Wikimedia-l January 2010

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[Foundation-l] Announcing: Britain Loves Wikipedia
by Michael Peel 28 Jan '10

28 Jan '10

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...

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[Foundation-l] October- Report to the Board of Trustees
by James Owen 28 Jan '10

28 Jan '10

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_force http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interviews http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Planning_Guiding_Summary http://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.html http://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.html http://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.

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[Foundation-l] September Report to the Board of Trustees
by James Owen 28 Jan '10

28 Jan '10

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=1170289 http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1170300 http://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.html http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1926826,00.html http://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.htm http://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.

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[Foundation-l] (no subject)
by TANMAY SARKAR 28 Jan '10

28 Jan '10

set a branch in new delhi india

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[Foundation-l] [Announcement] Neil Kandalgaonkar as Software Developer for Ford Multimedia Usability Project
by Naoko Komura 27 Jan '10

27 Jan '10

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

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[Foundation-l] sell wikipedia
by sterten＠aol.com 26 Jan '10

26 Jan '10

store it on memory chip or HD and sell it

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: Which online communty-building tools work in a crisis?
by Samuel Klein 26 Jan '10

26 Jan '10

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

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[Foundation-l] Give a man a fish and make it illegal to teach fishing
by David Gerard 25 Jan '10

25 Jan '10

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.

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Re: [Foundation-l] 2008/2009 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report
by Gregory Kohs 25 Jan '10

25 Jan '10

Fantastic work! Kudos to Rand Montoya! I loved the use of color to help convey the important messages. -- Gregory Kohs

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Re: [Foundation-l] sell wikipedia
by sterten＠aol.com 21 Jan '10

21 Jan '10

> 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.

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Wikimedia-l January 2010