Wikimedia-l November 2015

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136 participants
78 discussions

Difference between in- and off-campaign fundraising
by Lodewijk 07 Nov '15

07 Nov '15

(splitting this thread off) I see this wasn't posted on the list, but the fundraising team answered the question as well on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Q:_How_do_banners_.26_camp… Or at least, tried to do so in good faith. Unfortunately it doesn't answer the main question I had, which was (rephrased): what is the difference between on-season and off-season fundraising (bannerwise). It seems the answer is: only the level intensity of the banners is different: in-season you'll see a lot more banners and emails, off-season you should only see them sporadically. If I interpret it wrong, please shout out! Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 9:41 PM, Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: > Hi Lodewijk, > > On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 6:20 AM, Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org> > wrote: > > > > > I'm a little confused though, so I hope you (or someone else) can clarify > > something for me: what does a campaign look like these days? Because I'm > > seeing banners all year round (I live in the Netherlands, maybe that > makes > > a difference), every now and then. But I also understood that the > campaigns > > nowadays are more sophisticated, and don't show the banner 100% any > longer, > > but only once per IP/computer/person? > > > > The Fundraising team can better address this but since we're in a long > weekend, I'll say as much as I know: > There are different kinds of campaigns, ones that go constantly in a > country for a period of time, those that go on for a sample of the traffic > in a country for a specific period of time. The team is trying to spread > the effort across the year so all our eggs are not in one basket which is > December. :-) > > In terms of frequency, I think the team experiments with different banner > frequencies. We know that if you see the banner more than 5 times, banner > fatigue will take over. So, I think we are mostly testing with showing > banners less than 5 times. For the December campaign in the US last year, > if I remember correctly, you would see it once big, and then after that as > a little bar on top of the page until you would close it or donate. > > Leila > > > > Thanks, > > > > Lodewijk > > > > On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 10:58 PM, Megan Hernandez < > mhernandez(a)wikimedia.org > > > > > wrote: > > > > > Hi all, > > > > > > There's a new Q1 fundraising update on meta > > > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising#2015-2016_Q1_Update> and > > > posted here as well. > > > > > > The Wikimedia Foundation has just wrapped up the first quarter of the > > > 2015-16 fiscal year. Over these past three months, the fundraising team > > has > > > been running ran campaigns in Japan, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, > > > Belgium and Luxembourg and prepared for the upcoming year-end English > > > fundraising campaign. The online fundraising team missed the $6 million > > > goal for the quarter due to postponing the Italy fundraiser to October > to > > > support the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign. We raised roughly $5.7 > million > > > in the first quarter of the year and plan to make up for the loss in > the > > > next quarter. The 2014-15 fiscal year fundraising report > > > <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2014-2015_Fundraising_Report> > was > > > also posted in this quarter. If you haven’t read it yet, please do > check > > > out the report for a wealth of information on the last fiscal year. > > > > > > The team has used this first quarter to test a wide variety of brand > new > > > banners. From images, to banners highlighting photos from Commons, and > > > different messages, we’ve found a few new ways to share the fundraising > > > message with Wikipedia readers. With updated designs, we’ve ended the > > > quarter with a banner that performs roughly 20% better than the best- > > > performing banner from last quarter. Better performing banners are > > required > > > to raise a higher budget with declining traffic. We’ll continue testing > > new > > > banners into the next quarter and sharing highlights as we go. > > > > > > The banner message has also been updated with suggestions from the > > > Wikimedia community. Thank you to everyone who has suggested > improvements > > > so far! We have changed “We survive on donations averaging about $15” > to > > > “We are sustained by donations averaging about $15.” We’ve also changed > > > “Please help us end the fundraiser and get back to improving Wikipedia” > > to > > > “Please help us end the fundraiser and improve Wikipedia.” These > message > > > edits did not positively or negatively affect donations and were made > in > > > response to community feedback. In the past, we have also relied on > > > community feedback to improve our campaigns. In the last year, > community > > > feedback has led to improvements to the usability of the close X icon > > and a > > > new line to highlight the editing community, “Wikipedia is written by a > > > community of volunteers with a passion for sharing the world’s > > knowledge.” > > > All of these community suggestions remain in the banner. Another > sentence > > > that was briefly tested on a small percentage of users about a year ago > > > that received negative community feedback was “If everyone reading this > > > gave $3, we could keep it online and ad-free another year.” We did not > > end > > > up using that sentence for the campaign and we commit to not using it > in > > > any future campaign. In the next quarter, we are planning many more > > message > > > tests -- with both brand new ideas as well as smaller tweaks to the > > > existing text. If you have an idea to test, please share on the 2015-16 > > > test ideas page > > > <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2015-16_Fundraising_ideas > >. > > > Thanks again to everyone who has shared ideas so far. > > > > > > This upcoming quarter will be our biggest of the year with campaigns in > > > Italy, France, the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. > > The > > > team is focused on providing the best donation invitation and > experience > > > possible to readers. We will be sharing plenty of more information > about > > > the upcoming campaigns over the next couple of months. Thank you for > your > > > support! > > > > > > -- > > > > > > Megan Hernandez > > > > > > Director of Online Fundraising > > > Wikimedia Foundation > > > _______________________________________________ > > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > > > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> >

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New Wikimedia France board
by Pierre-Selim Huard 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

Dear movement fellows, Wikimedia France held its Annual General Meeting on October 24th, 2015. During this AGM, we elected 4 board members, of which 1 is new. Alexis Marise Bique, Ludovic Péron, Benoît Evellin and Léa Lacroix were not running for a new term. Wikimedia France board is grateful for their service. Emeric Vallespi, Guillaume Goursat were running again and were reelected. Florian Pépellin who was appointed in May and was this time candidate for a full term. As a reminder: * Émeric Vallespi is 28, a banker living in Montpellier. He served on the board for three years. He is especially interested in governance issues, internal control and strategy topics. * Guillaume Goursat is 30, and is based in Dakar (Senegal) where he works as an economist in water and sanitation. He served as a treasurer since May 2012 and is interested in internal control and projects in Africa − he organized Wiki Loves Monuments in Cameroon back in 2013. * Florian Pépellin is 26, living in Chambéry. An editor since 2005 and chapter member since 2011, his regular attendance over the years to Wikimedian meetups all over France has earned him the nickname of « Floflo of all cabals ». He has just finished his studies in accounting and research in economy/management. His professional background and his interest for strategy work prompted us to appoint him to the board 6 months ago, and he is now elected for a full term. Now, we would like to welcome a new board member: * Édouard Hue, 32, is a software architect living in Rennes. He has been an editor for six years and joined Wikimedia France after meeting chapter members at Wikipedia's ten years celebrations. He helped his local cabal grow with the estabilshment of their first partnership with the local university. After participating in two editions of Wiki Loves Monuments, he was a juror in two more editions and eventually set up the first edition of Wiki Loves Earth in France this year with his fellow chapter members. He also built a Wikimedia Commons software client that Wikimedia France is looking upon to enable its GLAM partners to upload their content by themselves. Being more and more involved in Wikimedia France's internal affairs, Édouard decided to apply as a board member with a focus on local development and members empowerment. Our board is now structured as follow: * Christophe Henner, Chair * Émeric Vallespi, Vice chair * Guillaume Goursat, Treasurer * Sébastien Beyou, Deputy treasurer * Pierre-Selim Huard, Secretary * Jean-Frédéric Berthelot, Deputy secretary * Édouard Hue, * Samuel Le Goff, * Florian Pépellin * Benoît Prieur, Please welcome the newcomer and do not hesitate to join us in expressing your gratitude to our former board members! Sincerely, Pierre-Selim -- Pierre-Selim Huard Wikimédia France, Association pour le libre partage de la connaissance pierre-selim.huard(a)wikimedia.fr

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Princess of Asturias Awards pics
by Salvador A 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

Hi community. I don't know if somebody already shared this. I remember some of you asked for photographs of the last Princess of Asturias Awards ceremony. You can find some in the next category in Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Princess_of_Asturias_Awards_201… I want to congratulate Wikimedia Spain for the magnificent idea of introducing a volunteer as oficial photographer in the ceremony authorized by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, and obviously to the photographer Ruben Ortega. There are some pictures from other volunteers that also atendeed to the ceremony, thanks to them too. AFAIK there is still some pendants photographs to be uploaded, but we have already those to use in Wikipedia, media and posts. Congratulations to all again! -- *Salvador Alcántar* *@salvador_alc*

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Khalid Mahmood is gone
by Asaf Bartov 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

Dear friends, Our colleague User:Khalid Mahmood, the most prolific contributor to the Western Punjabi Wikipedia[1], has died earlier this month, after long illness. Khalid was an educator from Pakistan who was passionate about creating and sharing free knowledge. He had great plans for promoting the mission in Pakistan. He has made more than 67 thousand edits across the projects. He attended Wikimania 2012 and 2014, where some of us met him. If you wish to leave condolences or share memories of Khalid, I suggest his talk page on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Khalid_Mahmood#Condolences_and_re… Yours, Asaf [1] Western Punjabi [used in Pakistan] and Eastern Punjabi [used in India] are practically the same language, but Western is written in the Perso-Arabic Shahmukhi script, whereas Eastern is written in the Gurmukhi script.) -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org> Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org

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Update from the Wikimedia Performance Team
by Ori Livneh 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

Hello, This is the first monthly report from the Wikimedia Performance Team. The purpose of these reports is to showcase our work, track our progress, and spark conversation. ## Who we are ## As the Wikimedia Foundation’s Performance Team, we want to create value for readers and editors by making it possible to retrieve and render content at the speed of thought, from anywhere in the world, on the broadest range of devices and connection profiles. We are five engineers: Aaron Schulz, Gilles Dubuc, Peter Hedenskog, Timo Tijhof, and me. Each of us was born in a different country and has a different mother tongue. We work out of San Francisco, London, Stockholm, and Montpellier. ## What we are working on ## * Availability. Although Wikimedia Foundation currently operates six data centers, MediaWiki is only running on one (in Ashburn, Virginia). If you are an editor in Jakarta, Indonesia, content has to travel over 15,000 kilometers to get from our servers to you (or vice versa). To run MediaWiki concurrently from multiple places across the globe, our code needs to be more resilient to failure modes that can occur when different subsystems are geographically remote from one another. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88445 * Performance testing infrastructure. WebPageTest provides a stable reference for a set of browsers, devices, and connection types from different points in the world. It collects very detailed telemetry that we use to find regressions and pinpoint where problems are coming from. This is addition to the more basic Navigation Timing metrics we gather from real users in production. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109666 * Media stack. We're currently working on overhauling our thumbnail infrastructure to achieve multiple goals. Improving future-proof maintainability by taking thumbnail code out of MediaWiki-Core and using a service instead to perform thumbnail operations. Saving on expensive storage by no longer storing multiple copies of all thumbnails on disk forever. Enabling far-future expires for images, to greatly improve their client cacheability. And finally switching to the best performing underlying software to generate thumbnails faster. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111718 * ResourceLoader. ResourceLoader is the MediaWiki subsystem that is responsible for loading JavaScript and CSS. Whereas much of MediaWiki's code executes only sparingly (in reaction to editors modifying content) ResourceLoader code runs over half a billion times a day on hundreds of millions of devices. Its contribution to how users experience our sites is very large. Our current focus is on improving ResourceLoader's cache efficiency by packaging and delivering JavaScript and CSS code in a way that allows it to be reused across page views without needing to be repeatedly downloaded. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102578 ## How are we doing? ## In future reports, we will spend less time on introductions and more time reporting on how particular performance metrics have trended since the previous report and why. In the meantime, we invite you to check out our dashboards: * https://performance.wikimedia.org/ * https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/navigation-timing * https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/time-to-first-byte * https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/job-queue-health ## Feedback? ## Please let us know what you think about these reports and whether we have picked the right lists to send it to. (We're going to make sure this information is available on mediawiki.org too.) Until next time, Aaron, Gilles, Peter, Timo & Ori

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Fwd: Invitation to WMF October 2015 Metrics & Activities Meeting: Thursday, November 5, 19:00 UTC
by Praveena Maharaj 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

REMINDER: This meeting starts in 30 minutes. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Praveena Maharaj <pmaharaj(a)wikimedia.org> Date: Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 3:00 PM Subject: Invitation to WMF October 2015 Metrics & Activities Meeting: Thursday, November 5, 19:00 UTC To: wikimediaannounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Dear all, The next WMF metrics and activities meeting will take place on Thursday, November 5, 2015, at 7:00 PM UTC (11 AM PST). The IRC channel is #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net, and the meeting will be broadcast as a live YouTube stream. Meeting agenda: * Welcomes * A few words from Jimmy Wales * Strategy update * Community update * WMF top-level metrics * Showcase: Content Translation * Questions/discussions Please review https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings for further information about the meeting and how to participate. We’ll post the video recording publicly after the meeting. Thank you, Praveena -- Praveena Maharaj Executive Assistant Wikimedia Foundation \\ www.wikimediafoundation.org

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Changes in operational management.
by Lila Tretikov 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

All, I’m writing to let you know that Terry Gilbey will be leaving the WMF. As Interim Chief Operating Officer this year, he helped us improve operational processes across the organization during an important time. I thank him for completing this service. During this time WMF teams became stronger, with more freedom to make right decisions in support of our communities. The Team Practices Group will continue to carry forward maintaining and helping improve the organizational processes we put into place. With improved processes in place, I see the need to focus our attention on WMF culture. With this change, we will take the first step: Boryana will join the C-Level team, representing HR and employee voice at the top level of organizational leadership. Our search for a new Chief Financial Officer is well on its way. Until we have a new CFO on board, the Finance team will report to me. The Office IT, Administration, and the Team Practices teams will report to Boryana. The Technology team that was co-managed by Terry and Wes will continue to be managed by Wes until we fill the leadership role internally or externally. ~~~~ Lila

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Train-a-Wikipedian (TAW): New initiative
by Tito Dutta 05 Nov '15

05 Nov '15

Hello, I want to inform you about a new project “Train-a-Wikipedian” (TAW), powered by CIS-A2K. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Train-a-Wikipedian You may know of the English Wikipedia program Adopt-a-user <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adopt-a-user>. We wanted to start something similar for the Indian Wikimedia communities. In February and June this year, CIS-A2K conducted Train the Trainer <http://CIS-A2K/Events/Train the Trainer Program> (TTT) and MediaWiki Train the Trainer <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Events/MediaWiki_Train_the_Trainer_…> (MWTTT). After conducting these two events, and communicating with the participants we found the necessity to start a training program that we’ll be running on regular basis, and from there we conceived this “Train-a-Wikipedian” program. Initially, we’ll concentrating on these 5 Indian languages Wikis: 1) Kannada, 2) Konkani, 3) Marathi, 4) Odia, 5) Telugu. But, we may expand soon, if our program is a success. In our TAW main page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K/Train-a-Wikipedian>, we have listed a number of topics those we’ll discussing during our training. We hope to conduct hangout or webinar sessions. Please provide your feedback and suggestion. :-) Regards. User:Titodutta English Wikipedia administrator CIS-A2K Program Associate (consultant)

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WMF Reading strategy update
by Moushira Elamrawy 04 Nov '15

04 Nov '15

Hi Everyone -- We wanted to give you an update on where we were with the strategy process and provide some more avenues for feedback and participation. When we last spoke, we had presented an initial draft of our strategy along with some details of the process we are using. This did not get the feedback that we had hoped for[1]. We considered this feedback and came up with some conclusions that we've used to move forward: 1. The strategic problem itself was too broad and unclear to be a suitable foundation for discussion or specifics. 2. The process is difficult to understand if you haven't been immersed in it. 3. Strategy is hard and collaborative strategy, particularly with a large group of distributed stakeholders, is harder. In response to these conclusions, we've done the following: 1. Simplified and pared down our scope and made our strategic problem more accessible and actionable. 2. Changed our communications plan to focus more on the outcomes of the strategic process (what we're proposed we do v. how we came to these ideas) with the belief that this will be easier to discuss. 3. Moved forward with the process to get to more specific plans and most importantly start the process to reverse engineer them to see if they will be effective. We also made a video to explain where we are and have started a process to gather input on design from the community. We'd like to ask for your help in the following way: 1. Please review this page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Strategy/Strategy_Process/Testing for details on how you can provide feedback become more involved in the process. We're also very happy to recieve feedback on the process itself and on the strategic options we are reverse-engineering. - The Reading Team [1] Our favorite was something along the lines of "It sounds like you put all of the buzzwords into a bag, shook it up, and poured it out on a table" -- this was good.

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(no subject)
by Pine W 03 Nov '15

03 Nov '15

Besides what readers think when they're fully informed, I'm also concerned about the legal issues surrounding the fundraising. IANAL, but I have a feeling that consumer protection attorneys may take an interest if they feel that there is a meaningful disconnect between what messages FR conveys and (1) how the funds are actually spent and/or (2) the overall financial health of WMF. Let's avoid inflicting legal costs and PR damage on ourselves, please. (: Pine On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 7:17 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 4:56 PM, Lisa Gruwell <lgruwell(a)wikimedia.org> > wrote: > > > So, we have drilled down on this more in our research to better > > understand what our readers think on this topic. We should have more to > > share on that in a week or two. > > > > > What readers think about this topic will very much depend on what > information they have been given. > > You need to find out what readers think who know > > 1. the cost of Internet hosting relative to the total budget (about 3 > percent); > 2. that you took five times as much money last year as you took five years > ago; > 3. how much money the Foundation has in cash and investments; > 4. that the number of paid staff has increased more than twentyfold since > 2007; > 5. how the vastly increased spending is affecting reader experience. > > Do you know what readers who know all of this think about the banners? Have > there been focus groups with donors who were given all of this information? > > This is necessary to make sure that when (not if) readers do find all of > this information out, there won't be a storm of protest from people who > feel they were misled as to the Foundation's financial situation. > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> >

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Wikimedia-l November 2015