Hi,
as mentioned in last week's announcement of the September 2011
Wikimedia Foundation report, this time we published a separate
"Highlights" summary, combining excerpts from the general report and
the engineering report. It's an experiment, a format which might be
useful for those who might find the full reports long to read, and it
facilitates translations.
Several translations are now available (help is welcome in spreading them):
مجموعة من أهم ما جاء في تقرير مؤسسة ويكيميديا وتقرير هندسة ويكيمييديا
لشهر سبتمبر 2011
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Highlights,_September_…
Höhepunkte aus dem Monatsbericht und dem technischen Bericht der
Wikimedia Foundation für September 2011
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Highlights,_September_…
I punti salienti presi dal Wikimedia Foundation Report e dal Wikimedia
engineering report del mese di Settembre 2011
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Highlights,_September_…
2011年9月のウィキメディア財団報告書及びウィキメディア技術報告より抄録
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Highlights,_September_…
Thanks to all translators! Translations can still be added at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Highlights,_September_…
As said above, this is an experiment, so it would be nice to hear how
useful the result is to people, and what could be improved.
I would also like to take the occasion to draw attention to
"Wikimedia:Woche", an new weekly newsletter run by the German
Wikimedia chapter, summarizing news from the whole movement in German
language (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/vereinde-l/2011-September/005121.html
). To my knowledge it is the first initiative of its kind by a
chapter (of course there are already volunteer-run publications such
as the Signpost, Wikizine and Kurier).
--
Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
Dear all,
This is the chapter report for Wikimedia Nederland for March 2011, which can
also be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Nederla…
*Wiki Loves Monuments*
In 2010, WMNL arranged a photo competition around monumental buildings and
objects ("rijksmonumenten"): Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM). In September 2011,
the photo competition will take place in several European countries, in
collaboration with the Wikimedia chapters in concern. WMNL members Lodewijk
Gelauff and MaartenD travelled to other countries to explain the concept. On
March 18th-20th Lodewijk attended the Wikimedia Conference in Wroclaw
(Poland), on March 20th MaartenD gave a workshop at WMDE's General Meeting
in Berlin (Germany). In March, for about ten countries confirmed that they
were going to participate.
In the Netherlands it was arranged that Cultural Heritage institution
"Heemschut" will sponsor WLM 2011 with PR and other help in the Netherlands
itself. Stichting Open Monumentdag, that organizes the general day of the
open monument, will help too.
*Chapters Meeting in Berlin*
On 25-27 March, Paul and Siebrand represented Wikimedia Nederland at the
Wikimedia Chapters Meeting in Berlin, Germany. Lodewijk presented Wiki Loves
Monuments in a seperate session.
*Donation to Wikimedia Foundation*
The Dutch chapter sent 75,000 EUR to the Foundation with regard to the
Fundraising of 2009/2010, and 150,000 EUR with regard to the Fundraising of
2010/2011.
*Professionalization*
Professionalization is an ongoing process. An office space has been rented
starting April 1 in the city center of Utrecht (a city centrally located in
the country).
*5 years Wikimedia Nederland*
On March 27, Wikimedia Nederland existed exactly 5 years. Since this was the
last day of the chapters meeting in Berlin, we celebrated this with our
international colleagues with cake, see the picture at
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:VWN5jaar.jpg
*Meetings & Conferences*
On 28-29 March, Lodewijk and Siebrand attended Global Melt (workshop about
exchanging knowledge in organizing events for Global movements) in Berlin,
Germany
*Upcoming:*
- April 1: Europeana hackathon
- April 2: General Assembly (strategy discussion, financial report 2010,
board elections) + strategy report discussion
- April 3: Lodewijk will give a Skype talk at Shristi 2011 (India)
- April 23: Lodewijk will give a workshop in Porto, Portugal
- May: International workshop in Berlin for all participating countries
- June 18/19: 10 years Dutch Wikipedia
- June: 2 people will visit the Wikimedia Fundraiser Summit in Austria
(by WMAT).
- June: Maarten will present Wikimedia at the study days of the national
archivist association (KVAN)
- September: Wiki Loves Monuments Europe
- 5 November: Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland 2011
Dear all,
Please find the Wikimedia Hungary Report for August online at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikim%C3%A9dia_Ma…
and copied below for your convenience.
--
Bence Damokos
Executive Vice President,
Wikimedia Hungary
http://wikimedia.hu
Wikimedia Hungary Report
Vol 4 Issue 8
August 2011
Prepared by: Bence Damokos
This is an update on Wikimédia Magyarország's activities covering
August 2011. August was a relatively slow month in terms of active
project developments due to summer holidays and Wikimania travel, much
emphasis was placed on internal admin work and preparation for future
projects.
== Wikimania ==
Six people participated in the Wikimania conference held in Haifa, one
of them received a partial scholarship from Wikimedia Hungary to
attend.
== Wiki Loves Monuments ==
Following a meeting in Haifa with the international coordinators of
the Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition we have decided to redouble
our efforts to have Wikimedia Hungary particiapte in the contest.
== Press ==
We have started preparing a strategy for publicizing the Hungarian
Wikipedia's 200 thousandth article milestone in collaboration with the
Wikimedia Communications Committee and especially Moka Pantages.
== Meetings ==
A members' get-together was held on the 6th of August and a board
meeting on the 29th.
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.
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)
Dear friends, I'm glad to announce that last saturday Wikimedia
Argentina held its General Assembly. As a result of the Assembly, a new
board was elected and the annual plan for 2012 was approved. The new
board is:
President: Patricio Lorente
VicePresident: Galileo Vidoni
Secretary: Ivana Lysholm
Vicesecretary: Nicolás Georgetti
Treasurer: Leandro Ferrari
Vicetreasurer: Patricio Molina
Members: Nahuel Kahles, Lila Pagola, Evelin Heidel
Alternate members: Mariano Pérez, Beatrice Murch
Patricio Lorente on behalf of Wikimedia Argentina