In addition to the Chief Program Officer and positions for the Stanton Usability initiative (which include two software developers and an interaction developer), the Wikimedia Foundation is also hiring a System Administrator. This position will work out of the San Francisco office. For more, see the job openings page on the Foundation wiki.

Two local Wikimedia Chapters were approved in January: Wikimedia New York City and Wikimedia UK. Wikimedia New York City is the first local chapter in the United States, and serves the Northeastern United States. Wikimedia UK serves the United Kingdom; it is being reconstituted. With these two chapters, Wikimedia Australia no longer has the sole claim to chapter representation of English Wikipedia and other English-language Wikimedia projects.

Two Wikipedia contributors, Thomas Larsen and Richard Austin, recently announced the public launch of a new encyclopedia project called Epistemia on the WikiEN-L mailing list. The project, which can be found at epistemia.org, is a wiki-based encyclopedia that, according to Larsen, aims to provide an alternative to "the negativity of the participatory culture that has developed on Wikipedia" and "the lack of consistent adherence to the conventional quality expectations associated with professional scholarship" on Wikipedia. Although these goals are similar to Citizendium's aims, Larsen stated that they hoped to run the project without implementing Citizendium's "overly-restrictive mechanisms". The new project is licensed under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license.

The French National Order of Merit has been awarded by President Sarkozy of France to Anthere (Florence Devouard). She received the rank of knight as "chair of an international foundation" (the Wikimedia Foundation). You can read more at Devouard, knight in the French National Order of Merit.

Estonian Wikipedian Andres Luure was one of fifteen individuals recognized for volunteering in Estonia for 2008. Country-wide volunteers of the year have been chosen in Estonia since 2005. Out of sixty nominees for the 2008 award, a committee consisting of representatives of media, the public sector, and others chose fifteen volunteers to be rewarded. Luure was recognized for his contributions to Wikipedia. Andres has been active in the Estonian Wikipedia since March 2003; he has the top edit count on the project. Estonian Television carried a live broadcast of the ceremony on December 7, 2008, with President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves in attendance.

• There is currently a survey about whether to increase the protection level of Biographies of Living People (BLP)s. This would affect a large number of articles: as of January 17, Category:Living people passed 333,333 articles (300,000 were reached on September 7, 2008).
• The 2009 Steward elections and reconfirmation will begin on Meta on February 1. Candidates may nominate themselves until January 25.
• According to the Wikipedia article traffic statistics page, the article on Barack Obama received almost a million page views on January 20, the day of his inauguration.
• Milestones:

• Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 100,000 articles.
• The Egyptian Arabic (Masry) Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 22,000 articles.
• The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages has reached 2,000 users with automatically created global user User:Kaio-ken x10.
• The Piemontèis Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.