Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: January 2009
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MY CURRENT PRIORITIES
1. World Economic Forum at Davos
2. Annual fundraising campaign wrap-up
3. January board meeting
4. Stanton Usability project starts up
5. Bits and pieces: normal fundraising activities, grant proposal
development, strategic plan, etc.
THIS PAST MONTH
JANUARY BOARD MEETING
On January 9-11, the Board of Trustees met at the Wikimedia Foundation
office in San Francisco. Agenda items included: a recap of the
success of the online fundraiser; a financial update recapping the
basics of the 2008-09 annual plan and informing the Board that the
organization is on track to meet its targets; an overview of the
proposed plan for achieving resolution on the license migration issue;
a walk-through of changes to the Form 990, coming next year;
presentation of a resolution requiring people bound by the Conflict of
Interest policy to update their statements annually; presentation of a
resolution to approve the establishment of a new Citibank account in
France; a general discussion of the time and travel commitment for
board members; presentation of resolutions to recognize Wikimedia NYC
as Wikimedia's first sub-national chapter, and to recognize Wiki UK
Limited as a chapter; presentation of the minutes of the October board
meeting and the November IRC board meeting; a discussion of the
collaborative strategy development process requested of Sue by the
Board; a review of the role of the Ombudsman commission and the
appointment of new members; an evaluation and revamp of Wikimedia
Board-created committees; an update on the status of the hiring of the
Chief Program Officer; an executive session; a wide-ranging
conversation with a potential new Advisory Board member; an update on
the activity of the Nominating Committee, and a presentation of
comScore Media Metrix data. The minutes of the January 9-11 Board of
Trustees meeting are expected to be released within a month or two.
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
>From January 27 to February 1, Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner attended
the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The main goals of the
trip were to present a proposal to a potential funder, increase
awareness of Wikipedia as a charity among WEF attendees, and actively
move forward relationships with a few key major donor prospects. Sue
was also able to meet briefly in Zurich with Board members of the
Swiss chapter. It was a successful trip, with all major goals met,
and is fully documented in a report to the Board of Trustees,
distributed to foundation-l on February 3. For further details,
please see that report.
LICENSE MIGRATION
On January 21, Erik Moeller and Mike Godwin published a proposal for
Wikimedia projects to migrate from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA, in order to
achieve greater legal compatibility with existing free educational
content, and to simplify and clarify the obligations of re-users. The
proposal invites all Wikimedia project contributors who have made at
least 10 edits prior to January 12, 2009, to participate in the
decision of whether to migrate. The vote will be made through an
implementation of the Board election software, and will be securely
administered by a third party. The proposal is here
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update. The vote is planned
to be held before April.
COLLABORATIVE STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Earlier in 2008, Michael Snow had asked Sue to begin designing a
heavily community-consultative process for development of a
three-to-five-year strategic plan for Wikimedia. The goals of the
strategy development process: 1) To develop a better shared
understanding inside Wikimedia regarding where we're collectively
headed, and 2) To enable us to communicate our goals more clearly to
external stakeholders, partners and the general public, so they can
join us in helping reach them. This would be a highly unusual,
volunteer-centric process, which would pose unique challenges, and
create unique opportunities to innovate. At the Board meeting in
January, Sue presented an early-stage draft proposal. The Board
endorsed the work done thus far, and asked Sue to continue evolving
the plan, including beginning to work through timing and resourcing.
FUNDRAISING AND GRANTS
During January, the Wikimedia Foundation wrapped up its annual giving
campaign for 2008-09: the most successful and ambitious fundraiser in
Wikimedia's history, with donations more than double the previous
year.
Between the launch of the campaign on November 4, 2008 and its
conclusion on January 9, 2009, a total of 139,124 people contributed
USD 4,967,759.77. This is particularly notable because of the
current very difficult global economic climate, and is testimony to
the dedication and passion of Wikimedia's many supporters. The
Wikimedia Foundation is enormously grateful to everyone who
contributed to the success of the fundraiser.
Seven of the international Wikimedia chapters participated in the
campaign, committing to apply 50% of monies received towards
priorities agreed-upon by both organizations. Wikimedia Österreich
(Austria) will contribute USD 6,271; Wikimedia Deutschland (Germany)
will contribute USD 189,486; Wikimédia France will contribute USD
40,252; Wikimedia Hungary will contribute USD 184; Wikimedia Israel
will contribute USD 947; Wikimedia Nederland will contribute USD
10,879. Wikimedia CH (Switzerland) has already contributed USD
29,173, and Wikimedia Italia, which did not participate in the
fundraiser, has contributed USD 4,550. (Please note that with the
exception of the figures attributed to Wikimedia CH and Wikimedia
Italia, the amounts listed here are inexact, due to fluctuating
exchange rates and other variables.)
In the month of January, the Wikimedia Foundation received 15,033
donations smaller than USD 10,000, totalling approximately USD
546,434.55. We also received major gifts totalling USD 50,000.
In January, the Mozilla Foundation awarded a grant of USD 100,000 to
the Wikimedia Foundation to help coordinate improvements to the
development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies.
Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards.
Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in
support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg
Theora formats, in which all Wikipedia audio and video is stored. The
USD 100,000 grant will be used to support the work of long-time
contributors to the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codebase and related tools, such
as libraries for network seeking. The improvements will be made over
the next six months.
In January, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a weekly “Restricted
Gifts” meeting bringing together the staff members who work on
mission-related projects that need funding, with the staff members
whose jobs are to secure funding. The meeting's purpose is to create
an avenue for frequent communication, in order to enable the
revenue-generating staff to speak authoritatively with external
parties about Wikimedia's goals and priorities, and also to provide
feedback to their colleagues from potential funders.
OUTREACH AND PROGRAMS
In January, Sue continued pre-interviewing candidates for the position
of Chief Program Officer. She also invited Board member Kat Walsh and
Board Chair Michael Snow to participate in the hiring interviews,
scheduled for February.
In January, Frank Schulenburg began developing the concept of a
Wikimedia “bookshelf”: a repository of reference materials designed to
1) create awareness of the Wikimedia projects and provide basic
information about them, 2) invite people to contribute to the
projects, including information designed to overcome common objections
to participation, and 3) provide information about how to edit the
Wikimedia projects, including tip sheets, how-to's, an annotated
“anatomy of an article,” policy summaries, etc. Some of the material
will be aimed at particular audiences such as schools. Working with
Jay and others, including a variety of external contractors, Frank
will design and develop the “bookshelf” in English over the coming
year. When complete, it is intended to serve as core instructional
materials, to be translated, adapted and used for multiple purposes by
Wikimedia chapters, individual volunteers, and partner organizations
such as schools.
Frank also created a set of help pages for the PediaPress book
extension, marking the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has
provided educational support for the release of a new MediaWiki
software feature. He began developing a Wikipedia Academy brochure. He
prepared a set of priority questions to be answered from the
(UNU-Merit) Wikimedia General Survey of Contributors and Readers,
began exploring the German "Mentorenproject" and began gathering
information about best practices in the German “Wiwiwiki” project.
Also in January, John Broughton’s book “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual”
was released for free on the English language Wikipedia, enabling
Wikipedia users around the world to read and edit it. John first
contributed to Wikipedia in August 2005: he is author of the Editor’s
index to Wikipedia, a comprehensive list of reference pages and links
to useful information and tools for Wikipedia editors. “Wikipedia:
The Missing Manual” teaches new users how to contribute to Wikipedia
and gives practical advice on how to collaborate with others to
improve the free encyclopedia’s content. The book was published by
O’Reilly in January 2008 and can now be found on Wikipedia’s help
pages. The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful to John and to O'Reilly
for this great gift to Wikipedia users.
TECHNOLOGY
On January 2, Naoko Komura began work for the Wikimedia Foundation
managing the Stanton usability project. The goal of the project is to
measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by
improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral
studies, thereby reducing barriers to participation. Naoko had worked
for Wikimedia for the prior three months as a contractor shepherding
two important projects: the Wikimedia General Survey of Readers and
Contributors, which was successfully launched and received tens of
thousands of responses in late 2008, and the Wikimania 2008
postmortem. Prior to joining Wikimedia, Naoko has worked as a Senior
Program Manager and Project Manager for Yahoo! Mail, Postini, and
Cygnus Solutions. She has an MA in International Development Policy
from Stanford University and an MS in Economics from Kobe University
in Japan. Naoko is a native speaker of Japanese.
On January 21, Naoko announced that, following a rigorous search
process, the new usability team will be housed at the offices of
Wikia, Inc. Wikimedia will pay market rent to sublease two Wikia
conference rooms, two blocks from the Wikimedia Foundation. The
deciding factors were proximity to the Wikimedia office, and readiness
of the space for immediate use. This will have the added benefit of
bringing Wikimedia's usability team into contact with Wikia
developers, who have been doing intensive work on Mediawiki usability.
Wikia, Inc. was co-founded by Wikimedia Foundation board member Jimmy
Wales: Jimmy was not involved in the decision to sublease from Wikia.
Naoko also posted three usability team job openings on the Wikimedia
Foundation website: an interaction designer, a senior software
developer, and a software developer. All will be located in San
Francisco, and are contract positions from February 15, 2009 to April
16, 2010.
In January, Brion Vibber posted a job advertisement on the Wikimedia
Foundation website, seeking a full-time system administrator to help
monitor, maintain, and document the 400+ Linux/Unix servers that
operate Wikipedia and its sister projects. This position will be based
at our San Francisco headquarters, but will work closely with our
remote staff and volunteers. A full-time system administrator will
let us be more responsive to site issues when they happen, and more
importantly be more proactive about planning for and averting problems
before they affect the folks back home.
The AbuseFilter extension (
http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter ) by Andrew Garrett, a
Wikimedia contractor, was enabled for testing on test.wikipedia.org.
It allows privileged users to set specific controls on user activity
and create automated reactions for certain behaviours. It can
potentially be used to handle many tasks that are currently performed
by bots, and to improve detection of problematic activity. A study
last year indicated that a particular filter, if applied in August
2007, would have blocked 60% of all page-move vandalism on English
Wikipedia over the subsequent year, with just five false positives
(0.6%).
The Drafts extension by Trevor Parscal (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Drafts ) was enabled for
testing on test.wikipedia.org. It automatically saves draft copies of
pages the user is working on to the server in regular intervals, to
allow edit recovery in case of browser or system crashes.
In October, the technical team rolled out the “wiki to print” feature
enabling users to generate PDF files, OpenDocument word processor
files, and on-demand printed books in one of our smaller sister
projects, Wikibooks. In January, wiki-to-print was enabled on the
German Wikipedia. Readers can now compile a wiki-book from any number
of Wikipedia articles, download a PDF or OpenDocument version, or
order a printed version from our technology partner, PediaPress.
COMMUNICATIONS
On January 2, the Wikimedia Foundation issued a press release
announcing the successful conclusion of its annual giving campaign.
On January 13, the Wikimedia Foundation issued a press release
announcing the appointment of Roger McNamee to the Foundation's
Advisory Board. Roger McNamee is Managing Director and Co-Founder of
Elevation Partners, which invests in media and consumer technology
companies. He is a long-term San Francisco Bay Area resident, a
professional musician, and a prominent Wikipedia supporter.
During the month of January, the Wikimedia Foundation and its
representatives had contact with the following media outlets: the
Reuters TV program “Davos Today;” BBC Radio; the German-language Swiss
daily paper Neue Zürcher Zeitung; the New York Times; the LA Times;
Italian news magazine Panorama; SWR Radio in Baden Baden, Germany; CBC
Radio in Toronto, Canada; Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia; Dutch
portal OneMoreThing.nl; Green 960 AM Radio in San Francisco,
California; technology news site TG Daily; New Delhi magazine SPAN;
news/blog site The Huffington Post; the weekly IT publication Network
World; the Las Vegas Sun; KFOG, an FM rock radio station in San
Francisco, California; the Dutch daily newspaper Nederlands Dagblad;
the Associated Press, and the Canadian daily newspaper the Globe and
Mail.
FINANCE AND ADMIN
In January, the Wikimedia Foundation enriched its employee health
insurance coverage by providing more comprehensive health and dental
coverage and adding vision coverage, while lowering the cost of the
plan. The Wikimedia Foundation also expanded its business insurance,
while lowering costs. And, we negotiated a reduction in Paypal fees,
including for amounts received during the online fundraiser.
IN COMING WEEKS
* Mid-year financial statements will be released
* Chief Program Officer hiring interviews will take place
[I've changed the subject line.]
2009/3/11 Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se>:
> If the content is free, people don't need to drink from our
> watertap. It's the water that's important, not the tap. We could
> have a minimal webserver to receive new edits. Serving replication
> feeds to a handful of media corporations (who might pay for it!)
> should be far cheaper than to receive all this web traffic. Some
> universities might serve up ad-free mirrors. We could be the
> Associated Press instead of the New York Times, the producer
> instead of the retailer.
> Or is the fact that we spend so much to maintain the 7th most
> visited website an admission to the fact that the space between
> the copies actually has a great value to us? A value that will be
> strengthened by cementing its URL and/or the name Wikipedia
> (attributing the project) into the new license?
> I'm not against that. I will go with whatever. I'm very flexible
> and I still think this is a very fun technical experiment. But I
> think the change is worth some consideration.
This is somewhat true. MediaWiki still needs a bloody huge central
database server (or three) and so it has them.
I suppose the place to ask your question is on wikitech-l.
Being able to duplicate the infrastructure is necessary for forking to
be meaningful:
http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/
I'm not sure anything listed there has meaningfully changed in the
last two years.
- d.
On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml(a)creativecommons.org>wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 12:46 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2009/3/6 Mike Linksvayer <ml(a)creativecommons.org>:
> >> Yes.
> >>
> >> Mike (not the CC counsel but just spoke to her)
> >
> > And what was the exact wording of the question asked and what was the
> > line of reasoning?
>
> The question was whether attribution by URL works offline as well as on.
>
> It was a very simple question (though she's read this thread) and
> answer, didn't go into reasoning.
I see you've posted a blog post (
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/13232) which suggests that
attribution by link was added in 2.5. You point to this a blog post by Mia
Garlick (http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5447) announcing the draft
changes. From the content of those changes I gather that you are referring
to the clause regarding the "terms of service or other reasonable means".
Is this correct?
--- On Mon, 3/9/09, Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> From: Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Biographies of Living People: a quick interim update
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Monday, March 9, 2009, 4:59 PM
> 2009/3/8 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>:
> > On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> 1) There is a big unresolved question around
> whether, if
> >> marginally-notable people ask to have their
> articles deleted, that
> >> request should be granted. My sense -both from
> the discussion here
> >> and other discussions elsewhere- is that many
> Wikipedians are very
> >> strongly protective of their general right to
> retain even very
> >> marginal BLPs. Presumably this is because
> notability is hard to
> >> define, and they are worried about stupid
> across-the-board
> >> interpretations that will result in massive
> deletionism. However,
> >> other people strongly feel that the current
> quantity of BLPs about
> >> less-notable people diminish the overall quality
> of the encyclopedia,
> >> reduce our credibility, and run the risk of
> hurting real people.
> >> There seems to be little consensus here.
> Roughly: some people seem
> >> to strongly feel the bar for notability should be
> set higher, and
> >> deletion requests generally granted: others seem
> to strongly feel the
> >> current state is preferable. I would welcome
> discussion about how to
> >> achieve better consensus on this issue.
> >>
> >>
> > I would quibble with this statement a little bit.
> There is a difference in
> > my mind between raising the notability bar and
> granting weight to subject
> > requests for deletion. There seems to be a growing
> agreement that marginally
> > notable subjects make for bad biographies and greater
> risk; there is very
> > little appetite for beginning deletion discussions or
> deleting articles upon
> > subject request.
> >
> > So these two issues need to be separated, because
> indeed they are quite
> > separate.
>
> Totally agreed, yes - thanks Nathan. In future I will
> separate these
> two points.
>
> One asks whether the subject of an article (be it a
> person,
> > corporation, or any other entity with living
> representatives) should be
> > afforded some control over encyclopedia content, even
> as little as the
> > ability to request a deletion nomination; most
> Wikipedians would be against
> > this, I believe.
>
> Hm. That's interesting.
>
> As a basic principle, that makes sense to me - that article
> subjects
> shouldn't have control over the content of the
> encyclopedia. But
> -perhaps this is a little bit of hair-splitting- OTOH I
> don't think we
> should take deletion requests any _less_ seriously than
> complaints
> from disinterested observers. In other words - someone
> saying "the
> article about me is awful and shouldn't be in an
> encyclopedia" should
> be taken equally as seriously as someone saying "that
> article about X
> is awful and doesn't deserve to be in an encyclopedia." In
> both
> instances, the article needs be assessed on its own
> merits.
>
> I say this because sometimes I think people may be tempted
> to refuse
> deletion requests _because_ they come from the article
> subject. If
> that indeed happens, I believe it's a mistake.
That is why I think we should process deletion requests by the subject without any special notice if they have a chance being deleted. And if they are obvious cases where they will be kept, simply tell the person we don't delete on request. Putting these articles at AfD with a note that the subject requested deletion is going to make things worse most of the time. It will attract people to the discussion who are interested in putting on a show for the announced audience and who would not show up at a basic AfD. I don't think listing an AfD as a subject request will change the overall result of the discussion, but just make the path to that result more difficult for the subject.
Birgitte SB
[Resending for archival purposes on Sue's behalf; also fixed typo:
94m->94K --Erik]
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: December 2008
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MY CURRENT PRIORITIES
1. The 2008-09 annual fundraising campaign
2. India Wikimedia awareness trip
3. Planning for Davos and the January board meeting
4. Stanton Usability project
5. Bits and pieces: normal fundraising activities, grant proposal
development, etc.
THIS PAST MONTH
INDIA TRIP
On December 9-15, Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner visited India. The
purpose of the trip was to create excitement and interest about
Wikipedia inside India among editors and potential editors, media, and
potential donors. The Wikimedia Foundation websites are the fourth
most popular web property world-wide, and sixth most-popular in India.
We were there to accept a gift from the Kerala government of a
Malayalam encyclopedia, which Kerala was releasing under a free
license, as well as to carry out a variety of outreach and media
activities. Jimmy spoke at the Free Software Free Society conference
in Trivandrum; a Wikipedia Academy was staged in Chennai; we met with
representatives of the Knowledge Foundation and with the Centre for
Internet and Society. Jimmy spoke at the Bangalore International
Centre; we received a briefing on the work of the Akshara Foundation,
Pratham Books, Argyham and e-Gov. We spoke at a private dinner, and
participated in several press conferences. The trip is fully
documented in the Report to the Board: India, which was published to
the board and also on foundation-l.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/158605
FUNDRAISING AND GRANTS
At 8:14 PM PST on Wednesday, December 31, the annual giving campaign
hit its USD 6M goal. It was the most successful and ambitious
fundraiser in Wikimedia's history, with donations more than double the
previous year. This is particularly notable because of the current
very difficult global economic climate, and is testimony to the
dedication and passion of Wikimedia's many supporters. The Wikimedia
Foundation is enormously grateful to everyone who contributed to the
success of the fundraiser.
In total, in the month of December, the Wikimedia Foundation received
79,611 donations smaller than USD 10,000, totaling USD 2.8m. We also
received major gifts totaling USD 94K.
Also in December, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a major grant of
USD 890,000 from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation, for the purpose of
making Wikipedia's writing and editing interface easier to use for
first-time authors. The grant will be used to fund a project team at
the Wikimedia Foundation's offices in San Francisco. This is our
second grant from the Stanton Foundation, which earlier gave us USD
262,000 for hardware purchases. The Wikimedia Foundation announced
the hiring of Naoko Komura to manage the Stanton usability project:
she will begin work on the project January 2. Because the Wikimedia
Foundation's office is currently at capacity, office manager Daniel
Phelps began a search for a satellite office to house the new
usability team.
The fundraising team continued to develop grant proposals for various
funders. Sue, Mike and the fundraising team investigated options for
offering tax deductibility for donations originating outside the
United States, including the commissioning of research from an
external firm.
LICENSE MIGRATION
On December 17, Erik Moeller and Mike Godwin posted a first set of
questions and answers related to license migration, here
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers.
The purpose of the FAQ is to describe the Wikimedia Foundation's
position on the license migration issue. It answers questions such
as: what is this issue about, why would the Wikimedia projects migrate
from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA, what is the history of the issue, and what
are the next steps in the decision-making process. The Wikimedia
Foundation expects to release a proposal for migration by mid-January,
which the Wikimedia community will later be asked to vote upon.
OUTREACH AND PROGRAMS
Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach, completed his move to the
United States from Germany, and was warmly welcomed by the staff.
Everybody was thrilled to finally have Frank with us in San Francisco.
On December 17, the Wikimedia Foundation staged an all-day meeting
with Patricio Lorente and Carlos Alberto Barcenilla of the Argentina
chapter, and with Phoebe Ayers, a longtime Wikimania organizer near
San Francisco. The goal of the meeting was to determine roles and
responsibilities for Wikimania 2009 with regards to financial
planning, sponsorships and travel scholarships. Wikimania 2009 -to be
held August 25-28 in Buenos Aires- will be the first Wikimania in
several years not to have been project-managed by a member of the
staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, hence the desire to clarify
responsibilities. If Wikimania 2009 planning runs smoothly, we plan
to replicate the 2009 roles-and-responsibilities, with iterations as
desired, for future Wikimanias.
Sue began pre-interviewing candidates for the newly-created position
of Chief Program Officer, as laid out in the 2008-09 annual plan. The
role of the CPO is to provide leadership to the Wikimedia Foundation's
program staff (currently, Jay, Frank and Cary), and to support and
facilitate the work of the international Wikimedia volunteer
community. It's an unusual job in a unique organization, which
means the successful candidate could come from a number of different
backgrounds, such as education, the non-profit/NGO world, technology,
digital media, product development, the free culture movement, etc.
In order to allow time for a rich and diverse pool of candidates to
develop, the job was posted on the Wikimedia Foundation website in
September, and also distributed via various lists and networks such as
LinkedIn. Interviews will take place in January and February.
COMMUNICATIONS
On December 3, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the Stanton grant
(as detailed above). Please see
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikipedia_to_become_more…
and http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/StantonGrantQA.
On December 7 and 9, the Wikimedia Foundation issued press releases
related to the blacklisting of one of its articles by a UK-based
internet watchdog group. On December 7, the Wikimedia Foundation
announced that as of December 6, 2008, most Internet users in the
United Kingdom were being denied full access to Wikipedia. Due to
censorship by the UK self-regulatory agency the Internet Watch
Foundation (IWF), most UK residents were rendered unable to edit
Wikipedia, and were denied access to an article in it describing a
32-year-old album by German rock group the Scorpions. Wikipedia
visitors in the UK also reported performance issues accessing the
site. The Wikimedia Foundation urged the IWF to remove Wikipedia from
its blacklist. Two days later, following considerable media coverage,
the Wikimedia Foundation issued a press release applauding the IWF's
removal of Wikipedia from its blacklist.
On December 15, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the appointment to
its Advisory Board of Neeru Khosla, co-founder and chair of CK-12, a
non-profit based in Palo Alto, California which is pioneering in the
area of open source textbooks.
During December, the Wikimedia Foundation and its representatives
participated in interviews with the Canadian daily newspaper the Globe
and Mail; the Wall Street Journal; the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation; KGO Radio (San Francisco); KGO ABC TV (San Francisco);
the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper; Computer Weekly magazine;
Laptop magazine; Time Out Bangalore; the New York Times; Wired News;
the Associated Press; the BBC World Service; German news site Heise
Online; CNET (San Francisco); the Financial Times newspaper;
ABCNews.com; Wired News; local New York newspaper The Alcove; NBC
Universal, and NBC Channel 1.
During December, Jay travelled to New York to staff some heavy media
days with Jimmy, and began exploratory talks with several branding
agencies.
FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
In December, KPMG completed the first draft of the 990 tax return.
The final version is expected to be be filed in April.
WMF continues to explore strategic partnerships (primarily in the
mobile space) which are mission-friendly and have more revenue
potential than other business development activities such as the
live-feed agreements.
TECHNOLOGY
Significant work went into improved real-time reporting tools for
donations, such as
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionStatistics and
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics . The
technical team also began setting up publicly downloadable dumps of
anonymized fundraising contribution data, so that interested
volunteers can study patterns and trends in the data.
Mark & Rob worked to get set up in a new data center in the
Netherlands, largely replacing the sponsored hosting services provided
for three years by Kennisnet. The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful to
Kennisnet for the significant support they have given us.
Bug #44, opened in August 2004, was finally fixed: the image
namespace, which can also contain sounds, video, uploaded documents
and other files, was renamed to File:, with redirects ensuring that
the old name continues to work.
The Configure extension was enabled for testing on
test.wikipedia.org. When deployed, it will make it easier for users
with limited technical access to perform tasks that can currently only
be performed by sysadmins, reducing the workload of the core
operations team.
Work has begun on an extension for managing and tracking data center
assets, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataCenter , which is
intended to replace the currently used RackTables software.
A brief report on the state of FlaggedRevs deployment, based in part
on a report by Philipp Birken about the German Wikipedia, was
published at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FlaggedRevs_Report_December_2008
Erik Zachte made significant improvements to the wikistats code to
improve its performance, and it is now running on its own dedicated
machine. Many updated statistics have been posted. (See:
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/12/wikistats-is-back/ ). When dumps
are available, statistics can now be generated regularly.
IN COMING WEEKS
Board Meeting January 9 – 11, 2009
Sue attending World Economic Forum in Davos (Jan. 24 – Feb. 2)
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: December 2008
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MY CURRENT PRIORITIES
1. The 2008-09 annual fundraising campaign
2. India Wikimedia awareness trip
3. Planning for Davos and the January board meeting
4. Stanton Usability project
5. Bits and pieces: normal fundraising activities, grant proposal
development, etc.
THIS PAST MONTH
INDIA TRIP
>From December 9-15, Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner visited India. The
purpose of the trip was to create excitement and interest about
Wikipedia inside India among editors and potential editors, media, and
potential donors. The Wikimedia Foundation websites are the fourth
most popular web property world-wide, and sixth most-popular in India.
We were there to accept a gift from the Kerala government of a
Malayalam encyclopedia, which Kerala was releasing under a free
license, as well as to carry out a variety of outreach and media
activities. Jimmy spoke at the Free Software Free Society conference
in Trivandrum; a Wikipedia Academy was staged in Chennai; we met with
representatives of the Knowledge Foundation and with the Centre for
Internet and Society. Jimmy spoke at the Bangalore International
Centre; we received a briefing on the work of the Akshara Foundation,
Pratham Books, Argyham and e-Gov. We spoke at a private dinner, and
participated in several press conferences. The trip is fully
documented in the Report to the Board: India, which was published to
the board and also on foundation-l.
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/158605
FUNDRAISING AND GRANTS
At 8:14 PM PST on Wednesday, December 31, the annual giving campaign
hit its USD 6M goal. It was the most successful and ambitious
fundraiser in Wikimedia's history, with donations more than double the
previous year. This is particularly notable because of the current
very difficult global economic climate, and is testimony to the
dedication and passion of Wikimedia's many supporters. The Wikimedia
Foundation is enormously grateful to everyone who contributed to the
success of the fundraiser.
In total, in the month of December, the Wikimedia Foundation received
79,611 donations smaller than USD 10,000, totaling USD 2.8m. We also
received major gifts totaling USD 94m.
Also in December, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a major grant of
USD 890,000 from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation, for the purpose of
making Wikipedia's writing and editing interface easier to use for
first-time authors. The grant will be used to fund a project team at
the Wikimedia Foundation's offices in San Francisco. This is our
second grant from the Stanton Foundation, which earlier gave us USD
262,000 for hardware purchases. The Wikimedia Foundation announced
the hiring of Naoko Komura to manage the Stanton usability project:
she will begin work on the project January 2. Because the Wikimedia
Foundation's office is currently at capacity, office manager Daniel
Phelps began a search for a satellite office to house the new
usability team.
The fundraising team continued to develop grant proposals for various
funders. Sue, Mike and the fundraising team investigated options for
offering tax deductibility for donations originating outside the
United States, including the commissioning of research from an
external firm.
LICENSE MIGRATION
On December 17, Erik Moeller and Mike Godwin posted a first set of
questions and answers related to license migration, here
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers.
The purpose of the FAQ is to describe the Wikimedia Foundation's
position on the license migration issue. It answers questions such
as: what is this issue about, why would the Wikimedia projects migrate
from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA, what is the history of the issue, and what
are the next steps in the decision-making process. The Wikimedia
Foundation expects to release a proposal for migration by mid-January,
which the Wikimedia community will later be asked to vote upon.
OUTREACH AND PROGRAMS
Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach, completed his move to the
United States from Germany, and was warmly welcomed by the staff.
Everybody was thrilled to finally have Frank with us in San Francisco.
On December 17, the Wikimedia Foundation staged an all-day meeting
with Patricio Lorente and Carlos Alberto Barcenilla of the Argentina
chapter, and with Phoebe Ayers, a longtime Wikimania organizer near
San Francisco. The goal of the meeting was to determine roles and
responsibilities for Wikimania 2009 with regards to financial
planning, sponsorships and travel scholarships. Wikimania 2009 -to be
held August 25-28 in Buenos Aires- will be the first Wikimania in
several years not to have been project-managed by a member of the
staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, hence the desire to clarify
responsibilities. If Wikimania 2009 planning runs smoothly, we plan
to replicate the 2009 roles-and-responsibilities, with iterations as
desired, for future Wikimanias.
Sue began pre-interviewing candidates for the newly-created position
of Chief Program Officer, as laid out in the 2008-09 annual plan. The
role of the CPO is to provide leadership to the Wikimedia Foundation's
program staff (currently, Jay, Frank and Cary), and to support and
facilitate the work of the international Wikimedia volunteer
community. It's an unusual job in a unique organization, which
means the successful candidate could come from a number of different
backgrounds, such as education, the non-profit/NGO world, technology,
digital media, product development, the free culture movement, etc.
In order to allow time for a rich and diverse pool of candidates to
develop, the job was posted on the Wikimedia Foundation website in
September, and also distributed via various lists and networks such as
LinkedIn. Interviews will take place in January and February.
COMMUNICATIONS
On December 3, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the Stanton grant
(as detailed above). Please see
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikipedia_to_become_more…
and http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/StantonGrantQA.
On December 7 and 9, the Wikimedia Foundation issued press releases
related to the blacklisting of one of its articles by a UK-based
internet watchdog group. On December 7, the Wikimedia Foundation
announced that as of December 6, 2008, most Internet users in the
United Kingdom were being denied full access to Wikipedia. Due to
censorship by the UK self-regulatory agency the Internet Watch
Foundation (IWF), most UK residents were rendered unable to edit
Wikipedia, and were denied access to an article in it describing a
32-year-old album by German rock group the Scorpions. Wikipedia
visitors in the UK also reported performance issues accessing the
site. The Wikimedia Foundation urged the IWF to remove Wikipedia from
its blacklist. Two days later, following considerable media coverage,
the Wikimedia Foundation issued a press release applauding the IWF's
removal of Wikipedia from its blacklist.
On December 15, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the appointment to
its Advisory Board of Neeru Khosla, co-founder and chair of CK-12, a
non-profit based in Palo Alto, California which is pioneering in the
area of open source textbooks.
During December, the Wikimedia Foundation and its representatives
participated in interviews with the Canadian daily newspaper the Globe
and Mail; the Wall Street Journal; the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation; KGO Radio (San Francisco); KGO ABC TV (San Francisco);
the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper; Computer Weekly magazine;
Laptop magazine; Time Out Bangalore; the New York Times; Wired News;
the Associated Press; the BBC World Service; German news site Heise
Online; CNET (San Francisco); the Financial Times newspaper;
ABCNews.com; Wired News; local New York newspaper The Alcove; NBC
Universal, and NBC Channel 1.
During December, Jay travelled to New York to staff some heavy media
days with Jimmy, and began exploratory talks with several branding
agencies.
FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
In December, KPMG completed the first draft of the 990 tax return.
The final version is expected to be be filed in April.
WMF continues to explore strategic partnerships (primarily in the
mobile space) which are mission-friendly and have more revenue
potential than other business development activities such as the
live-feed agreements.
TECHNOLOGY
Significant work went into improved real-time reporting tools for
donations, such as
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionStatistics and
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:FundraiserStatistics . The
technical team also began setting up publicly downloadable dumps of
anonymized fundraising contribution data, so that interested
volunteers can study patterns and trends in the data.
Mark & Rob worked to get set up in a new data center in the
Netherlands, largely replacing the sponsored hosting services provided
for three years by Kennisnet. The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful to
Kennisnet for the significant support they have given us.
Bug #44, opened in August 2004, was finally fixed: the image
namespace, which can also contain sounds, video, uploaded documents
and other files, was renamed to File:, with redirects ensuring that
the old name continues to work.
The Configure extension was enabled for testing on
test.wikipedia.org. When deployed, it will make it easier for users
with limited technical access to perform tasks that can currently only
be performed by sysadmins, reducing the workload of the core
operations team.
Work has begun on an extension for managing and tracking data center
assets, http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:DataCenter , which is
intended to replace the currently used RackTables software.
A brief report on the state of FlaggedRevs deployment, based in part
on a report by Philipp Birken about the German Wikipedia, was
published at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FlaggedRevs_Report_December_2008
Erik Zachte made significant improvements to the wikistats code to
improve its performance, and it is now running on its own dedicated
machine. Many updated statistics have been posted. (See:
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/12/wikistats-is-back/ ). When dumps
are available, statistics can now be generated regularly.
IN COMING WEEKS
Board Meeting January 9 – 11, 2009
Sue attending World Economic Forum in Davos (Jan. 24 – Feb. 2)
The Pontic wikipedia has launched! Everyone is welcome to participate in the
project. Also, I would like to thank Brion Vibber because he responded to my
mail and arranged the launch of the wikipedia.
Should a non-WMF project go for dual-licensing? I know this is a Wikimedia
Foundation list, but the clarifications needed here will be helpful to
Wikimedia people as well.
Specifically, I'm trying to understand whether there is a significant
downside to dual-licensing - comments by Erik and others suggest there is,
and this option is only being pursued as it was part of the agreement with
FSF. I'm not clear why - this looks to me like an elegant solution that
gives more freedom to the people re-using the content.
My question in full is here (but it seems to be a quiet page):
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers#…
Thanks.
--
Chris Watkins (a.k.a. Chriswaterguy)
Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.
identi.ca/appropedia / twitter.com/appropediablogs.appropedia.org
I like this: five.sentenc.es
The December report will follow, before Wednesday.
Thanks,
Sue
***********************************************
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: November 2008
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MY CURRENT PRIORITIES
1. 2008-09 annual fundraising campaign
2. India Wikimedia awareness trip
3. All Staff meeting
4. Development of grant proposals
5. Bits and pieces: normal fundraising activities, Wikimania
postmortem, NomCom, etc.
THIS PAST MONTH
LICENSING
The GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 was released, which will allow
the Wikimedia community to make content under GFDL available under
CC-BY-SA if it so chooses. A first community discussion was started
to discuss the parameters of the migration process.
ALL STAFF MEETING
In November, the Wikimedia Foundation held its second All Staff
meeting of 2008, in San Francisco. Staff gave presentations on their
work, and staged un-conference-style workshops on topics such as
fundraising and messaging in a time of economic turmoil; common
objections presented by donors and how to counter them; as well as
discussions about how to prioritize support of Wikipedia relative to
the other projects, and how to make decisions across departments.
Also, new staff members were photographed by Lane Hartwell.
FUNDRAISING
The annual campaign for the fiscal year 2008-09 launched November 4,
2008, drawing significant energy and attention from all departments.
A new donation module was implemented, including completely new
designs, and a new back-end based on the open-source CiviCRM database.
Agreements have been developed with interested chapters to highlight
these chapters during the fundraiser; in return, they will invest 50%
of their fundraising revenue in program activities agreed upon with
the Wikimedia Foundation. The preference is for activities with an
international impact, such as multi-chapter events and local
infrastructure and software development support.
A lot of effort has been invested in creating high quality sitenotice
designs, and on implementing real-time tracking to measure performance
of different fundraising messages.
Other changes to this year's fundraiser include radio PSAs that are
also available for download, and a "share your story" module that will
be used for future communications purposes. We're also now
automatically thanking all donors, and ask them for permission for
future e-mail contact. The press release for the annual campaign is
here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/2008-9_Annual_Giving_Cam…
In the month of November we received 46,209 donations smaller than USD
10,000, totaling approximately USD 1.3M. We also received major gifts
totaling approximately USD 295,000.
TECHNOLOGY
Thanks to a generous equipment donation by Sun Microsystems, we were
able to increase the file size limitation for uploads from 20 to 100
megabytes, which we hope will encourage people to upload more video
and very large image and sound files.
The FlaggedRevs extension for edit patrolling and flagging was
enabled in five additional Wikipedia language editions: Alemannic,
Classical Chinese, Esperanto, Polish, and Hungarian, and on the
English Wikibooks.
An instance of LimeSurvey was set up at survey.wikimedia.org for
miscellaneous survey uses.
Erik Zachte has begun working on a prototype for a monthly report
card to track key metrics, and on some detailed analysis of server
logs on a sample. This work will be iterative in coming months.
OUTREACH AND PROGRAMS
The Wikimedia Foundation has commissioned long-time Wikipedia editor
and author of “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual,” to write an
Educators' Guide to Wikipedia. It will be developed at
howto.pediapress.com.
Various “how to edit Wikipedia” educational videos were shot and put
into post-production, in Hamburg.
A second Wikipedia online course for senior citizens was launched in
Düsseldorf, Germany. A Wikipedia Academy was held in Lund, Sweden,
and Frank Schulenburg delivered a lecture on Wikipedia at the
University of Cologne.
Planning for Wikimania 2009 scholarships has begun.
COMMUNICATIONS
There was only one press release sent out in November: on November 5,
the Wikimedia Foundation officially launched its fifth annual giving
campaign, with the goal of raising USD 6 million to fund the
Foundation's 2008-09 operating costs.
In November, we participated in media interviews with entertainment
news website E-Online; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
flagship radio program Ideas; Linguamón (House of Languages: a
consortium involving the Government of Catalonia, the UNESCO Centre of
Catalonia and the Universal Forum of Cultures Foundation); Wired
Magazine; technology recruiting site Valt.com; the Associated Press;
the San Francisco Business Times; and the New York Times.
FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
In November, the Wikimedia Foundation released its audited financial
statements to the public, several months earlier than the prior year's
audit. This was the first Wikimedia audit to be conducted with KPMG,
an internationally-recognized accounting and audit firm.
Regular monthly financial reporting is now fully in place at the staff
level, with Wikimedia Foundation staff receiving regular financial
statements including actual-to-plan comparisons by the 20th day of the
next month.
IN COMING WEEKS
Sue and Jimmy in India attending Free Software, Free Society
conference plus outreach and media activities (Dec. 8 – 15)
Board Meeting in San Francisco January 9 – 11, 2009
Sue and Jimmy attending World Economic Forum conference in Davos,
Switzerland (Jan. 28 – Feb. 1). Sue is planning to meet with the Swiss
chapter after the conference.