Wikimedia-l January 2011

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

138 participants
87 discussions

[Foundation-l] Announcement: Pete Forsyth leaving the Wikimedia Foundation
by Frank Schulenburg 14 Jan '11

14 Jan '11

Hi All, This email is to announce that Pete Forsyth's year-long position with the Foundation has come to an end and he is leaving us January 15, 2011. Pete's contract as Public Outreach Officer actually ended by in October 2010, but we asked him to stay on for an additional few months to finish a few things and during that time he also provided some critical help to Sara Crouse on grant proposals and reports. Pete's biggest achievement was to help with the first phase of our Public Policy Initiative. He conducted initial interviews with about 40 professors and other stakeholders in fall 2009. He also worked with Rod Dunican, Sara and me to write the grant proposal for the Stanton Foundation in early 2010. In August 2010, Pete was involved in the training of the initial cohort of volunteer Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors. He also procured the donation to the commons of 18 high quality case studies by Cambridge University Press. As Public Outreach Officer, Pete worked with volunteers on outreach via screencasts, software feature development, and other initatives. He advised numerous Wikimedia projects in community relations and advised staff on onboarding and training processes related to wiki skills and Wikimedia culture. For our Bookshelf project, Pete authored and edited instructional materials about Wikipedia and related projects. In addition to working on the Public Policy Initiative grant proposal, he worked with Sara developing and writing proposals and reports for grants for foundations including Hewlett, Stanton, Ford, and Google Charitable Giving Fund. During his time at the Wikimedia Foundation, Pete presented to graduate students and faculty at Princeton and Harvard university; and to museum Wikimedians, museum curators, librarians at Wikimania, the Chapters meeting, Recent Changes Camp, and Wikimedia France's GLAM event. Going forward, Pete will be working as a consultant on online peer production projects, and looks forward to continued collaboration with the Wikimedians and academics he has worked with while at the Foundation. In the near term, Pete will also continue to consult with Sara on foundation relations projects. I particularly appreciated Pete's deep insights into Wikpedia's culture and policies. His involvement in the Public Policy Initiative was key in linking Wikipedia peer production with higher education. I wish Pete all the very best for his future. Frank ----- NB. This mail address is used for public mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will get lost.

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[Foundation-l] [Fwd: [Wiki-research-l] Pew Research Report on Wikipedia]
by Fred Bauder 14 Jan '11

14 Jan '11

"Broadband use remains another predictor, as 59% of those with home broadband use the service, compared with 26% of those who connect to the internet through dial-up." Many images... Although a sophisticated user can turn them off or use lynx. Fred User:Fred Bauder --------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Pew Research Report on Wikipedia From: "phoebe ayers" <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> Date: Thu, January 13, 2011 1:53 pm To: "Research into Wikimedia content and communities" <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- As you all may have seen there is tons of media coverage coming out around Wikipedia's 10th anniversary (Jan 15, 2011). In the midst of this the Pew Internet Research Center released a new report today: "Wikipedia, past and present" http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Wikipedia.aspx -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com * _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: December 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report
by Erik Moeller 14 Jan '11

14 Jan '11

[FYI] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 2011/1/14 Subject: December 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report To: wikimediaannounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org This is the e-mail version, please visit http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_December_2010 for the formatted version that you can edit. Note: As of this report, we no longer align the metrics reporting period with the activity reporting period (that is, if no December data is available yet by the time we create the report, we will include November data). This change allows us to release the monthly reports sooner, instead of waiting for certain metrics (e.g. comScore data) to become available. Also note that we're shifting to having a content-heavy "highlights" section at the top, followed by slightly more terse updates on other activities. This will hopefully give you a better sense of key accomplishments/milestones. Feedback on how to improve the reports is always welcome. All best, Erik ==Data and Trends== :Global unique visitors: :411 million (+0.6% compared to previous month / +18.8% compared to previous year) : (comScore data for November, all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release December data later in January) :Page requests: :13.9 billion (-6.7% compared to previous month / + 22.9% compared to previous year) : (Wikimedia Foundation data for December, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) Recent community metrics are not available as of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump production server that provides the underlying source data. ==Financials== [See the November report for November data. December data will be finalized later in January, and will be included with the January report.] == Highlights == === 2010 fundraising campaign reaches record target === December began with the fundraiser's daily numbers far too low to make our goal by December 31. There was even a question whether we could make the goal by January 15, as we knew we had used up all the easy-to-get donors in our first weeks in November. Our challenge for December was to communicate our authentic urgency to the community. We felt strongly about making our goal as early as possible in order to free the site from fundraising banners as soon as possible. But instead of going straight to an urgent message from Jimmy Wales or Sue Gardner, we took time to run banners and appeals from Wikipedia editors - most of whom had been featured in the Wikimedia Foundation's videos produced in Gdansk alongside Wikimania 2010. We thought it was important to spend time highlighting the community directly for some portion of the campaign. Finally, we did return to appeals from Jimmy and experimented with a wide range of approaches to both messaging, graphical treatment, ask amounts, and other variables. We were able to get the numbers back up and get within striking distance of our goal by the last days of December. With a strong end-of-year push, were were able to make our goal by midnight (San Francisco time) on December 31, and "Thank You" banners were launched. On January 1, we announced the unprecedented success of the 2010 fundraising campaign, and thanked everyone for this extraordinary expression of support: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Half_a_Million_People_Donate_to_Keep_Wi… In just 50 days, the shortest fundraiser in recent Wikimedia history, the Foundation received more than 500,000 individual donation from people living in about 140 countries, reaching its goal of raising $16 million. We received more than twice as many individual donations as in 2009, which garnered 230,000 total contributions. ===Public Policy Initiative: First Semester Wrap-Up === The first semester of classes assigning Wikipedia improvements as coursework to their students has wrapped up. Participating universities and courses are listed at: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol… Statistics and additional links are at: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol… Project staff member Sage Ross contributed a detailed perspective regarding the first semester, and regarding the Wikipedia Ambassadors program launched to support these types of assignments, to the Wikipedia Signpost: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-12-27/Ambass… Sage writes: "Overall, 207 students in these classes contributed more than 2 million bytes of new content to articles—an average of more than 10,000 bytes each to articles." ===India technology fact-finding trip=== Danese Cooper, Alolita Sharma and Erik Moeller traveled to India for about two weeks of meetings with various groups, organizations, and individuals. The purpose of the trip was to assess technical barriers to growing the India community of Wikimedia contributors and users, and to strengthen relationships with the open source community and the Wikimedia community. The stations of the trip were Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore. Groups we met with included C-DAC (for internationalization/localization issues), Mishi Choudhary of the Software Freedom Law Center India, the National Informatics Centre, the Ministry of Communications and IT, IIT Mumbai, Symbiosis University, the Pune Linux Users Group, the Pune Working Journalists, Red Hat, Canonical, Intel India, Novell India, Zmanda, Microsoft Research India, IIM Bangalore, plus Wikimedians in all places we visited (including board member Bishakha Datta and Advisory Board member Achal Prabhala), and many other individuals. Danese Cooper presented a keynote at the foss.in conference in Bangalore, and Erik Moeller organized a MediaWiki workshop at the conference. Wikimedia India and local Wikimedians staffed a booth at foss.in, and we provided t-shirts to attendees. Danese, Erik and Alolita also gave a talk to an audience of about 300 students at Symbiosis University, and presented (and listened) at the meetups they attended. The topics covered included: * input method issues with Indic languages like Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam (which input methods exist, which are supported at the operating system level, which are currently implemented on Wikipedia using custom JavaScript, etc.) * font encoding and rendering issues encountered by the various Indic language Wikimedia projects * search indexing of Indic language content * offline content deployment strategies, current projects (like the Malayalam Wikipedia CD), potential future projects * trends in mobile 2G and 3G, smartphone/feature phone usage * how relationships with the groups we met with could be leveraged towards meeting our goals. As an immediate next step, we are working with the Wikimedians in India to determine how we can best help address remaining internationalization/localization issues. === Director of Technical Operations hired === CT Woo was hired as Director of Technical Operations, reporting to our CTO, Danese Cooper. As Director of Technical Ops, his primary responsibility will to help provide for a stable, secure, documented, scalable and responsive systems environment. He'll be working with our small site operations team to assess the current state process of technical projects, short and long term risk to the technical infrastructure and work towards providing solutions and systems for failsafes and redundancy. He will also be a great resource for guidance and mentorship for the operations team. CT Woo joins us from Freshbrain, an educational non-profit, where he was VP of Engineering and IT. He had a long career at Sun Microsystems from 1993-2006, including as IT Director of Operations responsible for 150 staff, and as Software Engineering Director. In addition to English, CT speaks Malay, Indonesian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fukien. ==Technology== See http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/01/wmf-engineering-update/ for a full update, highlights are listed below. ===Overall Tech Department Updates=== '''Data Summit''': was rescheduled for Feb 4th in California alongside the O'Reilly Strata Conference (a new conference on "Big Data"), which O'Reilly generously gave us a large discount to. The Data Summit is an invitation-only event which will deal with a) structured data in Wikimedia projects, b) research/analytics and management of Wikimedia's large datasets. '''Upcoming Conferences''': Members of the Tech Department will be speaking at FOSDEM 2011, Strata 2011 and GNUnify 2011. Danese will be keynoting at a regional FBI conference in Oakland, and at a conference for the State Department in Washington, DC. '''Fundraiser''': The fundraising engineering team had an eventful December keeping up with the fast-moving requirements of an active Fundraiser in progress. We made modifications to the udp2log system to support multicast, revamped Central Notice authoring to allow non-programmers to create banners (due to increased demands for banner mods in close to real time), and implemented a premium-ordering process. ===Operations=== '''Data Centers''': We negotiated and signed a lease with a co-location facility for hosting our new Virginia Data Center (which was only possible after we'd selected a hardware strategy). We also completed the first phase of our Tampa consolidation. '''Data Dumps''': We were able to get the failed server to re-spin and we copied all files off to a new replacement server. Attempts to start a new dump failed and we are currently re-writing the software that produces dumps with the intention to have all services back in early January. ===Features=== '''Article Feedback''': Evaluation and re-design work for Phase 2 of this new feature was a major focus of December work, due to planned January deployment (see research section below). '''LiquidThreads''': Continuing work on user experience of this feature have led to extended discussions (and mock-ups) about how improved discussion systems can help us develop more effective collaboration and a more welcoming culture in Wikimedia projects. We expect to begin prototyping some of these ideas in the next quarter. ===General Engineering=== '''Improved Analytics''': Open Web Analytics servers came online in late December. We will be working in January to evaluate this new tool's performance and future integration possibilities. '''Code Review''': We are down to 300 remaining open requests in the Code Review Tool. Many of the remaining issues are associated with "FixMe" issues in Bugzilla and will be more difficult to work through. == Research and Strategy == Researchers from Cal-IT (University of California, San Diego) and the Persuasive Technology Lab (Stanford University) visited the Wikimedia Foundation to discuss potential research opportunities. More information may be found here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Thread:Village_pump/en/Researchers_from_… Work continued on the editor trends study, and Diederik van Liere visited the Wikimedia Foundation offices to discuss preliminary findings. Erik Moeller has continued research into expert review as an area of product development, and worked to launch an experiment with the Encyclopedia of Life, with much help from Magnus Manske: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/09/encyclopedia-of-life-curates-wiki… Howie Fung has published additional findings from our experiments with article feedback, focusing the analysis on the ratings received to a specific article (about the discovery of arsenic-based life) to help us better understand to what extent reader ratings accurately reflect actual changes in the article: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Early_Da… Dario Taraborelli, now a research consultant with the Wikimedia Foundation, organized the second meeting of the Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee, and helped organize follow-up activity, which includes a survey of the scholarly community and continued work on subject-recruitment procedures for researchers: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meeting_2010-12-18 ==Community== In addition to coordinating the fundraiser and supporting preparations for the tenth anniversary, the community department developed new Wikimedia fellowship agreements, which will be finalized and announced in January. ===Public Policy Initiative=== In December, work continued on the development of a train-the-trainer program and updates to the second training of campus ambassadors. Research analyst Amy Roth continued her analysis of various quality metrics (self-assessments by the community, expert assessments, reader feedback) to help assess the project's overall impact on content quality. In December, PPI began exploring ways to institutionalize Wikipedia curriculum use at universities. Annie Lin and Rod Dunican presented to over 40 professors, librarians, and staff for LSU's "Communication Across The Curriculum" department. The CAC group works with over 300 professors at LSU from several different fields of study. ==Global Development== ===Grants and related funding=== We approved and paid grants to the Czech Republic and Indonesia. We approved and paid grants to community members for projects including outreach in India. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index for up-to-date information on grant status, activities and reports. ===Offline=== We worked with engineering to support the development of an extension to the book tool that will enable the creation of collections that can be used with offline readers using the OpenZIM format. ===Wikimania Scholarships=== We finalized Wikimania scholarship application and selection criteria and established new "partial scholarship" opportunities to increase attendance opportunities. The scholarship program is managed by Jessie Wild this year. http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships ===Mobile=== We continued work on researching and developing strategies for mobile with a focus on the needs and opportunities in the Global South, and prepared for a presentation of findings to management and engineering in January. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile ===India planning=== * Barry Newstead traveled to Bangalore for interviews with 7 finalist candidates for the National Program Director position. Bishakha Datta and Achal Prabhala were part of the interviewing process throughout, and Erik Moeller and Sue Gardner interviewed two finalist candidates in Delhi. * We manually created a new metrics report card for India, working with Erik Zachte on automating the process ===Brazil planning=== * Carolina Rossini continues to work with the Wikimedia community in Brazil to understand the opportunities for growth of the community and readership; her first interim report has been submitted and is, or will soon be, available on the Brazil Catalyst Project page (which is written in both English and Portuguese) on Meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project * Kul Wadhwa and Jessie Wild made arrangements for a visit to Brazil in January ===Global Development staffing and recruiting=== * We continued recruiting for Chapter Development and India National Program Director positions. ==Communications== During December, Wikimedia spokespeople worked with over more than 100 media outlets, largely in support of pro-active outreach for the Wikimedia fundraiser and the 10th anniversary events. Selected contact with global media oulets: Jyllands-Posten, International Herald Tribune, BBC News Radio and TV, NPR, Sunday Business Post (Ireland), China Daily, Washington Post, and Swiss National TV. Media widely reported on the early fundraising victories and the coming 10 year celebration. Aside from pro-active media relations efforts in December, Wikimedia spokespeople around the world tracked the high profile news of the WikiLeaks release of US Diplomatic cables, often responding to and clarifying global coverage that innacurately connected Wikipedia and Wikileaks. A Wikimedia blog post was drafted as a single reference point for anyone dealing with the confusion: : http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/09/what%E2%80%99s-in-a-name-in-the-c… Media contacts: : http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#December_2010 Blog posts: : http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/ Please also see the detailed weekly news summaries by the Wikipedia Signpost: *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-06 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-13 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-20 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-27 ===10th Anniversary preparations=== * Ten.wikipedia.org had continued activity with over 170 parties in planning stages around the world - at least 5 per continent (except Antartica in spite of outreach efforts!) * WMF sent 10th Anniversary packages with t-shirts and buttons to the community for their celebrations - over 3,000 t-shirts were distributed with over 70 boxes shipped to date. * We continued our media relations efforts focused on completing 10-year messaging and outreach to media organizations. * We launched a community communications toolkit * We completed interviews/discussions with BBC, BusinessWeek, La Fohla, Time Magazine * The 10 year anniversary was mentioned in the Economist, NYT Magazine ===Communications products=== * The WMF Strategic plan main copy-editing drew to a close in December. Final designs have been developed and the report is going through final copy and fact checking before publication. * Work on the WMF Annual Report continued as well, however, the majority of design/copy efforts focused on the strategic plan. * Communications worked closely with the Community department on prospective special fundraising opportunities through December, laying the groundwork for possible future merchandise-oriented incentives. ==Human Resources== New Hires *Ryan Faulkner, Data Analyst (Communtiy/Fundraising) *Joshua VanDavier, Development Associate (Community/Fundraising) *CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations (Tech) *Alolita Sharma, Engineering Program Manager (Tech) New Postings :None this month Events *The Wikimedia Foundation holiday party was a great success. We used the leftover funds from the all hands to cover the costs, and had a nice, low-key event at local restuarant Roe. It was great to see Wikimedians out of their normal element, and to meet their friends and family. *First white elephant/baby/puppy party was great fun and well attended - this may need to become a quarterly event, sans the elephant part. Including our extended WMF family in our culture is an important part of growth for us, and helps bring balance and integration to our work lives. *Fellowship program made some strides in terms of getting standardized formatting for applicant approval. The fellowship prorgram is an important part of our internal HR mission to encourage thought leaders and other researchers in our space to contribute to the Wikimedia cause. *The HR Corner wiki page got the start of an overhaul, the beginnings of our service based environment. HR is understaffed and our infrastructure is in need of an overhaul, we are getting close to be ready to push forward on those objectives. *Jeff Jones, Office IT Manager departed. *Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator departed, as announced in August. :Total Employee Count: :Plan: 77, Actual: 64 :Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 28 : Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork ==Finance and Administration== ===Finance=== The Finance Department compiled the majority of schedules for the Form 990 Tax Return. The Department also began compiling data for January 1099 reporting for independent contractors. Several potential Controller candidates were screened and interviewed. KPMG (audit/tax firm) was consulted on the following issues: *India legal entity *Webstore and unrelated business income implications *Donation giveaways ===Administration=== There was continued preparation of the 6th floor expansion including the kitchen, the mothers' room, furniture, etc. The seating for the remaining teams on the 3rd floor was reorganized. The Administrative staff planned and managed the Staff Holiday party. ==Office of the Executive Director== Following her media/outreach tour (see previous report), Sue Gardner took a three-week vacation, her first extended vacation since her hiring as Executive Director. ==Visitors and Guests to the SF Office== #Colleen Kessler (freelance videographer) #Peter Adams (Open Web Analytics) #David Peters (ExBrook) #David Weir #Gabriel Alexander (Online donation feedback) #Katherine Beckwith (Online donation feedback) #Jonathan Beckhardt (Online donation feedback) #Kent Bach (Online donation feedback) #Christian Berger (Online donation feedback) #Barak Wouk (Student Visitor - Columbia University) #Dan Martin - (Professor UC Berkeley) #Benjamin Bratton (CAL IT) #Jim Giles (New Scientist) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] EN Wikizine - Year: 2011 Week: 2 Number: 122
by EN Wikizine 14 Jan '11

14 Jan '11

****************************************** __ __ _ _ _ _ / / /\ \ (_) | _(_)___(_)_ __ ___ \ \/ \/ / | |/ / |_ / | '_ \ / _ \ \ /\ /| | <| |/ /| | | | | __/ \/ \/ |_|_|\_\_/___|_|_| |_|\___| .org Year: 2011 Week: 2 Number: 122 ****************************************** An independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community ////////////////////////////////////////// === Community === [Wikipedia-day] - Once more it is almost the most important holiday of the year: Wikipedia day. Now Saturday we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project. The start of the very first Wikipedia, the English language Wikipedia. But this is also a day of celebration for all the other many projects and language editions who form the Wikimedia-family; Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Commons 10 years. 400 million unique visitors a month. 80,000 active volunteer editors. 17 million articles (wikipedia's only). A very successful fundraiser ( $US 16 million). Time to celebrate! - And how to do that? - With a special celebration-wiki; http://ten.wikipedia.org/ There are many Wikimeets and events world-wide. Check the celebration-wiki for an event near you. Wikipedia will also come these day extra in the news so watch those news reports on TV and newspapers to see what the traditional media write about our project. === Wikimedia news === [Steward elections] - Call for candidates for the upcoming steward-election. Stewards perform technical tasks on all Wikimedia wikis. Sort of über admin. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2011 [Wikimania 2011] - Applications are open until the end of the month for a subsidy to go to Wikimania 2011 in Israel. http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships === Quote === Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That?s our commitment. Jimmy Wales ////////////////////////////////////////// Editor(s): Walter Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org Website: http://www.wikizine.org ////////////////////////////////////////// Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed. Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is published as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe; mailto:request@wikizine.org?subject=unsubscribe

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[Foundation-l] Time capsule
by emijrp 13 Jan '11

13 Jan '11

Hi all; Please, read this interesting idea http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas#buy_Time_Capsules Any suggestion? Regards, emijrp

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: November 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report
by Erik Moeller 12 Jan '11

12 Jan '11

[FYI] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 2011/1/12 Subject: November 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report To: wikimediaannounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org This version is for email consumption, formatted version is at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_November_2010 All best, Erik ==Highlights== * 2010 Wikimedia fundraising campaign launches on November 12 * New upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons launches in beta * Preparations begin for 10th anniversary celebrations with launch of ten.wikipedia.org * Public Policy Initiative launches leaderboard showing results ==Data and Trends== :The monthly report card for November 2010 (partial data) can be found at: :http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/ :Global unique visitors: :411 million (+0.6% compared to previous month / +18.8% compared to previous year) : (comScore data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects) :Page requests: :14.9 billion (+2.8% compared to previous month / +24.5% compared to previous year) : (Wikimedia Foundation data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) Full community metrics for the month of November are not available as of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump production server that provides the underlying source data. ==Financials== :Operating revenue for November: $6.5MM vs plan of $3.9MM. :Operating revenue year-to-date November: $10.1MM vs plan of $5.3MM. Revenue YTD is on or over target in all areas. :Operating expenses for November: $1.4MM vs plan of $1.7MM :Operating expenses year-to-date November: $5.9MM vs plan of $8.2MM Underspending MTD is due to: timing of capital expenditures and internet hosting ($300K- capex and internet hosting-amounts were budgeted evenly over 12 months rather than reflecting the timing of the data center build-out and consequent increased hosting costs) and underspending in staff-related costs ($160K-salaries, taxes and benefits due primarily to hiring delays as well as staff development partially offset by recruiting and immigration expenses). Overspending for the month was primarily in bank fees ($86K), legal fees ($32K) and travel and conference expenses ($34K). Underspending YTD is also due to above items of timing of capex and internet hosting ($1.4MM - these funds will be spent), staff-related costs ($0.9MM) as well as outside contract services ($0.1MM) and volunteer development ($0.1MM). Overspending YTD is primarily in bank fees ($0.1MM), travel and conference expenses ($0.1MM) as well as in grants and awards ($0.1MM). Overages in grants and awards were due to the the Wikimania scholarships, grant to Wikimania Poland and sponsorship of WikiSym Poland-scholarships being budgeted over 12 months instead of 1 month. However, by year-end, grants and awards are expected to be near budget. Cash and investments as of November 2010 totaled $16.5MM (as of Nov 30, approximately 10 months of expenses) ==Preparations for Wikipedia's 10th anniversary== We launched ten.wikipedia.org, a dedicated wiki to support community celebrations of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary on January 15, 2011. We finalized designs for related merchandise and overall event branding, and made them available to the community for customization and localization: http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design We finalized our media outreach plan related to the 10th anniversary and began contacting long-lead monthly magazines. Wikimedia Fellow Steven Walling will provide support throughout the preparations and celebrations, by reaching out to communities, helping organize the event pages, supporting the distribution of event kits, etc. == 2010 fundraising campaign launches == On November 12, the Wikimedia Foundation "soft-launched" the 2010 fundraising campaign, with an official launch on November 15. It is the most ambitious fundraising campaign in Wikimedia's history, with a campaign goal of $16 million. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Seventh_Annual_Campaign_to_Support_Wiki… As always, the fundraiser represents a large, collaborative undertaking both within the organization (community department staff, engineering, communications, global development, finance, legal), between the Wikimedia Foundation and the international Wikimedia chapter organizations, and with the larger global Wikimedia community. The 2010 fundraising team had sought deep community and chapter engagement from the start, and through November, we saw unprecedented participation from the entire Wikimedia movement in running a successful campaign. The following Wikimedia chapters worked directly with the Wikimedia Foundation and processed funds in their respective countries: Wikimedia Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. This was possible in part because Wikimedia Foundation had spent time in prior months to work with chapters in clearing any legal hurdles to directing donors to them, and putting in place chapter fundraising agreements. The funds donated to chapters will support program work within their geographies, but chapters also support the wikimedia Foundation directly. The engineering team for the fundraiser enabled a successful launch without any major hiccups. Many improvements had been made leading up to the launch, and new technology continued to be developed, tested and deployed through November, with special focus on testing mechanisms to increase the efficiency of the donation process and reduce drop-off (for example, by testing a donation form that only requires a single step to complete a donation, instead of two steps). The new CentralNotice (banner management) system makes it possible to manage our now very complex campaign, with geo-targeted banners and an intense testing schedule. We got off to a very strong start by using the time-tested "Personal Appeal" from Jimmy Wales. Traditionally, this has been used later in the campaign, but was started earlier because of its strong pull and the ambitious fundraising goal. As expected, donations decayed over time as highly receptive givers made their donations. The fundraising team has tested many different approaches to appeals, regularly increasing donation rates over what was currently running, but not turning the tide of declining donations overall. We ended November with a cliffhanger, with some fear that we would not be able to make our fundraising goal by December 31 and that fundraising banners would have to be run all the way through the 10th Anniversary on January 15. The fundraising team worked hard in November to develop messages written by, and in collaboration with, Wikipedia editors that might be more effective than the appeal from Jimmy Wales. ==Technology== Monthly report on engineering activities in November 2010 can be found at http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/12/december-2010-wmf-engineering-update Highlights: ===Operations=== * '''Data Centers''': After extended discussions, an anticipated large-scale donation of equipment for the new data center in Virginia did not come through, and we began implementation in Virginia consistent with the original budget. We expect to sign a lease with a co-location facility in December, and hopefully to begin building in January. In Tampa we will be consolidating our servers on to one floor. * '''Data Dumps''': There was a serious failure of the server that hosts all data dumps made available through download.wikimedia.org, causing an outage in both access to existing dumps and in routine creation of new dumps. This is a high-priority issue for us, but may take some time to fix. It affects our ability to generate various statistics, such as editing activity. ===Features=== * '''Media Upload Wizard''': A major improvement in the upload experience, this feature was deployed in Beta as per the terms of the Ford Foundation grant that funded it. Details: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/30/upload-wizard-launches-beta-wikim… * '''Pending Changes (Flagged Revisions)''': Phase 2 of this quality control feature was deployed in November, with improvements to diff page viewing speed and small user interface improvements. We are awaiting feedback from the English Wikipedia community on the future of this feature. More information: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pending_Changes_enwiki_trial ===General Engineering=== * '''Improved Analytics''': Open Web Analytics modifications to support integration for Fundraising were completed and will be deployed once new operations infrastructure is in place. * '''Code Review''': In September we had 1400 open issues that had been open for some time, creating unhappiness in the volunteer developer community. We created a staff and volunteer tiger team to attack the problem. As of November, 800 requests were remaining. == Research and Strategy == The product strategy team (Howie Fung and Erik Moeller) began drafting a whitepaper analyzing both the Wikimedia projects in their environmental context, and current numerical trends with regard to community health and community development. The whitepaper further offers hypotheses as to how different product development priorities (e.g. focus on rich-text editing, focus on discussion systems, focus on interaction between new and experienced editors) are likely to help the Wikimedia movement achieve the strategic priorities identified through the strategic planning process and most sharply articulated through the five-year targets established by the Board of Trustees ( http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Five-year_targets ). The paper will be complemented with results from the Editor Trends Study currently conducted by Diederik van Liere on contract with the Wikimedia Foundation ( http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study ). The working draft of the whitepaper can be found at: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper Erik Moeller researched issues around upload of restricted filetypes, and management of large inflows of multimedia contributions (such as smartphone uploads). Related initial proposals can be found here: *http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Restricted_uploads *http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Media_review ==Community== With the exception of the public policy initiative, the community department was mainly preoccupied with coordinating 2010 fundraiser and with supporting the preparation of the 10th anniversary (see above). The two Russian Wikimedia fellows continued their development of a history of the Russian Wikipedia. ===Public Policy Initiative=== November started with Frank Schulenburg and Rod Dunican attending the Open Educational Resources 2011 conference and presenting the Public Policy Initiative at the Mozilla Drumbeat conference in Barcelona for learning innovation. While students in classes worked on articles, Frank created a new tool, the "PPI Leaderboard", to track student contributions and provide a level of competition between classes. The leaderboard tracks not just edit counts but also overall quantity of material added to articles. (Qualitative measures are coming.) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol… In November, the PPI team met with Liz Allison of the Stanton Foundation for the mid-point stagegate meeting. She was very happy with where the project is to date and at the end of the meeting said, "This is exactly what we expected from the initiative. This is what we wanted. Keep going." ==Global Development== ===Grants and related funding=== We contracted with Liam Wyatt to support preparatory work surrounding the GLAM-WIKI conference in the UK. WMF also approved and paid grants to the Argentina chapter. For more information on grant status and reports, please always consult: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index ===Offline=== We made further progress on the development of our offline strategy: namely, to approach those without Internet access primarily through offline computer-based programs via education channels. In the developing world, the total number of primary and secondary students and teachers with access to computers is approximately 550M. See below for details: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline/Target_Market ===Mobile=== Our team continued work on researching and developing strategies for mobile with a focus on the needs and opportunities in the Global South: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile We worked with Orange and Telefonica to continue and enhance our mobile partnerships. ===International visitor=== Siska Doviana from Wikimedia Indonesia visited for the last part of the month. She worked on a variety of projects, including documenting the history of Indonesian chapter, creating a skeleton of an international visitor program, and providing suggestions for a potential global campus program. ===India planning=== Barry Newstead, supported by Bishakha Datta and Achal Prabhala, continued work on the recruiting for India National Program Director. WMF worked with legal counsel on options regarding the potential setup of our office in India ===Brazil planning=== Carolina Rossini continues to work with the Wikimedia community in Brazil to understand the opportunities for growth of the community and readership; her first interim report has been submitted and is, or will soon be, available on the Brazil Catalyst Project page (which is written in both English and Portuguese) on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project Kul Wadhwa and Jessie Wild made arrangements for a visit to Brazil in January. ===Recruiting in Global Development=== Winifred Olliff was recruited as Program Assistant to support the Chief Global Development Office and the team including work on the grants process, merchandise management and other GD activity areas. We continued discussions with candidates regarding Chapter development. ==Communications== During November, Wikimedia spokespeople worked with over 45 global media outlets, including: CBC Radio, BBC Radio and TV, Channel One Russian TV news, Charlie Rose, NPR, Business week, CBS interactive, Canadian Business Magazine, Slate Magazine, Cinco Dias, and The Daily Telegraph. :http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#November_2010 :http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/ Please also see the detailed weekly news summaries by the Wikipedia Signpost: *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-01 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-08 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-15 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-22 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-29 ===Communications products=== * Work continued in November on the refining and editing of the WMF Strategic Plan document. Design concepts were finalized and text was finalized in draft state. * The WMF Annual Report was supported by an outside design strategist and journalist/writer. The report format was streamlined and visual research for photographs and charts began. * Through November, communications worked with a design strategist and WMF merchandise/printing supplier, Social Imprints, to refine a series of branded Wikipedia merchandise products, and start formulating an online webstore strategy. ==Human Resources== New Hires *Dario Taraborelli, Research Consultant (Tech/Product) *Winifred Olliff, Program Assistant (Global Development) *Bryony Jones, Program Assistant (Community) New postings *HR Generalist (HR) *Controller (Finance) *Data Analyst (Tech) *Software Developer, Features (Tech) *Performance Engineer (Tech) Events *November was mostly about clean up in preparation for new processes, the HRM system, and getting ready for the end of the year. November and December are slow hiring months, and we will need to get better processes in place to support the hiring we need in order to make thoughtful choices about onboarding and good hiring. Since we have such an ambitious hiring plan, we need better infrastructure to support that. *Much movement on the General Counsel front as we ramped up the search and did several long panel interviews with 10+ candidates, which netted us some good prospects. We are being thoughtful about the type of hire we make here, and have gone through an extensive (and at times exhaustive) search to make just the right match for the rest of our team. *Bill Gong, Accounting Manager and Financial Analyst departed. :Total Employee Count: :Plan: 76, Actual: 63 :Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 29 Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork ==Finance and Administration== ===Finance=== The Finance Team updated the Finance Corner on the Office Wiki with an updated Purchasing policy as well as updated procedures for Purchasing, Contracts and Expense Reports. The Finance Team also conducted trainings on the new policies and procedures with both new and existing staff. ===Administration=== Office: The 6th floor build-out for the Community Department was completed ahead of the rest of the build-out so that they could be settled to focus their efforts on the Fundraiser. The general 6th floor build-out continued. Office IT: The stability of the wireless network was increased. Six laptop models were evaluated for future hardware standardization, and a presentation was given on Google Apps. ==Office of the Executive Director== Between November 20 and December 6, Sue Gardner visited Stockholm, London, Dubai and Delhi. She spoke at three conferences, was interviewed by 16 journalists, met with about 50 Wikimedians as well as a few supporters and friends at cultural institutions, and interviewed candidates for the Wikimedia Program Director for India. The trip had multiple overlapping goals - to advance awareness of Wikipedia (particularly during our fundraising season), to encourage people to try editing, as well as to support chapters and find out a little more about the challenges and opportunities faced by editors in the Middle East. On the whole, the trip was successful and we’ll probably aim to do similar ones in future, building on lessons learned this time. ==Visitors and Guests to the SF Office== #Matias Attwell (Terra) #Cristiano Perozzo (Terra) #Maximillian Klein (Public Outreach) #Siska Doviana (Volunteer Global Development) #Professor David Silver (University of San Francisco (and his daughter Siena)) #Professor Crispin Thurlow (University of Washington (Dept of Communications) and Professor Irina Gendelman from Saint Martin's University (Instructional Design) #Denny Vrandecic #Anya Shyrokova #Liz Allison (Stanton Foundation) #Phoebe Ayers (Board member) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] Fwd: October 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report
by Erik Moeller 12 Jan '11

12 Jan '11

[FYI] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> Date: 2011/1/12 Subject: October 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report To: wikimediaannounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org This version is for e-mail consumption. Formatted, living version: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_October_2010 All best, Erik ==Highlights== * Wikimedia Foundation projects serve more than 400 million unique visitors * Events: Hack-a-Ton in Washington, DC; Inside the Globe event in New York * Board meeting in San Francisco ==Data and Trends== :The monthly report card for October 2010 (partial data) can be found at: :http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/ : Global unique visitors: : 408 million (+2.6% compared to previous month, +18.5% compared to previous year) : (comScore data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects) : Page requests: : 14.5 billion (no change compared to previous month / +18.6% compared to previous year) : (Wikimedia Foundation data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) : Note: Page request data now includes all projects (previous months only reported Wikipedia pageviews), including the mobile site. Source data can be found at http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjects.htm and http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyMobile.htm . :Full community metrics for the month of October are not available as of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump production server that provides the underlying source data. ==Financials == :Operating revenue for October: $3.2MM vs plan of $750K :Operating revenue year-to-date: $3.6MM vs plan of $1.4MM The MTD and YTD overages were due to unrestricted gifts including an anonymous $2MM gift and several hundred thousand dollars of revenue related to community gifts as a result of pre-fundraiser testing. :Operating expenses for October: $1.4MM vs plan of $2.0MM :Operating expenses year-to-date: $4.6MM vs plan of $6.5MM For MTD, underspending was due to: timing of capital expenditures and internet hosting ($180K-capex and internet hosting-amounts were budgeted evenly over 12 months rather than reflecting the timing of the data-center build-out and consequent increased hosting costs), timing of office expansion ($250K-costs incurred in Nov and Dec) and underspending in staff-related costs ($218K-salaries, taxes and benefits due primarily to hiring delays as well as staff development partially offset by immigration expenses). Overspending for the month primarily in travel and conference expenses ($50K). For YTD, underspending is also due to above items of timing of capex and internet hosting ($1.3MM) and staff-related costs ($0.7MM) as well as outside contract services and volunteer development ($0.2MM combined). Overspending YTD is primarily in travel and conference expenses ($80K) as well as grants and awards ($165K) related to Wikimania scholarships, grant to Wikimania Poland and sponsorship of WikiSym Poland (scholarships were budgeted over 12 months instead of 1 month). Cash and investments as of October 31 totaled $11.6MM. ==Board of Trustees Meeting== In October, the Board of Trustees met in San Francisco. This was the first time the full 10-person board met in San Francisco, and included new board member Phoebe Ayers. The meeting was chaired by our new chair, Ting Chen. Major agenda items included: *'''Governance Committee update and board member evaluation process:''' The board was joined by Jim Schwarz, a consultant from BoardSource who is helping with board development work. Major outcomes included (1) extending the terms of appointed "expertise" seats to two years from one year, and (2) a plan to run a self-evaluation process, in which all board members, as well as Sue Gardner, fill out detailed questionnaires assessing the performance of the individual board members. The assessments are meant to allow individual board members to strengthen their performance, as well as provide Ting and the governance committee with a more holistic picture of the board. *'''Chapters, financial controls and movement-wide transparency:''' The board was joined by staff members Erik, Barry, Veronique and Zack to discuss the legal status of the chapters, current fundraising practices, and the current state of chapters’ reporting mechanisms for both activities and financial reporting. The board passed a resolution that you can read here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_princi… . It essentially called for the Wikimedia Foundation to ensure that agreements with chapters for money transfers coming out of the 2010 fundraiser be based in sound legal frameworks and be vetted to ensure they're legally valid, enforceable and responsible. It also called for adherence to donor privacy policies and high standards of transparency and accountability, and it amended the audit committee's charter to add responsibility for ensuring transparency WRT how donations are used by all Wikimedia entities, including chapters. *'''Controversial content:''' The board was joined by consultants Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris. Robert and Dory's observations and recommendations can be read here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimeda_Study_of_Controversial_Content . To move the work forward, the Board appointed a working group led by Jan-Bart (as group chair), Phoebe and Kat, to work with Robert and Dory to figure out next steps, which will include communications with the Wikimedia community as well as specific discussions with the Commons community and development of a draft specific for the proposed new feature. *'''Movement Roles II:''' The board was joined by consultant John Huggett, and long-time Wikimedian, Austin Hair. The purpose of the Movement Roles II project is to draft a "Wikimedia Charter" clarifying the roles of different parts of the Wikimedia movement – basically, roles-and-responsibilities among the various organizational entities such as the Wikimedia Foundation, the chapters, and less-official associations such as wikipods, wiki-projects and student groups. The board voted to approve this resolution: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Movement_Roles_October_2010 . Read more about Movement Roles II here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles_working_group *'''Strategy update and review:''' At the board meeting, Sue Gardner gave the board a near-final version of the strategy document, which - once finalized - is intended to be published as a booklet which will be given out to chapters, foundations, partners, donors, and anyone else who wants it. The board voted to approve the final text, which means the document itself will be printed as soon as the final design is completed and approved. *'''Community health:''' The board held a broad discussion, led mainly by Samuel Klein, about community health. This included a discussion about development of a policy prohibiting both on- and off-wiki harassment of Wikimedia project participants, and responding to it it with global locking-out from the projects. Currently, board member Phoebe Ayers is working with Steven Walling to develop the draft policy, and hopes to have a near-final version of the policy available for the board to review in early November. ==Technology== Critical improvements were made to fundraising infrastructure in preparation for the 2010 fundraising campaign. The features team geared up for a deployment of the new upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons, and continued testing the Article Feedback tool (which enables readers to assign star ratings to articles) on a subset of Wikipedia articles. We've also been aggresively testing new versions of both the ResourceLoader (which will reduce page load times) and Pending Changes in preparation for production deployments this quarter. We're in the final phase of selecting a new primary data center location in Virginia. The new data center will mitigate our Tampa data center as a single point of failure for all Wikimedia Foundation projects. The technology department ran a Hack-A-Ton ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hack-A-Ton_DC ) in Washington, DC. This event was a great success for getting our volunteer development community together and squashing lots of bugs. We also began interviewing for the Director of Technical Operations position, as well as preparing a number of new job openings. :For more information, please read the October engineering update: :http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/10/october-2010-wmf-engineering-update/ == Research and Strategy == A new research project, the Editor Trends Study, was launched to better understand patterns of growth and change in Wikipedia's communities. Diederik van Liere was contracted to undertake this study, and its results as well as code will be made available at: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study A canonical list of Wikimedia research projects which are underway was launched at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research/Projects ==Community== ===Fundraising=== October included frenetic preparations for the 2010 fundraiser. We picked up the pace of our testing to improve messaging and the efficiency of our forms. The tech team assigned to fundraising solved several critical problems to enable fundraising and testing at a larger scale and higher speed than in years past. ===Fellows=== Our Community Fellows studying the Russian Wikipedia completed the first draft of their narrative history of the project. The team has a plan for releasing the history to the Russian and Meta communities soon and have moved on to a new phase of the project involving one-on-one interviews and a Russian community discussion. ===Public Outreach=== October saw lots of continued activity in the development, pilot and research plans for the new Article Feedback Tool. We began the Public Policy Initiative weekly newsletter, communicating updates on key project and related activities. To help with in-class teaching support, we finalized several brochures (e.g. "Evaluating Wikipedia Article Quality," "Introduction to Free Licenses," "How to Cite References on Wikipedia") and completed two Wikipedia screencast tutorials ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Resources ). We continued travel to universities, participating in workshops, recruiting new professors and checking with our current PPI professors. The Initiative launched a scaled-up version of its portal on Wikipedia that includes information about all of the different classes whose students are participating in the Public Policy Inititative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol… ===Inside the Globe Event=== On October 7th, more than one hundred Wikipedia editors, donors, and readers gathered in New York City for Inside the Globe, a celebration of the dynamic community that has helped build the world’s largest free-knowledge resource. Wikipedia editor and Wikimedia Foundation fellowship recipient Steven Walling presented a talk regarding the identity and culture of the most involved editors, highlighting the motivations and methods behind their amazing accomplishments. Founder Jimmy Wales also spoke about the enormous impact of Wikipedia and the importance of continued support. == Global Development== ===Capacity building=== The new Global Development department continued building capacity (see HR update below). Interviews were held for the positions of Program Assistant, Chapter Development Director, and National Program Director for India. ===Offline and Mobile strategy focus=== October was spent assessing the state of the offline and mobile work across the communities, and building on the strategic planning task force work in these areas in order to develop a scalable, strategic direction for investment. *Offline: We worked on strategy for the Wikimedia movement with a focus on scalability: i.e., how to get the best offline product available to the largest number of people. Some strategic direction is built out at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline *Mobile: Based on secondary research, we developed some strategic directions for Wikipedia's mobile platform. The strategy is being developed at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile ===Data Analytics=== Mani Pande helped set into motion data analytics and key metric tracking for different geographies and key programs. ==Communications== ===Media contact=== Through October, WMF reported media contact with Swedish Educational Broadcasting, BBC World, Wired Magazine, MSNBC, BBC Arabic Services, and The Ubyssey. While in India, Barry Newstead and other Wikimedia figures, including Board member Bishakha Datta met with a number of local media, including CIOL.com, Economic Times of India, Hindustan Times, and Asian News International. For more: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#October_2010 ===Valuable reads=== *http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gQPPK9VHdDGurS0y4u_r1GF5TgtQ *http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11653349 *http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/in-rancorous-times-can-wikipedia-show-us-how-to-all-get-along/64783/ *http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/what-if-we-ran-universities-like-wikipedia/27612 ===Ten Year Anniversary=== Communications worked on a special global global branding design concept for Wikipedia 10 in October, and began work on related merchandise to help celebrate the anniversary. See more at http://ten.wikipedia.org. On a related note, the Wikimedia Foundation has begun to explore the needs and requirements for a Wikimedia merchandise storefront. We also supported the work of the multimedia upload team with coordination of design strategy. Work also kicked off on global communications and media strategy planning for the annual fundraiser and for Wikipedia 10. ===Other Communications Topics=== :Blog posts for October 2010 :http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/10/ Major issues and media-interest topics: *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-04 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-11 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-18 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-25 ==Human Resources== :Total Employee Count: :Plan: 72, Actual: 61 :Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 31 :Process improvements should speed up the hiring over the rest of the fiscal year. :Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork In October the Wikimedia Foundation added 2 permanent hires (Jessie Wild - Special Projects Manager, Global Development and Mani Pande - Senior Research Analyst, Global Development) and 4 temporary hires (Christine Mollenberndt - Community Associate, Dan Rosenthal - Community Associate, Ryan Faulkner - Research Analyst, Community Department, and Michelle Paulson - Associate Counsel). Also in October the following employees left the Wikimedia Foundation; Rand Montoya - Head of Community Gifts, Aradhana Ravindra - Bookshelf Project Manager, and Mike Godwin - General Counsel. An announcement by Sue Gardner regarding Mike Godwin's departure can be found here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2010-October/00006… Wikimedia organized an overnight offsite all-hands in Half Moon Bay. Board member Phoebe Ayers gave the opening presentation. We had two days of meetings, with an evening dinner and social events. The venue donated meeting space to us and reduced fees for the rooms; the entire event came in significantly under the established budget. Following the departure of Mike Godwin, we engaged Alisa Key as interim General Counsel. Alisa has worked with us extensively in the past, and brings a broad-based knowledge of our particular legal challenges. She is working with Michelle Paulson, who has done pro bono legal work for the Wikimedia Foundation; Michelle is running our daily triage and more tactical engagements, and Alisa is overseeing Michelle and determining our interim strategy, as well as taking care of any legal challenges during this interim timeframe. We opened a General Counsel search this month, working with m|Oppenheim recruiting. The process included a reworking of the job description by Sue, Cyn, Erik and Lisa Grossman, recruiter. We will engage with several candidates in a few rounds of interviewing that will include the C-level team and a few board members. We are regarding this both as a process for finding a GC, and as an opportunity to engage with the legal community. ==Finance and Administration== ===Finance=== Audited financial statements were approved by the audit committee and published. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/cc/FINAL_09_10From_KPMG.… The Question and Answer sheet was also posted on the Foundation wiki at: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2009-2010_Financial_Statements_Question… ===Administration=== In October, work began on the office expansion to the 6th floor. Admin provided support for the Hack-A-Ton ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hack-A-Ton_DC ) in Washington D.C. and the All-Staff Retreat. ===Office IT=== A beta help desk ticketing system was launched. There were 186 tickets open during the month, and by the end of the month, 166 were resolved. This system is going to be expanded to include general administration needs as well. We continued to work on a Google calendar migration and LDAP central authentication. We also created a local Ubuntu repository. ===October 2010 Visitors to the San Francisco Office=== #David Peters (Bolt|Peters) #David Weir #Phoebe Ayers (Board member) #Jimmy Wales (Founder/Board member) #Samuel Klein (Board member) #Jan-Bart de Vreede (Board member) #Kat Walsh (Board member) #Arne Klempert (Board member) #Matt Halprin (Board member) #Ting Chen (Board member) #Bishakha Datta (Board member) #Jeff Gray, Andrew Clarke, & Cassie Shum (ThoughtWorks) #Jeff Wishnie #Tom Taylor #Craig Newmark (Advisory Board) #Audit Team (KPMG) #Steve Crocker #Jim Schwarz (consultant from BoardSource) #Robert Harris, (consultant for Board Meeting) #Dory Carr-Harris (consultant for Board Meeting) #Jon Huggett (consultant for Board Meeting) #Austin Hair (consultant for Board meeting/long-time Wikimedian) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] January 15 retro?
by Lodewijk 12 Jan '11

12 Jan '11

Hi, wouldn't it be nice to change the logo of Wikipedia on January 15th back for one day to those old logo's? Give people a retro feeling? (would love to see enwiki go back to the american flag, but perhaps the round text logo would lead to less overload of the OTRS queues) How can these logo's be changed if there is a wish to do so? It used to be possible through Wiki.png, but that is no longer the case. Best, Lodewijk

24 37

[Foundation-l] Central Notice is still not up?
by HW 11 Jan '11

11 Jan '11

It is only 4 days left to 15 January, which is Wikipedia birthday. Some language translation on meta is ready or proofreading. Since we should let the editor and reader know about that, I think we shall put up the central notice as soon as possible and it should be down on the end of January since http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:January_2011 list that except 23 January, the wikipedian still have activity so I suggest the notice should be up on today, 11-1-2010 and down on 31-1-2010 or longer. Thank you. HW

5 6

Re: [Foundation-l] Again: January 15 retro?
by Bence Damokos 11 Jan '11

11 Jan '11

I think the banners are already enabled in most "non-cat1-chapter" geographies. I think they should also be enabled in other places as/once the FR thank-you messages have run their course. I support the logo change, btw. Bence -- Sent from my phone On 2011.01.11. 14:10, "emijrp" <emijrp(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, readers may be interested in local meet-ups. A link to the Ten Wiki would be great. Come on! Involve readers in this! 2011/1/11 HW <waihorace(a)yahoo.com.hk> > I perfer a global notice for all project as soon as possible since some > activity > is going on ...

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