Hi all,
In case you haven't heard already, "Britain Loves Wikipedia", a free
photography scavenger hunt following on from Wiki Loves Art et al.,
will be taking place in 21 museums and archives across the UK
throughout February, and is launching on Sunday at the Victoria and
Albert Museum! Full details are now up on the WMUK blog, at:
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2010/01/britain-loves-wikipedia/
and also the Britain Loves Wikipedia website at:
http://www.britainloveswikipedia.org/
Thanks,
Mike Peel
Wikimedia UK
PS: Apologies if you're not in the UK...
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: October 2009
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MILESTONES FROM OCTOBER
1. Work begins on Multimedia Usability Project
2. Strategic Planning Task Forces Launch
3. Office move to 149 New Montgomery Street
4. Technology Staff and All Staff Meetings
KEY PRIORITIES FOR NOVEMBER
1. (Ongoing) Chief Development Officer and Chief Technical Officer
recruitment
2. Kickoff of 2009 Annual Giving Campaign
3. Launch of Public Outreach Resources "Bookshelf" Project
4. Multimedia Workshop in Paris
5. First Board of Trustees meeting in new office
THIS PAST MONTH
KEY PROGRAM METRICS
Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites:
345 million unique visitors (rank #5)
+24.3% (1 year ago) / +5.7% (1 month ago)
Source: comScore Media Metrics
Pages served:
11.6 billion
+8.8% (1 year ago) / +1.9% (1 month ago)
Active number of editors (5+ edits/month):
97,132
+1.9% (1 year ago) / +3.4% (1 month ago)
Source: October 2009 Report Card
<http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2009_10_detailed.html>
KEY FINANCIAL METRICS
Operating revenue year to date: USD 2.4MM vs. plan of USD 1.7MM [1]
Operating expenses year to date: USD 2.2MM vs. plan of USD 3.5 million
[2]
Unrestricted cash on hand as of November 11: USD 5.4MM
[1] Unanticipated early grant funding
[2] Delays in some large purchases
STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT
With the preliminary exploration and research phase wrapped up, the
Strategic Planning team spent October transitioning into a deep dive
exploration of critical, strategic questions.
In September, more than 3,000 people from inside and outside of the
Wikimedia movement applied to participate in Wikimedia's strategic
planning project. In October, the Task Force selection committee
reviewed all 3,000 applications, and put together 14 task forces, each
comprised of between four and eight members. Each of the Task Forces
is exploring a specific topic, with the goal of eventually making two
to four thoughtful recommendations aimed at the following areas:
increasing reach and participation in China, India, and Arabic-
speaking countries; stimulating development of smaller “local
language” Wikipedias; increasing Wikimedia project readership among
the five billion people who don't currently have internet access;
improving quality; expanding into other content areas; increasing
participation, particularly from high-potential under-represented
groups; fostering a healthy, productive editing community; determining
what organizational structures are required to support the Wikimedia
movement and how they should intersect; ensuring financial
sustainability; identifying the partnerships that are most critical to
advancing Wikimedia's mission; identifying the ideal technology
infrastructure, and ways to increase usability and foster technical
innovation; and developing recommendations for strategically
supporting high-priority advocacy.
The task forces are expected to finalize their recommendations by
January 12. Meanwhile, all discussions are happening publicly on the
strategy wiki, and everyone is invited to participate. The strategy
wiki increased from 600 editors in September to 780 in October:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Other important strategy URLs:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_forcehttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interviewshttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Planning_Guiding_Summaryhttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fact_base
TECHNOLOGY - CORE
Hiring has begun for the Code Maintenance Engineer position on the
core engineering team, responsible for reviewing, integrating and
deploying code, and advancing the overall MediaWiki development
architecture.
LiquidThreads, a complete overhaul of MediaWiki's discussion
functionality, has been made available through a dedicated Wikimedia
Labs site. The big picture here is that traditional wiki discussion
require complex and atypical user interaction that make them difficult
for new users to understand, and their lack of internal structure
makes it harder to search or display them systematically.
Thanks to hard work by contract developer Andrew Garrett based on the
initial code from David McCabe, LiquidThreads is now maturing to a
point to become useful for specific discussion spaces in the Wikimedia
universe:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/mediawikis-new-discussion-system-in-t…
Wikimedia set up a part-time contract with Siebrand Mazeland to
support the further growth and development of translatewiki.net, a
third party project used for the localization of MediaWiki and other
open source projects. Thanks to translatewiki.net and its large
community of volunteers, MediaWiki is one of the most actively
localized software packages available:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/supporting-translatewiki-net/
Tomasz Finc made XML snapshots of Wikipedia data available through
Amazon.com's Public Data Sets service, which will make it easier for
researchers and community members to perform computationally expensive
analysis:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/wikimedia-xml-data-sets-released-on-a…
Some of the fruits of Michael Dale's labor on improving Wikimedia's
rich media support can now be tested. This work is sponsored by
Kaltura. The new features include easier search and embedding of media
files, a new video player, and reliable uploading and transcoding of
videos through the Firefogg extension for Mozilla Firefox:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/new-media-features-gadget/
The language support of the new mobile gateway (m.wikipedia.org) has
dramatically increased, in large part thanks to the translatewiki.net
community, and thanks to volunteer Derk-Jan Hartman, additional
devices are now supported:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/october-mobile-update/
Former Wikimedia Foundation CTO Brion Vibber attended the SVG Open
conference and gave a presentation on the use of the open vector
graphics format in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Brion also learned
about recent development in supporting SVG through Flash, and
discussed the possibility of using this as a fallback mechanism in
Wikimedia's projects.
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/svg-open/http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/svg-in-wikipedia-and-wikimedia-common…
TECHNOLOGY - USABILITY
During October, usage of the usability beta interface has doubled,
with roughly 300,000 users trying the beta, and 235,000 of them
sticking with it. The retention rate is highest in English (between 83
and 95%), with retention lagging in German (70%) and Japanese (60%).
Beta survey analysis has started revealing the causes for low
retention rate for certain language wikis. The full beta analysis is
close to be completed and will be publicly available in November. The
English Wikinews project voted to adopt the new interface early:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/30/englsih-wikinews-adopted-the-usability…
The usability team conducted its second round of user tests in early
October. The testing was conducted by Bolt Peters and featured eight
participants in San Francisco, California. The goal was to evaluate
whether the Beta program has successfully reduced barriers to
participation. The study confirmed the positive impact of some of our
changes, while also highlighting remaining user experience issues,
particularly around complex mark-up and edit preview. A full report on
the usability study by Parul Vora including the videos of the study is
available at the Usability, Experience, and Progress Study page in the
usability wiki: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Stu…
To better support the usability work with data, we deployed the
first use of click-tracking on the edit toolbar, which will tell us
which buttons in the UI are being clicked, and which aren't: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/click-tracking-on-edit-toolbar-deploy…
In October, Guillaume Paumier joined the usability team as Product
Manager of the Ford multimedia usability initiative, aimed at making
it easier to upload files to Wikimedia Commons. Guillaume has been an
active Wikimedia contributor since 2005, and served as a board member
of the French chapter from 2007 to 2009. He also coordinated the all-
chapters meeting in Berlin for the German chapter last April.
Guillaume has a master's degree in nanotechnology from Institut
national des Sciences appliquées and a PhD in microsystems for life
sciences from Université Paul Sabatier, both in Toulouse, France.
Guillaume will be working remotely as a consultant until his visa to
work in the United States is approved. In his first weeks on the job,
Guillaume conducted a user survey of Commons contributors. The goal
was to collect basic data about how and why people use Commons. The
survey was available from all Wikimedia websites for logged-in users,
in twenty languages, and received over 25,000 responses. Its findings:
Even among users who have accounts in Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia
Commons is not very well known. 25% of respondents say they are not
familiar with Commons, and only 37% participate in it. Those who
participate say their purpose is to illustrate Wikipedia articles, or
articles on other Wikimedia projects. Only 50% of participants had
uploaded more than 10 media files to Commons. A detailed analysis of
the survey is underway: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:Initial_survey
OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
In October, Pete Forsyth joined the Wikimedia Foundation as
Wikimedia's first Public Outreach Officer. Pete will support Frank
Schulenburg, the Head of Public Outreach, in all the Foundation's
public outreach activities, including development of educational
outreach materials (Bookshelf Project), development of outreach-
related grant proposals and the communication of volunteer-led
outreach activities to a global audience. Pete's first priority will
be to help Frank develop a proposal for a grant aimed at working with
universities and other educational institutions, with the goal of
improving article quality.
Frank attended the Wikipedia Academy on October 14 and 15, in Bergen,
Norway: the first-ever Norwegian Wikipedia Academy. This was the third
Wikipedia Academy of 2009. There have already been successful
Academies this year in Tel Aviv, Israel and Bethesda, United States.
There will be one more Academy this year, in Stockholm, Sweden, in
November.
Also in October, Frank launched the new outreach wiki (http://outreach.wikimedia.org
). This wiki aims at serving as a knowledge collective and
collaboration space, to be used by both the outreach team and
Wikimedia editors who are interested in supporting outreach. The wiki
currently hosts the planning and design documents for the Bookshelf
Project and the “best practices documentation” project. Its audience
is not new contributors: its purpose is to be a home for documentation
and discussion of outreach activities aimed at bringing in new
contributors.
In October, Marlita Kahn, who runs the Bookshelf project, completed
the project's strategic development plan, design document, wiki
content, draft project schedule, and volunteer recruitment strategy.
She also began the hiring process for the project's writer and visual
designer. Because there are obvious linkages and interdependencies
between the bookshelf and usability projects, Marlita also began
coordination meetings with the usability team.
Cary Bass attended the WikiSym conference in Orlando, Florida, where
he met with researchers . He also met with Wikimedian and longtime
Wikimania planner Phoebe Ayers to discuss the bidding process for
Wikimania 2011. Cary also staged IRC office hours with Mike Godwin and
Kul Wadhwa, initiated the fundraising translations for the fundraiser
and assisted and advised the English Wikipedia arbitration committee
on several user-related matters.
COMMUNICATIONS
In October, Moka Pantages was hired as the Foundation's first
Communications Officer. Moka most recently worked with the Seoul
Broadcasting Services (one of the top 4 radio/TV broadcasters in South
Korea) in program and community development. She holds a Masters of
Art Degree from Yonsei University. Previously, Moka held positions at
PR firms Porter Novelli and Ruder Finn, and the Black Leadership
Council. She also did an internship with the United States Senate.
Throughout October, the communications department worked in
conjunction with the fundraising team and with Fenton Communications,
to create marketing materials for the Annual Giving Campaign,
including development of messaging and collateral (fundraising appeal
letter, banner copy, usability study and improvements to main donation
landing page). The team also worked with Fenton Communications to
develop a draft social media and public relations strategy, and QA/FAQ
for the campaign, as well as a plan to carry 'credibility' focused
initiatives through 2010, including updated plans for a WMF video,
story-telling publication, and speaking/media initiatives.
Major coverage during October revolved around the following stories:
1. OpenMoko's WikiReader takes center stage (late October)
Tech and IT media around the world responded to OpenMoko's release of
the handheld WikiReader device through October. Most coverage
applauded the idea of a WikiReader-type device; some criticized
aspects of its interface, and its lack of live realtime access to
Wikipedia.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10384858-23.htmlhttp://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iMT_Y6MHThjs-IPEoDIySsJji…http://www.zath.co.uk/wikireader-a-dedicated-wikipedia-reading-device/
2. Google tweaks Custom Search for Wikipedia (October 26)
In late October Google announced improvements to Google Custom Search,
including better customized search functions for Wikipedia. The new
search function was developed with deep community feedback and
support, using Wikipedia's open-API to provide improved results.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/26/google-experiments-with-new-ways-to-se…http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10383293-2.htmlhttp://searchengineland.com/google-new-custom-search-features-including-wik…http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/contextual-search-within-wikipedia.h…
Also in October, the Huffington Post named Wikimedia Foundation
Executive Director Sue Gardner one of its ten media “game changers” of
2009. “Drawing on the Wikimedia Foundation's mission of bringing free
knowledge to everybody, executive director Gardner is overseeing a
strategic plan to broaden access to Wikipedia’s vast storehouse of
information. Her battle plan: making Wikipedia easier to use and
available to more people worldwide,” says the Huffington Post.
Huffington Post readers will now vote for their top game changer out
of the ten nominees, and the winner will be announced in November.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/huffpost-game-changers-wh_n_337129…
Other worthwhile reads:
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales-internet-censo…http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/14/wiki.china/
Blog posts through Oct, 2009:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/
Media activity through Oct, 2009:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact_2008#October_2…
During October, the Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews
with the Bali Times (Bali, Indonesia); Washington Post (Washington,
DC, USA); Huffington Post (New York, New York, USA); Associated Press
(Philadelphia, PA, USA).
FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS
In October, the Wikimedia Foundation publicly posted its Chief
Development Officer position. The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an
innovative development professional with a strong understanding of
internet and traditional fundraising methods, to grow and diversify
fundraising capacity. The search is being conducted by m/Oppenheim
Associates: inquiries, nominations and résumés may be directed in
confidence to: Lisa Grossman at lisag(at)moppenheim.com.
The Wikimedia Foundation received 1,044 donations in October, totaling
approximately USD $54,642. Year-to-date, the Foundation has raised USD
521,93 in donations, 7% of its annual goal of USD 7,500,000. This puts
it slightly ahead of plan. In October, the Foundation also raised USD
1,050,000 of restricted and unrestricted grants, bringing the total
fundraising related revenue for the year to USD 2,067,905, 29% of the
USD 9,297,000 goal.
Included in that total is a grant of USD 550,000 from the Stanton
Foundation, to support the “bookshelf” project, hardware purchases,
and initiatives designed to improve quality. This is the third major
grant for Wikimedia from the Stanton Foundation: we are very grateful
for its support.
In October, Rand Montoya continued to prepare for the 2009 Annual
Campaign. (See Communications notes above.) In addition, Rand soft-
launched the mobile giving campaign (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mobile_Giving
) with a link on our mobile application encouraging people to text
WIKI to 25383 to give $10 to Wikipedia via their mobile phone. With no
real attempts to publicize it, this new feature is currently
generating about $150 a day. Testing was underway on Wikimedia's new
credit card processing gateway, which is expected to increaes
donations from users unfamiliar with PayPal.
In October, Development Associate Anya Shyrokova was promoted to
Stewardship Associate. In her new role, she will be manage and
cultivate $500 to $10,000 donors. To replace her, Megan Hernandez has
been hired as Development Associate. Megan recently graduated from the
University of California San Diego with a degree in Human Development
and a minor in Spanish Literature. She comes to Wikimedia with work
experiences from the American Cancer Society and Mundo De Ninos
Children's Shelter in Peru.
Rebecca Handler secured an unrestricted donation of USD 25,000 from
the Harnisch Foundation, and worked on fundraising for the new data
center.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Kul Wadhwa oversaw the first product launches of Wikipedia in Orange
in France, Spain and Poland, and the launch of Wikimedia on mobile in
France. Kul is now assessing multiple initiatives and/or proposals for
projects in Africa.
Kul and Tomasz Finc worked with memory device maker Kingston
Technologies and offline reader developers Wikipock to create a new
low-cost offline USB Wikipedia reader device. With the assistance of
staff in the technology department Kul gathered and assessed technical
and user feedback, discussed issues with community developers and
assessed previous community initiatives in the offline reader space.
Kul also created a cross-department working group, which is working
with outside parties to develop an improved version that they hope
will be ready for a retail test product launch by the first quarter of
2010.
FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
On October 15, the Wikimedia Foundation officially moved into its new
office located at 149 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA.
Special thanks went to Daniel Phelps for organizing and managing the
move, and to Steve Kent, Rob Halsell, and Fred Vassard for ensuring
the office server and other equipment were fully functional in the new
space.
SEMI-ANNUAL ALL STAFF MEETING, TECHNOLOGY MEETING
Twice a year, the Wikimedia Foundation brings all staff to San
Francisco for its semi-annual all-staff meeting. The second 2009
meeting took place in October. At it, staff received coaching in
giving and receiving feedback constructively, from facilitators from
the Center for Creative Leadership, a global non-profit organization
offering leadership training. The CCL facilitators also carried out
exercises (the FIRO-B and change style indicator) aimed at helping
staff better understand and better communicate with each other. Also,
the technical team met for two days prior to the all-staff meeting,
discussing operations planning, the software development roadmap, code
deployment and review, and other issues.
OTHER ACTIVITIES
Sara Crouse represented Wikimedia at a conference hosted by Lettera27
(which supports WikiAfrica) at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio,
Italy. The conference's focus was on reach and dissemination of
knowledge - particularly on mobile platforms - in African countries.
In attendance were representatives from NGOs in Africa, scholars and
researchers, and innovators in the field of mobile technology. The
relationships developed at this conference will help advance potential
future partnerships in the region, and are proving to be valuable to
the Strategic Planning process.
Sue Gardner attended the Sloan Foundation's 75th Anniversary event in
New York City. The Sloan Foundation is Wikimedia's largest benefactor
and an early supporter. Economists, luminaries, and foundation
representatives participated in the event. Wikimedia is featured in a
documentary and book about the Sloan Foundation, which were released
for the occasion.
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: September 2009
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MILESTONES FROM SEPTEMBER
1. Recruitment begins for Chief Technical Officer and Chief
Development Officer
2. 2009 Fundraiser planning begins
3. Strategy project launches Call For Participation
4. Usability team expanded
5. Bookshelf project for public outreach resources launched
KEY PRIORITIES FOR OCTOBER
1. Begin interviewing Chief Technical Officer candidates
2. Planning for 2009 Fundraiser continues (launches November)
3. Strategy Project task forces kick off
4. Semi-annual All Staff Meeting October 21-23
5. Office moves to 149 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco
REPORT FOR SEPTEMBER
KEY PROGRAM METRICS
Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites:
326 million unique visitors (rank #5)
+19.8% (1 year ago) / +6% (1 month ago)
Source: comScore Media Metrics
Pages served:
11.4 billion
+11.7% (1 year ago) / +5.1% (1 month ago)
Active number of editors (5+ edits/month):
94,565
+2.3% (1 year ago) / -2.5% (one month ago)
Source: September 2009 Report Card <http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2009_09_detailed.html
>
KEY FINANCIAL METRICS
Operating revenue year to date: USD 1.1MM vs. plan of USD 1.1MM
Operating expenses year to date: USD 1.6MM vs plan of USD 2.6MM.
Unrestricted cash on hand as of October 22 was USD 6.0MM.
STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS
September marked the formal launch of the strategy planning process.
In mid-September, a Call for Participation from Jimmy Wales and
Michael Snow appeared at the top of all Wikimedia sites, encouraging
people to volunteer to participate in strategy development task
forces, which will be responsible for digging deeper into the key
questions facing Wikimedia. The key questions include how to grow
readership and participation in geographies where Wikimedia projects
are under-performing (e.g., China, India, the Arabic-speaking
countries); how to make Wikimedia project material available to the
five billion people who don't yet have access to the internet; how to
convert readers into participants and improve the diversity and
general health of the Wikimedia movement, and how to enable Wikimedia,
as a social and political movement, to best shape and influence public
perception and public policy, internationally.
The Call for Participation resulted in almost 3,000 applications from
a wide variety of people, including active project participants and
readers from many projects and languages. A selection committee
carefully reviewed all applications, and in October will begin to
populate the task forces with the applicants who seem most
appropriate. Almost 30% of applicants committed to volunteering over
10 hours a week, indicating a strong desire to help and engage in this
process.
Meanwhile, in September, overall engagement on the strategy wiki
continued to grow. The strategy wiki now contains almost 6,000 pages
of content in more than 50 languages. Over 600 people have contributed
to the wiki.
Also in September, the Bridgespan Group continued to add data and
analysis to the strategy wiki in support of the task forces, and also
conducted a number of in-depth interviews with Wikimedia Foundation
Board members, Advisory Board members, staff, other supporters and
experts. Thus far, interviewees have included Board members Ting Chen,
Samuel Klein and Jimmy Wales, Advisory Board members Angela Beesley
Starling, Ward Cunningham, Clay Shirky, Achal Prabhala, Florence
Nibart-Devouard, Teemu Leinonen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Roger McNamee,
Melissa Hagemann, Mitch Kapor, Neeru Khosla, Wayne Mackintosh and
Ethan Zuckerman. Other interviews were conducted with Ed Chi,
researcher at Palo Alto Research Center, Eric Goldman, Santa Clara
University law professor and researcher, Rima Kupryte, from eIFL
(Electronic Information for Libraries), Andrew Lih, author of The
Wikipedia Revolution, Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative
Commons, Misiek Piskorski, Harvard Business School professor and
researcher, Jennifer Riggs, former Chief Program Officer for the
Wikimedia Foundation, Joseph Reagle, researcher into open source
communities, Matt Thompson, Online Community Manager at the Knight
Foundation and Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United
States. The following staff have also been interviewed: Mike Godwin,
General Counsel, Véronique Kessler, Chief Financial and Operating
Officer, Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving, Frank Schulenburg,
Head of Public Outreach, Brion Vibber, Chief Technical Officer, Tim
Starling, software developer, Kul Wadhwa, Head of Business
Development, Jay Walsh, Head of Communications, Erik Zachte, Data
Analyst, and Sue Gardner, Executive Director. All interview notes can
be found here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interviews
TECHNOLOGY - CORE
In September, Brion Vibber announced he will be leaving the Wikimedia
Foundation in October to take a role as open-microblogging developer
with StatusNet. Brion has agreed to stay with the Wikimedia Foundation
one day per week until the end of 2009, and he will continue to be
involved with Wikimedia as a volunteer developer in future. He will
also help to recruit his successor.
The technology team worked on Flagged Revisions testing configurations
for the English Wikipedia, these configurations are now live and
receiving testing and feedback on http://
flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/.
Supported by a general software update, the Technology team also
rolled out Localisation Update which will keep user interface
translations up to date with daily changes from TranslateWiki. This is
expected to accelerate localisation activity by ensuring updates are
consistent even if software upgrades are delayed.
The technology team began a decommissioning process for old servers
which are no longer under warranty and are more expensive to run than
the newer and more energy-efficient replacement servers. The
Foundation hopes to make the retired servers available to other non-
profit organizations that could use the hardware.
Tomasz Finc began working on an arrangement to make the full-text data
dumps available in Amazon's Public Data Sets for EC2 users. These will
be kept up to date over time, and will be available alongside existing
processed data sets from Freebase.
The ProofreadPage extension used by Wikisource received an update
which includes improved indexing of scanned pages.
TECHNOLOGY - USABLITY
One full-time software developer consultant, two part-time software
developer consultants, and one part-time interface design consultant
joined the Usability team in September. Adam Miller joined the
Usability team as a full-time software development consultant bringing
strong front-end web development skills. Adam was recently with the
Babarian Group as a lead web developer and led overhauling of Red
Bull1's 1000+ web properties including internationalization of the
sites. http://heyadammiller.com/ Yaron Koren, MediaWiki volunteer
developer and the creator of the Semantic Forms, joined the team as
part-time consultant. Yaron will work on a first specification for an
XML schema to describe template structures, allowing for automated
form UI generation and form-based data entry. He will also work on a
first proof-of-concept implementation of form-based data-entry for
MediaWiki based on this XML schema. http://yaronkoren.com/ Ryan Lane,
a long-time MediaWiki development volunteer, joined the team as a part-
time system administrator consultant. Ryan contributed various
MediaWiki extensions, such as LDAP authentication, smooth gallery and
others. Ryan is a full-time employee of Naval Oceanographic Office at
Stennis Space Center, but his work schedule allows him to work on the
usability project on Fridays. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Ryan_lane
Hannes Tank, the former designer intern of the usability team
rejoined the team as a part-time interface design consultant. Hannes
is a graduate student of the Muthesius Academy of Arts in Kiel,
Germany. He worked on redesign of Wikipedia as a school project in
2008. http://hannestank.de/wikipedia/english_about.html As of
September 12th, over 173,000 visitors and editors tried out the beta
and 134,000 people continued using the beta. The average beta
retention rate was roughly 77% and the retention rate for English
Wikipedia was 82%. The next step is to analyze the survey data to
identify language specific usability issues. More details about the
beta status is found at the WMF blog on this topic. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/14/usability-beta-status/
The second usability release, Babaco, was released to production on
September 30th. The major features of this release are; 1) Navigable
Table of Contents, which allows editors to jump to the start of each
section in the article, 2) Dialogues for inserting internal and
external links, and 3) Find and Replace feature. These features are
available in user preferences. More details about Babaco release can
be found in the tech blog post. http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/babaco-is-ready-for-tasting/3
Planning continued on the second usability study. The focus of the
second round study will be the evaluation of all user interface
changes made so far. The study size is eight participants in total and
the study will be conducted at a research facility in San Francisco in
early October. For the multimedia usability project funded by the Ford
Foundation, we received good numbers of applications for the product
management position and three promising candidates were interviewed.
The interviews for Product Manager has been concluded and the
background check has started. As for the applications to the software
development position, the screening is taking place and interviews
will be scheduled in October.
OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
Sue announced the departure of Jennifer Riggs as the Foundation's
Chief Program Officer. Sue and the Foundation's staff thanked Jennifer
for her contributions. During her term with the Foundation Jennifer
helped the Wikimedia improve in some important ways. She helped Frank,
Cary, and Jay structure their work, and she supported the staging of
the U.S. National Institute of Health's Wikipedia Academy, managed the
chapters grants process, and represented Wikimedia at the GLAM-Wiki
conference in Australia. Over the next few months, Sue will review and
refine the CPO job description, and begin recruitment.
In September, the Foundation hired Marlita Kahn as project manager for
the Bookshelf Project. Marlita comes to Wikimedia from Design Media,
where, as Senior Project Manager, she created and guided the product
design and content development for a large number of customers. Among
her projects were a product set targeted to educators and general
public for California State Capitol Museum that won the International
Web Page Award (2002), "Concepts of Biology", a high school biology
full year multimedia curriculum product and a 3D stereoscopic film
commemorating the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire using
historic imagery and original 3D animation, script and surround sound
that won the Silver and Bronze Telly Awards (2007). Prior to her work
at Design Media, Marlita worked as a Managing Director for the
Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library founded in 1996 by
internet entrepreneur and activist Brewster Kahle. She managed the
Archive from start-up and led the development of its five-year
strategic plan. Marlita is fluent in Spanish and holds a Master's
Degree in English Literature from the University of California at
Berkeley.
With the hiring of Marlita, the Foundation launches its Bookshelf
Project which aims to create a core set of awareness/engagement/
training high-quality resources that can be used to recruit new and
diverse participation. When complete, the bookshelf is intended to
serve as a core set of instructional materials, to be translated,
adapted and used for multiple purposes by volunteers, chapters, and
educational institutions such as schools and universities.
Also in September, Frank embarked upon exploring new ways of
affiliating with the Wikimedia movement by developing the "WikiPods"
concept <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiPods>. WikiPods are groups
of Wikimedia fans and enthusiasts working together in local teams
(your campus, your town, etc) to help advocate, promote, enrich and
otherwise improve Wikipedia or other projects of the Wikimedia
Foundation.
Also in September, Kathrin Jansen, Volunteer Project Lead of the Best
Practices series on Meta, and her team focused on a step-by-step
instruction on how to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool, which is
available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Best_practices_in_assigning_Wikipedia_articl…
.
And, Frank launched an informal speaker series aimed at providing a
space for staff to learn, talk and brainstorm together. The first
guest speaker, scheduled for early October, will be Danny Horn from
Wikia, talking about Wikia's WYSIWYG feature. Future speakers will
include Ed Chi, researcher at PARC, and Jack Herrick, founder of
WikiHow.
Also in September, Cary Bass launched the first IRC “office hours.”
IRC office hours are weekly meetings on the Freenode IRC channel
#wikimedia-office, at a standard set time, with one "special guest"
from the Foundation staff at each meeting, aimed at providing a
opportunity for volunteers to engage casually with staff members in
real time. The first guest was Executive Director Sue Gardner,
followed by Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving.
COMMUNICATIONS
Major coverage during September revolved around the following stories:
1. Wikimania follow up, coverage in Argentina (Early Sept)
Numerous Spanish publications, most based in Argentina, published long-
lead stories that were developed during Wikimania in Buenos Aires.
Many included interviews with Jimmy Wales and Richard Stallman.
http://www.lsdmagazine.com/wikipedia-lenciclopedia-libera-sul-web-sempre-pi…http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1170289http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1170300http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/argentina/090910/buenos-aires-wi-fi-wiki…
•
More Flagged Revs coverage in Time + much follow up (September 28)
Coverage of Flagged Revs and Ed Chi's research into stagnating
participation on Wikimedia projects continued in September with
several Time.com stories by journalist Farhad Manjoo and others. The
stories named Wikipedia as one of the “sites we can't live without,”
and expressed concerns about growing behind-the-scenes
bureaucratization and community dysfunction. Follow-up coverage
(including an U.S. National Public Radio story and others) echoed
those same themes.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492,00.htmlhttp://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1926826,00.htmlhttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113128568
3. Polanski article causes mainstream media stir (September 30)
Media attention around director Roman Polanski's arrest in Switzerland
spilled into the film-maker's Wikipedia article later in September,
focusing on discussion among editors about how to best incorporate the
arrest into the Polanski article. Some inaccurate coverage suggesting
the page 'lock' is due to charges the director faces.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/28/roman-polanski-wikipedia_n_301558.…http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/6238928/Roman-Polanskis-Wik…http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5g5lvi7XK0ko4DDwgJXpulj7z…
Other worthwhile reads:
http://nihrecord.od.nih.gov/newsletters/2009/09_04_2009/story2.htmhttp://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/wikipedias-rapid-reaction-to-ou…http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/23/joi-ito-creative-commons-t…
During September, the Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews
with Wired.com (San Francisco, California, USA); Technology Review
(Cambridge Massachusetts, USA); San Jose Mercury News (San Jose,
California, USA); Agence France Presse (Oakland, California, USA);
Business Week (New York City, New York, USA); BBC Television (New York
City, New York, USA); Al Jazeera (New York City, New York, USA); New
Jersey Law Journal (Newark, New Jersey, USA); Queen's University
Journal (Kingston, Ontario, Canada); Time Magazine (San Francisco,
California, USA); New York Post (New York City, New York, USA); Slate
magazine (New York City, New York, USA), and the Canadian Press
(Toronto, Ontario, Canada).
During September, Jay continued working on the communications campaign
with Fenton Communications. Fenton spent much of August and early
September undertaking a research phase with staff and stakeholders,
during which they spoke with Board members, Advisory Board members,
and members of the staff, as well as Wikimedia volunteers and readers.
Through this work, the team developed a first draft of messaging
tactics that will inform both the annual giving campaign and
Wikimedia's general communications activities. Through the rest of
September, the Fenton team worked with Jay and Rand on carrying out
notes and refining concepts for presentation in October, prior to the
November fundraiser launch.
FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS
The Wikimedia Foundation received 1,020 donations in September
totaling approximately USD 48,503. Year-to-date, the Foundation has
raised USD 467,369 in fundraising related revenue, 7% of the annual
goal of USD 7,500,000.
In September, recruiting firm m/Oppenheim interviewed Sue, the
fundraising team and other staff, several Board and Advisory Board
members, as well as some key donors and stakeholders, in order to
develop the job description for the new Chief Development Officer, and
create an initial list of about 30 potential candidates and
connectors. The job is expected to be posted in October, and the
position is open until filled: it will likely come to fruition in
December 2009.
Also in September, Development Associate Anya Shyrokova was promoted
to the new position of Stewardship Associate, handling the needs of
under-$500 donors, as well as cultivating and stewarding $500 to $10K
donors. Her former position, focused on managing Wikimedia's open
source donor database and handling donor and prospect research and
tracking, was posted on the Wikimedia Foundation website: the search
for her replacement is expected to wrap up in October.
Rand Montoya continued working towards the 2009 Annual Fundraiser,
planned to launch in November. He also launched new functionality
allowing people in the United States to donate via mobile phone, which
will be integrated into Wikipedia's mobile gateway. See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mobile_Giving
for more information.
Rebecca Handler traveled to New York City to meet with donors and
prospects prior to the launch of the annual campaign. During her trip,
Rebecca represented the Wikimedia Foundation at a dinner hosted by
Queen Rania and a number of other influential women. During September,
Rebecca also continued meeting with prospective donors to secure
funding for a new data center.
FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
In September, the Wikimedia Foundation announced it had successfully
concluded its search for new office space, and that it would be moving
to 149 New Montgomery Street on October 16. The move was approved as
part of the 2009-10 annual plan, and in August Office Manager Daniel
Phelps had begun leading a highly collaborative staff search process.
In mid-September, the Foundation formally selected 149 New Montgomery
Street as its new location, and Daniel spent the remainder of the
month finalizing lease terms, overseeing construction, and planning
towards the move. Daniel also announced in September that, although
the Wikimedia Foundation had originally tried to keep its initial San
Francisco address private in order to protect the staff from stalkers
and gawkers, it had since rethought that practice. Going forward, the
Wikimedia Foundation will openly publish its physical location.
Bill Gong and Veronique Kessler spent much of their month working with
the external audit firm KPMG to review the Foundation's financial
records and statements in preparation for their public release. The
fieldwork portion of the audit was completed in September, and the
final audit report is expected to be released in November.
At the request of the Audit Committee and with the support of other
staff, Veronique began development of an analysis of key risks facing
the Wikimedia projects, including in the areas of financial and
organizational sustainability, technology, reputation, community, and
the external environment. The preliminary draft suggests that the most
significant and/or likeliest risks facing Wikimedia include stagnation
of participation in the Wikimedia projects, a lack of technical
innovation, failure of the Wikimedia movement to develop sustainable
and essential organizational structures to support its work, a lack of
participation in developing countries, editorial scandal damaging
Wikipedia's reputation, competitor sites eroding our readership, a
plateauing of donations, and risk of a fundamental shift to our legal
context (e.g., transformative change to the U.S. Communications
Decency Act). Once the 2008-09 audited financial statements are
approved by the Audit Committee, Veronique will present to it the most
important risks facing us, and the Wikimedia Foundation's current
mitigation strategy for each one.
LEGAL
In September, the Wikimedia Foundation won a Uniform Domain-Name
Dispute-Resolution Policy (URDP) claim, winning the rights to two
domains based on variant spellings of Wikipedia. Mike Godwin also
initiated responses to two defamation lawsuits brought against
Wikipedia in the United States, and investigated possible responses to
a court order imposed on the Foundation in Germany. Additionally, Mike
offered assistance to Wikimedia Italia in their legal dispute by
offering to provide evidence to an Italian court that Wikimedia Italia
is not a division or agent of the Wikimedia Foundation.
It is my pleasure to announce that the usability team has a new member. Neil Kandalgaonkar joined the team as a software developer for the Ford multi-media usability project. Neil brings in the breadth of experience in software engineering from major social networking web sites such as Flickr and Upcoming.org. Neil oversaw improving payment system and
performance of FlickrMail interface at Flickr, integrated Upcoming.org into Yahoo properties and helped expand the team. Prior to Yahoo!, Neil was with Google and his main responsibility was to enable Google Checkout system for non-US markets. Neil holds Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada.
Neil will work closely with Guillaume Paumier, who manages the product side of the project, and also Michael Dale who have been developing a ton of multi-media support software and tools already.
I just posted the work in progress of the multi-media usability project for those who are curious about the development of the multi-media usability project.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/26/multimedia-usability-project-underway/
Please join me welcoming, Neil.
Naoko Komura
Program Manager
Wikimedia Usability Initiative
--
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Here's some very anecdotal data from people involved in CrisisCamps around
the country about which collaborative tools they'd found useful over the
past couple of weeks.
Wikis: used second-most, after phones; reviewed most positively.
SJ
================================
Subject: [CrisisCamp Coordinators] Quick recap on comms tools so far Date:
Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:05:19 -0800 From: Jeremy Johnstone
<jstone(a)rhok.org><jstone(a)rhok.org> To:
crisiscamp-coordinators(a)googlegroups.com
"Negative" = voted 1 or 2 for the tool
"Positive" = voted 3 or 4 for the tool
Twitter -- Neg: 11% / Pos: 47%
Mailing Lists -- Neg: 12% / Pos: 62%
Google Groups -- Neg: 14% / Pos: 63%
Atrium -- Neg: 34% / Pos: 22%
IRC -- Neg: 26% / Pos: 52%
Wiki -- Neg: 13% / Pos: 71%
Google Wave -- Neg: 50% / Pos: 16%
Phone -- Neg: 17-26% / Pos: 48-69%
Skype -- Neg: 10% / Pos: 58%
Will send out more detailed stats later, but wanted to get those numbers
into the hands of decision makers asap.
-Jeremy
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/5104
Michael Geist on how excessive copyright and ACTA-like treaties will
directly affect the process of sharing and education, i.e. what we do.
- d.
> Why would anybody want to buy it if it is possible to download it for
free?
download is impractical, it takes too long.
Often you want it offline, when no internet-connection is available.
Or you want to have a fixed version, not overwritten by updates.
Or you want to have it in case it stops and goes offline and is maybe no
longer available
one day.
The German version is being sold in Germany, but not the larger English
version.