Wikimedia-l March 2009

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[Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: January 2009
by Sue Gardner 12 Mar '09

12 Mar '09

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

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[Foundation-l] Wikimedia too centralised? (was Re: Attribution by URL reasoning?)
by David Gerard 11 Mar '09

11 Mar '09

[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.

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[Foundation-l] Attribution by URL reasoning?
by Anthony 11 Mar '09

11 Mar '09

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?

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Re: [Foundation-l] Biographies of Living People: a quick interim update
by Birgitte SB 11 Mar '09

11 Mar '09

--- 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

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[Foundation-l] (Resend) Report the the Board, December 2008
by Erik Moeller 11 Mar '09

11 Mar '09

[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)

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[Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: December 2008
by Sue Gardner 11 Mar '09

11 Mar '09

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)

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[Foundation-l] Creation of Pontic Wikipedia
by Zaharias Diakonikolaou 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

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.

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[Foundation-l] Should a non-WMF project go for dual-licensing?
by Chris Watkins 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

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/appropedia blogs.appropedia.org I like this: five.sentenc.es

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[Foundation-l] New Wikimedia indicator
by Przykuta 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

It is only a proposal: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Efficiency look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-Articles/Articles and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_article_depth if you change a part of definition - Non-Article/Article -> Article/Non-Article ... some wikis works well without thousands of userpages (facebook), meta-pages (subpages of AfD etc), filepages (we have Wikimedia Commons ;) and others. best regards przykuta

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[Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: November 2008
by Sue Gardner 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

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.

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