Somebody just contacted me to let me know that he thinks Google is
experimenting with their search result options: one option is to allow
users to block Wikipedia articles from showing up in Google's search
results. Sometimes this option comes up and sometimes is doesn't. Has
anyone else seen this? Does anybody know anything about this?
http://yfrog.com/hsylhpej
--Kul
Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 2/25/11 3:11 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM, <dex2000(a)pc.dk> wrote:
>>> ..
>>> I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis
>>> into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis
>>> with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in
>>> fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to
>>> 'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere
>>> of the smaller wikis could prevail.
>>
>> This is the best solution, in my opinion.
>
> Yes, the larger wikis need to become WikiProject-centric. First step in
> doing this would be to create a WikiProject namespace. Second step would
> be to make WikiProject article tagging/assessment part of the software
> instead of template-based.
I can see how those would be useful steps, however I think those steps
are part of a 10 year plan.
A 10 year plan will be overrun by events.
We need a much more direct plan.
I recommend breaking enWP apart by finding easy chunks and moving them
to a separate instance, and having readonly copies on the main project
like we do for File: pages from Commons.
IMO, the simplest and most useful set of articles to break apart is BLPs.
The criteria is really simple, and those articles already have lots of
policy differences around them.
By the time we have perfected this system with the BLPs, the community
will have come to understand the costs/benefits of moving other
clusters of articles to separate projects, and we'll see other
clusters of articles migrated to sub-projects.
btw, this idea is not new, but maybe its time has come.
http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=29729
--
John Vandenberg
Hi,
I noticed Wikimedia privacy policy on wmf site replaced with pdf
version and have no link to
other (informal) language versions. There is no suggestion users may
consult informal translations,
if any, now dead links on the wmf site without links from the original
or on meta as translating draft.
I don't mind who did it. But it put in my opinion non English speakers
inconvenience, specially
without any suggestion there could be translations, even informal
versions. I would like to know
why those links were removed.
Also I'm concerned with
1) if WMF has an intention to provide other language versions again on
its official site,
either informal and unauthorized version or formal and official
versions they are willing to authorize
(paid translation, with legal expert review, if utmost necessary?)
2) if WMF doesn't like to have informal versions at all, what do you
think to put a suggestion they may
use informal versions volunteer community may provide?
For your information, putting informal and unauthorized language
versions on the official site is the way
FSS handle their licensing documents including GFDL. I don't like the
current situation. Language community
as well its specific language readership, worth handy access to
information how their privacy are treated.
Cheers,
--
KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子
member of Wikimedians in Kansai / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会 http://kansai.wikimedia.jp
[FYI]
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: 2011/3/19
Subject: Wikimedia Foundation Report, February 2011
To: wikimediaannounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
As always, you can find the formatted version on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_February_2011
Plain text below & feedback welcome :-)
All best,
Erik
Contents
* 1 Data and Trends
* 2 Financials
* 3 Highlights
o 3.1 Strategic Plan Summary Published
o 3.2 New General Counsel
o 3.3 MediaWiki 1.17 Deployment
o 3.4 Data Summit
o 3.5 Gender Gap Conversations Begin
o 3.6 History of the Russian Wikipedia Published
* 4 Technology
o 4.1 Conferences
+ 4.1.1 GNUnify 2011 (February 11-12, Pune, India)
o 4.2 Operations
+ 4.2.1 Data Center Racking Party
o 4.3 Features
+ 4.3.1 Personal Image Filter
+ 4.3.2 Community Feature Prototyping
o 4.4 General Engineering
+ 4.4.1 Wikilytics
o 4.5 Moblie/Offline
+ 4.5.1 openZim for Collections
* 5 Research and Strategy
o 5.1 Internal Research Progress
o 5.2 Research Committee Activity
o 5.3 Research Outreach Initiatives
* 6 Community
o 6.1 Wiki Guides Experiment
o 6.2 New Account Creation Project
o 6.3 Fundraising
o 6.4 Public Policy Initiative
* 7 Global Development
o 7.1 Global Development Highlights
o 7.2 Chapter Relations and Grants
o 7.3 Brazil Catalyst
o 7.4 India Programs
o 7.5 Mobile Strategy
o 7.6 Editor Survey 2011
o 7.7 Offline
o 7.8 Global University Programs
o 7.9 Communications
+ 7.9.1 Major Stories and Coverage through February
+ 7.9.2 Major Announcements and Releases in February
2011
+ 7.9.3 Major Product Releases in February 2011
+ 7.9.4 Blog during February 2011
+ 7.9.5 Media contact through February, 2011
* 8 Human Resources
o 8.1 Staff Changes
o 8.2 Statistics
o 8.3 New Events
* 9 Finance and Administration
o 9.1 Finance
o 9.2 Administration
* 10 Legal
* 11 Visitors and Guests
== DATA AND TRENDS ==
Global unique visitors for January:
414 million (+4.7% compared to previous month / +13.5% compared to
previous year)
(comScore for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will
release February data later in March)
Page requests for January:
15.2 billion (+8.8% compared to previous month / +21.7% compared to
previous year)
Page requests for February:
15.5 billion (+1.9% compared to previous month / +24% compared to
previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including
Wikipedia mobile)
Report Card for January 2011:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_01_detailed.html
== FINANCIALS ==
(Financial information is only available for January 2011 at the time of
this report.)
Operating revenue for January: USD 1.6MM vs plan of 1.7MM.
Operating revenue year-to-date: USD 19.7MM vs plan of 16.8MM.
The successful 2010 fundraising campaign has resulted in the Wikimedia
Foundation exceeding its revenue targets year-to-date, despite lower
than planned revenue for the month of January. Revenue for January
includes a USD 108K donation from Wikimedia Switzerland.
Operating expenses for January: USD 2.9MM vs plan of 1.8MM.
Operating expenses year-to-date: USD 10.6MM vs plan of 11.8MM.
Expenses are over plan for the month due to data center purchases, which
were budgeted over 12 months but occured primarily in January, with some
additional spending in subsequent months. The Wikimedia Foundation is
underspent year-to-date due to the timing of additional capex spending
and Internet hosting, as well as under-spending in staffing costs.
Cash and investments as of January 2011 totaled USD $21.5MM
(approximately 13 months of expenses).
== HIIGHLIGHTS ==
Strategic Plan Summary Published
On February 25, we released the summary report of the Wikimedia
Foundation's five-year strategic plan. It synthesizes the effort of the
collaborative strategic planning process that took place through 2009
and 2010 and involved more than a thousand participants. A wiki version
and links to the PDF can be found here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summa…
New General Counsel
In February, Geoff Brigham was announced as the Wikimedia Foundation's
new General Counsel, replacing Mike Godwin who left the organization in
October. Geoff has been a lawyer for 20 years, including eight years at
eBay during its main growth period, which gives him important experience
managing the legal challenges and risks inherent in operating a popular
site. His work at eBay encompassed North America, Europe, Asia and
Australia. He held a variety of positions there, at offices in San Jose,
California, Bern, Switzerland and Paris, France: his most recent title
was Vice President and Deputy General Counsel.
MediaWiki 1.17 Deployment
After a long wait, we deployed a new version of the MediaWiki software
to all our production sites, containing a vast number of small fixes and
improvements, and a new subsystem for more efficient delivery of
JavaScript and stylesheets, the ResourceLoader.
Deployment was initially problematic because of major performance issues
that caused an outage. The problems were investigated, and we decided to
try heterogeneous deployment (meaning not all wikis would run the same
version of the software). On February 11, a first wave of small wikis
were switched to MediaWiki 1.17. On February 16, other small and
medium-sized wikis were switched. In retrospect, the issues encountered
during deployment were due to the large amount of code changes since the
last release (almost 5,500 changes reviewed over 7 months). In the
future, MediaWiki release deployments should be smaller and more
frequent, reducing deployment pains.
Full list of changes in 1.17:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/REL1_17/phase3/RELEASE-N…
Data Summit
On February 3-4, 2011, the Foundation organized a Data Summit in
Sebastopol, CA, to present and formally discuss Wikimedia data-related
issues and ongoing projects [1].
The *Data Analytics session* (chaired by Rob Lanphier) presented results
from the fundraiser's analytics, discussed how WMF is planning to use
analytics to support its initiatives, how to address existing gaps in
information collection and analysis, and how to meet the needs of
different stakeholders (WMF, researchers, the community). Several
working groups were established for further progress on analytics
functionality focusing on: (1) how to make revision data more accessible
via a NoSQL database, (2) defining requirements for session tracking,
(3) improving the data dump generation process, (4) addressing privacy
issues in light of WMF's privacy policy, (5) defining the requirements
for a dedicated data mining infrastructure, and (6) assessing the
existing analytics system.
In the *Parsers session* [3] (chaired by Danese Cooper) a number of
demos were presented with examples of how to build and exploit new data
structures to provide a better understanding of Wikimedia content. The
session also discussed the design of a new parser which would support a
standard intermediary format for representing Wikimedia content. WMF
expects to continue the discussion on parsers and data structures at the
WMDE Developer Meetup, currently scheduled for May 2011.
In the *Structured Data session* [4] (chaired by Erik Möller), the
capabilities of existing structured data systems (such as DBPedia,
Freebase, Shortipedia, SMW and other) were reviewed and several
questions were formulated on the technical requirements to support and
enhance Wikimedia's Structured Data functionality. The discussion
started at the Data Summit will continue on wiki-research-l and
wikitech-l and open up to all interested parties.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_summit_2011
[2] http://eiximenis.wikimedia.org/DataSummitAnalytics
[3] http://eiximenis.wikimedia.org/DataSummitParsers
[4] http://eiximenis.wikimedia.org/DataSummitSMW
Gender Gap Conversations Begin
On January 31, Noam Cohen of the New York Times published a piece about
Wikipedia's gender gap (13% of editors responding to the UNU-Merit
Survey of 2008 self-identified as female), which prompted dozens of
media stories and blog coverage in publications such as the Telegraph,
Mother Jones, Discover magazine, Jezebel, the Atlantic, and NPR. It also
gave rise to dozens of online comments and conversations from both women
and men, including readers, aspiring editors, current editors and lapsed
editors. Many women reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation offering
their help to fix the problem. As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation
created the “gender gap” mailing list, a place for Wikimedians and
interested outsiders to talk about strategies for solving the gender gap
problem. Since then, a number of initiatives have been undertaken to
drive up women's participation in the projects, including the
establishment of an Australian group called Women4Wikipedia, the staging
of a women editors meet-up in New York, discussions about Wikipedia and
gender at Recent Changes Camp 2011 in Boston, and the planning of a
women's wiki workshop in Kolkata, India.
In addition, in February, Sue was invited to join the board of the Ada
Initiative, a new non-profit aimed at promoting the visibility and
participation of women in open-source technology and culture.
Gender Gap community portal:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap
Related blog posts by Sue Gardner:
http://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia…http://suegardner.org/2011/01/31/new-york-times-prompts-a-flurry-of-coverag…
History of the Russian Wikipedia Published
One of the goals of the Community Department is to build a repository of
knowledge about practices and experiences in different Wikimedia
languages and projects, to inform both the work of the Wikimedia
Foundation and the larger community. For example, what is the experience
of a Wikipedia language that never created an Arbitration Committe? How
do processes like "speedy deletion" or "featured article candidates" get
handled in different languages? How did mass media attention affect the
development of our projects?
Within our large multilingual community, a diverse set of strategies to
solve similar problems have been attempted. Surfacing the hidden
knowledge about these strategies could be immensely valuable. To this
end, last year, the Community Department commissioned a first
"WikiHistory", a history of the Russian Wikipedia, written by Wikimedia
Foundation fellows Marayana Pinchuk and Victoria Dorovina. In February,
it was published on Meta and on the Russian Wikipedia:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History
It generated a considerable amount of interest both on Meta and in the
Russian community, where it was the subject of a lot of discussion,
which Victoria moderated and Maryana translated and moved to the talk
page of the English version. A methods page and discussion summary
postscript were also added.
Maryana worked in February to begin recruiting PhD candidates and
Wikimedians for a summer project to create at least a few more Wikipedia
histories, and to begin faciliating community-led processes for creating
project histories.
== TECHNOLOGY ==
As always, detailed info about the Tech Department's activities for
February 2011 can be found at
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/wikimedia-engineering-february-report/
Highlights below.
Conferences
GNUnify 2011 (February 11-12, Pune, India)
This year’s GNUnify Wikimedia track was an opportunity to present the
general Wikimedia technical architecture, how to hack MediaWiki, the use
of Drupal and CiviCRM at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the current and
future state of Wikimedia mobile. An Android prototype of WikiSnaps (a
mobile photo upload application) was also developed there. Along with
attending the technical tracks, numerous Wikipedians attended and gave
presentations on the Schools offline projects, challenges within India,
and basics on how to edit. Blog reports about the conference by an attendee:
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/gnunify-day-1/http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/gnunify-day-2/
Operations
Data Center Racking Party
By the end of February, nearly all hardware was delivered to the new
data center in Virginia. More than 50 pallets of equipment were unboxed,
stacked and installed in the 16 racks by a four person team. Almost
everything has now been cabled, and we are working on the finishing
touches, as well as the initial setup of all devices to make them
available for management on the network. In March, configuration of the
first clusters of servers and services will begin, while we wait for
network transport and transit services to be installed.
Features
Personal Image Filter
Following the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content, UI Brandon
Harris created mock-ups of a personal image/media filter in partnership
with the product strategy team, including initial UI design
recommendations. They will be presented to the Board of Trustees
controversial content workgroup for further discussion.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Personal_image_filter
Community Feature Prototyping
In February, the Community and Tech departments started a joint
experiment in which engineers work even more closely with Community
department staff. Developers are “embedded” in the Community department
to try out a more agile way to prototype and A/B test features. Trevor
Parscal started in this role in February, and will continue in March.
General Engineering
Wikilytics
During the Data Summit, Diederik van Liere released and presented the
Python toolkit he developed as part as his work on data analytics for
the Editor Trends Study. It is now available in SVN at
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/tools/editor_trends/
Mobile/Offline
openZim for Collections
PediaPress has wrapped up their first development push for adding
openZim support to the collections extension. We are now collecting bug
reports before deploying it to the live site.
== RESEARCH AND STRATEGY ==
Internal Research Progress
In February, Dario Taraborelli visited WMF and presented some
exploratory analysis of data collected as part of the *Article Feedback
project* [5], with the goal of informing the design of Phase 2 and
identifying possible issues in rolling out this functionality globally.
Erik Möller and Howie Fung started drafting a report of the Editor
Trends Study [6]. Work also continued on the drafting of the Product
Whitepaper [13].
Research Committee Activity
The Wikimedia Research Committee (RCom) held its 3rd meeting on February
25, 2011 [9]. The meeting focused on discussing progress on a number of
initiatives run by the RCom, including: subject recruitment procedures
[10], the open-access policy for Wikimedia research [11], and the
current participation in a survey on barriers to expert participation [12].
The *survey on barriers to expert participation* in Wikipedia [14] was
formally launched on February 9, 2011 and disseminated via a number of
social media and scholarly outlets, including /PLoS/, the /Wellcome
Trust/, /Nature Blogs/, the /Encyclopedia of Life/, and the /Open
Knowledge Foundation/ among others. The survey is due to close in March
with the publication of early results.
Research Outreach Initiatives
Diederik van Liere and Howie Fung started to define the goals, technical
requirements and submission procedure for a *data challenge* to be
hosted by /Kaggle/ [7] on behalf of WMF and focusing on statistical
models to predict editor participation. The call for contributions will
be formally announced in March or April. Winners will have the
opportunity of presenting their work at the /O'Reilly Strata Conference/
in New York [8].
Dario Taraborelli, Howie Fung and Felipe Ortega (WikiSym '11 general
chair) also started organizing a *visualization challenge* that will run
in Q2-Q3 of 2011. The challenge will focus on novel visualisations of a
number of datasets from Wikimedia projects that will be released in
April 2011. The winners will be announced in September 2011 and invited
to present their work at /WikiSym '11/ (October 3-5, 2011 – Mountain
View, CA) [15].
[5]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Early_Da…
[6] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
[7] http://kaggle.com
[8] http://strataconf.com/stratany2011
[9] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meeting_2011-02-25
[10]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Subject…
[11]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-ac…
[12]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Expert_…
[13] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper
[14] http://survey.nitens.org/index.php?sid=21693
[15] http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/
== COMMUNITY ==
The Community Department made progress on several community organizing
and research projects in February.
Wiki Guides Experiment
Philippe Beaudette and James Alexander began a project called "Wiki
Guides." This is an experiment designed to organize volunteers to
support and protect newbies through their first 100 or more edits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Guides
50 volunteer Guides joined the project and began their work with a
discussion of the newbie experience and potential interventions. One of
the early pages created by the Wiki Guides project is a place to share
stories of what it was like to be a new user:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wiki_Guides/What_was_your_new_u…
At the end of the month, each Guide was assigned a list of new users to
support. The project will change its tactics and structure weekly to try
out new approaches.
New Account Creation Project
Community fellow Lennart Guldbrandsson published the results of an
additional account creation survey:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Account_Creation_Improvement_Projec…
About 9,500 people who had previously created a new account, responded
to the survey. As a result, we have a better understanding of what
motivates people to create a user account on Wikipedia and what new
users' expectations are. Based on the survey results, Lennart started
testing the first iterations of improved account creation pages on the
English Wikipedia.
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project
Fundraising
The Fundraiser team continued their analysis of the 2010 fundraiser
testing experience and their work on a report to the community. Sara
Crouse completed new funding proposals.
Public Policy Initiative
The Public Policy Initiative team started to plan the first "Wikipedia
in Higher Education Summit", an event to be held in July 2011. The event
aims at celebrating the volunteers who participate in Wikimedia's
university based program activities, building a community of educators
and Wikipedia volunteers, and sharing skills, best practices and success
stories. In 2011, the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit will also be
the final event for the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Inititative.
>From February 10-13, LiAnna Davis and Amy Roth attended the APSA
(American Political Science Association) Teaching and Learning
conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They presented a workshop about
integrating Wikipedia into the classroom and provided outreach and
education at an exhibitor booth. Conference website:
http://www.apsanet.org/content_31632.cfm
== GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT ==
Global Development Highlights
* India Catalyst activities in support of the community accelerated
with the appointment of Hisham Mundol as consultant for India
Programs (
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2011-February/0001…
); Barry traveled to India to introduce Hisham to communities in
Pune, Mumbai and Bangalore.
* Progress on several key GD initiatives (see below for details and
links): Brazil Catalyst draft report, Global Education program,
Mobile Research and Editor Survey Research
* Shared draft fundraising agreement with the chapters for
discussion and made progress with chapters on getting chapter
agreements in place consistently.
Chapter Relations and Grants
* Announced the hiring of Asaf Bartov as Head of Global South
Relationships (to start in March), along with Moushira Elamrawy as
contractor supporting Chapter Relations:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2011-February/0001…
* Prepared draft of 2011/12 Fundraising agreement with the community
for comment:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011/Chapters_Agreement
* WMF and 9 of 12 chapters participating in the 2010/11 fundraiser
met the deadline to share information about their online revenue
through January 31:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tracking_Progress_for_2011_chapters_fundrais…
No new grants were funded in February.
Brazil Catalyst
For a full update: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project
* A draft of the Brazil "Action Plan" was completed with the help of
about 20 interviews of Brazilian Wikimedians. Based on the
detailed work led by Carolina Rossini, the general macro-actions
proposed are:
o Establish WMF's presence in Brazil and hire a National
Program Director.
o Engage in projects that recruit entirely new sets of readers
and editors such as national events, global events, and
university partnerships.
o Establish a new dynamic with the existing community.
India Programs
* Barry Newstead traveled to India for a brief trip during which he
introduced Hisham to the Indian community and chapter, and held
community meetings in Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore to introduce and
discuss community activities and expectations.
* Met with chapter in Bangalore to discuss chapter's way forward and
its collaboration with the community.
* Met and conversed with multiple community members, Bishakha Datta,
and Achal Prabhala to discuss Foundation activities in India.
* Reviewed existing information on India programs, and prepared a
draft "India Plan" including objectives, key initiatives, time
plans, and team structure:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_programs.
* Initiated discussions with Foundation staff on key initiatives:
campus outreach, research and communications; all to be taken
forward and fleshed out in Hisham's upcoming SF visit.
Mobile Strategy
We finalized the schedule and methodology of conducting research to
understand mobile user experience in India and Brazil.
Editor Survey 2011
The Wikimedia Foundation is planning a new, comprehensive survey of the
Wikipedia editor community. In February, we:
* Finalized the questionnaire after several iterations.
* Hired a vendor for programming and cleaning of the survey.
* Began work with volunteer translators to get the survey translated
in several languages.
* Began work with the engineering team to launch the survey on the
website.
We should launch the survey in the last week of March or the first week
of April.
Offline
* Worked with community members on the best ways to select high
quality and important articles to create article collections. Tech
began helping us think about how we can develop tools to assist.
* Distribution is happening already in several parts of the world.
For example, enabled by a grant provided by WMF, a group of Kenyan
Wikimedians began uploading prototype offline versions of offline
Wikipedia (via DVD & USB sticks) onto computers in schools
throughout Kenya. Demand is very high here.
Global University Programs
Frank Schulenburg, Jessie Wild, Rod Dunican and Annie Lin kicked off the
strategy planning process for a Wikimedia Global University Program. A
preliminary version of their strategy paper can be found on the outreach
wiki:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_University_Program
This is still in the planning and discussion phase. At this point, the
general recommendations are to
1. Create a platform for professors from all countries to be able to
easily incorporate the editing of Wikipedia in the classroom and,
2. Empower students to form student groups to facilitate outreach and
editing.
Communications
/February saw a range of media coverage, mostly following up on the
global activites around Wikipedia 10 and on the presence of a gender gap
within Wikipedia's editor community (see highlights, omitted below). The
Foundation distributed a press release in conjunction with up-time
monitoring service 'WatchMouse' and finalized design and released the
Strategic Plan summary document./
Major Stories and Coverage through February
After its January story about the gender gap, the New York Times set
up a special debate portal and invited scholars on the topic to
contribute views, and dozens of other outlets followed up on the
question, e.g..
* http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/02/where-are-the-women-in-wiki…
* http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/01/31/133375307/facing-serious-gen…
* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8293217/Why-Wikipedias-edit…
*Behind the Scenes at Wikipedia.IN*
A thoughtful overview of the Wikimedia movement in India and the
diversity of activities taking place in all corners of the country.
The story features an interview with Jimmy Wales and focuses on work
being done to support Indic language projects.
* http://epaper.hindustantimes.com/PUBLICATIONS/HT/HM/2011/02/13/ArticleHtmls…
*Other worthwhile reads:*
* http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/our-wiki-wiki-ways-beautiful-i…
* http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/feb/19/interview-jimmy-wales-wik…
* http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedias_goal_1_billion_monthly_visi…
Major Announcements and Releases in February 2011
*Wikimedia Foundation selects Watchmouse monitoring service* (February
9, 2011):
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/February_2011_Wikimedia_…
Major Product Releases in February 2011
*Wikimedia's Strategic Plan Summary*:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summa…
Blog during February 2011
During the month of February, WMF's blog highlighted 8 topics:
* Wikipedia’s gender gap
* WikiProject Medicine urges medical community to edit.
* Wikimedia selects Watchmouse for global monitoring services.
* Welcome Wikimedia’s 30th Global Chapter, Wikimedia España.
* Wikipedia Contribution Team Plans Events Throughout UK and Beyond.
* Wikipedia Enters the Sun King’s Court.
* Sue Gardner joins Ada Initiative advisory board.
* Wikimedia presents its five-year strategic plan.
All posts for February can be found at:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2011/02/.
Media contact through February, 2011
WMF received 15 media contacts from organizations including BBC World
Service, ABC Australia, Marie Claire, Times of London, Fast Company,
Communications Daily, Read Write Web, NOS Dutch Public Television, The
Guardian (UK), Women in Business, Data Center Dynamics, and Visionary
Productions "On the road in America".
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#February_2011
== HUMAN RESOURCES ==
Staff Changes
*New Hires*
* Geoffrey Brigham, General Counsel (Legal) – FT Permanent
* Jon Davis, Interim Office IT Manager (Finance) – Temp Full Time
* Tony Le, Controller (Finance) – FT Permanent
* Janice Tud, HR Generalist (HR) – FT Permanent
*New Contractors*
* Hisham Mundol (Global Development)
* Moushira Elamwray (Global Development)
*Extended Contracts*
* Michelle Paulson (Legal) – Temp Full Time
* Christine Moellenbrandt, Community Associate (Community) – Temp
Full Time
* Joshua VanDavier, Development Associate (Community) – Temp Full Time
*New Job Postings*
* Senior QA Engineer (Tech)
* Office Assistant, Travel (Finance/Admin)
* Major Gifts Associate (Community)
* Grants & Information Officer (Community)
*Contract Ended*
* Deniz Gultekin, Community Associate
* Tara Harwood, Head of Office Admin
* Steven Ma, Community Associate
Statistics
*Vital Stats:* Total Employee Count
Plan: 81
Actual: 63
Attrition: 3
Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 29
*Diversity stats:*
* 63 Total Employees (includes people considered international
employees)
* 42.9% female employees; 6.9% increase from 7/1/10
* 31.8% ethnic minorities; 5.8% increase from 7/1/10
* 38.1% foreign nationals; 1.9% increase in U.S. hiring from 7/1/10
* 42.9% Wikimedians; 0.86% increase from 7/1/10
* 71.4% have lived abroad; 1.4% increase from 7/1/10
Real-time feed for HR updates:
http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
New Events
The HR Department has been digging into some exciting work since the new
year began. Here's a recap of what we've been working on broken out by
function:
*Recruiting*
We worked on increasing our hiring capacity by adding new recruiting
firms and optimizing and streamlining our recruiting pipeline. We also
worked very closely with hiring managers to collaboratively rethink the
current process and address any challenges we're finding.
*HR Documentation*
The HR department, with the addition of our new generalist Janice Tud,
undertook a documentation project to raise level of awareness regarding
process in hiring and staff development.
*HR Metrics*
HR started tracking diversity stats (see below) to better understand the
make up of our culture. We were excited to see that we are well above
the average for technology companies in several areas.
We also worked on tracking our capactiy to hire. This information is
imperfect, but we are getting closer to understanding our hiring
ability. As we get better data we will talk about it in more detail.
*Staff Development*
Cyn and Daniel attended a seminar at LinkedIn to learn about thier new
recruiting funtionality. While the seminar was fairly cheesy and
targeted at less tech savvy organizations than ourselves, it was a good
learning experience. It may lead to a deeper level of engagement with
LinkedIn to help us find the right people for our organization.
*HRIS (HR Information System)*
The HR team decided on, and began implementation of, a new database to
help track and manage personnel information. The software is called
OrangeHRM and is an open source project:
http://www.orangehrm.com/
The implementation team at OrangeHRM has been great, and we will be
ready to launch in March. This will go a long way towards
professionalizing our department and providing us with accurate data.
== FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION ==
Finance
* Mid-year financials were published on the Foundation website at
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports.
* Started planning for the development of the 2011-12 annual
financial plan.
* Built rough forecast of revenue and spending for end of 2010-11
fiscal year; expect to be approximately 5 to 10% underspent at
year-end.
* Continued to work with Marcin to warp up Wikimania Gdansk
reporting, funds collections and invoice payment.
Administration
* Departments received individual purchasing cards, which will make
the coding and reporting of expenses paid by credit card more
efficient.
* Began searches for interim Head of Office Administration,
permanent Travel Assistant and Help Desk associate.
== LEGAL ==
* Geoff began his orientation, starting to learn the ropes at the
Foundation and within the community, and beginning the development
of legal strategy and 2011-12 plan inputs.
* Geoff continues to be supported by Michelle Paulson, associate
counsel, who has maintained the legal office since last October.
* Sue and Geoff met with the staff of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation for pizza & discussion.
== VISITORS AND GUESTS ==
1. Manish Shah (Intuit - txtweb.com demo)
2. Manish Maheshwari (Intuit - txtweb.com demo)
3. Yohei Murakami (Language Grid Project)
4. Sonia Eunhai Kim Felix (South Korea) (PPI consuls wives and
honorary consul group)
5. Florence de Noray (France) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul
group)
6. Luisa Scapolla (Italien) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul group)
7. Satsuki Kawada (Singapore) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul
group)
8. Gayle Evans (Great Britain) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul
group)
9. Clelia Piragibe (Brazil) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul group)
10. Eva Voisin (Honorary Consul Hungary) (PPI consuls wives and
honorary consul group)
11. Liliane Koziol (Honorary Consul Madagaskar) (PPI consuls wives and
honorary consul group)
12. Eny Arguelles (MD, USA) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul group)
13. Mary Staunton (Ireland) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul group)
14. Josette Osgood (Honorary Consul Côte d’Ivoire) (PPI consuls wives
and honorary consul group)
15. Huguette Wildschutz (Luxembourg) (PPI consuls wives and honorary
consul group)
16. Brigitte Brockmann (Germany) (PPI consuls wives and honorary
consul group)
17. Martha Hertelendy (USA) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul group)
18. Kathleen Kimura (Great Britain) (PPI consuls wives and honorary
consul group)
19. Gerlind Rothen (Germany) (PPI consuls wives and honorary consul group)
20. Latoya Peterson (Community Member - WikiHistories project)
21. Gina Glantz (Consultant)
22. Erik Swan (Splunk)
23. Ward Cunningham (CTO CitizenGlobal)
24. Jerome Gary (Producer/Director) and 15 person crew
(arabic-speaking world 'On the road in America)
25. Valerie Aurora (Ada Initiative)
26. Cheol Ryul and Colleague (Korean Wikimedian)
27. Derrick Coetzee(Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors)
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
"It's the oldest temptation. Not gold or the power it can buy, not love, not
even the deep, drumming fires of lust: What we coveted first was knowledge."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lee_Carrell
"Haunt Me Still"
Chapter 1
Line 1
Hi there,
why is the Foundation so passive??? I have been since almost 5 years with various Wikimedia projects and I can really see NO PROGRESS from the side of the Foundation but more employees, 2 new blogs, new Vector skin and maybe MediaWiki performance tweaks. My participation declined radically, because I can not feel any real support from the foundation. It is not 2006 anymore. Look at what other websites have done in 5 years and you realize they have undergone major redesigns. And as someone wrote here lately Wikipedia still seems so 2005. This is OK for an encyclopedia, but unfortunately the way volunteers work is stuck in 2005 too...
Large-scale LiquidThreads deployment is far far away to allow more sophisticated discussion on wikis. Few central notices is what the Strategy project just resulted in, without any "serious" action (anyone to remember that "call for action" thing?). I really doubt the community is able to do more than just bring few ideas (proposals) together.
The Fellowship program has been largely a PR thing only so far, wasting its great potential to bring a real change in how Wikimedia uses its (financial) resources. Similarly working grant program for wide community is needed to be able to do the necessary progress. Besides that, we as the community have very, very little control over what the 5 tenths of staff are paid for (I mean a real tasks breakdown).
Sophisticated decision mechanism simply does not exist on a community level, and those on Foundation level are of little importance. Is it really that hard to launch an ideas bank (at ideas.wikimedia.org for example) to boil down what the community really needs instead of letting volunteers have endless discussions in wiki-style? Will someone finally realize that wiki is not the holy-grail of "collaboration" and maybe other tools are needed too?
Videos are still not being offered in various bitrates which makes them unusable within the encyclopedia, etc. etc. There has been literally no progress at all from an established editor point of view and that is very depriving. Very little is done in supporting new projects creation, Data Commons being an example.
I wish I had the power to change all these things, but unfortunately I do not. Of course, if I do not want to have endless discussion in wiki (or mailing list) -style...
Cheers,
Kozuch
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kozuch
Dear all,
it's now official: I'm no longer working as an employee of Wikimédia
France.
Please don't use bastien.guerry(a)wikimedia.fr anymore, use bzg(a)gnu.org
or bzg(a)altern.org instead.
This year has been hectic: I coordinated the WMFR/Toulouse partnership,
organized the GLAMWIKI:Fr conference in Paris, and I helped the chapter
as much as I could about its daily tasks.
A big THANK to all wikimedians and wikipedians from all over the world
who helped me understand the Wikimedia projects, their communities and
the global mouvement. It was a great experience.
Good luck to the new WMFR board and to its future employees.
The good news is that I'm now allowed to edit the project, and I hope I
will contribute there.
Best,
--
Bastien
Reminder that this is happening in several hours.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Steven Walling <swalling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 12:04 PM
Subject: IRC office hours this week with Sue Gardner
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi all,
Just a quick heads up that Sue Gardner will be holding an IRC office hours
Friday the 18th at 04:00 UTC
(conversion<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?hour=04&min=00&sec=0&d…>)
in #wikimedia-office. We set it then to make it easier for those of you in
Asian time zones, so we look forward to hearing from Wikimedians in India,
et cetera.
More info about how to join at the usual place on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
--
Steven Walling
Fellow at Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-ne…
Can we expect a spillover on to the non-English Wikimedia projects?
<quote>
Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports
classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable
Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the
US."
He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be
unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology, and any
English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly
attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted
include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.
Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working
around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online
conversations with any number of co-ordinated Facebook messages,
blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions.
Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air
force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.
</quote>
Yours sincerely,
Anirudh Bhati
00 91 9328712208
Skype: anirudhsbh
--- On Tue, Mar 8, 2011, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- On Tue, 8/3/11, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote:
> > From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>
> > Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>
> > I guess I would like editors to have access to archives and
> > databases
> > such as those ProQuest sells. Not sure how that would fit
> > into our
> > budget.
>
> I would like to second that as well -- this is a very important way in
> which
> the Foundation could support high-volume content contributors, and
which
> would make a significant difference to article quality.
>
> This should be a part of university outreach as well. Many university
> students have log-in IDs enabling them to log into academic databases
from
> their homes. Please tell universities who would like to support
Wikipedia
> that this is a really important way in which they can support the
project,
> by allowing established content contributors access to these
databases.
In general, access to academic journals is extremely expensive and
usually only possible for those affiliated with universities. However
there is an alternative. There are now over 6,000 peer-reviewed open
access journals which are freely available online (www.doaj.org) and
over 1,800 academic repositories where authors deposit copies of their
research articles (www.opendoar.org). This is the result of the open
access movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing)
which advocates for public access to publicly funded research.
Hopefully the research which is being made available through open access
can help to support the work of the community.
Melissa