Hi folks,
We are the Finance Fellows, a multicultural team consisting of 4 young
professionals. We are happy to introduce a 6-month movement-wide project
that focuses on the consistency of how we operate, which is explained
further in this announcement.
*But here's some information about us*:
Arda [User:Melmas_(WMF)] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Melmas_(WMF)> is
from Turkey. He holds a BA in Economics.
Lene [User:Lgillis_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lgillis_(WMF)> is from Belgium. She
holds a Master's degree in Applied Economics and a Master's degree in
Business Communication.
Seyi [User:Oolukoya_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Oolukoya_(WMF)> is from Nigeria. She
holds a Master's in International Business and a BSc in Economics.
Walter [User:Wagsegura_(WMF)]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wagsegura_(WMF)> is from Nicaragua.
He holds a BA in Applied Economics.
*About the project "Movement-wide financial report"*
Driven by the Wikimedia Foundation's guiding principles of transparency and
accountability, our goal is to gather data and develop systematic metrics
in order to provide a better understanding of financial statements. The aim
is to help make financial data and statements more consistent and
comparable across all Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and the
Wikimedia Foundation, to the benefit of the whole movement.
The idea of this project comes from the WMF Board of Trustee's Audit
Committee and is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. An initial quantitative
analysis of Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic Organizations
<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Chapters_in_Numbers>
demonstrated
at Wikimania 2013 by Michal Buczyński (User:Aegis Maelstrom)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aegis_Maelstrom>, highlighted the
importance of meaningful, obtainable and unified data.
The Finance Fellows have been formed by WMF to spearhead this project. The
intention of this project is to enable Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic
Organizations to benchmark activities and costs in a consistent way. We
will begin by gathering comparable quantitative financial data about
Wikimedia Chapters and Thematic Organizations. Our findings will later be
released movement-wide, on Meta-Wiki.
Please note that this is not an audit process. We are simply collecting the
data and developing global metrics. The metric is an objective measurement
that will enable data to be consistent, meaningful and comparable among the
Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation.
We will build on existing data sets and reach out to Chapters and Thematic
Organizations if further information is required. After processing the
gathered information, we will confirm the data with each organization.
In the long run, we envision that this project could be replicated
annually. In this attempt to enable Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic
Organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation to help make the movement's
financial data more consistent, we rely on the data provided by the
organizations. We believe that there is enough data available to make a new
attempt on capturing the movement's finances as a whole.
A meta page <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement-wide_Financial_Report>
was
created for the project, in order to make the information accessible to
everyone and create a space for discussion and/or suggestions. We strongly
encourage you to share with us what types of additional information is
desired.
And of course: This is all an experiment! If it does not work, we will try
to apply a modified 'agile' process by iterating, repeating, and trying
again based on the feedback we are getting. If this does not seem right, or
if it appears we are missing something obvious, please let us know!
Thank you,
WMF Finance Fellows (User:WMF Finance Fellows)
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:WMF_Finance_Fellows>
Dear all,
The next WMF metrics and activities meeting will take place on
Thursday, June 11, 2015 at 6:00 PM UTC (11 AM PDT). Please note, on
this occasion, we are holding this meeting on the second Thursday in
June.
The IRC channel is #wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net, and the meeting will
be broadcast as a live YouTube stream.
Each month at the metrics meeting, we will:
* Welcome recent hires
* Present a community update
* Present reports/updates that are focused on a key topic or theme; the
topic for June's meeting is WMF Strategy Preview
* Engage in questions/discussions
Please review
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings for further
information about how to participate.
We’ll post the video recording publicly after the meeting.
Thank you,
Praveena
--
Praveena Maharaj
Executive Assistant to the Vice President of Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation \\ www.wikimediafoundation.org
[ cross-posted to MediaWiki-i18n, Wikimedia-L and Wikitech-L ]
Dear Wikimedians,
The 2000th article that was written using the ContentTranslation extension
was published today.
Article #2000 was translated from English to Greek, and it's about Škocjan
Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Slovenia.
Original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0kocjan_Caves
Translated:
https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A3%CF%80%CE%AE%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B9%CE%B1_%C…
In case you're wondering what ContentTranslation is, here's a brief
summary: ContentTranslation is an extension that helps Wikipedia editors to
create articles quickly and easily by translating them from other
languages. It's being developed by the Language Engineering team. Its
design started in the summer of 2013 and its coding started in early 2014.
You can find more info at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CX as well as in
the following blog posts:
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/10/content-translation-beta-coming-soon/
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/20/try-content-translation/
*
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/06/content-translation-improved-my-edits/
* http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/08/the-new-content-translation-tool/
Some more data about ContentTranslation:
* Our first deployment was in mid-January to Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese,
Esperanto, Norwegian Bokmal, Danish, Indonesian and Malay. Now we support
43 languages, and this number is growing every week as we extend the
deployment (a special thank-you to the Ops and Release Engineering people,
who continuously and tirelessly support our deployment effort).
* In all the Wikipedias in which ContentTranslation is deployed, it is
currently defined as a Beta feature, which means that it is only available
to logged-in users who opted into it in the preferences.
* The 1000th article was written on April 10th, so it took much less to get
to 2000 than to 1000.
* The language into which the most articles were translated is Catalan:
762. The Catalan Wikipedia community always had a strong inclination to
translation, it was the first one that volunteered to test the tool in labs
in the summer of 2014 and provided a lot of useful feedback, and it also
has good machine translation support thanks to the Freely-licensed Apertium
engine.
* The second most popular target language is Spanish. It started slowly in
the first couple of months, but it's quickly growing since March.
* Other target languages that are quickly growing lately are French,
Portuguese and Ukrainian.
* The language from which the largest number of articles is translated is
English. It is followed by Spanish, from which a lot of articles are
translated to the closely related Portuguese and Catalan.
* The total number of people who published at least one translated article
into any language is 663.
* Of more than 2000 articles that were created, about 60 were deleted, so
we have a reason to think that the quality of the created articles is
pretty OK.
* In Catalan we see that ContentTranslation has some influence on the
number of articles created per day - it was usually between 60 and 90
before 2015, and in January and February it was over a 100. It's too early
to say how does it influence other languages, but we are optimistic ;)
* A community discussion about enabling the tool in the French Wikipedia
ended with 50 "votes" in support of the tool and 0 "votes" against it ;)
Some of our plans for the coming months are:
* Enabling more languages, including big ones like English, Russian and
Italian, as well as right-to-left languages.
* Improving the support for links.
* Creating support for smart suggestions of articles to translate, as well
as "task lists" for translation projects.
* Starting to get the tool out of beta status :)
I'd like to thank all the Wikimedia volunteers around the planet who are
participating in this effort by translating articles, translating the
extension's user interface, testing the tool, assisting other wikipedians
to translate, organizing translation workshops, reporting useful bugs,
submitting patches, and generally proving day after day what an incredible
community they are - hard-working, massively-multilingual, helpful,
patient, creative and talented.
Thank you - we have a lot more to achieve together \o/
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
... it would be good to talk a bit about the state of our community
and movement.
Initially, I was quite positively surprised by the fact that this will
be the best WMF Board elections ever in the terms of turnout of
voters. It will beat 2007 elections and it will be likely 2.5 times
better than previous one.
I would really like to know what's so different than in 2013. Also, if
this is the sign of the community health, how come that we are now
better than we were at the peak of our movement?
Then I made my personal community health check: the size of the
gzipped file of the discussions on this list [1]. And I was surprised
again to realize that this is the *worst* month since December 2004
(it's not likely that we'll pass192KB of the August 2012 in the next
few hours) in the sense of quantity of communication.
At the other side, the list is not quiet, which makes things a bit more odd.
If we just compare quantity of communication vs. quantity of topics,
it would be easy to conclude that there are less deep and less heated
discussions, which basically means that although we've become more
civilized, we care much less about Wikimedia.
However, turnout of voters says something completely different. I am a
bit puzzled and I don't have the idea what doesn't fit, except to
complain that somebody messed up with Universe constants.
So, any idea? But, please, something sensible, not things like "We've
become more mature".
And two more precise requests:
1) May Election committee give unified data for all previous
elections? If possible, structured by countries and projects. Output
of all democratic elections assume presenting data according to area.
It's legitimate to know that voters from country X voted for candidate
Y. It gives a clue of what's going on inside of the movement.
2) Besides very intuitive (not to say pseudoscientific, dilettantish)
methods of making conclusions that "something is good here" or
"something is bad there", we don't have any systematic way for
gathering and analyzing data about the state of our community and
movement. I think that the responsibility of the Board is to find a
way to, for the beginning, quantify whatever could be quantified in
relation to the community and movement traits. And to inform the rest
of us periodically. (To be more clear: this is not ED's job, this is
Board's job; it's not about running the projects, but about running
the movement.)
[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/
Below is the list of the languages sorted by the number of L2 speakers
(more than one million of them).
L2 speakers appear in two occasions:
* First and important to us is about languages used for wider
communication. For example, French is L2 among educated people of West
Africa.
* The second type is related to the native languages in not so good
position (either dying or reviving). For example, English is L1 language of
the most of Native Americans, as well as Russian is L1 language of the most
of ethnicities of former Soviet Union, while their own languages are L2
ones. (They are important in other cases, but not for this purpose.)
I omitted English (there is no sense, as we are communicating in English
and English is default for all the localization) and few spoken languages
(our content is [mostly] written).
I also removed some languages which belong to the second category (Irish
Gaelic and Scots, for example), but it could be the case that some of the
languages from the list belong to that category, as well (though I am
pretty sure they don't).
There are languages inside of this list with well developed Wikimedia
projects and without particular need to promote work on Wikimedia projects
among them: French, Spanish and German are the examples. There is no
Russian inside of the list, as it's usually L1 language, as mentioned
above, but it belongs to the category of the languages with well developed
Wikimedia projects.
There are also languages spoken in countries with low level of internet
access and issues much more important than writing an encyclopedia, like
Congo Swahili is. Those are the areas not yet ready even for the projects
like OLPC is and we don't have a lot to do there.
But there are a number of languages in between with active chapter(s) or
user group(s) inside of relevant countries. Those languages should be the
priority in promotion collaboration.
They are: Arabic (Arabic user groups), Indonesian (WM ID), Hindi (WM IN),
Urdu (Pakistani user group), Thai (Thailand UG), Bengali (WM BD), Zulu (WM
ZA), Hausa (West African user groups), Xhosa (WM ZA), Afrikaans (WM ZA),
Kannada (WM IN), Telugu (WM IN), Tsonga (WM ZA), Malay (WM ID and Malaysian
Wikimedians), Marathi (WM IN).
The priorities for those languages should include (but likely not limited
to):
* Translation of MediaWiki messages should be 100%.
* Those languages should be priorities for every document which should be
translated. For example, ongoing Board elections; but also various Meta
pages.
* We should have the pool of literate people in those languages for various
purposes, not just for translation. For example, if we want to create
projects in languages of Pakistan, we should have a number of literate Urdu
speakers, willing to help newcomers speaking Urdu as their L2 language.
Will be back with other languages-related data :)
LanguageCodeL1 speakersL2 speakersStandard
Arabicarb206,000,000246,000,000Mandarin
Chinesecmn847,808,270178,000,000Indonesianind23,200,480140,000,000Hindihin
260,333,620120,000,000Spanishspa398,931,84096,990,000Urduurd64,035,800
94,000,000Frenchfra75,916,15087,000,000Thaitha20,396,93040,000,000Bengaliben
189,261,20019,200,000Zuluzul11,969,10015,700,000Hausahau25,109,00015,000,000
Xhosaxho8,177,30011,000,000Afrikaansafr7,096,81010,300,000Bamanankanbam
4,072,04010,000,000Burmesemya32,035,30010,000,000Congo Swahiliswc1,000
9,100,000Northern Sothonso4,631,0009,100,000Kannadakan37,739,0409,000,000
Germandeu78,093,9808,000,000Tamiltam68,776,4608,000,000Juladyu2,550,000
7,000,000Lingalalin2,141,3007,000,000Koongokng5,016,5005,000,000Telugutel
74,049,0005,000,000Ibibioibb1,500,0004,500,000Tok Pisintpi122,0004,000,000
Kriokri495,6004,000,000Amharicamh21,811,6004,000,000Bangalabxg~0
3,500,000Tsongatso4,009,0003,400,000Malayzlm15,848,5003,000,000Marathimar
71,780,6603,000,000Sinhalasin15,613,9802,000,000Efikefi405,2602,000,000Duala
dua87,7002,000,000Yorubayor19,380,8002,000,000Shonasna10,741,7001,800,000
Vendaven1,294,0001,700,000Sangosag404,0001,600,000Manado Malayxmm850,000
1,500,000Sylhetisyl10,300,0001,500,000Ambonese Malayabs245,0201,400,000
Ndebelenbl1,090,0001,400,000Rakhinerki1,000,0001,020,000Gandalug4,130,000
1,000,000Akanaka8,314,6001,000,000Khmerkhm14,224,5001,000,000
> From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>
> To: Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj(a)alk.edu.pl>, Wikimedia Mailing List
> <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan for FY
> 15-16
> Message-ID:
> <
> CAAtU9WLhkF44ogkAgYq2_-J1n_8KpWRTURNok5+DkH4BhSA61A(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> @Garfield - I would love to hear what sort of community feedback you are
> hoping for; and what you would ideally get out of it.
> Was this past week's input helpful? Are you looking for additional
> feedback over the coming weeks?
>
I'm Echoing Sam's callout for the level of feedback;
The annual plan, in its current structure, is fairly high-level. I find
most of the goals to be agreeable, but am looking for more details about
the following:
1) How the increase in staffing is translated into aggressive goals
(especially in areas like community engagement, engineering, communications
- where staffing has increased significantly)
2) On the other end of the scale, what current areas of operation will be
discontinued / significantly reduced in scope - this is also a part of a
good workplan.
--Ido / [[user:Alleycat80]]
"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary,
and those who don't."
(unknown)
Yes I agree that well educated, young and technical blind people from
the developed world have found better solutions for using the internet
that we could produce with a listen button.
I see this more for 1) people who do not read because they do not know
how 2) people who are blind but not technical (maybe they are elderly)
Patient.co.uk say that their listen button is used about 1% of the
time. You can see it here http://www.patient.co.uk/health/gout-leaflet
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com