Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 30 September 2011. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a line on this report's talk page.
This report is also available, complete with pictures, on our website at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/September .
Contents
1 Recruitment
2 Program activities
2.1 Education projects
2.2 GLAM activities
2.3 Other activities
2.4 UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)
2.5 Upcoming activities in October
3 Administrative activities
3.1 Board activities
3.2 Charitable status
3.3 Fundraising
Recruitment
This month we completed our recruitment of our new Chief Exec: Jon Davies will start work on 1 October. Andrew Turvey, who led the recruitment, blogged about the process of recruiting our Chief Exec; one of the last steps in this process was the presence of the final three candidates at the 49th London Meetup so that the community could provide their input.
Our new full-time Office Administrator, Richard Symonds, known as Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry on Wikipedia, started work this month to assist specifically with the fundraiser work, and also more generally with WMUK's administrative needs. His contract runs until mid-January.
Program activities
Education projects
On the 1st September, Martin Poulter and User:Martinvl ran a workshop for members of the Institute of Physics. The event was written up in a blog post.
We funded two scholarships to attend WikiSym 2011 in October 2011. The scholarships were awarded to Dr Mark Graham, and Han-Teng Liao, both from the Oxford Internet Institute. Following from the visit, they will also present about their work at the Wikimedia Foundation offices.
GLAM activities
Two ARKive project events were held in Bristol on 15 September (one in the afternoon, the other in the evening), led by Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing), details of which are at Wiki Wildlife Bristol. These were part of a larger collaboration to improve Wikipedia articles on threatened species, full information for which is available at Wikipedia:GLAM/ARKive. The events were covered by a number of local blogs and media organisations.
QRPedia saw extensive media coverage this month, mostly following from the WMF blog post about it. See below for links to the news stories.
A number of other GLAM activities also took place, including:
3rd - The Mayor of Derby awarded prizes by a webstream to winners in Russia, France and Indonesia for the Derby Multilingual challenge
8th - the first Wikipedia editing training session at the British Museum was, with nine BM people present (a mix of curators, curatorial interns and volunteers) and three Wikimedians. More details are on the Wikipedia project page.
14th - A workshop for GLAMs was run at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. For more information on this, see the 'This month in GLAM' UK report.
27th - A presentation was given to all staff at the British Library by Fae and Roger
30th - Fae meet with Museums Galleries Scotland to talk about an upcoming partnership.
Other activities
UK Wikimeets this month: London (11th) and Manchester (17th)
2nd-3rd - Mike Peel presented at Science Online London in the "How are wikis being used to carry out and communicate science?" session, and also the 'Micro-attribution' session.
8th - Steve Virgin and Roger Bamkin presented at TEDx Bristol
13th - Jimmy Wales uses QRpedia in Indianapolis
14th - Editathon in Barcelona creates articles to support QRpedia at Foundation Joan Miro
27th - Fiona Apps (User:Panyd) spoke about Women and Wikipedia at Manchester Girl Geek Dinner at B-Hive, Manchester. A report is available on the wiki.
We have offered travel grants to support UK residents' attendance of WikiConference India in November.
UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)
Press coverage of Wikimedia in UK publications this month included:
1st - QRpedia and Lori on Indianapolis local radio
8th - Wikipedia creator’s keynote speech at radio festival, JournalLive
9th - Wikipedia founder wows Cambridge Network audience - "Wikipedia attracts more readers than the top 20 newspapers in the world combined. ", also covered in Cabume (13th)
12th - Joan Collins Corrects Wikipedia Entry, Express
14th - Johann Hari: A personal apology, Independent. Also covered in The Guardian and Periscope Post.
15th - QR Codes at the National Archives: National archives news & GovernmentNews
16th - coverage of ARKive event:
Life’s wild editing Wikipedia, Bristol Wireless
Bristol ‘Wikipedians’ taught to edit online encylopaedia, Bristol 24/7
ARKive on the Road: Wiki ‘Wildlife editathon’ in Bristol, UK, ARKive blog.
24th - QRpedia on Spanish Discussion programme as part of 40 minute programme on Wikipedia - one of three Spanish TV interviews
28th - 维基百科推出可能有史以来最酷的QRpedia » 竹筱杰 QRpedia and also in two other places.
29th - coverage of QRPedia (a project developed by UK wikimedian and Terence Eden):
Wikipedia launches QR code creation service to assist museum visitors, PanArmenian
QRPedia: Wikipedia makes visiting museums more fun, MemeBurn
QRpedia creates multilingual QR codes for Wikipedia articles, The Next Web
QRPedia: Wikipedia launches QR code tool for museums, Australian Techworld
Several others that day
30th More coverage of QRpedia
How Wikipedia Is Making QR Codes Useful Again
维基百科二维码移动应用 QRpedia，简单并且好用，堪称应用典范！ | TechFrom科技源 TechFrom and several others that day
Upcoming activities in October
1st - Herbert Art Gallery and Museum Backstage Pass
1st - Warwick University Freshers fair - Panyd organising stall
1st - Edinburgh meetup - run by Fæ and Brian McNeil
1st - Tom Morris attending Over the Air at Bletchley Park where Terence Eden did keynote on QRpedia
5th - Martin Poulter speaking on "Common pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia" at Bathcamp #26, the Innovation Centre, Bath
5th - Roger Bamkin speaking at Europeana Conference at Austrian National Library on "WLM, GLAM and QRpedia"
7th - 13.30-17.00 British Museum internal training workshop.
7th - Meeting with Central Midlands Archives, Derby City Council re QRpedia
8th - Andy Mabbett - "GLAM and QRpedia" at Library Camp UK in Birmingham
8th - Cambridge meetup
11th - Board meeting
13th - 10.00-17.00 British Museum Ice Age art "Behind the Scenes" event.
15th - Largest Joan Miro exhibition for 20 years in Barcelona uses 17 QRpedia codes which access English articles (Oh and some in Catalan)
16th - London meetup
16th - EGM - see below
24th - 10.00-18.00 Wikipedia Lounge at The University of Manchester
28th - Meeting scheduled in Monmouth to try and launch partnership with the town
For events in November and onwards, please see Events.
Administrative activities
Board activities
We held an In-person executive board meeting on 18 September in Derby. Discussions focused on plans for our upcoming EGM (see below) and on the induction process for our new chief exec.
Draft reports from board members on their recent activities are available on the WMUK wiki in preparation for the next board meeting on 11 October.
Charitable status
Our application to be recognised as a charity by the UK's Charity Commission was significantly progressed this month. We will be holding an Extraordinary General Meeting on 16 October 2011 to pass a special resolution to change our Objects to bring them in line with the Charity Commission's view of what a charity is. See our blog post on this subject for more information.
Fundraising
In preparation for the upcoming fundraiser, we have run a series of fundraising tests this month. The tests and their outcomes are described on meta.
We received £3624.73 in paypal donations from 272 donors this month - more than twice what we received in August. We have also started accepting monthly and quarterly Direct Debits: this month we recieved eight new Direct Debit instructions, averaging £22/month. All but one of these came in during the hour-long fundraising test on 28 September.
For more information please see our monthly fundraising report at Fundraising Report - Monthly Totals 2011.
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited.
Wiki UK Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827.
The Registered Office is at 23 Cartwright Way, Nottingham, NG9 1RL, United Kingdom.
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
_______________________________________________
WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Re
>> I claim that you are talking total crap. It is not *that* difficult to
>> get the
>> categories of an image and reject based on which categories the image
>> is in are. There are enough people out there busily categorizing all the
>> images already that any org that may wish to could block images that
>> are in disapproved categories.
>It is incredibly easy. One justs says any image within Category:Sex is
>not acceptable.
>Its not hard to do. An organisation can run a script once a week or so
>to delve down
>through the category hierachy to pick up any changes.
>You already categorize the images for any one with enough processing
>power, or the
>will to censor the content. I doubt that anyone doing so is going to be
>too bothered
>whether they've falsely censored an image that is in Category:Sex that
>isn't 'controversial'
>or not.
Anyone who thinks that a category based solution can work because we have
enough categorisors, may I suggest that you go to
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Geograph_British…
And try categorising 0.01% of that part of the backlog yourself before being
so over optimistic about our categorisation resources.
When we've cleared all the subscategories in there then maybe I could be
convinced that Commons has enough categorisors to handle what it already
does. Taking on a major new obligation would be another matter though, even
if that obligation could be defined and its categories agreed.
A categorisation approach also has the difficult task of getting people to
agree what porn is. This is something that varies enormously around the
world, and while there will be some images that we can all agree are
pornographic, I'm pretty sure there will be a far larger number where people
will be genuinely surprised to discover that others have dramatically
different views as to whether they should be classed as porn. For some
people this may seem easy, anything depicting certain parts of the human
anatomy or certain poses is pornographic to them. But different people will
have a different understanding as to which parts of the body should be
counted as pornographic. Getting the community to agree whether all images
depicting human penises are pornographic will not be easy, and that's before
you get into arguments as to how abstract a depiction of a penis has to be
be before it ceases to be an image of a penis.
We also need to consider how we relate to outside organisations,
particularly with important initiatives such as the GLAM program. This
mildly not safe for work image
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JinaVA.jpg is a good example of the
challenge here. To those concerned about human penises it may well count as
pornographic, though the museum that has it on display certainly does not
bar children from that gallery. This image was loaded by one of our GLAM
partners, our hope for the GLAM project is that hundreds of partners will
load millions perhaps tens of millions of images onto Commons. If that
succeeds then our current categorisation backlog will be utterly dwarfed by
future backlogs. If we start telling GLAM partners that yes we want them to
upload images, but they will need to categorise them through an ill defined
and arbitrary offensiveness criteria, then our GLAM program will have a
problem. In principle I support an image filter, I've even proposed one
design. But if people want to go down the route of a category based image
filter they don't just have to convince the many who oppose any filter as
censorship, they also need to be aware that to me and probably others GLAM
is core to our mission and important, whilst an image filter is non-core and
of relatively low importance. If the two conflict then choosing between them
would be easy.
If people want to advocate a categorisation approach to an image filter I
would suggest they start with the difficult areas of defining where the
boundary would be between porn and non-porn, or between hardcore and
softcore. Drawing clear and sharp lines between different shades of grey is
not easy, especially where you want them to be perceived as right by a
globally diverse population. My advice to anyone considering a category
based filter system is to focus on the shades of grey, not at the extreme
examples on the uncontentious contentious scale.
Then if you manage to square that particular circle an equally difficult
task would be to recruit sufficient categorisers. As someone who has
categorised many hundreds of the Geograph images I'd be surprised to find
any Geograph images that I would be offended by. The sort of statues of
topless ladies that you find on display in England certainly don't offend
me, but bare breasts are pornographic to some people in some contexts. So
there will be some long uncategorised images amongst the 1.7 million from
the Geograph load that meet some peoples definition of porn. Any
categorisation based approach needs to explain how it would recruit more
categorisers, retain those we have, and get those volunteers to work to a
categorisation scheme that for many will seem arbitrary and foreign to their
culture.
As for "I doubt that anyone doing so is going to be too bothered whether
they've falsely censored an image that is in Category:Sex". Quality matters
to Wikimedians, false positives and a tolerance for shoddy work offend
almost all of us. A large proportion of the community don't approve of
censorship even if it was done conscientiously and with a deep concern for
getting it right. Personally I'm in the camp that thinks we could justify an
image filter as part of making our data available to some of the people we
don't currently reach; But I'm all too aware that there are Wikimedians who
are not just bothered by inaccurate censorship, but who consider any
censorship to be out of scope and Foundation money spent on it to be a
misuse of charitable funds. Simply asserting that such people don't exist is
unlikely to get them to agree to any form of censorship, better in my view
to try and design a censorship tool that would give a high quality result.
WereSpielChequers
For reference, the resolution said:
* We ask the Executive Director, in consultation with the community, to develop and implement a personal image hiding feature that will enable readers to easily hide images hosted ***on the projects*** that they do not wish to view, either when first viewing the image or ahead of time through preference settings. We affirm that no image should be permanently removed because of this feature, only hidden; that the language used in the interface and development of this feature be as neutral and inclusive as possible; that the principle of least astonishment for the reader is applied; and that the feature be visible, clear and usable on ***all Wikimedia projects*** for both logged-in and logged-out readers.
This doesn't look like Commons is exempt from that, but perhaps the Board might like to clarify that point.
Andreas
>________________________________
>From: Thyge <ltl.privat(a)gmail.com>
>To: Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)yahoo.com>; Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
>Sent: Monday, 17 October 2011, 2:59
>Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
>
>2011/10/17 Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)yahoo.com>:
>> Commons featured prominently in the Harris study, as well as the board resolution on controversial content.
>
>Indeed, but featured curation on Commons, not filtering Commons. IMHO
>the filter discussion should concentrate on the other projects and
>treat Commons differently and separately.
>
>Sir48/Thyge
>
>
>
In the last weeks i hold myself back and watched over the comments at
multiple places to see what is the current development. At first i have
to point out that I'm very disappointed by the current progress. Sue
called for a more general discussion. Ting stated again, like in
Nürnberg, that it is already decided. That is controversial in itself
and can't lead to a constructive discussion.
That aside, I looked at the various comments and the "brainstorming"
pages. It is really boring to look at them, since 99% of the comments
miss the point. There are a whole lot of comments regarding how the
image filter should look like. That are all comments/suggestions not
related to the fundamental questions. But they only serve to disrupt the
thought progress, ignoring anything aside how it should look like, and
even ignoring the basic complaints (non-neutral categorization).
The first question should be: Is controversial content a problem for the
project?
Some might now say "yes" or "no". But I'm not interested in this
answers. I'm also not interested in single examples. I'm interested in
whole view and sources that speak in general about this question.
If we might come to the conclusion that there is a general (not
specific) problem, then we might talk about the image filter and if it
can be a solution to that problem.
nya~
> Message: 4
> Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:40:28 +0100 (BST)
> From: Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] An image filter proposal from German Wikipedia
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <1318635628.69020.YahooMailNeo(a)web29616.mail.ird.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> An editor on the German Wikipedia has proposed an alternative approach to
> the personal image filter -- I provided a translation here?
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier#.C3.9Cbersetzung
>
>
> ---o0o---
>
>
> 1. There is?no?central
> categorisation of all images in different filter categories.
>
>
> 2. Instead, a new "hidden" attribute is
> introduced in Mediawiki when adding an image. "hidden" has the
> following effects:
>
> ? ?- Unregistered users see the image
> "hidden", meaning it is not visible.
>
> ? ?- One click on a show/hide button displays the
> image, another click renders it invisible again.
>
> 3. For registered users, there is a new option for
> "hidden images" in the user preferences: a) invisible, b) visible.
>
> 4. There are?no?separate
> categories.
>
> 5. One and the same image can be "hidden"
> in one article, and "not hidden" in another (principle of least
> surprise).
>
> 6. The same image can be "hidden" in an
> article in one language version (e.g. Arabic Wikipedia) and "not
> hidden" in an article in another language version (e.g. French Wikipedia).
> Each language version has its own community and can determine the use of
> the
> attribute according to its own guidelines and policies. Cultural aspects
> can
> thus be given due consideration. This is exactly analogous to the current
> principles informing article illustration.
>
> 7. This solution would leave it to the individual
> wikis to decide which images are encyclopaedically relevant (informative,
> illustrative) ? but still "critical/controversial" ? in which
> articles. Images of spiders could be handled in the same way as images of
> Muhammad, sex or violence.
>
> 8. The presentation of images outside of the article
> context ? e.g. in galleries for Commons categories or Commons search
> results ?
> would require a separate solution, perhaps to be implemented in a
> subsequent
> phase.
> ?
>
> ---o0o---
>
>
>
> What I like about this proposal is its simplicity and elegance.?It has the
> great benefit of leaving the communities and content writers in charge of
> where and to what extent they use the filter, and it also includes
> non-logged-in users.?
>
>
> Andreas?
>
>
>
Hi Andreas, that's certainly an interesting proposal, but I'm not sure it
meets our needs as a community.
Firstly this would censor images for all logged in users whether they want
this or not. If we need a filter it must be one that individuals can opt in
to, but which does not impose one person's filter on another.
Secondly it would involve all editors in decisions as to which images should
be hidden - this puts the burden of censor on us all, even those who don't
want to be censors. We need a system that has no impact on those who do not
choose to participate in it.
Thirdly by working at the level of an image in an article we are
collectively making a decision for everyone, and rarer phobias or more
extreme positions will not be catered for - each project would in effect
have to decide where to draw lines. If one person is not bothered about
seeing penises, another is OK providing they are flaccid and a third does
not want to see penises then in this system only one can get the result they
want.
Fourthly we are asking people to make their private concerns public, and
some people may be uncomfortable with that. If someone has a fear of heights
and wants to filter out aerial photographs, views down from the tops of
cliffs, towers or minarets then this system would firstly require them to
disclose that phobia, and secondly to convince other editors that it was
sufficiently serious and widespread that an image should be hidden. Even
when they've done that, if their's is a rare phobia they would have that
argument on each image they wanted to hide. Whereas we could give them a
system where they could choose to default image to hidden, unhide or confirm
their decision when they read the description or alt text and if others
share their phobia the system would eventually pickup on that and hide or
display images according to the filter choices of others who make the same
choices on images.
My belief is that many of us would be OK with a filtering system for use by
people with an aversion to images of spiders, penises, gore or whatever
their phobia or cultural aversion is; Provided they don't impose their
concerns on others, or create undue work for others. I think this fails both
tests. Though as the author of a rival option at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/filter I may be a
little biased.
WereSpielChequers
Ilario writes:
> We have two ways: to be passive or to be active. If we choose the
> passivity, it means that we can only organize a system of proxies like
> done in China or to organize some workarounds to make Wikipedia
> available to the person living in totalitarism.
>
> The Italian community has demonstrated that they would be active: I live
> in Switzerland, where Italian is a national language, and I can assure
> that the Swiss users have understood the problem and approved the strike.
I have great respect for Ray and others who worry that a strike
somehow undercuts the mission of the Wikimedia movement. But (and I'm
speaking only for myself here) I think Ilario's point here is valid --
sometimes the movement has to take active steps to draw attention to
the consequences of bad laws and bad government action. And a strike
is sometimes the best, most effective way to do that.
Ray's point about language groups not being limited to particular
countries (e.g., the Swiss who speak Italian, and the many nations
that speak English or Spanish) is an important one, but there is more
than one way to implement a strike. Properly implemented (by IP
ranges, for example) a strike could be limited, more or less, to a
single country.
One of the things I did some preliminary investigation about when I
was a staff member for Wikimedia Foundation was whether a strike of
the sort we've just seen would be workable. I came to the conclusion
that it would be, provided it was done with approval of the
Wikimedians in the nation or geographical territory where the bad law
or bad government action was taking place.
Again, speaking only for myself, I believe the Italian Wikimedians
made the right choice, and I believe that, so long as this tactic is
not overused, a strike may be the best and most effective response to
other anti-free-speech events in the future.
--Mike
On 10/14/2011 9:17 PM, foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> However archiving is rather different from what we are dealing with
> which is more focused on books and other mass market material rather
> than say old planning application maps and minutes of the union of
> postal workers 1937.
Exactly so. Old mass market material tends to be thrown out when it gets
wet, dusty or is in the way, torn up to line drawers, and otherwise
casually treated. It is just this sort of treatment that makes a very
old mass market work valuable - as it may be the only surviving copy of
a large production run.
In my family they've tended to regard 100 year old school textbooks as
having high value. But what of a 100 year old newspaper? Unless it was
of direct concern it is long gone. Newspapers come and go. If that
newspaper or the local library kept archival copies they will be on
microfilm by now.
You'd think that a newspaper morgue would still have original
photographs or negatives of events less than 50 years old - but that is
rarely the case. Unless something at the time of creation was flagged as
having special value it might be thrown out within the year. So (for
example) a photo of Sargent Schriver taken in 1954 when he was a member
of the Chicago Board of Education might have been published in a local
newspaper - but the original negative destroyed within a year or two.
Therefore that newspaper could not republish that same photo several
years later when he became the first director of the Peace Corps in
1961, much less in his obituary this year (unless they extracted it from
the microfilm copy of the published paper).
Going forward, this sort of information will potentially have a longer
life as digital data storage contains more and more recent history, but
the gatekeepers and preservationists will control access to much of that
material. A website I helped create in 1995 was captured by the IA in
1996 (and many times since), but that first capture has already been
destroyed due to a backup failure.
An editor on the German Wikipedia has proposed an alternative approach to the personal image filter -- I provided a translation here
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier#.C3.9Cbersetzung
---o0o---
1. There is no central
categorisation of all images in different filter categories.
2. Instead, a new "hidden" attribute is
introduced in Mediawiki when adding an image. "hidden" has the
following effects:
- Unregistered users see the image
"hidden", meaning it is not visible.
- One click on a show/hide button displays the
image, another click renders it invisible again.
3. For registered users, there is a new option for
"hidden images" in the user preferences: a) invisible, b) visible.
4. There are no separate
categories.
5. One and the same image can be "hidden"
in one article, and "not hidden" in another (principle of least
surprise).
6. The same image can be "hidden" in an
article in one language version (e.g. Arabic Wikipedia) and "not
hidden" in an article in another language version (e.g. French Wikipedia).
Each language version has its own community and can determine the use of the
attribute according to its own guidelines and policies. Cultural aspects can
thus be given due consideration. This is exactly analogous to the current
principles informing article illustration.
7. This solution would leave it to the individual
wikis to decide which images are encyclopaedically relevant (informative,
illustrative) – but still "critical/controversial" – in which
articles. Images of spiders could be handled in the same way as images of
Muhammad, sex or violence.
8. The presentation of images outside of the article
context – e.g. in galleries for Commons categories or Commons search results –
would require a separate solution, perhaps to be implemented in a subsequent
phase.
---o0o---
What I like about this proposal is its simplicity and elegance. It has the great benefit of leaving the communities and content writers in charge of where and to what extent they use the filter, and it also includes non-logged-in users.
Andreas
Hello all,
please find below the WMF report for September, in plain text.
As always, the editable and formatted version is on Meta:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_September_2011
The reports are posted on the Wikimedia blog, too:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/c/corporate/wmf-monthly-reports/
As an experiment, we are publishing a separate "Highlights" summary of key
Wikimedia Foundation reports.
Please consider helping non-English-language communities to stay updated
on the most important WMF activities in the past month, by providing a
translation:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Highlights,_September_…
Let us know how we can make this more useful for you :-)
Many thanks,
Erik
--
* 1 Data and Trends
* 2 Financials
* 3 Highlights
o 3.1 Public Policy Initiative and Global Education Program
o 3.2 Technology
o 3.3 Community
o 3.4 Global Development
* 4 Technology
o 4.1 Tech Highlights
o 4.2 Operations
o 4.3 Features Engineering
o 4.4 Mobile
o 4.5 Special projects
o 4.6 Platform Engineering
* 5 Research
* 6 Community
o 6.1 Projects
o 6.2 Fundraising
o 6.3 Public Policy Initiative
o 6.4 Fellowship Program
* 7 Global Development
o 7.1 Grants Awarded and Executed
o 7.2 Chapter Relations
o 7.3 Global South
o 7.4 Brazil Catalyst
+ 7.4.1 Research on Portuguese Wikipedia
o 7.5 MENA Catalyst
o 7.6 Mobile Strategy and Business Development
o 7.7 Editor Survey
o 7.8 Reader Survey
o 7.9 Mobile Research
o 7.10 Global Education Program
o 7.11 Student organizations
o 7.12 India Programs
o 7.13 Communications
+ 7.13.1 Global Communications
+ 7.13.2 Storylines through August
+ 7.13.3 Other worthwhile reads
+ 7.13.4 Global media coverage
+ 7.13.5 Wikipedia Signpost
+ 7.13.6 WMF Blog posts
o 7.14 Media Contact
* 8 Human Resources
o 8.1 Staff Changes
o 8.2 Statistics
o 8.3 Department Updates
* 9 Finance and Administration
* 10 Legal
* 11 Visitors and Guests
== Data and Trends ==
Global unique visitors for August:
422 million (+7.9% compared with July; +13.7% compared with the
previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will
release September data later in October)
Page requests for September:
15.8 billion (+5,1% compared with August; +9.0% compared with the
previous year)
Report Card for August 2011: The report card is currently undergoing
a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard.
== Financials ==
(Financial information is only available for August 2011 at the time of
this report.)
Financial information as of August 31, 2011
Revenue: $1,415,075
Expenses:
* Technology Group: $1,474,075
* Community/Fundraiser Group: $493,102
* Global Development Group: $552,953
* Governance Group: $183,732
* Finance/Legal/HR/Admin. Group: $921,318
Total Expenses: $3,625,273
Total surplus/(loss): ($2,210,198)
Revenue was ahead of plan at $1.4M due to an increase in donations.
Expenses were below plan at $3.6M actual vs. $4.5M plan. Expenses were
below plan due to lower than plan expenditures in Capital Expenditures,
Chapter Grants and other activities due to being only two months into
the fiscal year.
Cash of $15.5M, which is six months of cash reserves at current spending
levels.
== Highlights ==
=== Public Policy Initiative and Global Education Program ===
<Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-Ambassador-Program-Logo.p…
Logo of the Wikipedia Ambassador Program (which originated as part of
the Public Policy Initiative) >
In September, the Public Policy Initiative wrapped up after 17 months.
Collaboratively, the team created a final report for the Stanton
Foundation (awaiting financial summary) and documented achievements,
best practices and lessons learned. Other team activities included:
Overall project documentation for Chapters Report; last PPI Regional
Ambassador trainings throughout the United States; wrapping up the
project research components and presenting results on-wiki, in papers
and at the end of the month in a final presentation to the rest of the
staff at one of the Wikimedia Foundation's brown bag meetings.
Additionally, we transitioned specific project activities to the new
Global Education Team. With the end of the Public Policy Initiative, the
contracts of three team members, Sage Ross, Amy Roth and Mishelle
Gonzales, ended by convention. We thank them for their hard work and
their commitment to our mission. Sage's, Amy's and Mishelle's
involvement in the Public Policy Initiative was key in linking Wikipedia
peer production with higher education. We wish them all the very best
for their future.
Also in September, the new Global Education Program team worked on
preparing the first "Global Education Program Metrics and Activities
Meeting" (October 25). This new monthly meeting is targeted at everybody
(educators, students, Wikimedia chapters, individual volunteers) who is
interested in outreach activities at educational institutions. The
meeting aims at ensuring that best practices and lessons learned get
shared across different countries. More information:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Education_Program_Metrics_and_Act…
Ayush Khanna, who joined the Global Education Program team as a
half-time contractor at the end of the month, will be in charge of
providing quantitative data on our programmatic activities at
universities around the globe.
The Global Education Program team also worked on preparing the start of
a Wikipedia university initiative in the Middle East and North Africa
(MENA). Supported by Sara Yap, Catalyst Project Associate for the Global
Development team, the team embarked on developing a strategy for
kicking-off a MENA Education Program in spring 2012.
=== Technology ===
* The deployment of protocol-relative URLs
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/27/protocol-relative-urls-enabled-on-all-…>
paved the way for native HTTPS support.
* Major progress was made by our new Internationalization &
localization team
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/14/the-l10n-team-brings-you-input-methods/>.
=== Community ===
Jon Harald Søby transitioned into a Fellow position, focused on
community translations [1] and long-time research fellows Steven Walling
and Maryana Pinchuk transitioned into full time Community Organizer
positions to focus 100% on turning around editor decline.
1.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/27/announcing-community-fellow-jon-harald…
=== Global Development ===
* Launch of a research project on Portuguese Wikipedia
* Preliminary work for launching projects in the MENA region is underway.
== Technology ==
A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for September 2011
can be found at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2011/September
=== Tech Highlights ===
Apart from progress regarding HTTPS and
internationalization/localization (see general "Highlights" section
above), September's Tech highlights include:
* The deployment of our new mobile front-end
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/14/new-mobile-site-launched-on-wikipedia-…>,
now the default mobile experience;
* The start of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.18
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/> to
Wikimedia sites;
* The completion of the Google Summer of Code
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/22/gsoc-students-reach-project-milestones/>
project;
* Ongoing preparation for the upcoming coding events in the USA
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/NOLA_Hackathon>, the UK
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Brighton_Hackathon_2011>, India
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011> and online
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Weekend_of_Code>;
* A revamped, and now maintained, roadmap
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/roadmap> for Wikimedia engineering efforts.
=== Operations ===
* *Tampa Data Center* — Our new data center contractor in Tampa has
finalized the installation of three new racks, which will be used
for networking, application serving, caching and data storage. Two
racks (72 servers) worth of application servers have also been
installed. With each server having 12 CPU cores, this is almost
doubling our existing application server capacity. To-date, we have
deployed and added 58 (of the 72) new application servers to
production capacity.
* *Virginia Data Center* — We completed replicating external storage
(article texts) data to our new data center in Ashburn, for disaster
recovery and usage by eqiad application servers in the future.
Preparations are also being made to deploy bits.wikimedia.org in
eqiad using Varnish 3.
* *HTTPS* — Protocol-relative URLs have been enabled on all sites
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/27/protocol-relative-urls-enabled-on-all-…>.
SSL termination servers have arrived and are in the process of being
installed, to prepare for the full deployment of HTTPS to all wikis.
* *Virtualization test cluster* — All services except for DNS are up.
The puppet repository has been released in a public repository
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/19/ever-wondered-how-the-wikimedia-server…>.
We've switched to using git/gerrit for our production puppet
process. New instances have been tested building from scratch using
puppet.
=== Features Engineering ===
* *Internationalization and localization tools
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization_tools>*
(i18n/l10n) — A list of initial Indic target languages was created
to improve support in MediaWiki for India's 28 official languages.
The Babel extension
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/21/babel-extension-live-on-the-wmf-projec…>
was deployed. MediaWiki's logging system was rewritten to better
support internationalization, and the Narayam extension, which
provides input methods, was improved and deployed to select
Wikimedia wikis
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/14/the-l10n-team-brings-you-input-methods/>.
* *Article creation and patrol* — In response to a request by a
majority of English Wikipedia community members to restrict new page
creation to autoconfirmed users, discussions are underway to improve
the article creation workflow
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/article_creation_workflow> and the user
interface for new page patrolling
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Page_Patrol_Zoom_Interface> as
alternative strategies to cope with the new page creation backlog
and reduce high-friction interactions with new users.
* *UploadWizard <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard>* — A number of
bugs were fixed, notably related to the Wiki Loves Monuments
campaign and the deployment of protocol-relative URLs to Wikimedia
Commons. Work was also done on multi-file selection, AJAX uploading
and custom licenses.
* *ResourceLoader <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader>* — The
back-end for .js/.css page search suggestions was completed, and the
Gadgets API overhauled. The gadget manager and the AJAX gadget
editor are nearing completion: displaying, modifying, saving of
gadgets and autocompletion in all form fields is now implemented.
=== Mobile <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects> ===
* *Mobile Research <https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile/Research>* —
The team continued to work on the report on their field research in
India and Brazil. Phone interviews in San Francisco, Chicago and
Dallas were completed.
* *MobileFrontend <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MobileFrontend>* —
MobileFrontend was deployed in September
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/14/new-mobile-site-launched-on-wikipedia-…>
and is now the default Wikipedia mobile experience. We've reached
out to our various communities to create custom main pages, and are
rolling out new ways of viewing Wikimedia projects on mobile. We
also migrated our old WAP gateway traffic to MobileFrontend, so that
we can serve our users from one place.
=== Special projects ===
* *2011 Fundraiser
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/2011_Wikimedia_fundraiser>* — Increased
logging was added to CentralNotice changes, including interfaces and
filters to search and review them. The DonationInterface extension
was abstracted and refactored in preparation for supporting a new
potential payment processor, GlobalCollect. The team also fixed a
number of bugs and added new features.
=== Platform Engineering
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Platform_Engineering> ===
* *MediaWiki 1.18 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.18>* —
Wikimedia engineers worked together relentlessly in September to
ready MediaWiki 1.18 for deployment. They finalized the review of
the code, and fixed all the issues they could find. The deployment
to Wikimedia sites was split into several phases using the
heterogeneous deployment system. Stages 1 and 2 were completed on
select wikis without too much trouble. Deployment to all remaining
Wikimedia sites is scheduled for October 4th, 2011
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/>.
* *Code review management
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_review_management>* — Even though
engineering and code review efforts were focused on MediaWiki 1.18
in September, the backlog of unreviewed commits in trunk still
continued to decrease, which means we will be able to release
MediaWiki 1.19 fairly rapidly, possibly as soon as December 2011.
* *Wikimedia Report Card 2.0* — The process of statistics generation
continued to be automated; summaries for all Wikimedia wikis
<http://infodisiac.com/blog/2011/09/summary-reports-for-all-wikimedia-wikis/>
were also created, using the India report card as a model.
* *Summer of Code 2011 <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2011>*
(GSoC) — All seven GSoC students passed. Most projects are in a good
shape
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/22/gsoc-students-reach-project-milestones/>,
even if not totally complete. Work now focuses on getting the
students' code reviewed and polished before it can be merged and
used on production wikis.
== Research ==
<Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikiviz_datatelling_WikiGlobalReach…
Screenshot from the winning entry of the WikiViz 2011 Data Visualization
Challenge. Lines represent readership of different Wikipedia language
versions (lower half) from countries (upper half)>
* The Research Committee (RCom) held its sixth meeting and addressed
procedures for member turnover, new candidates for RCom, the scope
and function of the RCom review process, a proposal for Wikimedians
in residence in science/higher education, licensing requirements for
WMF-supported projects and the preparation of a WMF data policy. [0]
* We continued to work on the Open Access initiative, led by Daniel
Mietchen. We submitted a response to an EU consultation on Open
Access on behalf of WMF. [1] Daniel Mietchen and Dario Taraborelli
attended COASP '11 [2] and worked with the Open Access publisher
community on a strategy to increase the visibility of OA contents on
Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. We released a tool (the Wikipedia
Cite-o-Meter) to measure citations and media used from scholarly
journals across Wikimedia projects. [3]
* We announced the winner of the WikiViz challenge (co-organized by
WikiSym and WMF): Jen Lowe, for her work titled "A Thousand Fibers
Connect Us – Wikipedia’s Global Reach" [4]. The awarding ceremony
took place at WikiSym 2011 in Mountain View, CA.
* We published the third issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter
and presented the project at WikiSym. [5] We continued reviewing
support requests from external research teams and testing solutions
for open data hosting.
[0] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/RCom201109
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:Committee/Areas_of_int…
[2] http://oaspa.org/coasp/
[3] http://toolserver.org/~dartar/cite-o-meter/
[4]
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/06/a-thousand-fibers-connect-us-wikiviz-…
[5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2011-09-26
== Community ==
Department highlights
/see general "Highlights" section above/
=== Projects ===
<Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Answers.tiff
Screenshot of the "answers" system>
Reader Relations and Support
We responded to 39 requests for assistance from the community and the
legal department during the month of September (on average spending
around 60 minutes per request, though some are obviously much longer).
In addition, Maggie has rolled out a trial of the "answers" system - a
system designed for community members to ask questions that they haven't
been able to find answers to before. From this, we'll be building out a
knowledge bank of frequently asked questions about the Foundation, the
communities, and hopefully developing a system that allows users to find
the answers themselves in the future.
Philippe was primarily focused on supporting the Image Filter Referendum
and data analysis from that. Philippe also supported Siko and Jon in the
creation of their translations recruiting system and worked with them to
be sure that the back end contact management system worked as designed
and coordinated form creation with PeterG.
Christine began the process of transitioning to a data analysis project
for Zack, and was on leave to support American Red Cross hurricane
relief efforts.
Data Competition
The data competition <http://www.kaggle.com/c/wikichallenge> is over! 96
teams, 193 players and 1019 submissions later we have a winner. We are
right now evaluating the models and we will announce the winners on
October 15th.
Editor Retention
Maryana and Steven are working on their first project as Community
Organizers: running a second round of the template experiment performed
by WSoR researchers Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker. They will extend
the experiment to all level one warnings delivered via the
semi-automated editing tool Huggle, in order to see if changing the
content of warning messages (which has remained static since user
warnings were first created in 2006) has an impact on the users who
receive them. They are also working with community members on exploring
ways to extend these A/B testing methods to other areas, such as bots
and help spaces.
=== Fundraising ===
Fundraiser
The fundraising team has been working to integrate with a new payment
provider that will allow us to accept many more currencies and local
payment methods in different countries. We have been working to create a
more global campaign to optimize our donations worldwide.
Weekly fundraising testing continued in September. The team put a lot of
effort into designing, building, and testing several new donation form
designs to streamline the donation process.
Messaging testing also continued in September. We had already discovered
effective programmer, staff and founder messages, but this was our first
effective editor appeal. For more details on specific tests, please see
our updates on meta <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011>.
In September, we also held a focus group to learn more about our donors
and why they support the Wikimedia Foundation. A report from this
research will be posted in October.
Fundraiser Translations
We made a big leap in translator recruitment for the fundraiser in
September. We streamlined the translation coordination pages to make it
easier for translators to find new work and focus on quality checking,
and we built a signup form and process to easily add recruits to CRM for
email campaigns. As a result, 850 new translators were recruited. We now
have 1000 translators signed up and are tracking end to end
recruitment-translation-quality control for over 50 languages.
Major Gifts and Foundations
We attended a funders' conference sponsored by the Indigo Trust and the
Omidyar Network that focused on how to use technology to produce social
impact in the developing world. We received a $15,000 grant from the
Indigo Trust. Finally, submitted two new proposals for major foundation
funding.
=== Public Policy Initiative ===
/see "Highlights" section above/
=== Fellowship Program ===
Fellowships
Jon Harald Søby transitioned into a Fellow position, focusing on
community translations. Jon's announcement can be viewed here [1]. More
metrics for Jon's project are in the Fundraiser Translations update above.
WikiHistories Project
The WikiHistory fellows wrapped up their travel and blogging [2] and
submitted their final reports at the end of this month. Their full work,
as well as a summary of their findings, will go up on Meta in October.
1.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/27/announcing-community-fellow-jon-harald…
2.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/02/update-on-virtual-community-history-re…
== Global Development ==
Department highlights
Apart from activities regarding the Portuguese Wikipedia and the MENA
regions (see general "Highlights" section), Global Developments
hightlights include:
* Ayush Khanna joins the Global Development Team as Data Analyst.
* Working with chapters to compile program plans for 2011-2012.
=== Grants Awarded and Executed ===
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_DK/Wikipedian-in-Residence_Scholar…
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_US-DC/Bootstrapping_grant
* http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:GLAM_NARA/Events_fund
=== Chapter Relations ===
* Compiling chapters' plans at [1]
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters/Plans_2011-2012>
* Finalizing chapters tracker for 2011/2012 Fundraiser and identifying
chapters' FR statuses: [2]
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tracking_Progress_for_2011_chapters_fundrais…>
* Tracking 2011/2012 Fundraiser: [3]
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tracking_progress_for_2011-2012_chapters%27_…>
=== Global South ===
* The seTswana Wikipedia Challenge -- a collaboration between Google,
Wikimedia Foundation, BITS (Botswana) and Wikimedians in Kenya -- is
underway.
=== Brazil Catalyst <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project> ===
* Said farewell to our fabulous consultant, Carolina Rossini. (She
finished her contract supporting the Brazil Catalyst Project and
left her work in great condition for us to continue pushing forward.)
* Discussions with recruiters and lawyers regarding the logistics of
opening an office in Brazil continue: we hope to have a few program
employees in place by early next year.
* Jessie Wild and Barry Newstead will visit Brazil in October to meet
with the community and visit universities.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project/Agenda_October_2011
==== Research on Portuguese Wikipedia ====
Officially started a research project on the state of the Portuguese
Wikipedia in conjunction with Siko and Fabian from the Community
department. We have a qualitative researcher based out of Porto Alegre,
Brazil, who is working on contract with us as well. Results can be
tracked on the Meta wiki:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Portuguese_Wikipedia_trends_and_beh…
Some preliminary results:
* Total number of editors has remained fairly constant since 2008.
* Total number of new editors has also remained fairly constant, and
comprises over 50% of the total editors in any given month.
* According to the Editor Survey, PT-WP is the *least satisified* of
all the language projects based on the WESI score developed by Mani
and Ayush.
=== MENA Catalyst ===
* Initiated our efforts to support the growth of the Arabic Wikipedia
in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/04/wikimedia-foundation-to-launch-arabic-…
* Discussions with the Qatar Foundation intensify, and we are close to
announcing a partnership to work with the Arabic Wikipedia community
to grow the Arabic Wikipedia.
* The Qatar Foundation agreed to host a small Arabic Wikipedia
Convening in Doha on October 20-21.
=== Mobile Strategy and Business Development ===
* Progressing on several partnership discussions with Indian and
Southeast Asian operators to make Wikipedia more widely available on
their devices throughout those regions
* The mobile team is also working on a marketing and technical plan,
in collaboration with the engineering department, to provide
zero-rated (free data access) to Wikipedia in developing countries.
* Will post a position for a Mobile Partner Manager (Technical) later
this month.
=== Editor Survey ===
Started work on the second iteration of the editor survey. Ayush Khanna
has also joined the research team (taking the total to 2.5) as a
contractor helping support survey and research efforts. Here is the Meta
page for the survey:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Editor_Survey_November_20…
=== Reader Survey ===
Have got results from the fieldwork from consultants. We have
preliminary data from 16 countries and will be sharing output in October.
=== Mobile Research ===
First draft of the report done. Working on the second iteration of the
report.
* Most searches for Wikipedia content start on Google even on the mobile.
* Search in Indic Wikipedias is very hard.
* Readers want more multimedia.
* Editing remains a blind spot for most readers.
=== Global Education Program ===
/see "Highlights" section above/
=== Student organizations ===
* After the first draft of the page creation process was tested, some
changes need to be made and a new layout has been created. Testing
will continue this month.
* WMF is reaching out to student groups to send them "welcome packs"
containing buttons, stickers, and other Wikipedia merchandise.
=== India Programs ===
* Worked on creating a support ecosystem for students in the Education
program - with additional Campus Ambassadors as well as a new layer
of Online Ambassadors. (Both got trained last month - including mock
Q&As.)
* Commenced a community-wide collaborative endeavour to develop the
Indic languages plan.
* Formally registered the Wikimedia India Program Trust.
* Initiated meetings with potential mobile partner (manufacturers,
carriers & value added service providors).
* Secured temporary office space in Delhi for the India team, and
started working out of it.
* Working on last hiring 2 team members - Communications & Program Support
=== Communications ===
* Work was completed on a monograph of activities arond the India
Catalyst efforts, set to be released in the next few days.
* Support for identity and design systems for the Global Education
Program kicked off in September.
* Updates and refinements to the Wikimedia Shop (terms of service,
privacy policy, other MOUs with vendors) were finalized in September
- launch imminent!
* We also further developed a speaking platform for Wikimedia
stakeholders around editor decline and retention > focussing on our
efforts to make Wikipedia more universal.
* Movement communications has been building out a soon-to-be-released
rapid communication tool to share our (and community) progress on
edtior recruitement (and how everyone can help).
* Work continued on the 2010/11 WMF Annual Report, set for release in
November 2011.
==== Global Communications ====
* Building on the Communications Committee's commitment to working
more collaboratively, members now have access to the Internal wiki.
ComCom will work to co-create communications materials and share
best practices on the Internal wiki.
* Global communications worked with Wikimedia Hungary to implement a
communications strategy around the Hungarian Wikipedia's 200,000
article milestone. The celebration included digital and traditional
media outreach and resulted in good media coverage in the region. An
overview of the strategies, tactics and materials are now available
on the Internal wiki to guide other volunteers when conducting
outreach around article milestones.
* Drafted communications plan for Wikimedia India's WikiConference to
be held in Mumbai in November. The team is now working to secure a
pro-bono communications firm to assist with outreach activities.
* Macedonian Wikipedia conducted light media outreach to celebrate its
50,000 article milestone and Polish Wikipedia celebrated its 10 year
anniversary.
* "Wiki Loves Monuments", a pan-European photo competition, launched,
welcomed by an outpouring of positive coverage from media all over
Europe. The contest concluded with 165,000 photos submitted.
==== Storylines through August ====
Wikipedia's cancer coverage explored
Mostly neutral to positive tone coverage of a study that examined the
quality of Wikipedia's articles about cancer topics - declaring it's of
high quality, but sometimes difficult to read.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2011/09/16/wikipedia-cancer.htmlhttp://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2011/9/19/wikipedia-content-on-cancer-i…
Continuing coverage of Wikipedia's 'gender gap'
CBC's nationally broadcast radio show 'Spark' conducted an interview
with Sue Gardner in September focussing on the facts around Wikipedia's
gender imbalance. The Atlantic also conducted an interview on the same
topic.
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2011/09/sue-gardner-on-wikipedias-gender-gap/http://www.ivillage.ca/living/women-we-love/looking-powerful-canadian-women…
==== Other worthwhile reads ====
* http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/meme-weaver/8625/
* http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/08/29/wikipedias-jimmy-wales-sp_n_9412…
==== Global media coverage ====
Polish Wikipedia turns 10
http://www.poland.pl/news/article,Polish_Wikipedia_is_10_Years_Old,id,46116…
Times of India, India
You can't copy-paste this homework
http://www.timescrest.com/life/you-cant-copypaste-this-homework-6226
IT Cafe, Hungary
Hungarian Wikipedia celebrates two hundred thousandth article
http://itcafe.hu/hir/magyar_wikipedia_wikimedia_ketszazezer.html
Turisver, Portugal
Portuguese Pousadas in Wiki Loves Monuments Portugal
http://www.turisver.com/article.php?id=53722
Le Monde, France
Give the French their architectural landscape back
http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/09/27/rendre-aux-francais-leur-pay…
ERR, Russia
15 European countries will participate in Wikipedia photo contest
http://rus.err.ee/culture/e2ea37cf-09a4-45f2-a907-a30a8cf0613f
Diari Andorra, Andorra
Andorra participates in a photo contest to promote the cultural heritage
http://www.diariandorra.ad/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=14581&Itemi…
==== Wikipedia Signpost ====
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-09…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-09…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-09…
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-09…
==== WMF Blog posts ====
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/
==== Media Contact ====
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#September_2011
== Human Resources ==
=== Staff Changes ====
New Perm Position Hire
* Laura James, Office Travel Coordinator (Admin)
* Michelle Paulson, Legal Counsel (Legal)
Conversions
* Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, Development Director (Community)
* Michelle Paulson, Legal Associate (Legal)
* Maryana Pinchuk, Community Organizer (Community)
* Steven Walling, Community Organizer (Community)
New Contractors
* Greg DeKoenigsberg
* Aislinn Dewey
* Daniela Fiejó
* Christophe Henner
* Christopher Johnson (Technology)
* Jeannie Mayall
* Santosh Thottingal
* Susan Walling
New Legal Intern
* Andrew Alire
Contract Extended
* Pavel Andreev
* Tilman Bayer
* Fabrice Florin
* Fabian Kaelin
* Ayush Khanna
* Yusuke Matsubara
* Ashok Misra
* Jonathan Morgan
* Sam Reed
Departed
* Daniel Phelps
Contract Ended
* Hampton Catlin
* Mishelle Gonzales
* Skye Kraft
* Sage Ross
* Amy Roth
New Postings
* Senior Accountant
RFPs
* U.S. Education Program Associate
* Systems & Operations Engineer
* XML Dumps Help
=== Statistics ===
Total Employee Count
Plan: 98
Filled: 1
September Attrition: 1
YTD Attrition: 6
Actual: 85
Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 32
=== Department Updates ===
The HR team continues to make great strides, particularly in recruiting.
Steph Thommen has agreed to a longer term contract. She will be heading
up the recruiting effort, in coordination with the hiring managers,
C-levels and other contract recruiters and agencies. So far she has been
a tremendous help in coordinating and vetting candidates in a timely
manner. Steph has a superb background in hiring, management and
training, so we are lucky to have her with us. We are also welcoming
Jeannie Mayall as a generalist to help us cover some of our areas of
need. Jeanie has great experience in immigration, so she can help us
keep our visa work on track. She's also got awesome compliance chops,
and is helping us with our ongoing HRiS deployment.
The All Hands (All Staff) meeting is right over the horizon, and we've
been working hard to get it organized and ready for the team. Thanks to
the admin team for their support, in particular Isa Munne and Laura
James for travel help and assistance in finding venues and general
organizing. We think the All Hands will be super; the emphasis is on our
current progress and work towards our strategic goals, and practical
work tools for all of us to be as efficient as we can.
When it comes to the All Hands this year, you can't really say the words
without thanking Melanie Brown! She has done a fantastic job of cat
herding, coordinating, emailing and calling to make this event happen,
and we owe her a big round of applause (and probably a cookie) for her
efforts. Thanks Mel!!
Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
== Finance and Administration ==
* Completed setting up all the travel for the All Staff Meeting.
* Completed setting up all the travel for the New Orleans Hack-a-thon.
* The air conditioner on the sixth floor has been repaired.
* Laura James has joined us as permanent employee in the
Administration Department as our travel specialist.
== Legal ==
* Proposed Terms of Use shared with Community for comments and
feedback. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_use
* Our Deputy General Counsel, Kelly Kay, started (Oct. 1).
* Michelle Paulson received permanent status and a promotion to Legal
Counsel.
* Engaged MarkMonitor for improved brand protection.
https://www.markmonitor.com/
* Finished webstore agreement with TOS & Privacy Policy
* Issued anti-corrupt payments policy for WMF. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act
* Issued new article feedback privacy statement.
* Issued survey protocol.
* Stats:
September 2011
1. contracts signed - 20
2. trademark requests - 2
approved - 2
August 2011
1. contracts signed in August - 8
2. trademark requests - 15
approved - 7
denied - 3
pending - 5
== Visitors and Guests ==
1. Jonathan Good (Cofounder, 1000Memories)
2. Patrick Kane (WAWD)
3. James Rucker (Citizen Engagement Laboratory)
4. Carole Tang (Board Member, Wikimedia Hong Kong)
5. Kathy Dong (Hiaring + Smith LLP)
6. Vijay Toke (Hiaring + Smith LLP)
7. Anne Hiaring (Hiaring + Smith LLP)
8. Pierre Khawand, People-OnTheGo)
9. Christophe Bisciglia (Cloudera)
10. Carrie Olson (MoveOn.org)
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
_______________________________________________
WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
