Three new community-elected trustees announced, incumbents out
The Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer election committee has announced the election results for the three vacant seats on the Board of Trustees. Dariusz Jemielniak (Pundit), James Heilman (Doc James), and Denny Vrandečić (Denny) are set to take up their two-year terms on the Board. They will replace the three incumbents, all of whom stood this time unsuccessfully: Phoebe Ayers (phoebe), Samuel Klein (Sj), and María Sefidari (Raystorm).
Dariusz is a steward, and a bureaucrat and checkuser on the Polish Wikipedia, and has chaired the WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee, which recommends the allocation of annual operating grants for eligible affiliates, since its inception in 2012. He is a full professor of management at Kozminski University in Poland, and researches open collaboration projects such as Wikipedia and F/LOSS, narrativity, storytelling, knowledge-intensive organizations, virtual communities, and organizational archetypes, using interpretive and qualitative methods. He is a native speaker of Polish, and has near native-speaker fluency in English.
James has a significant track-record in advocating for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He is an active contributor to WikiProject Medicine and is the president of Wiki Project Med. Last October, the Signpost reported the publication of the first Wikipedia article as a peer-reviewed academic journal article, in Open Medicine ("Dengue fever: a Wikipedia clinical review"), for which James was first author. James is a Canadian hospital emergency physician, and is a clinical assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia. He is a native English speaker.
Denny was the first administrator and bureaucrat on the Croatian Wikipedia. He studied at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and gained his PhD in computer science and philosophy from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology—both prestigious institutions. He joined Wikimedia Germany to launch the Wikidata project in 2012, and now works at Google. He counts himself as a double native speaker of Croatian and German, and speaks English at a professional standard.