragesoss's excellent essay: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ragesoss/Gender_and_Wikipedia
Resource: The FAQ's at http://wikichix.org/wiki/WikiChix
Do we have/know any sociologists who could look into this?

I wonder if we've done an adequate job of communicating the core values. What if you aren't inclined to read them in English? How wide are the translations? More precisely, are they being modeled in the farther reaches of the projects? Do the smallest Wikipedias or Wiktionaries or whatever really model the values? And how do we know?

How do we do this better? Social networking tools?

How do we better engage those who came to this wiki once and made only a single (or very few) edits?

Note on user talk pages: "now that you've created your first proposal...."

Favorite quotes

Werdna: As a developer, I am obliged to forget about things and act like it is obvious when somebody asks.

My new favorite quote is from an ad I saw while at the musical Wicked:

Listen, I have flying monkeys, and I'm not afraid to use them!

There have been so many moments in my life when I wish I could have said that!

Word cloud

I love this. It's a word cloud built from the Skills statements that were submitted in applications for strategic planning task forces.