How the chapter works/Board approvals

This is one of what will be a number of pages explaining how Wikimedia UK operates. This page covers the various types of approval that the Board gives to pieces of text. (The actual business of approvals of members is covered elsewhere.

Routes

There are various routes to approval, including but perhaps not restricted to the following:

Route	Comments	Typical examples
Majority	Vote of the Board to approve or not.	Used for past minutes at the Board meetings, after changes that may be made in real time. Used for press releases.
Two-star (**)	72 hours notice of text to office list, and one Board member must positively approve.	Current mechanism for the wiki version of newsletter.
One-star (*)	24 hours notice of text to office list, and one Board member must positively approve.	Current mechanism for blog postings. In that case the Board member approving may be the author or poster.
Delegated	No approval needed.	Member renewal messages.

Mechanisms, places and version control

The default mechanism for version control would be a wiki page either on this wiki or the office wiki (possibly with a transfer of a draft from the office wiki here). This offers known advantages:

• all versions are in the history;
• all edits may be commented;
• the Talk page can be used.

Particularly, there is just one version active at a given moment. On the other hand, discussion is often going on via an email list. There are therefore three main candidates for mechanism:

• wiki-style;
• onlist (with competing versions and merging);
• onlist with feedback to X and iteration (i.e. X is tasked with incorporating comments into new versions).