Hello,
See the chapter reports from the Netherlands (November and December 2012) here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Nederla…
Kind regards, and the best wishes for 2013,
Ziko
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter
http://wmnederland.nl/
Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
-----------------------------------------------------------
Hi all,
Here is the report of activities of Wikimedia Argentina in December 2012.
The report is fully available in Spanish and English here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Argentina/Reportes/2012-12
== Content ==
1. Edit-a-thon in the Museum of the Bicentenary
2. «Wikipedia in the classroom» in Guarani language
3. Wikipedia editing manual
4. Future activities
== Edit-a-thon in the Museum of the Bicentenary ==
On December 8th, nearly 20 Wikipedia volunteers participated in the first
edit-a-thon organized in Buenos Aires. The event was hosted by Wikimedia
Argentina and the Museum of the Bicentenary, which was also the venue for
the activity.
After a tour in the museum, the Wikipedians edited and developed several
articles on Spanish Wikipedia related to Argentine history and the articles
of the museum’s collection. For this, the Museum of the Bicentenary
released several high-quality images of objects currently on display, works
of art from its collection and photographs of the museum itself. These 86
images were published under free licenses and can be used on Wikipedia and
by anybody else, while attributing the author of the work and keeping the
original license.
Among the published images are the official portrait of Juan Domingo Perón
and his wife Eva, made by Numa Ayrinhac, the presidential sash and baton of
Raúl Alfonsín and the first presidential chair, used by Santiago Derqui.
In only a few weeks, more than 40 images have already been used in more
than 16 languages (from Spanish to Aragonese, Arabic and Ukrainian). It is
estimated that over 2 million people per month will see the images of the
Museum that are currently in use on Wikipedia, but that number could rise
as volunteers illustrate new Wikipedia articles with these images.
The initiative was welcomed by Juan José Ganduglia, Director of the Museum,
who was actively involved in the activity, supporting attendees and
providing information about the museum and the history behind its exhibits.
The success of this first edit-a-thon will make it possible to host new
events for 2013 in the Museum and in other similar institutions within
Argentina.
* All images donated by the Museum here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_provided_by_the_Museo_del_…
* Pictures of the edit-a-thon, here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Editat%C3%B3n_en_el_Museo_del_Bi…
== «Wikipedia in the classroom» in Guarani language ==
On mid-December, Wikimedia Argentina published the first edition of its
booklet “Wikipedia in the classroom” in an indigenous language, like
Guarani. “Vikipetã mbo’eha kotýpe” is also the first publication about
Wikipedia in Guarani language and any other American indigenous language.
The goal of “Wikipedia in the classroom”, both in Spanish and Guarani, is
to help teachers to understand what is Wikipedia, how it works and how they
can use it in an useful way. Most students already use Wikipedia so it is
really important that teachers know what to do.
“Wikipedia in the classroom” is an initiative launched in 2010 by Wikimedia
Argentina with the support of different institutions, including the
Education portal of the Argentine government, educ.ar. They released an
special website about the project. Wikimedia Argentina will print 500
booklets of the Guarani edition to be distributed in schools and other
educational institutions, and we expect to publish new editions in other
indigenous languages in 2013.
Guarani Wikipedia or Vikipetã was released in 2005, but lacks more active
volunteers (currently, it has less than 20). Guaraní (avañe’ẽ) is spoken by
8 million people and is the official language of Paraguay, Bolivia and
Corrientes Province in Argentina, being one of the most used indigenous
American languages currently. Wikimedia Argentina in the past years have
started different projects to increase the usage and development of the
Guarani Wikipedia, teaching its use to native speakers, something that was
recognized by the Chamber of Deputies of the Province of Buenos Aires. We
hope that this initiative can attract more speakers of that language to
participate in projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.
* File available here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vikipet%C3%A3_mbo%27eha_kot%C3%BDpe.…
== Wikipedia editing manual ==
During 2012, Wikimedia Argentina volunteers created a Wikipedia ''pocket
manual''. This document is an adaptation of the German manual ''Das kleine
Wikipedia-Einmaleins'', created by Elisabeth Bauer and edited by Wikimedia
Deutschland in 2006.
This ''Quick guide for Wikipedians'' has 13 pages showing the main features
of Wikipedia (with emphasis in the Spanish version). In this way, a new
volunteer will be able to read the main polices ruling the site, a simple
description of the editing process and the most used wiki syntax for
formatting text.
The manual will be printed by Wikimedia Argentina this month with the aim
of using it as the main tool to disseminate Wikipedia in new audiences,
because of its simplicity. Thus Wikimedia Argentina expects to raise
awareness of how easy is to edit an article and thus increase the number of
volunteers in Wikipedia.
* File available here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manual_de_Bolsillo_Wikipedia_-_Wikim…
== Future activities ==
Wikimedia Argentina is already planning activities for the upcoming months.
Among the most important projects is the design of a Master Plan for
Education that encompasses the various activities that the chapter has done
to date, which will be held in conjunction with experts in various
educational areas. A meeting to develop this project is intended for early
March.
During the month of February, the awards ceremony of the local version of
Wiki Loves Monuments is being planned. The ceremony, to be held in the San
Martín Cultural Center, will be accompanied by a photo exhibition with the
ten winners of the local contest, along with the winner of the
international edition of Wiki Loves Monuments.
----------------------------
Osmar Valdebenito G.
Director Ejecutivo
A. C. Wikimedia Argentina
SJ,
I have been looking for the commitment you mentioned in Board and
related records, but I can not find it:
> We have committed to ending the active banner-driven fundraising once we meet our targets.
Does that commitment take precedence over the unanimous resolution of
the board of 9 October 2010 that Nemo pointed out at
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_princ…
which directs the Executive Director to "implement ... 1) Maximizing
public support: Fundraising activities in the Wikimedia movement
should generally be directed at achieving the highest possible overall
financial support for the Wikimedia movement, in terms of both
financial totals and the number of individuals making
contributions...."? If so, could you please share the background and
Board deliberation records pertaining to it? I am concerned that the
Foundation is bowing to the wishes of op-ed critiques in the press to
the exclusion of the Board's unanimous resolutions.
Again, I would not be so concerned if it were not for the evidence of
the deception regarding measured fundraising message effectiveness,
the nearly two million dollars in missing reserve funds, the sharply
widening ratio between executive and junior staff pay, the high staff
turnover, late vital projects, insufficient staff for the Education
Program, employee dissatisfaction and below par compensation reported
on Glassdoor.com, lack of a meaningfully wide call for community
consultation or reasonable numbers of community members commenting on
the recent "narrowing focus" changes, and lack of telepresence options
for Wikimania attendees. Many of these issues dwarf the ignominious
events of the Foundation's past, so I hope you, the other trustees,
and the Foundation leadership will address all of them swiftly.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
Thomas Morton wrote:
>
> If you know nothing about surveys or statistics it is probably a good idea
> not to describe a properly calculated metric (yes, I sat down and did the
> math) as absurd....
I stand by my statement that trying to pin down donor opinion on
whether they approve of meeting or exceeding market pay to a 1% margin
of error with a 99% confidence interval is completely unnecessary. If
a survey with a few hundred respondents turns out to be ambiguous,
additional donors could be surveyed later. I have been trying to
discuss this with Tom off-list.
Pine wrote:
>
> I'm a little confounded as to why you're still looking to Glassdoor as your
> primary source of information on employee satisfaction after Gayle indicated
> that she has much more comprehensive data on this subject from the employee
> survey....
Please have a look at the slides from that survey at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5m5AHoGno&t=60m -- Particular
questions I have about the employee engagement survey so far include:
(1) Is a survey of 84 respondents which asks age, marital status,
ethnicity, gender, department, tenure, and organizational level an
anonymous survey, or would nearly all of such responses be personally
identifiable? Glassdoor offers much stronger anonymity,
(2) In general, were there any questions pertaining to whether
employees are satisfied with their pay? I can see none on any of the
report slides. I do see questions pertaining to "recognition" which
are repeatedly identified as problem areas. Pay is by far the largest
complaint on Glassdoor from both satisfied and unsatisfied employees,
but it does not appear to have been measured on the Foundation's
survey. At 1:12:30 it is said that the slide deck will be made public.
I hope we get to see the list of questions too.
(3) The slide at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5m5AHoGno&t=65m is
astounding. What does it mean that all three of the executive
respondents completely agreed with the statements that "we treat
everyone with dignity and respect" and "we consistently hire strong
talent and recognize strong performers" but only 54% and 52% of the
twenty-four managers responding agreed, respectively?
(4) The top two questions at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5m5AHoGno&t=65m45s indicate that
those who have been working for the Foundation for more than two years
have very profoundly different assessments of both recognition (which,
again, seems to be the closest thing to pay that the survey asked
about) and the competence of people in key positions compared to newer
employees. Do we want to trust employees opinion in proportion to
their experience with the organization?
(5) At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5m5AHoGno&t=68m "attracting
skilled individuals for hiring" is identified as a specific
improvement need. How is it being addressed?
David Gerard wrote:
> Anyone in IT knows that there's such a thing as "charity scale", where
> you get paid less because you're working for a nonprofit in exchange
> for less stress and/or doing actual good in the world.
The slide at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB5m5AHoGno&t=62m10s
indicates that in comparison against 120 corporations and 7
non-profits who have participated in similar surveys over the past
seven years, the Foundation scored in the 76th percentile on this
survey. I am not sure that reflects very well, given the state of the
economy over that time period.
I do believe paying people more does lower their stress and attract
and retain more talent. Although there is apparently no shortage of
opinion to the contrary, I have yet to see any data in agreement with
those opinions.
James,
I'm a little confounded as to why you're still looking to Glassdoor as your
primary source of information on employee satisfaction after Gayle indicated
that she has much more comprehensive data on this subject from the employee
survey.
Also, I will stand up and say that I, for one, am not a fan of WMF trying to
match market pay in the SF area. I am interested WMF in retaining qualified
and motivated employees, and I am interested in employee job satisfaction
which includes pay as only one of many factors. If pay was a widespread
problem then I'm sure Gayle and Eric would be seeing that. I expect that,
as with many nonprofits, the mission of the nonprofit and the satisfaction
of working on the mission with like-minded people will compensate for the
lower monetary compensation.
It seems to me that your concerns about HR issues have been generally well
addressed by Eric and Gayle. Gayle has also agreed to do an IRC office hour,
which would be a good opportunity for you to ask more questions if you're
still not clear on the applicability of Glassdoor vs. the applicability of
the employee survey data.
Pine
Hi folks,
a quick update on the launch of a travel project under the WMF
umbrella, and the import of the existing Wikivoyage site.
* The name of the new site will be wikivoyage.org, per community vote.
Language domains will live at (foo).wikivoyage.org.
* A mailing list has been set up at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikivoyage-l
* We're not planning to import "Wikivoyage Shared" (which is a media
repository similar to Commons) and are encouraging the community to
help with transferring appropriately licensed files to Wikimedia
Commons.
* The Wikivoyage Association is currently finalizing details of a
domain name transfer with WMF. They have also recently secured
wikivoyage.com.
* The technical launch team at WMF consists of Chris Steipp, Daniel
Zahn, Sam Reed, Matthias Mullie, and myself. Everyone is encouraged to
help. Technical updates will be posted to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikivoyage_migration and related pages.
We're using #wikimedia-wikivoyage on irc.freenode.net to coordinate,
so feel free to join us there any time and use it for other related
issues.
* We've received a tarball of extensions running on the Wikivoyage
sites, have imported them into Wikimedia's Git repo, and are currently
reviewing them and making changes where needed to ensure they're ready
for WMF. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikivoyage_migration/Extensions
for a list of extensions if you want to help (and feel free to comment
on the priorities suggested by the Wikivoyage folks)
We may not be able to deploy all extensions; we're using the two week
time-box for the launch as the main forcing function.
* The hairiest part is to properly migrate user accounts. We can only
migrate with users' permission, so Wikivoyage will kick off an opt-in
process shortly to ask users to consent to transferring their private
account data. On the WMF side, we have to reconcile account names with
existing ones and require renames if necessary.
We'll set up an initially private test instance in Labs and iterate
over it with a (possibly reduced) content import, to ensure that all
the tricky legal bits (e.g. attribution) are handled correctly. Then
we'll set up the production cluster wikis.
* Our goal is to go live by the end of this month. That might slip
depending on the domain name transfer and unexpected technical hurdles
or emergencies on the WMF side. We will aim to minimize downtime for
current users, and to ensure that the old sites can be available in
read-only mode for a little while longer to make it possible to
compare site behavior.
Let me know if you have any questions about the process. :-)
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Michael Snow wrote:
>
>... You think that having people mortgage their future and simply
> giving them more cash, which they don't ultimately enjoy other
> than to pay loans at distressed interest rates, is a greater benefit
> to them than providing the best insurance coverage we can offer?
No, I didn't mean to imply anything like that. If a typical working
age American's immediate family suffers catastrophic medical expenses,
it's most likely going to be one of their parents, who aren't covered
by the Foundation's or any other employer's plan. Medicare only pays
for 60 days of hospitalization, with copayments totaling about $30,000
for the following 60 days, and then it stops paying altogether. (See
e.g. http://www.kff.org/medicare/upload/7768.pdf ) In any case, most
Americans who enter bankruptcy because of medical expenses have on
average about $45,000 of debt, which amounts to 2.2 years of the
difference between the mean salary of Wikimedia and Mozilla Foundation
junior software engineers. It's not like the difference between being
able to save a loved one from bankruptcy and keeping them in the
hospital when they need it would displace existing health insurance or
even make a serious dent in retirement savings.
And that brings up another important point: What kind of talent does
the WMF forgo by not being able to offer employees competitive
retirement savings? I suggest that there are very good reasons that
all the additional Glassdoor reviews in the past week didn't really
move the needle in satisfaction or recommendation scores. If anything
the Foundation should be exceeding market rate to make up for its
inability to provide equity participation plans for retirement savings
which commercial firms can offer.
Richard Symonds wrote:
>
> I would object to the precedent being set that donors from around the
> world, however old or young, are able to directly decide the salaries of
> staff at the WMF....
I am not suggesting allowing donors to set salary levels, only to
express their opinions as to whether they would object to the
Foundation meeting market labor pay, or exceeding it to compensate for
the inability to offer equity participation. Since the only objections
raised against competitive pay have been that it would be an
"irresponsible" use of donor's money, why not find out from the
donor's whether they actually share that view? The worst that could
happen would be that we would find that donors agree with the status
quo.
> I would also have an issue with donors being bombarded with emails...
A representative sample of 384 donors is sufficient to establish the
answer with 95% confidence. I am not suggesting asking all however
many million there have been.
> we should be saving our 'communication points' for something more important.
What might be more important that we haven't already asked in donor
surveys of years past?
Aaron Halfaker, 04/01/2013 23:57:
> Forgive me, but:
>
>> 1) we already know that users who joined in 2005/2006 are still
> disproportionately active in most community processes like deletion
> discussions and so on,
>
> How disproportionately active *are* the 2005/2006ers and is the problem
> solving itself or getting worse?
I've no idea of course, I'm not able to produce updates for papers I
read (and embarassingly enough, not even to quickly find the paper in
question on my hard drive). :-)
>
>> 2) everybody knows that to influence how the wiki is run it's more
> effective to change a single word in an important policy than to
> establish ten new policies.
>
> I'm not sure I agree with this statement. It certainly depends on the
> importance of the single word and the potential ten new policies. Do
> you know how the influence of policy works and can you prove it?
I don't see why the burden of proof should be on me: you are the one
claiming that non-multiplication of policies is a problem, a very novel
concept to my mind.
I suppose that some useful research could be done on the "verifiability,
not truth" motto, which in the end was killed: a big example of
NoRespectForHistory I'd say; maybe a nice achievement for the recent
editors you'd think.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability/2012_RfC>
>
> As Oliver stated, there's a big difference between just knowing
> something and having a good reason to know it. In this paper, we
> explored quite a few intuitive explanations for the decline and reduced
> them dramatically. A lot of "known"s became known to be wrong in the
> process of our analysis (e.g. that the decline was caused by the
> declining quality of newcomers).
>
> I'd go farther than Oliver though to start we all gain a lot by using
> data to beat back assumptions that were wrong and supporting those that
> are right. It's not just academics that are empowered by knowledge
> based on big data analysis. Both the community and the foundation need
> to know the scale and trajectory of certain problems in order to
> prioritize and act effectively. The intuition of individuals is
> invaluable, no doubt, but it is no substitute for data on important
> patterns that are difficult to observe.
Again, I never said the contrary.
Nemo
Michael Snow wrote:
>... Paying market rate salaries is not what
> protects employees from being overwhelmed by medical expenses.
> The type of long-term or catastrophic medical event that generates
> a situation like this can outstrip even the most generous salary.
> What's actually relevant is the scope of medical coverage offered,
> including for dependents.
Even the best medical plans don't protect medical debtors the way that
the ability to finance long term personal debt with greater salary and
savings does. Three quarters of U.S. debtors entering bankruptcy for
medical reasons have insurance:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/american_journal_of…
Does anyone object to the idea of surveying donors to find their
opinions on whether the Foundation should pay market rate for labor?
Nine additional reviews have been added to
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Wikimedia-Foundation-Reviews-E38331.htm
since Glassdoor was mentioned here last week. Glassdoor verifies email
addresses for those who claim to be current employees, and they
provide anonymity in the way an internal survey with detailed
responses can not. The Foundation's employee satisfaction and
recommendation scores there have improved very slightly, but still not
enough to exceed any of the other comparable firms and foundations.
It is great to hear personally from satisfied employees, but it seems
more reasonable to trust reasonably anonymous data rather than
anecdotes in this case.
Nathan wrote:
> "Does the Foundation have the will to protect volunteer editors from
> the deleterious effects of income inequality?"
> This is, I think, is the signal of where James is going with this. This is
> the recurrence of the argument from a few months ago of paying editors,
> something that I think virtually anyone who has thought about it would oppose.
I've never suggested paying editors, but I was hoping that something
like the Fellowship program could have been extended to established,
long-term contributors living in poverty. There are now Foundation
grants available for individuals which will be announced in a few
weeks: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Individual_Engagement_Grants
When I wrote that, I was trying to suggest that it would be reasonable
for the Foundation to undertake an educational action campaign to help
people understand the implications of Arthur Okun's 1975 regression
mistake described in
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/09/berg.htm -- I think
it is absolutely correct to describe that as the worst mathematical
error in the history of human civilization, which has resulted in more
than two billion preventable premature deaths and more than $20
trillion in financial losses since 1975. Moreover, the error underlies
essentially all of the "left-right" economic debates taking place
worldwide today.
However, since I wrote that, it has become apparent that the IMF
itself, at its highest levels, is starting to come to terms with the
magnitude and implications of the error and address them directly on
the world stage, and the press has picked up on that:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/03/an-amazing-mea-c…
So it's probably best to take a wait-and-see attitude for a month or
so before I would continue to recommend such action.
On Wed, 2 Jan 2013 2:54 PM, Leslie Carr <lcarr(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 2:50 PM, cyrano <cyrano.fawkes(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm proud of people like Leslie who work for less money than other
>> opportunities but for a cause. They stand for their beliefs and their
>> values, I strongly respect that.
I certainly do, too. I'm happy to volunteer for no pay, so I doubt
anyone can possibly question that. However, underpaying for labor in a
high demand market is a huge risk to the timely success of Foundation
projects. The "cons" comments on Glassdoor.com from both satisfied and
unsatisfied Foundation employees explain several reasons why.
>> Yet the money of the donations, which is given for a universal cause, is
>> paying an incredibly tiny subset of humanity with very expensive standards
>> of life. I think that's something pertinent to consider given the topic.
Don't forget where the money is coming from. 89% of donors visit
Wikipedia several times per week and 40% of them visit at least once a
day,[1] but only a third have ever edited.[2] 88% of them have a
college degree,[3] and more than three quarters work in skilled
professions.[4] Their worldwide median income is about USD $75,000 and
more than 5% make over $200,000 per year.[5] Does that sound like the
kind of people who would want to risk losing talent because their
donations were limited to a fundraising goal set based on the
blatantly false assertion that we aren't able to raise enough money to
pay market rate?
Donors' primary concern for the future, far more than any other
concerns across all ages, income and education levels and gender, is
that volunteers will lose interest causing Wikipedia to become out of
date.[6] Sadly, that is exactly the problem we are having.[7] Of all
the strategic goals, the number of active editors is the only one not
being met.[8] But the Education Program, the most promising in
training editors inside the world's colleges and universities, doesn't
even have the staff to make sure that their article talk page
templates are correctly dated. Someone seriously asked me in private
email whether that means they're simply slacking off. No, it does not.
Those templates were corrected by staff if they were added with the
wrong date back when the Education Program was much smaller, but its
staffing levels has fallen far behind the numbers of articles or
students participating in it.
The Foundation has shown it has the political will to take action to
protect the Legal and Office Actions staff from the considerable
overhead that SOPA/PIPA would have caused had it become law. Does the
Foundation have the will to protect volunteer editors from the
deleterious effects of income inequality? Is there any other political
action which would truly or more closely be in the interest of our
volunteer editors, about a fifth of whom work in or near poverty to
contribute to Foundation projects? Given how popular the SOPA/PIPA
action was, do we have any reason to believe than editors and the
public would not overwhelmingly support such an action in support of
income equality? I intend to find out.
>... it would be irresponsible of us to try to keep up with the
> average Tech company, as James Salsman had suggested.
Leslie, the most frequent cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is
unanticipated medical expenses. If one of your family members faced
such unanticipated expenses, and you realized you could save them from
bankruptcy and perhaps even save their life by leaving the Foundation
and taking a job at market rate, would that not tend to sway your
idealism? Since any of your colleagues could face the same
circumstances, is it therefore not irresponsible instead to fail to
meet or exceed the local market rate for technical labor?
By the way, less than 10% of the volunteer-contributed appeal
messaging submissions from the 2010 fundraiser have ever been tested,
and those that were form a lognormal distribution suggesting that we
could be raising about 2.5 times as much as the best performing banner
from December, if the appeal statement in its third sentence were
replaced with the best performing result of multivariate testing of
those alternate appeal statements. All of the foreign language testing
from this and previous years shows that the best performance in
English produces the best performance in other languages, usually by
about the same margin. Therefore, performing a multivariate test to
optimize the banners and then translating the top performing resulting
messages would not place any more of a burden on translators than
using A/B testing to derive a much more poorly performing local
optimum and then translating that.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e…
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e…
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e…
[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e…
[5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010_Donor_survey_report_e…
[6] http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:2010FR_Donor_survey_report…
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_English_Wikipedia_editors,_2001_to_Se…
[8] http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors_target
