Wikimedia-l September 2010

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

107 participants
76 discussions

Re: [Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content
by James Heilman 05 Sep '10

05 Sep '10

I agree with Peter's comment that Wikipedia could use some added mechanisms to improve content ( especially controversial content ). We have a lot of great policies however they are often unevenly applied. One mechanism would be to apply more thoroughly the policies we have. A current problem is the difficult there is in bringing in third party input after all other mechanisms have failed on a content issue. We have ArbCom however they only deal with behavior not content. This is something that needs to be addressed so otherwise final arbitration goes to whomever is willing to but in the most effort. -- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.

3 2

[Foundation-l] Fundraising time is approaching!
by Keegan Peterzell 05 Sep '10

05 Sep '10

(sending from personal email since @wikimedia isn't subscribed at the moment) Hello Wikimedians, As many of you are aware, we are now two months away from the Fundraiser for the Wikimedia Foundation, 2010. We have lofty goals, and we can meet them and exceed them! The meta translators are already actively engaged in the annual drive to distribute our messages, but we would like to point everyone to the developments we've made in banner messages- from creation to commentary to the ones that will go live for test and for the drive itself in November. It's one of our goals to make sure that all volunteers know that there is a place for them in the Fundraising drive. We've started the setup on meta[1] for both banner submission[2], statistical analysis[3], and grouping volunteers together that would like to find specific focus and work in that area[4]. This year the Wikimedia Foundation is taking a proactive stance in reaching out to each and every Wikimedia project and volunteer to find innovation, collaboration, and collation of ideas from the community driven process. The staff working on this is comprised of long-time Wikimedians with as much care and concern for the success of this drive as the volunteers, and we want you to actively participate and have a voice. Use the talk pages on meta, talk to your local communities, talk to others, talk to us. Engagement is what we strive for, without each other we would never had made Wikimedia succeed. Everyone is welcome to contact any of us on staff at any time with a timely response to follow. We actively encourage focusing discussion on meta so we can all work together. See you on the wiki! 1. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010 2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Messages 3. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testing/Stats 4. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Committee -- Keegan Peterzell Associate Community Officer, Fundraising 2010 Wikimedia Foundation kpeterzell(a)wikimedia.org Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

2 2

[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Report - July 2010
by Erik Moeller 03 Sep '10

03 Sep '10

Hello all, sent on Sue's behalf. We're working through the April/May/June backlog for historical completeness, but wanted to share this new report upon completion. We should be returning to predicable production frequency now. I'd also like to invite you to help get the word out about this report, to start disseminating it to a wider audience. There's a wiki version at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_July_2010 which you can share, help improve, translate, wikify. :-) All best, Erik WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION REPORT - JULY 2010 HIGHLIGHTS 1) Wikimedia community, staff and board attend Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk, Poland. 70 travel scholarships were awarded to recipients in 39 countries. 2) Beginning of the new fiscal year. New hiring plan underway. First-ever open call for community fellowship and residency applications. 3) Catalyst grants awarded to Wikimedia chapter organizations in nine countries 4) Planning continues for new data center in Virginia WIKIMANIA 2010 More than 300 Wikimedians gathered in Gdansk, Poland, for the sixth Wikimania conference. The Wikimedia Foundation awarded 70 travel scholarships to Wikimedians from 39 countries -- greatly expanding on past years' scholarship programs. There were many side meetings in which contributors to fledgling Wikimedia projects shared experiences, encourgaged each other, and met with Wikimedia Foundation board and staff, as well as like-minded organizations. New Wikimedians, new board members, and new staff were welcomed by Wikimania regulars. A great line up of presentations and discussions delved into new and long standing questions about community health, project governance, growth and new technology. Many Wikimedia Foundation staff members gave presentations. Our communications team carried our first major video production effort focused on capturing the stories of Wikimedians on the sidelines of Wikimania. They interviewed 35 people and the final videos are forthcoming. Wikimania 2010 program: http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule Photos: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2010 Community report in the Wikipedia Signpost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-07-12/News_a… DATA, TRENDS AND FINANCIALS The monthly report card for July 2010 can be found at: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_07_detailed.html Global unique visitors: 360 million (-5% compared to previous month / + 21.9% compared to previous year) Page requests: 13.1 billion (-6% compared to previous month / + 27.2% compared to previous year) July 1, 2010 is the beginning of the 2010-11 Financial Year. The Annual Plan can be found at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports Operating Revenue Budget: USD 20.4MM Operating Expense Budget: USD 20.4MM Operating revenue for July: USD 160K vs. plan of USD 188K Operating expenses July: USD1.3MM vs. plan of USD 1.6MM Unrestricted cash on hand as of mid August: USD 11.0MM The underspend in July is primarily due to underspending in capital expenditures and internet hosting (those were budgeted evenly over the year but will actually start lower and increase throughout the year) and underspending related to personnel. This was partially offset by overages related to Wikimania funding and WikiSym sponsorship and timing of Wikimania scholarships. The review of global unique visitors and pageviews shows the normal June/July seasonal drop during sommer months. Wikimedia Foundation data analyst Erik Zachte has created a series of new reports on revert trends (how frequently are changes undone), which he also presented at Wikimania. The relevant blog post can be found at: http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/08/wikistats-reports-on-article-revert-tren… The data, for example for the English language Wikipedia, can be found at: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/EditsRevertsEN.htm In coming months, we hope to gain a better understanding of the relationship between revert trends and editing trends: Do revert ratios predict editing activity? We invite the research community to help us in the sensemaking process. An additional set of reports was prepared by Erik Zachte to capture pageviews and editing activity by country-of-origin: http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportsCountriesLanguagesV… Particularly noticeable is the relatively high percentage of edits from European countries, as well as the strong correspondence between the percentage of pageviews and the percentage of edits from the Global South, which suggests that scaling our reach in the Global South will also help us to gain more participants in those countries. Other notes and obervations: * It is instructive to review the "movers and shakers" section of page requests, which shows that Indonesian, Korean, and Russian Wikipedia have seen the strongest growth over the last year. * A recent data loss issue on the logging server has been fixed. Previously logged pageview data has been corrected based on an estimate of the data loss. Months affected by the data loss are grayed out in the report card. * We've received more detailed reports from PediaPress about sales of books using the book tool (compile Wikipedia articles into a printed book), and will share some of this data soon. Highlights: From May through July, PediaPress shipped 1,671 printed books to 981 buyers in 46 countries. 38% of books were sold to Germany and 28% to the United States. The feature was also used to generate approximately 85,000 PDF files per day. HUMAN RESOURCES In July, we added 1 permanent hire (Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer) and 2 temporary employees (Alolita Sharma, Engineering Program Manager, and Arthur Richards, Fundraising Engineer). Stewardship Associate Anya Shyrokova resigned from her position with Wikimedia to attend graduate school. The hiring of Barry Newstead as Chief Global Development Officer and Zack Exley as Chief Community Officer was announced in June. Please refer to the press release for more information: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/June_2010_Wikimedia_Foun… Total employee count: Plan: 51, Actual: 49 TECHNOLOGY 1) New Data Center We are building out an additional data center location for safe failover in the event that our current primary facility in Tampa, Florida suffers a major downtime. In July, we've been collecting rough bids from hosting vendors we met in our June visit to Ashburn, VA. We have submitted requirements to a potential major equipment donor and attended meetings to support their consideration of whether to give us machines as an in-kind donation. We have enough budget earmarked to purchase these machines, but are looking for donations so we can repurpose any savings. 2) Project overview A full overview of projects that the engineering team has been working on through much of July and August can be found at: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering/ Here are some highlights: - Resource Loader - Planning and requirements gathering for an enhanced capability to handle JavaScript loading in MediaWiki in support of deployment of new functionality, including the new media upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons. - Article Assessment, AKA "Rate This Article" - Requirements gathering for a pilot of this capability, tied to the Public Policy Initiative - Pending Changes - Half-way through trial deployment of this feature for the English Wikipedia, which was formerly called "Flagged Revisions". - Liquid Threads - A new discussion system. Working on UI redesign, which was presented at Wikimania. - Vector Phase V - Final rollout of new default look and feel for Wikimedia properities (already deployed on all of the large sites) scheduled for early September. This change will complete the rollout of the Vector project. Wikimedians interested in what we are working on should watch the wiki pages mentioned in the tech blog entry. 3) Visits and planned meetings - Student contractors - Over the summer, most of our student contractors made visits to the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco. - Hackathon - Planning a 2-day public event to get together the WMF Tech Staff with volunteer engineers for an old-fashioned face-to-face coding sprint. This meeting will be formally announced in September and will take place in October this year on the East Coast of the US. - Data Summit - Planning an invitational meeting to discuss plans related to how data is organized, displayed, captured and analyzed on WMF properties. Keeping the invite list small, but interested parties should apply to danese at wikimedia dot org for an invite. GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT Overall, the Global Development (GD) team is still very much in its formative stages with the CGDO coming on board in July. We are focused on building the team with active or soon-to-be active searches for key positions including Chapter Development Director, National Program Director for India, Senior Research Analyst, Global Product Merchandise, Movement Communications and Program Assistant. In July, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved the formation of a chapter in India. The Indian team is now moving forward to secure the legal registration of the chapter. We did make significant progress on the first stage of chapter grant making with grants approved for 9 chapters (Argentina, Switzerland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Czech Republic, Ukraine, New York) and a grant to support the formation of a chapter in South Africa. We have increased our budget available for grants this year. For more information about the grant-making process and the submitted grants and reports, please see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index The Wikimedia blog (http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/07/) featured postings from volunteer Liam Wyatt on his internship at the British Museum, updates to the Google translation toolkit, changes to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the approval of the Indian chapter, the first ever open call for community fellowship and residency applicants, and a summary of a Wikimedia and free culture community event in Germany called Skill Share. COMMUNICATIONS The communication team carried out Foundation's first major video production project. The project interviewed over 35 wikpedians and is the Foundation first series of videos intended to shed light on the Wikimedia community. The videos will debut in September 2010. * Major issues and media-interest topics: ** Gov't edits to Wikipedia articles rattle Canadian politicians (July 29) http://www.montrealgazette.com/opinion/editorials/computers+used+alter+Wiki… ** Wikipedia tops in customer service (July 20) http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-20/facebook-ranks-in-bottom-5-in-c… ** Wikipedia bottoms in collecting user-data (July 30) http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk/2010/07/30/wikipediaorg/ Media contact through the reporting period: July 2010 http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#July_2010 Please also see the detailed weekly news summaries by the Wikipedia Signpost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-07-05/In_the… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-07-12/In_the… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-07-19/In_the… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-07-26/In_the… COMMUNITY DEPARTMENT The Community Department launched an "open call" for submissions by people interested in working on community-facing projects. There were almost 2,000 submissions, many very promising, who were and are being evaluated for fellowship and residency positions at the Wikimedia Foundation. The open call brought us in contact with many active Wikimedians outside of the circle of well known voices and many women and candidates from the Global South. The public policy initiative held several in-person meetings, events and trainings around the country of professors, student volunteers and Wikimedians to build out the organization for the first semester. Community staff working on the fundraiser established a volunteer fundraising committee of Wikimedians from around the world to help drive the 2010 fundraiser, as well as working through many other preparations for the fundraiser. FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS During July, the Wikimedia Foundation received 762 donations, with a combined total value of USD 64,292. July is the beginning of the Wikimedia Foundation's fiscal year; this year's Community Give and Major Gifts target is USD 16,500,000. Combined with the USD 3,500,000 goal for Partnerships and Foundation related activiteis brings the total Fundraising related goal for the year to USD 20,000,000. LEGAL Mike conducted ongoing work identifying and interviewing legal resources for Wikimedia UK, to support the process of obtaining charitable status. We've been in contact with both the Apple and Android app stores to ask their assistance in policing trademark-infringing apps. We're also working independently with Apple to conclude a pre-existing legacy agreement and develop a new contractual relationship regarding Wikimedia trademark use in Apple products. In July we re-engaged a charity-specialist attorney, first to help identify the right path to organizing fundraising and other activities in India, and later to help with other fundraising/chapter issues. We confirmed that there are ongoing structural issues, particularly in Europe, with transferring charitable funds to WMF -- we're looking for holistic, comprehensive ways of resolving these issues. VISITORS AND GUESTS In July, the following people visited the Wikimedia Foundation offices for meetings and talks: Kathy Nicholson, Program Officer with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Travis Kriplean and Jonathan Morgan, HCI Researchers at the University of Washington, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, and 20 attendees from a conference on direct democracy, most of whom were visiting from Europe. EXECUTIVE BLOG Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner launched her personal blog in July, starting with two blog posts: "Why Wikimedia’s new revenue strategy makes me happy" http://suegardner.org/2010/07/17/hello-world/ "If You Have These Five Characteristics Wikimedia Wants to Hire You" http://suegardner.org/2010/07/25/if-you-have-these-five-characteristics-wik… -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

1 0

[Foundation-l] HR and Recruiting Feed on Identi.ca and Twitter
by Daniel Phelps 03 Sep '10

03 Sep '10

Hello Everyone, Recently we've been having some internal conversations regarding transparency for our hiring, recruiting and contracting. In efforts to be more proactive about sharing this information we're moving to a system of tweeting short bursts of announcements. This will be done in a "bot" style voice not unlike the WMF tech feeds. The idea is that we'll get the information out on new hires and new contractors and consultants working with us along with new job openings etc. Basically the streams will recap the comings and goings in a short and sweet format. I invite you all to see these data streams - http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork/all or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork. Eventually we also hope to find more ways to use this feed for recruiting and reaching out to a larger candidate pool and audience. There will also be times where we link the streams or feeds to longer and more detailed blog postings. -Daniel

9 12

[Foundation-l] You have been unsubscribed from the WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
by wikimediaannounce-l-bounces＠lists.wikimedia.org 03 Sep '10

03 Sep '10

2 1

[Foundation-l] Organization on Wikipedia that deals with content issues.
by Peter Damian 02 Sep '10

02 Sep '10

Gerard writes: >>The trouble is that attempts to make something that lures experts but keeps idiots out of their faces have so far failed and/or attracted no attention, even from the experts (Citizendium, Scholarpedia). That is, they sound like a good idea; but in practice, Wikipedia has so far been the least worst system. True. But is there not some way of making Wikipedia just a little more attractive to people who have studied the subject? I used to propose things like credentials based on trust earned on Wikipedia (which would require getting trust from other trusted editors, much like in financial markets). These all naturally got shot down, and silly of me to have tried. But is there not some way of just making it a little easier? The problem is that until someone sits up and notices the serious errors that are propagated through Wikipedia (and which are now becoming part of the folk wisdom of the internet), no one will be bothered. The problem is that no one *knows* there are problems, and so no one can be bothered. I've started documenting the problem in a small way, e.g. here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/william-of-ockham.html and here http://ocham.blogspot.com/2010/06/avicennian-logic.html , but this is only in my own area of expertise. What is the very smallest thing that could be done, I wonder? Peter

14 45

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

Wikimedia-l September 2010