WikimediaAnnounce-l June 2013

wikimediaannounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org

14 participants
23 discussions

Toby Negrin joins Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Analytics

by Erik Moeller

Hello all, it’s my great pleasure to announce that as of today, Toby Negrin is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as the new Director of Analytics. Toby will be responsible for leading the analytics team, which is responsible for enabling data-driven decisions in the Wikimedia Foundation and the broader Wikimedia community. As of today, the team consists of: Diederik van Liere, Dario Taraborelli, Andrew Otto, Evan Rosen, Dan Andreescu, Stefan Petrea (contractor), Erik Zachte (part-time), and Aaron Halfaker (contractor). Newly integrated into the team are Dario, Evan and Aaron. Toby joins us from DeNA (formerly ngmoco), a $2B Japanese mobile gaming company where he was Director of Analytics in the US from 2011 to 2013. He enabled data-informed decision making throughout the company, established an Insights team and scaled the Analytics team to 21 members. He managed a 300+ node Hadoop platform, multiple data driven applications and led the effort to open source Mobilize, a script deployment and dataviz framework developed in-house at DeNA. Prior to DeNA, Toby was Director of Product Management for Cloud Platforms and Hadoop at Yahoo! from 2008-2011. Leading 10 PMs at peak, through this group Toby was responsible for interfacing between the hundreds of internal users of analytics, storage and other cloud services and the developers/maintainers of said infrastructure. There aren’t many jobs that could prepare you for Wikimedia’s complex network of analytics stakeholders, but this surely is one of them. Toby has worked as a software engineer for many years and holds a BS Equivalent in Computer Science from California State University, an MBA from NIMBAS Graduate School of Management in Utrecht, and a BA in Visual Culture and History from University of California, Santa Cruz. After growing up in the Bay Area, Toby’s lived recently in Stockholm and Amsterdam so he’s using his spare time to explore California’s wilderness on two feet and two wheels with his family. His two daughters keep him pretty busy! Toby is looking forward to making the shift to a mission-driven non-profit organization. When I asked him what he’d be doing if not Wikimedia, he expressed an interest in urban planning, green cities, and public transport. In an alternative universe, San Francisco is becoming a greener city with a more reliable public transport system. In this one, we get awesome Wikimedia analytics instead. There are always tradeoffs. ;-) Toby’s incredibly excited about working with the team to tackle Wikimedia’s analytics challenges and the increasing hunger for data across the organization and the movement. Please join me in welcoming him on board. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

10 years, 10 months

PRISM, government surveillance, and Wikimedia: Request for community feedback

by Geoff Brigham

Note: German (Deutsch) and Spanish (Español) versions are below. ***English*** Hi all, We want to direct your attention to our blog post ( https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/14/prism-surveillance-wikimedia/ ) about the PRISM situation involving government intelligence surveillance on the Internet. We are asking for Wikimedia community feedback on a proposed course of action ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PRISM ). In short, we are inclined to recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation collaborate with organizations including Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology. These groups have now prepared an open letter to the US congress (https://www.stopwatching.us/ ), calling for transparency, investigation, reform, and accountability, and have asked other organizations (including the Wikimedia Foundation) to join them in their efforts. We ask you to read the blog post for more details, and encourage you to tell us your views on this. Many thanks, Geoff and Luis Geoff Brigham General Counsel Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation Note: We expect to have a couple more translations of this announcement in the next couple of days. We would like to ask the international Wikimedia community to help translate the blog posting and feedback page (which are almost the same) as well as people’s feedback given throughout the course of this consultation period. Due to tight time limits, we hope to have professional translations for these documents posted by next Tuesday for at least German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. ___________ ***Deutsch*** Hallo, Wir würden eure Aufmerksamkeit gern auf unseren Blogeintrag ( https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/14/prism-surveillance-wikimedia/ ) zur PRISM-Situation und geheimdienstlicher Überwachung des Internets lenken. Wir bitten die Wikimediagemeinschaften um Rückmeldung zum vorgeschlagenen Vorgehen. (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PRISM) Kurz zusammengefasst tendieren wir dazu zu empfehlen, dass die Wikimedia Foundation mit Organisationen wie Mozilla, der Electronic Frontier Foundation, der Free Software Foundation und dem Zentrum für Demokratie und Technologie zusammenarbeitet. Diese Gruppen haben einen offenen Brief an den Kongress der Vereinigten Staaten (https://www.stopwatching.us/) vorbereitet um Transparenz, Untersuchung der Vorgänge, Reform sowie Rechenschaftspflicht einzufordern und haben andere Organisationen (einschließlich der Wikimedia Foundation) darum gebeten dieses Vorhaben zu unterstützen. Wir bitten euch den Blogeintrag mit den zugehörigen Details zu lesen und uns eure Meinung zu dem Vorschlag mitzuteilen. Vielen Dank, Geoff und Luis Geoff Brigham General Counsel Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation Hinweis: Wir würden die internationale WIkimediagemeinschaft gern darum bitten bei der Übersetzung des Blogeintrags und der Feedbackseite (die beiden sind fast identisch) sowie der Rückmeldungen aus der Community während der Konsultationsperiode mitzuhelfen. Durch die kurze Vorbereitungszeit hoffen wir bis Dienstag zumindest professionelle Übersetzungen für die Dokumente zumindest in Deutsch, Französisch, Spanisch und Japanisch zu haben. _______________ ***Español*** Hola, Queremos dirigir su atención a nuestra entrada en el blog ( https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/14/prism-surveillance-wikimedia/ ) sobre la situación PRISM involucra la vigilancia de inteligencia del gobierno en Internet. Estamos pidiendo Wikimedia retroalimentación de la comunidad sobre un curso de acción propuesto. ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PRISM ) En resumen, nos sentimos inclinados a recomendar que la Fundación Wikimedia colaborar con organizaciones como Mozilla, la Fundación Fronteras Electrónicas, la Fundación para el software libre y el Centro para la Democracia y la Tecnología. Estos grupos han preparado una carta abierta al Congreso de EE.UU. (https://www.stopwatching.us/), exigiendo la transparencia, la investigación, la reforma y la rendición de cuentas, y han pedido a otras organizaciones (entre ellas la Fundación Wikimedia) a unirse a ellos en sus esfuerzos. Le pedimos que lea el blog para más detalles, y le animamos a decirnos sus puntos de vista sobre esto. Muchas gracias, Geoff y Luis Geoff Brigham General Counsel Luis Villa Deputy General Counsel Wikimedia Foundation Nota: Nos gustaría pedir a la comunidad internacional Wikimedia para ayudar a traducir la entrada de blog y la página de comentarios (que son casi lo mismo), así como la retroalimentación de las usuarios que recibieron durante este período de consulta. Debido a los plazos ajustados, esperamos contar con traducciones profesionales para los documentos enviados por el próximo martes por lo menos alemán, francés, español y japonés.

10 years, 10 months

The Signpost -- Volume 9, Issue 24 -- 12 June 2013

by Wikipedia Signpost

10 years, 11 months

Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2013

by Tilman Bayer

Hi all, please find below the WMF report for May 2013, in plain text. As always, the editable and formatted version has been published on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_May_2013 and the reports are being posted on the Wikimedia blog, too: https://blog.wikimedia.org/c/corporate/wmf-monthly-reports/ As usual, we are also publishing a separate "Highlights" summary. Please consider helping non-English-language communities to stay updated, by providing a translation: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_May_2013 Many thanks to those who have translated the April "Highlights" into Asturian, Spanish, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Turkish and Simplified Chinese (while translations are still ongoing into German, Finnish, French, Thai and Vietnamese)! While still focusing on WMF activities, the "Highlights" include a small selection of the most noteworthy events from the whole movement. Suggestions for the upcoming June issue are welcome until July 3 at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Highlights Regards, Tilman -- Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2013 <Video: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_Monthly_Metrics_Meeting_June_6,…> Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of May <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/2013-06-06> (June 6, 2013) Contents * 1 Data and Trends * 2 Financials * 3 Highlights o 3.1 Fundraising report released o 3.2 Community invited to discuss trademark practices o 3.3 Wikipedia Zero launches in Pakistan o 3.4 "Nearby" feature shows Wikipedia articles in the reader's vicinity o 3.5 New hosting environment for community-developed tools o 3.6 Search for new Executive Director begins * 4 Engineering o 4.1 VisualEditor o 4.2 Editor engagement o 4.3 Mobile * 5 Fundraising o 5.1 Major Gifts and Foundations o 5.2 Annual Fundraiser * 6 Grantmaking o 6.1 Strategic Goals Metrics o 6.2 Funds Dissemination Committee o 6.3 WMF Grants + 6.3.1 Grants awarded in May 2013 + 6.3.2 Reports accepted in May 2013 o 6.4 Participation Support + 6.4.1 Requests awarded in May 2013 + 6.4.2 Reports accepted in May 2013 o 6.5 Individual Engagement Grants + 6.5.1 Program + 6.5.2 Grantees o 6.6 Learning & Evaluation o 6.7 Brazil Catalyst Project + 6.7.1 Institutional + 6.7.2 Data & Experiments + 6.7.3 Staff & Community work + 6.7.4 Education + 6.7.5 Medicine Wikiproject * 7 Program Development o 7.1 Program Evaluation and Design o 7.2 Wikipedia Zero o 7.3 Wikipedia Education Program * 8 Human Resources o 8.1 Staff Changes o 8.2 Statistics o 8.3 Department Updates * 9 Finance and Administration * 10 Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department o 10.1 LCA Report, May 2013 + 10.1.1 Contract Metrics + 10.1.2 Trademark Metrics + 10.1.3 Coming & Going + 10.1.4 Other Activities o 10.2 Communications Report, May 2013 + 10.2.1 Major announcements + 10.2.2 Major Storylines through March + 10.2.3 Other worthwhile reads + 10.2.4 WMF Blog posts + 10.2.5 Media Contact + 10.2.6 Wikipedia Signpost * 11 Visitors and Guests == Data and Trends == Global unique visitors for April: *517 million* (-0.17% compared with March; +9.16% compared with the previous year) (comScore data <http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique_visitors> for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release May data later in June) Page requests for May: *21.0 billion* (+0.8% compared with April; 16.5% compared with the previous year) (Server log data <http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjects.htm>, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access) Active Registered Editors for April 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots): *82,553* (+0.86% compared with March / +4.38% compared with the previous year) (Database data <http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors>, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.) *Report Card* (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects): http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ (Definitions <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Metric_definitions>) == Financials == <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_Revenue_%26_Expenses_April_2013…> Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of April 30, 2013 <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF_Expenses_by_Functions_April_201…> Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of April 30, 2013 (Financial information is only available through April 2013 at the time of this report.) All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date April 30, 2013. Revenue $50,441,664 *Expenses:* Engineering Group $11,909,113 Fundraiser Group $3,085,352 Grantmaking & Programs Group $7,894,416 Governance Group $630,123 Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group $2,560,446 Finance/HR/Admin Group $4,757,347 Total Expenses $30,836,797 Total surplus $19,604,867 * Revenue for the month of April is $8.87MM versus plan of $9.78MM, approximately $908K or 9% under plan. * Year-to-date revenue is $50.44MM versus plan of $45.52MM, approximately $4.92MM or 11% over plan. * Expenses for the month of April is $5.78MM versus plan of $4.10MM, approximately $1.68MM or 41% over plan, primarily due to higher grant expenses (timing of FDC grants), legal fees, and personal property tax expenses partially offset by lower personnel expenses, internet hosting, and bank fees. * Year-to-date expenses is $30.84MM versus plan of $34.07MM, approximately $3.24MM or 9% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, outside contract services, and personal property tax expenses. * Cash position is $45.6MM as of April 30, 2013. == Highlights == <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iterationsoffactsbanner.png> >From the Fundraising report: The "facts" banner (listing some basic facts about Wikipedia) was tested in many different versions and eventually performed better than all previous fundraising banners === Fundraising report released === The Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising team published <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/04/wikimedia-foundation-releases-detaile…> a report from the 2012-2013 fundraiser <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012/report>. The report reviews the evolution of banner design and includes data about the 2012 year-end English campaign and the 2013 multilingual campaign, which raised a total $35 million USD from over 2 million donors. === Community invited to discuss trademark practices === The Legal and Community Advocacy <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_and_Community_Advocacy> (LCA) team published a statement on trademark practices <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trademark_practices_discussion>, which requests community feedback on the Wikimedia trademark policy, procedure, and other questions. The objective is to balance the interest in licensing the brand for mission-aligned activities, with the necessity of preventing misuse and "naked licensing" (licensing without quality control). This is the opportunity to provide ideas as the team considers updating the trademark policy and practices. === Wikipedia Zero launches in Pakistan === Wikipedia Zero, the program to give people around the world mobile access to Wikipedia free of data charges, is now available in Pakistan <http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/busin…>, in partnership with Mobilink (Vimpelcom). The company's user base of over 32 million people makes this the second largest Wikipedia Zero launch to date. <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Nearby_in_Vatican_City_20…> The "Nearby" feature in Vatican City. The camera icon (bottom) indicates an article which misses images, inviting users to contribute one. === "Nearby" feature shows Wikipedia articles in the reader's vicinity === On location-aware devices (such as smartphones with GPS), a new <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/29/wikipedia-nearby-beta/> "Nearby" page <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby> lists articles close to the reader's current location. The feature is designed for mobile devices, but also works on the desktop version of Wikipedia. <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tool_Labs_presentation_(Hackaton_20…> Presentation slides with the Tool Labs logo === New hosting environment for community-developed tools === The Tool Labs, an environment for community developers to provide external software tools supporting work on Wikimedia projects, is now operating. With the support of the German Wikimedia chapter, many existing tools have already migrated from the Wikimedia Toolserver to Tools Labs <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/30/preparing-for-the-migration-from-the-…>. === Search for new Executive Director begins === The job opening for the Wikimedia Foundation's new Executive Director <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o1huXfwt&c=qSa9VfwQ> has been posted. This starts the search for a successor for Sue Gardner, who will step down later this year. Board of Trustees chair Kat Walsh asked Wikimedians for help <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/21/search-for-next-wikimedia-foundation-…> in finding the best possible candidate, by spreading the news in their networks. == Engineering == A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for May 2013 can be found at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/May Department Highlights Major news in May include: * An invitation <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/01/apply-for-an-internship-with-the-lang…> from the Language engineering team to collaborate on language-related projects; * A new Notifications system <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/02/notifications-launch-english-wikipedi…> enabled on the English Wikipedia; * Recent developments <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/08/updates-from-language-engineering-cha…> in language engineering, and the upcoming deployment of the Universal language selector <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/22/getting-ready-for-uls-everywhere-2/> on all wikis; * The start of a discussion around Flow <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/20/flow-next-generation-discussion-syste…>, a proposed discussion system for Wikimedia sites; * A call for proposals <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/21/request-for-proposals-mediawiki-relea…> to manage the MediaWiki release cycle; * An experience-sharing exercise <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/28/developing-distributedly-part-1-tools…> by the Mobile engineering team about distributed collaboration; * "Nearby <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/29/wikipedia-nearby-beta/>", a feature showing Wikipedia articles about nearby places on location-aware devices; * Tool Labs, which is now operational and ready to host tools <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/30/preparing-for-the-migration-from-the-…> migrated from the Toolserver; * A test wiki <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/30/test-features-in-a-right-to-left-lang…> to try out new features in right-to-left languages * Tech news <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech_news>, a weekly tech newsletter to help users stay informed of technical changes going to impact them. === VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor> === In May, the VisualEditor team worked to complete major new features. The objective is for VisualEditor to be the default editor for all Wikipedia users, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the wikitext editor, in July 2013. The team has focused on four areas of new functionality: references, templates, categories and media items. Editing of references and templates has been implemented in experimental code; category editing is nearly complete and should be made available very soon. The deployed alpha version of VisualEditor was updated twice (1.22-wmf4 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf4#VisualEditor> and 1.22-wmf5 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf5#VisualEditor>), adding a number of user interface improvements, including further work behind the scenes to better support the new features, and fixing a number of bugs. VisualEditor relies on Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>, the program that serves as translator between wikitext code and annotated HTML. The Parsoid team implemented several new features, particularly around the handling the inclusion of images (and their parameters). Improvements were also made to support editing of templates within extensions. This lets editors modify and add templated citations in VisualEditor, an important feature to improve the quality of articles in Wikipedia. In addition to new features, the team implemented important performance optimizations as well, in preparation for the July VisualEditor milestone. For example, the processing of expensive templates, extensions and images is now reused in order to avoid reprocessing identical code. This is necessary to avoid overwhelming the servers when tracking all edits on Wikimedia projects. A cache infrastructure with appropriate purging was set up and will be tested at full load through June. Last, at the Amsterdam hackathon, the team helped other developers use Parsoid's annotated HTML for other projects, such as a Wikipedia-to-SMS service or the Kiwix offline Wikipedia reader. <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Notifications-Message-Indicator-Opt…> Indicator for new user talk page messages in the Notifications tool <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Notifications-Flyout-Screenshot-Tha…> A thanks notification === Editor engagement <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_editor_engagement> === In May, the Editor engagement team (E2) activated new features and bug fixes for Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)> on the English Wikipedia and mediawiki.org. In collaboration with community members, a 'new message indicator' <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/New_message_indicator> was developed to inform users when someone posts on their talk page. The team also released a new 'Thanks notification <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/Thanks>' that lets editors show their appreciation to users who make helpful edits, and offers a quick way to give positive feedback on Wikipedia. Messages are now marked as read when you visit your talk page, and talk page notifications link directly to their sections. Work continued on the metrics dashboard <http://toolserver.org/~dartar/en/echo/> and HTML email notifications. A few final features and bug fixes were added to Article feedback <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback>, a quality assessment feature. As requested by community members, a new opt-in feature now makes it easier to enable or disable feedback on a page; UI improvements were also developed to simplify the feedback page. The team activated new feedback links and tested the auto-archive feature on prototype. Feature development has now ended for this project, and next steps will be determined based on the upcoming community vote on the German Wikipedia in coming weeks. Discussion portals about Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal>, a feed-like interface to enable users to better interact with their projects, were announced <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/20/flow-next-generation-discussion-syste…> and opened on three wikis: the English Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Wikipedia:Flow>, Meta-Wiki <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flow>, and mediawiki.org <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal>. An interactive prototype <http://unicorn.wmflabs.org/flow/> was released to the public for discussion, now ongoing. <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mobile_Update_(June_2013).pdf?page=2> Update on the Mobile team's work (presentation slides) As for the Editor engagement experiments <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_engagement_experiments> team (E3), they launched their new account creation and login forms <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience>, after numerous bug fixes and working with local communities to customize the interface. Complete deployment as the default for all Wikimedia projects was enabled by early June. The team also launched and tested a new version of the "Getting Started" <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted> interface for onboarding new Wikipedians <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/onboarding_new_Wikipedians>. The results of A/B testing <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:OB5> of this new version showed the largest increase in click-through rates for the landing page. Last but not least, the PostEdit extension <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PostEdit> was moved to MediaWiki core, making it available to all wikis. === Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering> === This month, the Mobile team launched Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero> with Mobilink in Pakistan. They improved code quality and configuration of Zero programs, and fixed bugs. A major focus in May was the activation of 'Nearby' view on the stable version of the mobile site (see also general "Highlights" section above). Now, with a location-aware device, users can easily identify articles close to their current location. Improvements were also made to photo uploads and the photo upload experience, including improved messaging around image quality and copyright requirements for new uploaders in the beta version of the mobile site. The upload features in general have been a great success, with over 1000 unique uploaders <http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique-uploaders> over the last two months. Experiments continue in the beta version of the site with improvements to article editing, an improved reorganization of site navigation, Echo notifications, talk pages, and simplifying discovery of article actions (like editing and watching). These beta features are expected to be released in June. <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sinenjongo_12A_High_Schoolers_and_V…> Students from Sinenjongo High School with Victor Grigas == Fundraising == === Major Gifts and Foundations === * Completed our transition to a new caging service, i.e. mail and check processing service * Began planning for a New York event === Annual Fundraiser === * Posted <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/04/wikimedia-foundation-releases-detaile…> the 2012-2013 fundraiser report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012/report> (see general "Highlights" section) * Tested a new banner design with the donation form in the banner. Updates with results <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2013#May_19.2C_2013_Form_Banner…> are posted on Meta-wiki. * Held a week-long communication workshop with the entire fundraising team. * Victor Grigas and filmmaker Charlene Music filmed a short documentary about Sinenjongo High School, South Africa and their grassroots efforts to get Wikipedia free on their cellphones. == Grantmaking == Department highlights * Grantmaking quarterly review (notes and slides) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…> * The FDC's recommendation for 2012-2013 Round 2 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/2012-2013_ro…> is published and was approved by the WMF Board of Trustees on 31 May <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Board_decisions/2012-2013_round2>, recommending funds allocations for Wikimedia Norge <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2012-2013_round2/Wikim…> and Wikimédia France <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2012-2013_round2/Wikim…>. * FDC staff prepares for the deadline for submitting a Letter of Intent (LOI) <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Sample_letter_of_intent>, which is a mandatory step in the FDC process, by hosting two IRC discussions. LOIs for 2013-2014 Round 1 are due by 8 June. * Elections for the two remaining seats on the FDC <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/FDC_election…> are taking place now. * In total, 12 grant requests to individuals, groups, and organizations were approved in May (2 FDC proposals, 4 WMF Grants Program submissions, 6 Participation Support requests) * The WMF Grants Program <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index> is experiencing record numbers of open requests this month <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index/Requests>, with 11 requests currently being considered. * The eight approved Individual Engagement Grants <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG> are now all underway. * The Participation Support Program has published new criteria for eligibility and selection on the Participation Support page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Support>. * Wikipedia Education Program presents its Mid-Year Review. Minutes and slides from the meeting are available on Meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…>. === Strategic Goals Metrics === Metric Value MoM MoM% Chart Global South Active Editors (5+ edits in main namespace) 15.7k -235 -1.4% Decrease [1] <http://gp.wmflabs.org/graphs/global_north_south_active_editors> === Funds Dissemination Committee === * On May 31, the WMF Board of Trustees published their decision <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Board_decisions/2012-2013_round2> on the FDC's *Round 2 funding* recommendations with no changes. Wikimedia Norge will receive a funds allocation of US$140,000 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2012-2013_round2/Wikim…> and Wikimédia France will receive a funds allocation of US$525,000 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals/2012-2013_round2/Wikim…>. * The FDC now has two seats up for *community elections* <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/FDC_election…>. The two successful candidates will join the now seven-person committee in July 2013, making a total of nine people. Seven candidates have put themselves forward. The ombudsperson position is also up for election, and two candidates <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/FDC_Ombudspe…> have presented themselves for the elction. * FDC staff held two *IRC office hours* logged here <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-05-29> and here <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-05-29_2> focusing on the first step of the FDC application process: the letter of intent <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Sample_letter_of_intent>. *The letter of intent is the first, mandatory step in applying to funds and must be submitted by end of day UTC June 8, 2013 to apply for 2013-2014 Round 1 in the fall.* To create a letter of intent, please visit the FDC portal <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal>. As always, any questions or comments should be directed to FDCsupport at wikimedia.org . * Following the publication of the FDC's Round 2 recommendations <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/2012-2013_ro…>, Wikimedia Hong Kong submitted an *official complaint <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Complaints_regarding_FDC_recomme…>* to the Board of Trustees. After reviewing the complaint, the Board responded <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Complaints_regarding_FDC_recomme…>, highlighting the factors that went into the FDC's decision, primarily: "the effectiveness of the programs proposed in terms of both potential impact and budgetary implications, and the internal governance and organizational capacity of the WMHK chapter to administer such a large grant." * Wikimedia Hong Kong also submitted an *appeal on the eligibility status* of WMHK and WMCZ <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Appeals_regarding_FDC_process/20…> to the ombudsperson. In her capacity, the ombudsperson provided a detailed report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Appeals_regarding_FDC_process/20…> with facts on the matter, as well as learning for future rounds. === WMF Grants === * The WMF Grants Program is experiencing *record numbers of open requests* this May, and the GAC is working hard to encourage discussions around these many open requests. There are currently 11 open requests. * In numbers: *4 grants approved and 9 reports accepted* ==== Grants awarded in May 2013 ==== * Funds to support the Third *Ibero-American Summit* in México City: Grants:WM_MX/Iberoconf_2013 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_MX/Iberoconf_2013> * Funds to support a *concert featuring freely licensed vocal music* in the Ukraine: Grants:WM_UA/Free_Vocal_Music_concert <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_UA/Free_Vocal_Music_concert> * Funds to support a *photo contest in the Ukraine* featuring Ukraine’s Natural Heritage sites: Grants:WM_UA/Wiki_Loves_Earth <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_UA/Wiki_Loves_Earth> * Funds to support a gathering of a national *Brazilian working group on free knowledge and science*: Grants:Alexandre_Hannud_Abdo_-_Grupo_de_Trabalho_em_Ciência_Aberta/Encontro_de_Acadêmicos_pelo_Conhecimento_Livre <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Alexandre_Hannud_Abdo_-_Grupo_de_Tra…> ==== Reports accepted in May 2013 ==== * Grants:Michel_Castelo_Branco_-_Wikimedians_in_Brazil/WikiBrasil_2012/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Michel_Castelo_Branco_-_Wikimedians_…> * Grants:WM_AT/Annual_Program_Plan_2012/Report_Q4 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_AT/Annual_Program_Plan_2012/Repor…> * Grants:WM_AT/Annual_Program_Plan_2012/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_AT/Annual_Program_Plan_2012/Report> * Grants:WM_CZ/Presentation_&_Outreach/Report2013-1 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_CZ/Presentation_%26_Outreach/Repo…> * Grants:Dominic/GLAM_NARA_Events_fund/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Dominic/GLAM_NARA_Events_fund/Report> * Grants:WM_IL/Legal_Opinions/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_IL/Legal_Opinions/Report> * Grants:WM_CA/In_person_meeting <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_CA/In_person_meeting> * Grants:WM_EE/2012/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_EE/2012/Report> * Grants:WM_CZ/Mediagrant/Report/2013/05 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_CZ/Mediagrant/Report/2013/05> === Participation Support === * In numbers: *8 participants funded (6 requests) and 3 reports accepted* * Participation Support *selection criteria and eligibility requirements have been updated* on the Participation Support landing page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Support>. We encourage anyone interested in receiving travel support for a non-Wikimedia event to review the new criteria. * Please note that the PSP will only consider requests for WikiSym-OpenSym submitted before 10 June. * If you are planning an event and will need funding for scholarship participants, the event organizers should apply through the Wikimedia Foundation Grants Program for a scholarship grant or for a portion of an event grant that may be used for scholarships rather than sending individual participants to the PSP. Please contact grants at wikimedia dot or with questions. ==== Requests awarded in May 2013 ==== * Funding for three volunteers to attend a spring at the *Open Help conference*: Participation:Ocaasi,_Valeriej,_The_wub/Open_Help_Conference <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Ocaasi,_Valeriej,_The_wub/Ope…> Funding for 5 volunteers to attend *Open Source Bridge* 2013: * Participation:Paulproteus/Open_Source_Bridge_2013 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Paulproteus/Open_Source_Bridg…> * Participation:Harsh4101991/Open_Source_Bridge_2013 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Harsh4101991/Open_Source_Brid…> * Participation:Sucheta_Ghoshal/Open_Source_Bridge_2013 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Sucheta_Ghoshal/Open_Source_B…> * Participation:Sky_Harbor/OpenSourceBridge13 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Sky_Harbor/OpenSourceBridge13> * Participation:Noopur28/OpenSourceBridge13 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Noopur28/OpenSourceBridge13> ==== Reports accepted in May 2013 ==== * Thelmadatter's report on participation in the *Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials*: Participation:Thelmadatter/Seminar_on_the_Acquisition_of_Latin_American_Library_Materials/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Thelmadatter/Seminar_on_the_A…> * Nicola's report on participation in the *International Cycling History Conference*: Participation:Nicola/International_Cycling_History_Conference/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Nicola/International_Cycling_…> * Lpagola's report on participation in LibreGraphicsMeeting: Participation:Lpagola/LibreGraphicsMeeting/Report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Participation:Lpagola/LibreGraphicsMeeting/…> === Individual Engagement Grants === ==== Program ==== * We've been iterating on *program pages* and the proposal review process <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Committee/Workroom/Review#review…> and timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Committee/Workroom#committee-rev…> in preparation for round 2, in response to round 1 feedback <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Feedback/round_1_2013>. * A work sprint <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Build/May_2013_sprint_plan> is underway in the *IdeaLab*. Enhanced functionality is intended to boost dynamic activity in the space in preparation for the next IEG open call. ==== Grantees ==== * *7 IEGrantees projects continue and an 8th is beginnning* after clearing dependencies from its original provisional approval. Some grantees are contributing to the WMF blog <https://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/individual-engagement-grants/>, and all grantees' progress is chronicled each month at: o Grants:IEG/Build an effective method of publicity in PRChina/Timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Build_an_effective_method_of_pub…> o Grants:IEG/Consolidate wikiArS to involve art schools/Timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Consolidate_wikiArS_to_involve_a…> o Grants:IEG/Elaborate_Wikisource strategic vision/Timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Elaborate_Wikisource_strategic_v…> o Grants:IEG/MediaWiki data browser/Timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/MediaWiki_data_browser/Timeline> o Grants:IEG/Replay Edits/Timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Replay_Edits/Timeline> o Grants:IEG/The Wikipedia Adventure/Timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/The_Wikipedia_Adventure/Timeline> o Grants:IEG/The Wikipedia Library/Timeline <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/The_Wikipedia_Library/Timeline> o Grants:IEG/MediaWiki_and_Javanese_script <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/MediaWiki_and_Javanese_script> * Grantees Ocaasi and Micru attended the *Hackathon* in Amsterdam to connect with technical contributors across the movement. === Learning & Evaluation === Internal Performance Monitoring * Grantmaking quarterly report <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…> * Updated grantmaking dashboard Grantmaking Programs Feedback * Created *feedback surveys* for IEG and the Grants Program <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_and_Programs/Learning_%26_Evalu…> (draft); refined feedback surveys for FDC, to be distributed in June. * Executed first feedback surveys for IEG <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Feedback/round_1_2013> and filtered feedback (people liked the program!) * Administered survey for feedback from FDC for the deliberation process Grantee tools * Working with the Analytics team to rescope and refine the *UserMetrics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UserMetrics> API* to allow it to be usable publicly. See draft of Grantmaking needs from the tool <http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/GtRLUKyOTb> * Developed overview of *surveying for grantees* <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_and_Programs/Learning_%26_Evalu…>; working on finding good survey solutions for them to use === Brazil Catalyst Project === ==== Institutional ==== Our *potential institutional partner* in Brazil, Ação Educativa, has been finalizing a project's proposal to be submitted to WMF. ==== Data & Experiments ==== * Partial *translation* of the Meta Page Research:Data <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data> into Portuguese has been released <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data/pt>. * Prototype of *ptwiki timeline <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Arqueologia/Linha_do_tempo>* created with events data structured. * Ongoing evalution on the design of the *Data Center <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Central_de_pesquisas/Portal_de…>* * Research released: o *Vandalism* profile, impact and occurance <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usu%C3%A1rio(a):HAndrade_(WMF)/Pesquisa_Vanda…> (preliminary results released, still collecting more data) * Research in the planning phase: o Medicin Wikiproject <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Brazil_Program/Education_program/Goal#…>: The activity of users that were invited to the project by the Wikiprojetosbot will be tracked to measure the *effectiveness of the invitations*. ==== Staff & Community work ==== * *IRC meeting* with community <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Projetos/Wikip%C3%A9dia/Reuni%…>: agenda covered vandalism research, consensus on Wikipedia, mismatching disambiguations, education program job positions, ptwiki research center history and future, medicin wikiproject and ptwiki timeline. ==== Education ==== <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oona_Castro_UFRGS_01.JPG> Oona Castro speaking at the UFGRS outreach event in Porto Alegre * Education program *job positions*: o Interview with candidates (we had 100+ applicants!) for the education program positions o Online task with final candidates for the coordination position <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/geral/Sobre_a_efici%…> o Two *new independent contractors* to substitute the Education Program Consultant, Everton Alvarenga, were chosen * Ongoing *support for professors* on our network and others willing to join * *Outreach materials*: Finalising outreach and guide materials * *Outreach events*: successful outreach event organized by the community at UFRGS <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Encontros/UFRGS20131> (Porto Alegre city) * *In the media:* "Wikipédia aposta no professor para se tornar mais confiável no Brasil <http://noticias.terra.com.br/educacao/wikipedia-aposta-no-professor-para-se…>" (terra.com.br) and "Wikipédia quer universidades <http://www.baguete.com.br/noticias/24/05/2013/wikipedia-quer-universidades>" (Baguete) ==== Medicine Wikiproject ==== * Wikiprojetosbot <https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usu%C3%A1rio:Wikiprojetosbot> started dispatching *invitations* for users to join the wikiproject. * Despite its preliminary stage, this strategy is already showing some results such as community engagement on the Wikiproject talk page and an increasing number of new editors. == Program Development == Department highlights * The Mobile team launched *Wikipedia Zero in Pakistan*. With over 32 million mobile customers, this is the second largest launch for Wikipedia Zero to date. * Program Evaluation and Design staff is getting ready for the *first evaluation workshop* in Budapest (June 22–23). Participants from more than 15 countries will meet in Hungary to gain a basic shared understanding of program evaluation, work collaboratively to map and prioritize measurable outcomes, and gain increased fluency in a common language of evaluation. Wikimédia Magyarország kindly supports this workshop, which will afterwards also be available online through videos and slides on Commons. More information is available on Meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Program_Evaluation_and_Design/June_2013_Wor…>. * The *Education Team presented strong numbers in its mid-year review <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…>*. For the current fiscal year, the team expects to be on track for a total goal of 25 million bytes of new content contributed to Wikipedia's article namespace by students. Classes participating in Egypt showed a particularly high percentage of female editors (~ 85%); one of the Arabic Wikipedia's current administrators and now top-editors coming out of the Egypt Education Program. === Program Evaluation and Design === * In May, the team worked on organizing the *upcoming Budapest workshop* (June 21–23). Adele Vrana provided support with the logistics of the meeting, Sarah Stierch communicated with participants and the Hungarian Chapter, and Jaime Anstee started her work on presentation slides and the agenda of the meeting. Interest in the workshop exceeded our expectations by far – more than 50 chapters representatives and unaffiliated volunteers applied to be part of the event. The team is working on preparing all materials in a way that they can be published online; it is also planning on documenting parts of the meeting on video so people who won't be able to attend the workshop in person will have the opportunity to follow the discussion. * Also in May, Jaime worked on a *glossary of terms* around evaluation and program design. Having a shared language in these two areas will help people from different countries understand each other better – which we consider a key advantage given that our movement is so diverse and most people come from countries where English is not a native language. The team is planning to publish a first draft of the glossary on Meta prior to the June event in Budapest. * In early May, the team had a one-day offsite *team retreat*. This event served to build a better team cohesion and to work on shared team vision and goals. The event was facilitated by Liz Williams, an outside contractor that also provides coaching services to the Wikimedia Foundation. * Frank Schulenburg and Anasuya Sengupta worked on a detailed plan that outlines how the Grantmaking and the Program Evaluation and Design teams will work with each other in the future. Part of this plan is a *roles and responsibilities grid* that got shared with members of each team in late May. The work on this document was an important step for getting better clarity about the scope of each team's work and also for setting the stage for future collaboration. === Wikipedia Zero === * Launched Wikipedia Zero <http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/busin…> with Mobilink (Vimpelcom) in *Pakistan*. This is our second largest launch to date (in terms of userbase, which is over 32 milion people) * Refactored legacy codebase to move configuration to an improved format which will act as the foundation of a *web portal system*. * Updated code to handle *recent changes to the mobile site* correctly for Wikipedia Zero <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Education_Program_Mid-Yea…> Slides from the Mid-Year Review of the Wikipedia Education Program === Wikipedia Education Program === * The team prepared for and participated in a *Mid-Year Review* with Sue and Erik. Minutes and slides from the meeting are available on Meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_r…>. * Reviewed resumes and interviewed candidates for *Global Education Program Manager* position. * Documented Education Program *training infrastructure* for easier porting and translation. US/Canada * *Followed up with professors* from Spring 2013 to reflect on learnings, brainstorm potential blog posts to feature those learnings or great experiences from student contributions, and get feedback for needed support for Fall 2013. * Began creating official list of *classes that will participate in Fall 2013* and connecting those classes to Ambassador support and assignment design advice * Developed priorities for *Education Extension redesign* to improve the user interface for Fall 2013 semester * Volunteers creating the *new non-profit (to run the US/CA program)* requested start-up funding from GAC and Thematic Organization affiliation via the Affiliations Committee * Implemented "Did You Know box" content for the *Special:MyCourses feed* on English Wikipedia. Arab World * Classes have started editing the Arabic Wikipedia in *Jordan, Algeria, and Egypt*. * Faris planned travel to visit Dr. Yahia Fares University of Médéa in *Algeria* in hopes of expanding the program beyond one class there. * Reviewed resumes for *Arab World Education Program Manager*. Communications * LiAnna and Sage worked closely with David Peters on a design of a new *brochure about Wikimedia Commons*, a companion piece to the "Welcome to Wikipedia" brochure. A preliminary design will be available in June, and the brochure will be available after the launch of the VisualEditor. * Facilitated six *blog posts* on the WMF blog: o Arabic Wikipedia grows thanks to Wikipedia Education Program students <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/02/wikipedia-education-program-arab-world/> o Rice University students take multiple classes with a Wikipedia-editing assignment <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/07/wikipedia-education-program-nadhika-ra…> o Physics professor assigns students to edit Portuguese Wikipedia <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/08/rafael-pezzi-profile/> o School of Open offers free Wikipedia course <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/10/school-of-open-offers-free-wikipedia-c…> o What’s going on in Sweden? <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/13/wikipedia-education-program-update-swe…> o Busy Wikimedia semester at ITESM Campus Ciudad de México <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/15/education-program-mexico/> * Two *newsletters* posted: o 7 May 2013 <https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program/News/7_May_…> o 21 May 2013 <https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program/News/21_May…> == Human Resources == In May, HR completed extensive preparatory work to kick off the June *annual review* cycle for the participation of all employees, including some light redesign of last year's templates, a redesign of the format and timing to work in a sprint-like approach, and training for new managers. HR also contracted with Radford to conduct a thorough analysis of the utility and application of existing *salary bands*, and in comparison with market data, and working to update our compensation philosophy. We have also transitioned *401k retirement funding* advisors, and did research with the 401k committee to select new index funds to make available for staff. Time was also spent streamlining data with two of our providers and process in coordination with F&A, namely around ADP and oDesk. HR also kicked off a group, self-named the "aliens" club, to support our *expat employees and contractors* with settling into life in the United States. We also completed the first year of the WikiLead pilot, a program for Directors and other WMF management on *leadership skills training*, and ran a pilot *negotiations training* to help people engage constructively in expectations setting and coming to shared agreeements. Overall, it has been a month of heavy hiring and other activity for HR, which also continues to support the search for the new Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation (with a newly redesigned jobs page at jobs.wikimedia.org <http://jobs.wikimedia.org>). === Staff Changes === New Requisitions Filled * Nik Everett, Senior Software Engineer (Engineering) * MunMay Galloway, Visual Designer (Engineering) * Alexandros Kosiaris, Operations Engineer (Engineering) * Meron Kristos, Staff Accountant (Finance) * Heather Walls, Communications Design Manager (Communications) * Yana Welinder, Legal Counsel (Legal) * Jared Zimmerman, Director of UX (Engineering) New Legal Interns * Jennifer Bloom * Matthew Collins * Tiffany Li New Contractors * Anna Lantz (Human Resources) * Robert Smith (Engineering) Departures * Ram Ramanath * David Schoonover Contracts Ended * Ashok Misra * Kraig Parkinson * Vanessa Sanchez * Joseph Seddon New Postings * A/P Clerk * Arab World Education Program Manager * Fundraising Donor Services Associate * Global Education Program Manager * Product Manager | Platform * Recruitment Team Intern (Undergrad/Student) * Research Analyst * Wikimedia Foundation: Executive Director === Statistics === Total Requisitions Filled May Actual: 143 May Total Plan: 174 May Filled: 7, Month Attrition: 2, YTD Filled: 58, YTD Attrition: 27 4 Canceled Requisitions for FY, as of May 31 Remaining Open Requisitions to fiscal year end 27 (reflects 4 canceled requisitions for FY) === Department Updates === Real-time feed for HR updates http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork == Finance and Administration == * Continued work on the Wikimedia Foundation *Annual Plan* with a final draft version presented to Stu West (Chair of the Audit Committee). * Have begun to *rebalance the reserves* of the Wikimedia Foundation so that more of the reserve is being held in bonds instead of certificates of deposit. This is being done to improve the real rate of return of the portfolio. * The Wikimedia Foundation - IRS *Form 990* for FY 2011-12 was posted on the Wikimedia Foundation web site <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2011.E2.80.932012_fi…>. * In addition to holding and paying in a group of currencies, we have begun work on reducing the cost of *converting USD to other curriences* when sending funds for payments or grants. == Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department == === LCA Report, May 2013 === ==== Contract Metrics ==== * Submitted : 20 * Completed : 19 ==== Trademark Metrics ==== * Submitted : 13 * Approved : 2 * Pending : 9 * Denied : 2 <Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Metrics_and_Activities_Meeting_-_20…> Yana Welinder explaining "naked licensing" in a presentation about trademarks (slides <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trademark_Policy_Presentation.pdf>) ==== Coming & Going ==== * Yana Welinder <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:YWelinder_(WMF)> joined the LCA team as legal counsel. * Four legal interns joined for the summer: Jennifer Bloom (Harvard), Matthew Collins (Columbia), and Tiffany Li (Georgetown). ==== Other Activities ==== * LCA launched a community discussion <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage/Logo_announcement> about the process for choosing a new Wikivoyage logo in the face of legal challenge to the former one. This also followed a new proposed logo selection procedure <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_selection_procedure>. We encourage people to participate! * LCA published a statement on trademark practices <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trademark_practices_discussion>, which requests community feedback on the Wikimedia trademark policy, procedures, and other questions. This is your opportunity to give us ideas as we consider updating our trademark policy and practices. * The minutes <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2013-04-18> and resolutions from the WMF Board of Trustees April meeting were published. * Luis Villa <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LVilla_(WMF)> attended the Open Source Initiative board meeting in Washington D.C. * LCA began interviewing candidates for a new legal counsel position <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ooajXfwy&c=qSa9VfwQ>. * Updated Legal and Community Advocacy page on Meta <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_and_Community_Advocacy>. * Two presentations from LCA were accepted at Wikimania 2013: Discussing Our Legal Strategy Going Forward: A Talk with the WMF General Counsel <http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Discussing_Our_Legal_St…> (Geoff), Open Culture, Open Data, Open Source <http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Open_Culture,_Open_Data…> (Luis and Stephen) === Communications Report, May 2013 === May's major news focused on the announcement of the ED search process for WMF, and some considerable residual attention paid to the issue of the women American novelists category on EN Wikipedia. In May we also welcomed Heather Walls as the communications team's first Communications Design Manager. ==== Major announcements ==== ‘’*The Wikimedia Foundation announces search for new Executive Director to lead the Wikimedia movement <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/The_search_for_our_next…>* ’’(22 May 2013) The Wikimedia Foundation has begun a global search for a new Executive Director to lead the organization through its next phase of innovation and growth. The new Executive Director will lead a thriving international organization that operates the number five most-popular web property in the world. ==== Major Storylines through March ==== Quite a bit of coverage through the month, largely focussing on local/regional Wikipedia articles and topics of interest to niche audiences. ‘’Can Wikipedia predict the stock market?’’ (May 8) Many outlets covered a May 8 Scientific Reports study that suggests Wikipedia can be used to predict the behavior of the stock market, specifically openly available page view stats for articles can predict decreases in relevant stock prices. Coverage was predominantly positive or neutral in tone. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/8/wikipedia-views-stock-market http://www.yourmoney.com/your-money/news/2268887/can-wikipedia-predict-the-… http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-2326268/Visits-Wikipedia… /Mapping of live, anon edits on WP makes headlines/ (May 13) A popular visualization tool (http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en) by WMF's own Stephen LaPorte of current anonymous edits on Wikipedia received substantial coverage through mid-May: http://mashable.com/2013/05/13/wikipedia-edits-live-map/ http://boingboing.net/2013/05/13/realtime-map-of-anonymous-edit.html http://phys.org/news/2013-05-realtime-wikipedia-worldwide.html http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682965/view-all-unregistered-wikipedia-edits-i… /WMF launches its ED search/ (May 22) We publicly launched our search for the next Executive Director of the WMF in late May. Coverage was not extensive as the original announcement of Sue's departure, although social media sharing was substantial. http://allthingsd.com/20130522/wikimedia-starts-hunt-for-new-executive-dire… WMF Blog post <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/21/search-for-next-wikimedia-foundation-…> Economist Job posting <http://jobs.economist.com/job/4676/executive-director/> ==== Other worthwhile reads ==== Wikipedia's 'Nearby' Feature Pulls Up Articles Related to Your Location <http://mashable.com/2013/05/30/wikipedia-nearby/> | Mashable | May 30 Wikipedia’s anti-Pagan crusade <http://www.salon.com/2013/05/24/wikipedias_anti_pagan_crusade/> | Salon | May 24 Wargaming supports open source <http://www.develop-online.net/news/44296/Wargamingnet-supports-open-source> | develop | May 24 Wikipedia to Appear in Shughni <http://globalvoicesonline.org/2013/05/12/tajikistan-wikipedia-to-appear-in-…> | Global Voices | May 12 ==== WMF Blog posts ==== Thirty-nine blog posts in May <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/>, with bilingual posts <https://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/multilingual-post/> in Arabic, Catalan, French, German, Russian, Japanese, Serbian, Spanish and Swedish. The Wikimedia blog is moving rapidly towards more than 50% content available in a language other than English. Some highlights from the month: * *A librarian uses her expertise to improve Wikipedia <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/06/a-librarian-uses-her-expertise-to-imp…>* * *Spanish Wikipedia surpasses the 1 million article milestone <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/17/spanish-wikipedia-1-million-articles/>* * *Russian Wikipedia celebrates 12th anniversary and millionth article <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/23/russian-wikipedia-millionth-article/>* * *Documenting the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 for Wikimedia <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/31/documenting-eurovision-for-wikimedia/>* ==== Media Contact ==== https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#May_2013 ==== Wikipedia Signpost ==== For lots of detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for May 2013: * Volume 9, Issue 17 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2013-05…>, 6 May 2013 * Volume 9, Issue 18 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2013-05…>, 13 May 2013 * Volume 9, Issue 19 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2013-05…>, 20 May 2013 * Volume 9, Issue 20 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2013-05…>, 27 May 2013 == Visitors and Guests == Visitors and guests to the WMF office in May 2013: 1. Sarah Pearson (Creative Commons) 2. Sara Crouse (Creative Commons) 3. Eric Steuer (Creative Commons) 4. Elliot Harmon (Creative Commons) 5. Kellie Brownell (The Ada Initiative) 6. Peter Coopr (Paul Hastings) 7. Rishi Sharma (Paul Hastings) 8. Virginia Sutton (J&D) 9. Deb Wolter (Red Bamboo Consulting) 10. Rudy Rucker (Monkey Brains) 11. Michael Stella (McCladrey) 12. R. Schmidt (McCladrey) 13. Lisa Grossman (m|Oppenheim) 14. Mike Schwartz (Senior VP Engineering, Wikia) 15. Jennifer Garvey Berger (Cultivating Leadership) 16. Jim Nelson (executive director, Yorba) 17. Chaz, Eric, Lucas, Clinton (Engineers, Yorba) 18. Leif Johanssen (SUNET) 19. Valter Nordh (SUNET) 20. Simon Phipps (MariaDB Foundation) 21. Somnath Ray (Timescape) 22. Kathy Reich (Packard Foundation) 23. Anna Stillwell (Human Project) 24. Alex Gladstein (Oslo Freedom Forum) 25. R.P. (Open Knowledge Foundation) 26. Debbie Walter (Red Bamboo Consulting) 27. Nash Hurley (Vital) 28. Taylor Keep (Vital) 29. Lisa Grossman (m|Oppenheim) 30. Kathy Ramsey (TAI) 31. Aloka Archige (Forte) 32. Sarah Nagel (IIE) 33. Audrey Milo (C & RE) 34. Brian Lee (Forte) 35. Sophie Österberg (WMSE) 36. Valerie Aurora (TAI) 37. Mary Gardiner (TAI) -- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB

10 years, 11 months

WMIT bulletin no. 53 - May 29, 2013

by .mau. (maurizio codogno)

Hi all, the new bulletin from Wikimedia Italia (#53) is available. This time we write about Amsterdam Hackathon 2013, the contest Veneto in Wikipedia, searches for people, and our next appointments. As usual a link has been added to meta, at Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Italia ; more-or-less raw text of the bulletin follows below. ciao, .mau. > > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= __NOTOC__ [[Image:Wikimedia news1.png|400px|center]] {{titolo errato|titolo=Wikimedia news}}{{WMNpubblico|53|May 29, 2013}} ---- [[File:Wikimedia_Hackathon_2013.jpg|thumb|400px|center| "Working Group" - By Sebastiaan ter Burg from Utrecht, The Netherlands (Wikimedia Hackathon 2013) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons]] == Amsterdam Hackathon 2013 == Over the weekend from May 24 to 26, the [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013 Wikimedia Hackathon 2013] was held in Amsterdam. The annual gathering, which brings together all Wikimedian interested in the development of MediaWiki and other Wikimedia projects, was organized by Wikimedia Nederland and was held at the [http://www.stayokay.com/en/hostel/amsterdam-zeeburg Stayokay hostel]. There were about a hundred Wikimedian; the participants appreciate the Dutch organization which was impeccable. [[:it:Utente:CristianCantoro|Cristian]] (''vicepresident of Wikimedia Italia'') was present on behalf of Wikimedia Italia and [[:commons:Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2013/Who's_who | Wiki Loves Monuments international group]]. In addition to numerous other projects, [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs Wikimedia Labs] were presented: tjey are the new infrastructure that will manage the development of new tools for Wikimedia sites. == Wikimedia Italia is hiring == Are you determined, do you like to work in teams, to interact with the public? Are you willing to learn some new computer program?! Then read [http://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/Ricerca_collaboratori the announcement for a secretarial employee] published by Wikimedia Italia. Our staff is growing! All specifications can be found on the dedicated page: here we anticipate that the workplace is in Monza (with occasional short trips) and that the type of commitment required will be 20 hours per week (horizontal or vertical part-time). The announcement is aimed at candidates of both sexes (L.125/91) and will remain valid until 15 June 2013. If you are interested, send your CV and a presentation letter to the email address lavoro(a)wikimedia.it. == Veneto in Wikipedia == [http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Coordinamento/Scuole/Autori_in_Wikipe… Veneto in Wikipedia] is a competition, organized by our member Professor Corrado Petrucco from the University of Padua together with Enrica Pagano and Simonetta Boscolo in collaboration with Wikimedia Italia, planned to invite classes of students of schools of all levels to create or improve entries on Wikipedia. Monday, June 3 a meeting will be held for the closure of the project. [[:it:User:Cotton| Cotton]] will participate for Wikimedia Italia: Cotton will talk in particular about the criteria used for the evaluation of new entries in Wikipedia created by the children. At the conclusion of the meeting the best work will be awarded. The event will take place from 16:00 at the "Einaudi Gramsci" institute (via delle Palme, 1 35137 Padova); [http://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/File:Locandina_veneto_in_wikipedia.pdf here] the complete program. == Wikimedia Foundation is looking for Italian-speaking people == The Engineering and Product Developement department of the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for two or thres [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/66337 Community Liaison, Product Development], i.e. representatives of the local Wikimedian community who will act as intermediaries between users and the engineering team, supporting them in the activation phase of new extensions on the sites of projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. This would be a task for a period of about 3 months, which requires a minimum commitment of 15 hours per week. In particular the urgent need at the moment is on the launch of [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor Visual Editor] on Wikipedia in different languages; they will need, for example, to explain to their community the news and manage useful feedback tools significant to the computer development department. Basic requirements are knowledge of the English language (as well as Italian), years of experience as active users on Wikimedia sites (not just Wikipedia) and excellent communication skills. To apply, you must write to Philippe Beaudette at pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org. Read through the requirements and then, if you know you have a few free hours to devote each day, you can apply or invite some Wikimedian friend to do so. == Pages most seen on Italian Wikipedia == The list with the [http://stats.grok.se/it/top most visited articles in Italian Wikipedia] has just be updated. Reading it provided an insight on how users make use of the free encyclopedia. In April, for example, Italian politics and television series are the most browsed categories of voices. == Next appointments == * '''May 30, Crema''': [[:it:Utente:Virginia_Gentilini|Virginia Gentilini]] will speak at the conference [http://opac.provincia.cremona.it/library/home-RBC/viaggio-nel-mondo-del-lib…'' Librarians tell themselves: challenges, opportunities and alliances''] organized by the Cremona Libraries' Network, talking of the relationship between Wikipedia and the world of libraries. What does it mean to be ''Wikipedian librarians''? Citing his personal experience, Virginia will attempt to answer this question, revealing the possible future developments of the librarian's role and its relationship with users. The meeting ([http://opac.provincia.cremona.it/sites/brescia/assets/UFF.-BIBLIOTECHE-CREM… here] the full program) will begin at 9:30 am and will take place at the S. Pietro da Cemmo Hall of the S. Agostino Augustine (Museo Civico - piazza Winifred Terni de Gregory). You can [http://opac.provincia.cremona.it/library/home-RBC/form-iscrizione-convegno/ register online]. Other information may be obtained by phone (0372/406283) or e-mail: cultura(a)provincia.cremona.it. *''June 8, Bologna''': after the success of the meeting of May 4, it was decided to replicate the laboratory on Wikipedia aimed at beginners. The course, part of the cycle [http://www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it/eventi/23821 Wikipedia in the Library], is free and will be held again by [[:it:Utente:P tasso|P tasso]]. The appointment is at 15:00 in the Sala Internet (hall of Bramante) of [http://www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it/home.php Salaborsa Library] of Bologna. *'''10 June, Bologna''': [[:it:User:Virginia_Gentilini | Virginia Gentilini]] and [[:it:User:Atropine | Atropine]] will hold an introductory meeting on Wikipedia at the center of documentation of the Arcigay in Bologna, "Il Cassero", starting at about 17.00. This will be an informal chat in the hope of establishing a more structured collaboration in the future. The official website of the center is [http://www.cassero.it/ www.cassero.it], but it is currently under renovation, so we suggest you also check their [https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cassero-LGBT-center/192581134090979 official facebook page] for all the updates. *''' 27 May and 3 June, Bagno a Ripoli (FI)''': at the [http://biblioteca.comune.bagno-a-ripoli.fi.it/opencms/opencms/Contenuti/Cat… Municipal Library], introductory course to Wikipedia for users (from 16.30 to 18.30). Teacher: [[:it:Utente:Giaccai|Susanna Giaccai]]. *'''5 And 12 June, Borgo San Lorenzo (Florence)''': introductory course to Wikipedia for librarians, at the computer room at the Union of Municipalities of Montana Mugello (from 9 to 13). Teacher: [http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Giaccai Susanna Giaccai].

10 years, 11 months

Call for community input on our trademark policy and practices

by Yana Welinder

Hi all, On Friday, the Legal and Community Advocacy team posted a call for community input on our trademark policy and practices: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/07/call-for-community-input-trademark-pol… We have identified some trademark practices that we think are going well, as well as some areas that could be improved. We have also raised specific questions for discussion and seen great community engagement on this issue. To date, community members have provided excellent input on how the trademark policy can be clarified [1] and started translating our initial trademark statement [2] into German, Greek, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Russian, and Swedish to make the discussion more approachable internationally. We would like to get as many community members as possible to participate in the discussion and look forward to your comments. Many thanks for your wisdom and help with this! Yana Welinder, Legal Counsel References: [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Trademark_practices_discussion [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trademark_practices_discussion

10 years, 11 months

Wikimedia engineering May 2013 report

by Guillaume Paumier

Hi, The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in May 2013 is now available. Wiki version: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/May Blog version: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/06/10/wikimedia-engineering-may-2013-report/ We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/May/summary Below is the full HTML text of the report. As always, feedback is appreciated on the usefulness of the report and its summary, and on how to improve them. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Major news in May include: - An invitation<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/01/apply-for-an-internship-with-the-lang…>from the Language engineering team to collaborate on language-related projects; - A new Notifications system<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/02/notifications-launch-english-wikipedi…>enabled on the English Wikipedia; - Recent developments<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/08/updates-from-language-engineering-cha…>in language engineering, and the upcoming deployment of the Universal language selector<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/22/getting-ready-for-uls-everywhere-2/>on all wikis; - The start of a discussion around Flow<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/20/flow-next-generation-discussion-syste…>, a proposed discussion system for Wikimedia sites; - A call for proposals<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/21/request-for-proposals-mediawiki-relea…>to manage the MediaWiki release cycle; - An experience-sharing exercise<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/28/developing-distributedly-part-1-tools…>by the Mobile engineering team about distributed collaboration; - "Nearby <https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/29/wikipedia-nearby-beta/>", a feature showing Wikipedia articles about nearby places on location-aware devices; - Tool Labs, which is now operational and ready to host tools<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/30/preparing-for-the-migration-from-the-…>migrated from the Toolserver; - A test wiki<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/30/test-features-in-a-right-to-left-lang…>to try out new features in right-to-left languages - Tech news <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News>, a weekly tech newsletter to help users stay informed of technical changes going to impact them. *Note: We're also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/May/summary>that does not assume specialized technical knowledge. * Personnel Work with us <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us> Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles. - Software Engineer - Parser<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oIsbXfw2> - Software Engineer - Fundraising<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oawpXfwM> - Software Engineer - Language Engineering<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oH3gXfwH> - Software Engineer - Mobile<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o4cKWfwG> - Software Engineer - Multimedia Systems<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oj40Wfw3> - Software Engineer - Multimedia User Interfaces<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ohqbXfwz> - Senior Software Engineer - Platform<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ouLnWfwi> - UX Designer <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=onImXfw8> - Research Analyst <http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=oTqrXfwr> - Product Manager - Platform<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=o3vtXfwI> - Dev-Ops Engineer - SRE<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=ocLCWfwf> - MySQL Database Administrator<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=obMOWfwr> - Director of Technical Operations<http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?j=orXoXfwt> Announcements - Alexandros Kosiaris joined the Technical Operations team as Operations Engineer (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-May/069370.html> ). - May Galloway joined the Product Development team as Visual Designer ( announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/design/2013-May/000518.html> ). - Jared Zimmerman joined the Engineering Department as Director of User Experience (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2013-May/000647.ht…> ). - Nik Everett joined the Platform engineering team as Senior Software Engineer specializing in Search (announcement<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-May/069668.html> ). - Aarti Dwivedi <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rtdwivedi>, Anubhav Agarwal <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Anubhav_iitr>, Harsh Kothari<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Harsh4101991>, Himeshi De Silva <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Himeshi>, Jiabao Wu<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jiabao_wu>, Kiran Mathew Koshy<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993>, Liangent <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Liangent>, Molly White<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:GorillaWarfare>, Moriel Schottlender <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Mooeypoo>, Nazmul Chowdhury <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rasel160>, Nilesh Chakraborty <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Nilesh.c>, Or Sagi<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Orsagi>, Petr Onderka <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick>, Pragun Bhutani<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Pragunbhutani>, Praveen Singh <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Prageck>, Rahul Maliakkal <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rahul21>, Richa Jain<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rjain>, Rohan Verma <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Clancer>, Tongbo Sui<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Beanixster>and Yevheniy Vlasenko <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Zhenya> joined the Wikimedia tech community as part of Summer of Code 2013<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013>. Katie Cunningham <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:KatieIreneC> and Rachel Thomas <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rachel99> joined as part of the Outreach Program for Women<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_6> . Technical Operations *Site infrastructure* The migration to MariaDB continued, with Wikimedia Commons now fully moved over. Additional database infrastructure work was completed in support of the Tool Labs, producing a row-based replication stream with all PII<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Personally_identifiable_information>removed for the publicly accessible Tool Labs databases.We'll be upgrading to Request Tracker version 4 and migrating the service to Eqiad soon. Most of the ground work is laid for this; RT4 is puppetized and we've done a dry run.Brandon Black made improvements to our Varnish cache invalidation code. Together with Mark Bergsma and Faidon Liambotis, they wrote a replacement for varnishhtcpd called vhtcpd<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=operations%2Fsoftware%2Fvarnish%2Fv…>, and deployed it to the production Varnish machines. The new daemon is ~50x more efficient at the same basic job. This buys us some performance on Varnish machines in general, but more importantly it gets rid of invalidation failures due to network buffer overruns when the old daemon couldn't keep up. This should also rid us from the random software failures in the old daemon that resulted in missing some or all cache purge requests for extended periods of time. The initial deployment has just been a basic swap of the two daemons. Further near-future improvements include turning on the new daemon's HTCP regex filtering configuration for more efficiency gains, and tying its HTCP packet statistics back into our normal monitoring and analysis infrastructure, so that we can better see any further multicast invalidation delivery issues that may arise.Daniel Zahn led the OS patch release train; the team has started to upgrade about 50% of the servers to-date and will finish the rest in June.Faidon also worked with Aaron Schulz and made Ceph at Eqiad the primary media storage back-end, leaving Swift at Tampa as a secondary fail-over back-end. This means that MediaWiki application servers were writing to & reading from there for about four & two weeks respectively. More recently, the cluster encountered some problems and traffic was temporarily reverted back to Tampa. Faidon is now upgrading Ceph software to the newer upstream version, Cuttlefish, which addresses a number of problems that were encountered during this time and were successfully reported to Ceph developers. Testing will resume after that happens, both by re-enabling Ceph as a MediaWiki back-end and by switching a portion of Varnish traffic to Ceph.Mark and Faidon started working on migrating the Text Squid servers to use Varnish instead. In Mark's preliminary tests on 1 Esams and 4 Eqiad servers, the results look encouraging. He will start adding more traffic to them in the coming weeks. *Data Dumps <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Data_Dumps>* The routine dumps of Wikidata ran into two roadblocks, one of them related to the way that Recent changes patrol and autopatrolling are handled in MediaWiki. While a local workaround is in place, there has been discussion of revamping the patrolling mechanism including changes to the database [1]<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17237>. The other issue, affecting the full history content dumps, also has a temporary workaround until we can decide what the meaning of the rev_lenfield in the database for revisions really means.The mwxml2sql utils have been through some testing and bug fixes, and a volunteer is interested in packaging them for Debian to accompany his code for local installation of a mirror of Wikipedia (or the project of one's choice).Incremental dumps will be developed this summer by User:Svick<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Svick/Incremental_dumps>as part of this year's GSoC program. We're happy to have him and can't wait for the finished code! *Wikimedia Labs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Labs>* This month was mostly dedicated to bringing Tool Labs online, but a number of other changes occurred as well. Work has progressed on AJAXification of the OpenStackManager interface. Instance reboot actions are now using this and there are gerrit changes awaiting review for instance console output, instance deletion, and some IP address actions. The custom virtual machine image had a number of fixes this month improving reliability and boot speed. We expect further improvements with upgrades to the OpenStack grizzly or havana releases. OpenStack was upgraded from the essex release to the folsom release, increasing speed of operations and bringing some new features (such as instance resizing). We'll be making these features available for use soon. All virtualization hosts and all instances were upgraded for a kernel security vulnerability and were rebooted this month, causing roughly an hour of scheduled downtime. Work has also been progressing on creating instances pre-configured for doing MediaWiki development; this has been working in the past, but it is now more reliable, faster, and meets our legal team's requirements for MediaWiki installations in Labs. Work has also progressed on a more reliable development environment for Labs itself. Soon it should be possible to install a pre-configured instance ready for making changes to the Labs infrastructure.Tool Labs is now operational, with roughly 150 tools already migrated. With the completion of the basics of replication (all but s7 are operational), there remains no roadblocks for migration. During the week since the Amsterdam Hackaton, a fair number of minor issues have been found and fixed, and the general consensus from users is that the environment is functional. On the roadmap for the next month is cleaning up some of the management for replication (so that it is more generalized), finish s7, and help users with their migration issues. Tool Labs work has also added a new feature available to all of Labs: service groups. Service groups are a user/group combination available locally within a project. Service group membership allows regular users to sudo to the service groups, allowing per-project service users, rather than needing to create local users via puppet, or create global users via wikitech. Work progresses on puppetizing more OpenStack services and the OpenStackManager extension. Currently OSM development is hampered by a lack of test installs; soon we should have the ability to easily create new labs instances running Openstack and OpenStackManager for testing and development. Features Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Features_engineering> Editor retention: Editing tools *VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>* In May, the VisualEditor team worked to complete the major new features we have prioritised over the past few months. Our objective is for VisualEditor to be the default editor for all Wikipedia users, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the wikitext editor, in July 2013. We have focussed on four areas of new functionality: adding and editing inclusions of references, templates, categories and media items. Our main area of work over the past month has been on references and templates, and we now have implemented editing them in our experimental code; category editing is nearly complete and should be made available very soon. The deployed alpha version of VisualEditor was updated twice (1.22-wmf4<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf4#VisualEditor>and 1.22-wmf5 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf5#VisualEditor>), adding a number of user interface improvements, including further work on the back-end to better support the new features, and fixing a number of bugs. *Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>* In May, the Parsoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid> team implemented several new features, as well as important performance optimizations in preparation for the July VisualEditor release. A major image handling overhaul enabled rendering and editing of all image-related parameters with a relatively simple DOM structure<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/MediaWiki_DOM_spec#Images>. Template and extension editing was improved to support editing of templates within extensions. This lets editors modify and add templated citations in VisualEditor, an important feature to improve the quality of articles in Wikipedia. On the performance front, we are now reusing expensive template, extension and image expansions from our own previous output to avoid most API queries after an edit. This is necessary to avoid overloading the API when tracking all edits on Wikimedia projects. A cache infrastructure with appropriate purging was set up and will be tested at full load through June. At the Amsterdam hackathon, we helped developers leverage our rich HTML+RDFa DOM output<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/MediaWiki_DOM_spec>for projects like a Wikipedia-to-SMS service or the Kiwix offline Wikipedia reader <http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page>. Editor engagement features *Notifications <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_%28Notifications%29>* In May, we released new features and bug fixes for Notifications on the English Wikipedia and mediawiki.org. Ryan Kaldari, Vibha Bamba and Fabrice Florin collaborated with community members to develop a 'new message indicator'<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/New_message_indicator>, to inform users when someone posts on their talk page. The team also released a new 'Thanks notification<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/Thanks>' that lets editors show their appreciation to users who make helpful edits, and offers a quick way to give positive feedback on Wikipedia. Benny Situ developed a feature that marks messages as read when you visit your talk page and expanded our first metrics dashboards<http://toolserver.org/%7Edartar/en/echo/>, in collaboration with Dario Taraborelli and Aaron Halfaker. New team member Erik Bernhardson developed several new features, such as updating talk page notifications to link directly to their sections. Luke Welling continued to develop HTML Email notifications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#HTML_single_email_…>. Fabrice Florin worked with Oliver Keyes to discuss this product with a wide range of community members, and led the team to plan the next steps<https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/presentation/d/1LyqKRVH1mWs3OMWOCIL…>for Notifications and other editor engagement features. To learn more, visit the project portal<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications>, read the FAQ page<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/FAQ>and join the discussion on the talk page <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications>. *Article feedback <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback>* In May, we developed a few last features and bug fixes on the English<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ArticleFeedbackv5>, French <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Sp%C3%A9cial:ArticleFeedbackv5>and German<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:Spezial:Artikelr%C3%BCckmeldungen_v5>Wikipedias. As requested by community members, Matthias Mullie developed a new opt-in feature that makes it easier to enable or disable feedback on a page<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requireme…>, as well as new UI improvements to simplify the feedback page, based on designs by Pau Giner and specifications by Fabrice Florin. The team also released new feedback links<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requireme…>and tested the auto-archive<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requireme…>feature on prototype. For tips on how to use Article feedback, visit the testing page <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Testing>, and let us know what you think on this talk page<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5>. Feature development has now ended for this project, and we will determine our next steps based on the upcoming community vote on the German Wikipedia in coming weeks. *Flow <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal/Project_information>* Discussion portals were announced<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/05/20/flow-next-generation-discussion-syste…>and opened on three wikis: the English Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Wikipedia:Flow>, Meta-Wiki<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flow>, and mediawiki.org <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal>. An interactive prototype <http://unicorn.wmflabs.org/flow/> was released to the public for discussion. Discussion is on-going, and the definition of the "minimum viable product" is being worked on. Editor engagement experiments *Editor engagement experiments<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_engagement_experiments> * In May, the Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) launched its redesigns of account creation and login<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience>forms, after numerous bug fixes and working with local communities to customize the interface as needed. The initial rollout was to 30 of the largest Wikimedia projects in English and other languages, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikisource. Complete deployment as the default for all remaining projects was enabled early in June. Also this month, the team launched and tested a major revamp of the "Getting Started" <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GettingStarted>interface for onboarding new Wikipedians <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Onboarding_new_Wikipedians>(in English). This included a redesigned landing page, a refactor of the backend to increase speed and stability, a new navigation toolbar on articles that new users were given as their first editing task, and a guided tour <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Guided_tour> to help them complete their first edit. The results of A/B testing<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/R:OB5>of this new version showed the largest increase in click-through rates for the landing page – up to 32%, a large increase over the 10-12% click-through rate of previous versions. Overall, it also showed a small but statistically significant increase in the rate of first time edits (+1.7%) by new English Wikipedians invited to participate in Getting Started. Last but not least, the PostEdit extension<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PostEdit>(previously enabled on most of the top Wikimedia projects by size) was migrated to MediaWiki core. With this change, the post-edit confirmation message <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Confirmation_message> will be available on all projects, and will be more easily integrated in to VisualEditor <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor>. Support *2012 Wikimedia fundraiser<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2012_Wikimedia_fundraiser> * The Operations team moved db1025 into the firewalled fundraising cluster (frack), rebuilt it on Precise with MariaDB. RAID monitoring tools were updated to support RAID controllers used in frack. We've mostly finished building/puppetizing the new payments listener (thulium) as well as a new CiviCRM host (barium), both of which are in frack. Language engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering> *Language tools <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_tools>* The last round of major bugs have been fixed in the Universal Language Selector (ULS) before we start phased its deployment over the month of June across hundreds of Wikimedia websites. Communications announcements have been started for the first phase of deployment which includes removal of Narayam and WebFonts from sites before ULS is rolled out with the same integrated feature set. Test scenarios for ULS have been identified in detail. Implementation of automated tests is in progress. A combination of ULS integration and cross browser testing is in progress. Final performance tweaks are in progress before we get ready to launch the redesigned home page of Translatewiki.net in June. The monthly version of the Mediawiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB) was released on May 29. *Milkshake <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Milkshake>* jQuery.webfonts and jQuery.IME continue to be in maintenance mode with new input methods added to our repository this month. jQuery.ULS is being actively updated to reflect design changes suggested by the Product team as well as bug fixes. *Language Engineering Communications and Outreach<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Language_engineering_communications_and_outr…> * The Language Mavens met and discussed areas they can contribute to for Language tools. As part of GSoC 2013, all developers on the team are set to mentor 4 Language Engineering projects supporting jQuery.IME, Language Coverage Matrix, RTL support for Visual Editor and Translate mobile app. Monthly office hours and bug triage were held. The team continued to report and blog on its activities. Hackathon organization and participation at Amsterdam and Tel Aviv were very successful. Mobile <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering> *Wikipedia Zero <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>* This month, the team launched Wikipedia Zero with Mobilink in Pakistan, refactored legacy codebase, migrated configuration from monolithic wiki articles to per-carrier JSON configuration blobs, generated utility scripts, patched legacy hyperlink redirect and content rendering bugs, and supported partner on-boarding. *Mobile Web Photo Upload<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_design/Uploads> * This month, we've pushed the 'Nearby' view to the stable version of the mobile site. Now, with a location-aware device, you can easily identify articles close to your current location. We've also made ongoing improvements to photo uploads and the photo upload experience, including improved messaging around image quality and copyright requirements for new uploaders in the beta version of the mobile site. The upload features in general have been a great success, as we've sustained over 1000 unique uploaders <http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/unique-uploaders>over the last two months. We are continuing to experiment in the beta version of the site with improvements to article editing, an improved reorganization of site navigation, Echo notifications, talk pages, and simplifying discovery of article actions (eg editing and watching). We plan to launch these beta features over the course of the next month. Platform Engineering<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering> MediaWiki Core *MediaWiki 1.21 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap>* MediaWiki 1.21.0 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21> was released, followed by a MediaWiki 1.21.1 maintenance release. *MediaWiki 1.22 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/Roadmap>* MediaWiki 1.22wmf3 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf3>, wmf4 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf4>, and wmf5<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/wmf5>were deployed to Wikimedia sites during the month of May. This included one breaking change, gerrit change 49364<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#q,49364,n,z> . *Multimedia <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia>* After deploying Score <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Score> in April, various performance improvements and fixes were merged in May. To improve scaling of large images, the VipsScaler extension<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VipsScaler>was prepared on the cluster and is ready for deployment in the next weeks. TimedMediaHandler<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler>had various bug fixes and the libraries used to encode WebM videos were updated to improve quality and address encoding issues. *Wikidata deployment <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_deployment>* Wikidata continued to roll out updates to the client (what lives on the various project wikis) and repository (what powers wikidata.org) software; see the wikidata newsletter for more information: May 3rd<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Status_updates/2013_05_03>and May 24th <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Status_updates/2013_05_24>. Additionally, there was Operations-related work to create helpful URL redirects for entity matching along with fixes to the logging of autopatrolled edits (which was causing massive database usage and issues when doing archival dumps). These URL redirects and autopatrol fixes should go out in June. *Site performance and architecture<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Site_performance_and_architecture> * Many MediaWiki developers met in Amsterdam<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-May/069569.html>to discuss architectural principles <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_guidelines> and the RFC process. *Admin tools development<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development> * This month the team worked on Single User Login finalisation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/SUL_Audit>, which will mean that all user accounts will be global across all of Wikimedia's public wikis, and so allowing for cross-wiki notifications and better tools for editors. This will require all user accounts to be uniquely named and not conflict with other accounts. Some more work was done on the global account renaming tool<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development/Global_Rename>. The team attended the Wikimedia Hackathon 2013 in Amsterdam<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Hackathon_2013>where we discussed issues with admin tools and plans for the future with a number of volunteer developers. *Security auditing and response<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security_auditing_and_response> * We released MediaWiki 1.20.6/1.19.7 and provided security training for developers at the Amsterdam Hackathon. *HipHop deployment <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/HipHop_deployment>* Several engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation met with Facebook engineers to discuss potential deployment of HHVM in 2013 (summary<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-May/069264.html>). We formed the HipHop mailing list<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/hiphop>to discuss moving forward with this work. Quality assurance *Quality Assurance <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance>* In May, QA worked with a number of parties both in and outside the Wikimedia Foundation to test Echo, VisualEditor, Universal Language Selector, and other projects. We began an official QA mailing list<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/qa> . *Beta cluster <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_cluster>* In May, Ariel Glenn helped out setting up missing bits of infrastructure to the beta cluster. He added a Redis instance (that holds the job information) and HTTPS support <https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org>. HTTPS will let us write scenarios related to logging in on the wiki or via a mobile device; it will also let us test out OAuth. udp2log archiving is now working reliably. Max Semenik has set up an EventLogging infrastructure on beta, and Niklas Laxström enabled Universal Language Selector. The Job processing was malfunctioning but was restored. Since April 30, the MediaWiki instances are using NFS, which is much faster than the previous GlusterFS share; pages serving time went from 560 ms to 260 ms. Roan Kattouw has deployed Parsoid and VisualEditor on beta. Just like in production, users can enable it in your their preferences under 'Editing'. *Continuous integration<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Continuous_integration> * In the beginning of May, Jenkins/Zuul faced overload for a few days; this was resolved by upgrading Zuul and tweaking some time-expensive part of the code. Zuul now lets us define which jobs it triggers by using a predefined template which makes it easier to add new projects. Zuul is now faster to report changes back to Gerrit, which was a complaint during rush hours. The Wikibase client and repo components are now tested in Jenkins. All puppet repositories are now verifying the puppet manifests and erb templates for syntax validity. The Qunit tests being run for MediaWiki core and VisualEditor seem to be in good shape. PHP CodeSniffer has been upgraded as well as the standard for MediaWiki code. We have yet to enforce it though, since the current code base does not pass the standard. *Browser testing<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Quality_Assurance/Browser_testing> * In May, we added beta labs as a target for automated browser tests, which allowed us to create tests for the Universal Language Selector at the Hackathon in Amsterdam. We shored up a lot of Jenkins builds at the hackathon as well. We created our first test for VisualEditor, and we are looking forward to working with Rachel Thomas (as part of the Outreach Program for Women) to create more. Analytics *Analytics infrastructure<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Infrastructure> * We continued our efforts of increasing our monitor coverage of the different webrequest dataflows. On the udp2log side, we added monitoring per DC/server role<http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?c=Miscellaneous%20pmtpa&h=emery.wikime…>. Every month, we work on improving the robustness and security of the analytics-related servers that we run: we moved the multicast relay from Oxygen to Gadolinium, we upgraded Oxygen to Ubuntu Precise, and we moved all the Limn-based dashboards from the Kripke labs instance to the Limn0 labs instance. Continous integration for webstatscollector, wikistats and udp-filters now works. The puppet module for Hadoop<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/61710/>has been merged in the Operations reposotiry; this is a big step forward in moving Kraken from beta to production status. Magnus Edenhill demonstrated varnishkafka based on Kafka 0.8; on a local machine varniskafka was able to process 140k msgs/s and we are planning to do production testing mid June. Last, we separated the Kraken machines from the other production servers by installing network ACLs. *Analytics Visualization, Reporting & Applications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Visualization,_Reporting_%26_Appli…> * For the mobile team, we started collecting pageview counts<http://stats.wikimedia.org/kraken-public/webrequest/mobile/platform/>for both official and non-official Wikipedia apps. We changed our Kafka import configuration so that the raw webrequest folders are directly queryable using Hive. The decision was made to re-platform the UMAPI codebase; we have spent quite some time specifying user stories<https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/analytics/cards?favorite_id=764&…>and had productive discussions about the architecture during the Amsterdam Hackathon. On the development side, the 'page count' metric was introduced. We adapted Ori Livneh's Mediawiki Vagrant VM to also support UMAPI in combination with test data. This will make it much easier to debug issues and open development up to community members. We also fixed numerous stability bugs. Engineering community team *Bug management <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management>* A Wikimedia Labs instance <http://boogs.wmflabs.org/> to test Bugzilla software changes and a patch to puppetize Bugzilla<https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/62404/>are now available (thanks to Ori Livneh <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:User:Ori.livneh>). This will make updating Bugzilla to newer versions and reapplying Wikimedia's custom patches much easier. A MediaWiki Installer bugday<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20130503>took place in preparation of the MediaWiki 1.21 release, as well as an IRC office hour<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2013-05-13>. Andre Klapper worked on a proposal for a Bugzilla admin policy<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:AKlapper_%28WMF%29/BugzillaAdminPolicy>. In Bugzilla's configuration, the number of Bugzilla administrators<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/System_administrators/table>has been decreased in order to improve coordination. As a side-effect of his investigation, Andre documented<http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2013/05/28/understanding-bugzilla-groups-an…>the meaning of Bugzilla admin rights. *Mentorship programs <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs>* We selected 20 Google Summer of Code<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2013>and 2 Outreach Program for Women<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_Program_for_Women/Round_6>projects that will be mentored by a total of 32 volunteers. This represents more than double the amount of projects we had last year. We received 69 applications from 60 students for Google Summer of Code 2013, from which 9 were also applying to OPW, and 4 OPW-only individual applications. Google allocated the 21 slots we requested, but we decided to give one back in order to keep a standard on project feasibility. *Technical communications<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications> * In May, Guillaume Paumier <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Guillom>'s major focus was on supporting Tech ambassadors<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Ambassadors>and setting up Tech news <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News>, an initiative aiming to collaboratively monitor recent software changes likely to impact Wikimedians, and distribute a weekly summary, free of technical jargon, to subscribers on their talk page. Two issues of this weekly summary were published this month; starting with the second issue, the content is now distributed in several languages if translations are available. Guillaume also continued to review technical blog posts, and executed the move of the Mobile documentation<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Technical_communications/Mobile_documentatio…>from Meta-Wiki to mediawiki.org. *Volunteer coordination and outreach<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Volunteer_coordination_and_outreach> * Quim Gil <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil> has been preparing a proposal to get automated community metrics<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_metrics>based on vizGrimoire <http://vizgrimoire.bitergia.org/> and provided by their maintainers, Bitergia <http://bitergia.com/>. It is currently being discussed with Sumana Harihareswara<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sharihareswara_%28WMF%29>and Rob Lanphier <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa-WMF> for budget approval. Quim also worked on a user-friendly template for the landing page of the wikitech-announce<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-announce>mailing list that can be used for other Wikimedia lists (source code <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil/wikitech-announce>). He also created a landing page for organizations<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Organizations>willing to collaborate with Wikimedia to co-organize technical activities. Kiwix <http://www.kiwix.org> *The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CH> .* With openZIM <http://www.openzim.org>, we have finally released the first version of its standard implementation code: the zimlib<http://www.openzim.org/wiki/Zimlib>. Kiwix was introduced in Debian testing<http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=all&arch=any&searchon=names&keyword…>. A new release of Kiwix for Android<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwixmobile>, with a few bug fixes and improvements, was released. Our first GSoC project (ZIM incremental updates for Kiwix<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993/ZIM_incremental_updat…>) was prepared and accepted; work has already started with Kiran<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kiran_mathew_1993>, the Indian student responsible for this project. Wikidata<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata> *The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/en> .* The Wikidata team worked on 2 major topics in May: the ability to access data from Wikidata in a Wikipedia article by its label and not just its ID, and the ability to enter points in time into Wikidata<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Time_datatype_available…>, which for example now makes it possible to enter the date of birth of a person. Magnus Manske blogged about the tool ecosystem<http://blog.wikimedia.de/2013/05/06/the-wikidata-tool-ecosystem/>that is building around Wikidata. During the next 3 months, the team will be working<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-l/2013-May/002293.html>with 3 Google Summer of Code students, and 2 other students will be working with other organizations on Wikidata-related projects. The codebase has been reviewed<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata-tech/2013-May/000006.html>by Qafoo. Wikidata-tech <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-tech>, a new mailing list for discussions related to the development around Wikidata, was created. Additionally, the team attended the hackathon in Amsterdam to give tutorials and meet other developers. A prototype of a multilingual map <http://4thmain.github.io/d3hacks/wiki-atlas.html> was built there, among other things. Future The engineering management team continues to update the *Deployments<https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments> * page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the *engineering roadmap<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Roadmap> *, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts. -- Guillaume Paumier Technical Communications Manager — Wikimedia Foundation https://donate.wikimedia.org

10 years, 11 months

This Month in GLAM: May 2013

by The 'This Month in GLAM' team

*This Month in GLAM* is a monthly newsletter documenting recent happenings within the GLAM project, such as content donations, residencies, events and more. GLAM is an acronym of *G*alleries, *L*ibraries, *A*rchives and *M*useums. You can find more information on the project at glamwiki.org. *This Month in GLAM – Issue V, Volume III – May 2013* ------------------------------ Australia and New Zealand report: Australian participation - east and west; urban and outback; at home and away http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Austra… Belgium report: Belgian cultural institutions interested in Open Data http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Belgiu… Czech Republic report: QRpedia codes in Silesian Museum Opava http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Czech_… Finland report: Maps; WLPA; Workshop material http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Finlan… France report: Edit-a-thon in Quai Branly http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/France… Germany report: Being online on air - TV cooperation http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/German… Mexico report: Edit-a-thons in Puebla and Mexico City; *Möebius* radio program http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Mexico… Netherlands report: Europeana Fashion edit-a-thon; First Dutch Wikipedian in Residence; Wikimedia Hackathon; Wiki loves libraries http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Nether… Spain report: Wiki Loves Catalan Public libraries http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Spain_… Sweden report: A month full of art http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Sweden… Switzerland report: QRpedia Pilot at the Natural History Museum in Bern http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Switze… UK report: Monmouth; Museums; More http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/UK_rep… USA report: Wikipedian in Residence in the Smithsonian; News in brief http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/USA_re… Special story: GLAM and Early Telescopes http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Specia… Open Access report: Bugfixes; over 10,000 files from PLOS; conferences http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Open_A… Calendar: June's GLAM events http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Contents/Events ------------------------------ Single page view http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/May_2013/Single Twitter http://twitter.com/ThisMonthinGLAM Work on the next edition http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/Newsroom -- The *This Month in GLAM* team http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter

10 years, 11 months

The Signpost -- Volume 9, Issue 23 -- 05 June 2013

by Wikipedia Signpost

10 years, 11 months

Fwd: Welcome to Ken Snider, Wikimedia Operations

by Erik Moeller

FYI :) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 9:17 AM Subject: Welcome to Ken Snider, Wikimedia Operations To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Hello all, I’m delighted to announce that Ken Snider is joining the Wikimedia operations team. He will start as an international contractor working remotely from Toronto, Canada on June 10, and will be visiting SF in the week of June 17. We’re currently in the process of seeking work authorization in the United States in the Director of TechOps position. CT has graciously agreed to support the ops leadership transition full-time through June, and part-time through July. We’ll be starting the handover while Ken is working remotely. A bit more about Ken: Ken was apparently genetically predisposed to become a sysadmin since he joined one of Canada’s first large ISPs, Primus, straight out of school in 1997 and helped build their infrastructure til 2001. He then joined a startup called OpenCOLA in 2001 which was co-founded by Cory Doctorow and developed early P2P precursors to tools like BitTorrent and Steam. It’s best known today for the development of an open source (GPL’d) cola recipe which is still in use (more than 150,000 cans sold if Wikipedia is to be believed). Ken got involved in one of Cory’s pet projects, BoingBoing.net which some of you may have heard of ;-), and has been their sysadmin since 2003. After a stint from 2001-2005 at DataWire, Ken became Director of Tech Ops at Federated Media, a role he held from 2005-2012. Federated Media is an ad network that was founded to support high traffic blogs and sites that want to stay independent of large publishers, with a network that supports more than 1B requests/day. One of the unusual challenges at FM was that the company grew through acquisitions of various blogging and publishing networks. This led to the challenge of integrating very heterogeneous operations and engineering infrastructure, including multiple geographically distributed ops teams and data-center locations. As DTO, Ken led these efforts, such as OS standardization, development of a unified deployment infrastructure, etc. Ken also ensured that the operations group partnered effectively with the various engineering teams developing site features and enhancements. I want to again take this opportunity to thank CT Woo for his tireless operations leadership since December 2010. I’d also like to thank everyone who’s participated in the Director of TechOps search process. Please join me in welcoming Ken to the Wikimedia Foundation and the community. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

10 years, 11 months

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