This is the e-mail version, please visit
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_December_2010
for the formatted version that you can edit.
Note: As of this report, we no longer align the metrics reporting
period with the activity reporting period (that is, if no December
data is available yet by the time we create the report, we will
include November data). This change allows us to release the monthly
reports sooner, instead of waiting for certain metrics (e.g. comScore
data) to become available.
Also note that we're shifting to having a content-heavy "highlights"
section at the top, followed by slightly more terse updates on other
activities. This will hopefully give you a better sense of key
accomplishments/milestones. Feedback on how to improve the reports is
always welcome.
All best,
Erik
==Data and Trends==
:Global unique visitors:
:411 million (+0.6% compared to previous month / +18.8% compared to
previous year)
: (comScore data for November, all Wikimedia Foundation projects;
comScore will release December data later in January)
:Page requests:
:13.9 billion (-6.7% compared to previous month / + 22.9% compared to
previous year)
: (Wikimedia Foundation data for December, all Wikimedia Foundation
projects including Wikipedia mobile)
Recent community metrics are not available as of this writing due to
an extended outage of the database dump production server that
provides the underlying source data.
==Financials==
[See the November report for November data. December data will be
finalized later in January, and will be included with the January
report.]
== Highlights ==
=== 2010 fundraising campaign reaches record target ===
December began with the fundraiser's daily numbers far too low to make
our goal by December 31. There was even a question whether we could
make the goal by January 15, as we knew we had used up all the
easy-to-get donors in our first weeks in November. Our challenge for
December was to communicate our authentic urgency to the community. We
felt strongly about making our goal as early as possible in order to
free the site from fundraising banners as soon as possible.
But instead of going straight to an urgent message from Jimmy Wales or
Sue Gardner, we took time to run banners and appeals from Wikipedia
editors - most of whom had been featured in the Wikimedia Foundation's
videos produced in Gdansk alongside Wikimania 2010. We thought it was
important to spend time highlighting the community directly for some
portion of the campaign.
Finally, we did return to appeals from Jimmy and experimented with a
wide range of approaches to both messaging, graphical treatment, ask
amounts, and other variables. We were able to get the numbers back up
and get within striking distance of our goal by the last days of
December. With a strong end-of-year push, were were able to make our
goal by midnight (San Francisco time) on December 31, and "Thank You"
banners were launched.
On January 1, we announced the unprecedented success of the 2010
fundraising campaign, and thanked everyone for this extraordinary
expression of support:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Half_a_Million_People_Donate_to_Keep_Wi…
In just 50 days, the shortest fundraiser in recent Wikimedia history,
the Foundation received more than 500,000 individual donation from
people living in about 140 countries, reaching its goal of raising $16
million. We received more than twice as many individual donations as
in 2009, which garnered 230,000 total contributions.
===Public Policy Initiative: First Semester Wrap-Up ===
The first semester of classes assigning Wikipedia improvements as
coursework to their students has wrapped up. Participating
universities and courses are listed at:
: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol…
Statistics and additional links are at:
: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol…
Project staff member Sage Ross contributed a detailed perspective
regarding the first semester, and regarding the Wikipedia Ambassadors
program launched to support these types of assignments, to the
Wikipedia Signpost:
: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-12-27/Ambass…
Sage writes: "Overall, 207 students in these classes contributed more
than 2 million bytes of new content to articles—an average of more
than 10,000 bytes each to articles."
===India technology fact-finding trip===
Danese Cooper, Alolita Sharma and Erik Moeller traveled to India for
about two weeks of meetings with various groups, organizations, and
individuals. The purpose of the trip was to assess technical barriers
to growing the India community of Wikimedia contributors and users,
and to strengthen relationships with the open source community and the
Wikimedia community. The stations of the trip were Delhi, Mumbai,
Pune, and Bangalore.
Groups we met with included C-DAC (for
internationalization/localization issues), Mishi Choudhary of the
Software Freedom Law Center India, the National Informatics Centre,
the Ministry of Communications and IT, IIT Mumbai, Symbiosis
University, the Pune Linux Users Group, the Pune Working Journalists,
Red Hat, Canonical, Intel India, Novell India, Zmanda, Microsoft
Research India, IIM Bangalore, plus Wikimedians in all places we
visited (including board member Bishakha Datta and Advisory Board
member Achal Prabhala), and many other individuals.
Danese Cooper presented a keynote at the foss.in conference in
Bangalore, and Erik Moeller organized a MediaWiki workshop at the
conference. Wikimedia India and local Wikimedians staffed a booth at
foss.in, and we provided t-shirts to attendees. Danese, Erik and
Alolita also gave a talk to an audience of about 300 students at
Symbiosis University, and presented (and listened) at the meetups they
attended.
The topics covered included:
* input method issues with Indic languages like Hindi, Kannada and
Malayalam (which input methods exist, which are supported at the
operating system level, which are currently implemented on Wikipedia
using custom JavaScript, etc.)
* font encoding and rendering issues encountered by the various Indic
language Wikimedia projects
* search indexing of Indic language content
* offline content deployment strategies, current projects (like the
Malayalam Wikipedia CD), potential future projects
* trends in mobile 2G and 3G, smartphone/feature phone usage
* how relationships with the groups we met with could be leveraged
towards meeting our goals.
As an immediate next step, we are working with the Wikimedians in
India to determine how we can best help address remaining
internationalization/localization issues.
=== Director of Technical Operations hired ===
CT Woo was hired as Director of Technical Operations, reporting to our
CTO, Danese Cooper. As Director of Technical Ops, his primary
responsibility will to help provide for a stable, secure, documented,
scalable and responsive systems environment. He'll be working with
our small site operations team to assess the current state process of
technical projects, short and long term risk to the technical
infrastructure and work towards providing solutions and systems for
failsafes and redundancy. He will also be a great resource for
guidance and mentorship for the operations team. CT Woo joins us from
Freshbrain, an educational non-profit, where he was VP of Engineering
and IT. He had a long career at Sun Microsystems from 1993-2006,
including as IT Director of Operations responsible for 150 staff, and
as Software Engineering Director. In addition to English, CT speaks
Malay, Indonesian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fukien.
==Technology==
See http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/01/wmf-engineering-update/ for
a full update, highlights are listed below.
===Overall Tech Department Updates===
'''Data Summit''': was rescheduled for Feb 4th in California alongside
the O'Reilly Strata Conference (a new conference on "Big Data"), which
O'Reilly generously gave us a large discount to. The Data Summit is
an invitation-only event which will deal with a) structured data in
Wikimedia projects, b) research/analytics and management of
Wikimedia's large datasets.
'''Upcoming Conferences''': Members of the Tech Department will be
speaking at FOSDEM 2011, Strata 2011 and GNUnify 2011. Danese will be
keynoting at a regional FBI conference in Oakland, and at a conference
for the State Department in Washington, DC.
'''Fundraiser''': The fundraising engineering team had an eventful
December keeping up with the fast-moving requirements of an active
Fundraiser in progress. We made modifications to the udp2log system
to support multicast, revamped Central Notice authoring to allow
non-programmers to create banners (due to increased demands for banner
mods in close to real time), and implemented a premium-ordering
process.
===Operations===
'''Data Centers''': We negotiated and signed a lease with a
co-location facility for hosting our new Virginia Data Center (which
was only possible after we'd selected a hardware strategy). We also
completed the first phase of our Tampa consolidation.
'''Data Dumps''': We were able to get the failed server to re-spin and
we copied all files off to a new replacement server. Attempts to
start a new dump failed and we are currently re-writing the software
that produces dumps with the intention to have all services back in
early January.
===Features===
'''Article Feedback''': Evaluation and re-design work for Phase 2 of
this new feature was a major focus of December work, due to planned
January deployment (see research section below).
'''LiquidThreads''': Continuing work on user experience of this
feature have led to extended discussions (and mock-ups) about how
improved discussion systems can help us develop more effective
collaboration and a more welcoming culture in Wikimedia projects. We
expect to begin prototyping some of these ideas in the next quarter.
===General Engineering===
'''Improved Analytics''': Open Web Analytics servers came online in
late December. We will be working in January to evaluate this new
tool's performance and future integration possibilities.
'''Code Review''': We are down to 300 remaining open requests in the
Code Review Tool. Many of the remaining issues are associated with
"FixMe" issues in Bugzilla and will be more difficult to work through.
== Research and Strategy ==
Researchers from Cal-IT (University of California, San Diego) and the
Persuasive Technology Lab (Stanford University) visited the Wikimedia
Foundation to discuss potential research opportunities. More
information may be found here:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Thread:Village_pump/en/Researchers_from_…
Work continued on the editor trends study, and Diederik van Liere
visited the Wikimedia Foundation offices to discuss preliminary
findings.
Erik Moeller has continued research into expert review as an area of
product development, and worked to launch an experiment with the
Encyclopedia of Life, with much help from Magnus Manske:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/09/encyclopedia-of-life-curates-wiki…
Howie Fung has published additional findings from our experiments with
article feedback, focusing the analysis on the ratings received to a
specific article (about the discovery of arsenic-based life) to help
us better understand to what extent reader ratings accurately reflect
actual changes in the article:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Early_Da…
Dario Taraborelli, now a research consultant with the Wikimedia
Foundation, organized the second meeting of the Wikimedia Foundation
Research Committee, and helped organize follow-up activity, which
includes a survey of the scholarly community and continued work on
subject-recruitment procedures for researchers:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meeting_2010-12-18
==Community==
In addition to coordinating the fundraiser and supporting preparations
for the tenth anniversary, the community department developed new
Wikimedia fellowship agreements, which will be finalized and announced
in January.
===Public Policy Initiative===
In December, work continued on the development of a train-the-trainer
program and updates to the second training of campus ambassadors.
Research analyst Amy Roth continued her analysis of various quality
metrics (self-assessments by the community, expert assessments, reader
feedback) to help assess the project's overall impact on content
quality.
In December, PPI began exploring ways to institutionalize Wikipedia
curriculum use at universities. Annie Lin and Rod Dunican presented to
over 40 professors, librarians, and staff for LSU's "Communication
Across The Curriculum" department. The CAC group works with over 300
professors at LSU from several different fields of study.
==Global Development==
===Grants and related funding===
We approved and paid grants to the Czech Republic and Indonesia. We
approved and paid grants to community members for projects including
outreach in India.
See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index for up-to-date
information on grant status, activities and reports.
===Offline===
We worked with engineering to support the development of an extension
to the book tool that will enable the creation of collections that can
be used with offline readers using the OpenZIM format.
===Wikimania Scholarships===
We finalized Wikimania scholarship application and selection criteria
and established new "partial scholarship" opportunities to increase
attendance opportunities. The scholarship program is managed by Jessie
Wild this year.
http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships
===Mobile===
We continued work on researching and developing strategies for mobile
with a focus on the needs and opportunities in the Global South, and
prepared for a presentation of findings to management and engineering
in January.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile
===India planning===
* Barry Newstead traveled to Bangalore for interviews with 7 finalist
candidates for the National Program Director position. Bishakha Datta
and Achal Prabhala were part of the interviewing process throughout,
and Erik Moeller and Sue Gardner interviewed two finalist candidates
in Delhi.
* We manually created a new metrics report card for India, working
with Erik Zachte on automating the process
===Brazil planning===
* Carolina Rossini continues to work with the Wikimedia community in
Brazil to understand the opportunities for growth of the community and
readership; her first interim report has been submitted and is, or
will soon be, available on the Brazil Catalyst Project page (which is
written in both English and Portuguese) on Meta
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project
* Kul Wadhwa and Jessie Wild made arrangements for a visit to Brazil in January
===Global Development staffing and recruiting===
* We continued recruiting for Chapter Development and India National
Program Director positions.
==Communications==
During December, Wikimedia spokespeople worked with over more than 100
media outlets, largely in support of pro-active outreach for the
Wikimedia fundraiser and the 10th anniversary events. Selected
contact with global media oulets: Jyllands-Posten, International
Herald Tribune, BBC News Radio and TV, NPR, Sunday Business Post
(Ireland), China Daily, Washington Post, and Swiss National TV.
Media widely reported on the early fundraising victories and the
coming 10 year celebration.
Aside from pro-active media relations efforts in December, Wikimedia
spokespeople around the world tracked the high profile news of the
WikiLeaks release of US Diplomatic cables, often responding to and
clarifying global coverage that innacurately connected Wikipedia and
Wikileaks. A Wikimedia blog post was drafted as a single reference
point for anyone dealing with the confusion:
: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/09/what%E2%80%99s-in-a-name-in-the-c…
Media contacts:
: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#December_2010
Blog posts:
: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/12/
Please also see the detailed weekly news summaries by the Wikipedia Signpost:
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-06
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-13
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-20
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-12-27
===10th Anniversary preparations===
* Ten.wikipedia.org had continued activity with over 170 parties in
planning stages around the world - at least 5 per continent (except
Antartica in spite of outreach efforts!)
* WMF sent 10th Anniversary packages with t-shirts and buttons to the
community for their celebrations - over 3,000 t-shirts were
distributed with over 70 boxes shipped to date.
* We continued our media relations efforts focused on completing
10-year messaging and outreach to media organizations.
* We launched a community communications toolkit
* We completed interviews/discussions with BBC, BusinessWeek, La
Fohla, Time Magazine
* The 10 year anniversary was mentioned in the Economist, NYT Magazine
===Communications products===
* The WMF Strategic plan main copy-editing drew to a close in
December. Final designs have been developed and the report is going
through final copy and fact checking before publication.
* Work on the WMF Annual Report continued as well, however, the
majority of design/copy efforts focused on the strategic plan.
* Communications worked closely with the Community department on
prospective special fundraising opportunities through December, laying
the groundwork for possible future merchandise-oriented incentives.
==Human Resources==
New Hires
*Ryan Faulkner, Data Analyst (Communtiy/Fundraising)
*Joshua VanDavier, Development Associate (Community/Fundraising)
*CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations (Tech)
*Alolita Sharma, Engineering Program Manager (Tech)
New Postings
:None this month
Events
*The Wikimedia Foundation holiday party was a great success. We used
the leftover funds from the all hands to cover the costs, and had a
nice, low-key event at local restuarant Roe. It was great to see
Wikimedians out of their normal element, and to meet their friends and
family.
*First white elephant/baby/puppy party was great fun and well attended
- this may need to become a quarterly event, sans the elephant part.
Including our extended WMF family in our culture is an important part
of growth for us, and helps bring balance and integration to our work
lives.
*Fellowship program made some strides in terms of getting standardized
formatting for applicant approval. The fellowship prorgram is an
important part of our internal HR mission to encourage thought leaders
and other researchers in our space to contribute to the Wikimedia
cause.
*The HR Corner wiki page got the start of an overhaul, the beginnings
of our service based environment. HR is understaffed and our
infrastructure is in need of an overhaul, we are getting close to be
ready to push forward on those objectives.
*Jeff Jones, Office IT Manager departed.
*Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator departed, as announced in August.
:Total Employee Count:
:Plan: 77, Actual: 64
:Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 28
: Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
==Finance and Administration==
===Finance===
The Finance Department compiled the majority of schedules for the Form
990 Tax Return. The Department also began compiling data for January
1099 reporting for independent contractors. Several potential
Controller candidates were screened and interviewed. KPMG (audit/tax
firm) was consulted on the following issues:
*India legal entity
*Webstore and unrelated business income implications
*Donation giveaways
===Administration===
There was continued preparation of the 6th floor expansion including
the kitchen, the mothers' room, furniture, etc. The seating for the
remaining teams on the 3rd floor was reorganized. The Administrative
staff planned and managed the Staff Holiday party.
==Office of the Executive Director==
Following her media/outreach tour (see previous report), Sue Gardner
took a three-week vacation, her first extended vacation since her
hiring as Executive Director.
==Visitors and Guests to the SF Office==
#Colleen Kessler (freelance videographer)
#Peter Adams (Open Web Analytics)
#David Peters (ExBrook)
#David Weir
#Gabriel Alexander (Online donation feedback)
#Katherine Beckwith (Online donation feedback)
#Jonathan Beckhardt (Online donation feedback)
#Kent Bach (Online donation feedback)
#Christian Berger (Online donation feedback)
#Barak Wouk (Student Visitor - Columbia University)
#Dan Martin - (Professor UC Berkeley)
#Benjamin Bratton (CAL IT)
#Jim Giles (New Scientist)
This version is for email consumption, formatted version is at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_November_2010
All best,
Erik
==Highlights==
* 2010 Wikimedia fundraising campaign launches on November 12
* New upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons launches in beta
* Preparations begin for 10th anniversary celebrations with launch of
ten.wikipedia.org
* Public Policy Initiative launches leaderboard showing results
==Data and Trends==
:The monthly report card for November 2010 (partial data) can be found at:
:http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/
:Global unique visitors:
:411 million (+0.6% compared to previous month / +18.8% compared to
previous year)
: (comScore data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects)
:Page requests:
:14.9 billion (+2.8% compared to previous month / +24.5% compared to
previous year)
: (Wikimedia Foundation data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects
including Wikipedia mobile)
Full community metrics for the month of November are not available as
of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump
production server that provides the underlying source data.
==Financials==
:Operating revenue for November: $6.5MM vs plan of $3.9MM.
:Operating revenue year-to-date November: $10.1MM vs plan of $5.3MM.
Revenue YTD is on or over target in all areas.
:Operating expenses for November: $1.4MM vs plan of $1.7MM
:Operating expenses year-to-date November: $5.9MM vs plan of $8.2MM
Underspending MTD is due to: timing of capital expenditures and
internet hosting ($300K- capex and internet hosting-amounts were
budgeted evenly over 12 months rather than reflecting the timing of
the data center build-out and consequent increased hosting costs) and
underspending in staff-related costs ($160K-salaries, taxes and
benefits due primarily to hiring delays as well as staff development
partially offset by recruiting and immigration expenses).
Overspending for the month was primarily in bank fees ($86K), legal
fees ($32K) and travel and conference expenses ($34K).
Underspending YTD is also due to above items of timing of capex and
internet hosting ($1.4MM - these funds will be spent), staff-related
costs ($0.9MM) as well as outside contract services ($0.1MM) and
volunteer development ($0.1MM). Overspending YTD is primarily in bank
fees ($0.1MM), travel and conference expenses ($0.1MM) as well as in
grants and awards ($0.1MM). Overages in grants and awards were due to
the the Wikimania scholarships, grant to Wikimania Poland and
sponsorship of WikiSym Poland-scholarships being budgeted over 12
months instead of 1 month. However, by year-end, grants and awards
are expected to be near budget.
Cash and investments as of November 2010 totaled $16.5MM (as of Nov
30, approximately 10 months of expenses)
==Preparations for Wikipedia's 10th anniversary==
We launched ten.wikipedia.org, a dedicated wiki to support community
celebrations of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary on January 15, 2011. We
finalized designs for related merchandise and overall event branding,
and made them available to the community for customization and
localization:
http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design
We finalized our media outreach plan related to the 10th anniversary
and began contacting long-lead monthly magazines.
Wikimedia Fellow Steven Walling will provide support throughout the
preparations and celebrations, by reaching out to communities, helping
organize the event pages, supporting the distribution of event kits,
etc.
== 2010 fundraising campaign launches ==
On November 12, the Wikimedia Foundation "soft-launched" the 2010
fundraising campaign, with an official launch on November 15. It is
the most ambitious fundraising campaign in Wikimedia's history, with a
campaign goal of $16 million.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Seventh_Annual_Campaign_to_Support_Wiki…
As always, the fundraiser represents a large, collaborative
undertaking both within the organization (community department staff,
engineering, communications, global development, finance, legal),
between the Wikimedia Foundation and the international Wikimedia
chapter organizations, and with the larger global Wikimedia community.
The 2010 fundraising team had sought deep community and chapter
engagement from the start, and through November, we saw unprecedented
participation from the entire Wikimedia movement in running a
successful campaign.
The following Wikimedia chapters worked directly with the Wikimedia
Foundation and processed funds in their respective countries:
Wikimedia Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy,
Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. This was possible
in part because Wikimedia Foundation had spent time in prior months to
work with chapters in clearing any legal hurdles to directing donors
to them, and putting in place chapter fundraising agreements. The
funds donated to chapters will support program work within their
geographies, but chapters also support the wikimedia Foundation
directly.
The engineering team for the fundraiser enabled a successful launch
without any major hiccups. Many improvements had been made leading up
to the launch, and new technology continued to be developed, tested
and deployed through November, with special focus on testing
mechanisms to increase the efficiency of the donation process and
reduce drop-off (for example, by testing a donation form that only
requires a single step to complete a donation, instead of two steps).
The new CentralNotice (banner management) system makes it possible to
manage our now very complex campaign, with geo-targeted banners and an
intense testing schedule.
We got off to a very strong start by using the time-tested "Personal
Appeal" from Jimmy Wales. Traditionally, this has been used later in
the campaign, but was started earlier because of its strong pull and
the ambitious fundraising goal. As expected, donations decayed over
time as highly receptive givers made their donations. The fundraising
team has tested many different approaches to appeals, regularly
increasing donation rates over what was currently running, but not
turning the tide of declining donations overall. We ended November
with a cliffhanger, with some fear that we would not be able to make
our fundraising goal by December 31 and that fundraising banners would
have to be run all the way through the 10th Anniversary on January 15.
The fundraising team worked hard in November to develop messages
written by, and in collaboration with, Wikipedia editors that might be
more effective than the appeal from Jimmy Wales.
==Technology==
Monthly report on engineering activities in November 2010 can be found
at http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/12/december-2010-wmf-engineering-update
Highlights:
===Operations===
* '''Data Centers''': After extended discussions, an anticipated
large-scale donation of equipment for the new data center in Virginia
did not come through, and we began implementation in Virginia
consistent with the original budget. We expect to sign a lease with a
co-location facility in December, and hopefully to begin building in
January. In Tampa we will be consolidating our servers on to one
floor.
* '''Data Dumps''': There was a serious failure of the server that
hosts all data dumps made available through download.wikimedia.org,
causing an outage in both access to existing dumps and in routine
creation of new dumps. This is a high-priority issue for us, but may
take some time to fix. It affects our ability to generate various
statistics, such as editing activity.
===Features===
* '''Media Upload Wizard''': A major improvement in the upload
experience, this feature was deployed in Beta as per the terms of the
Ford Foundation grant that funded it. Details:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/30/upload-wizard-launches-beta-wikim…
* '''Pending Changes (Flagged Revisions)''': Phase 2 of this quality
control feature was deployed in November, with improvements to diff
page viewing speed and small user interface improvements. We are
awaiting feedback from the English Wikipedia community on the future
of this feature. More information:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pending_Changes_enwiki_trial
===General Engineering===
* '''Improved Analytics''': Open Web Analytics modifications to
support integration for Fundraising were completed and will be
deployed once new operations infrastructure is in place.
* '''Code Review''': In September we had 1400 open issues that had
been open for some time, creating unhappiness in the volunteer
developer community. We created a staff and volunteer tiger team to
attack the problem. As of November, 800 requests were remaining.
== Research and Strategy ==
The product strategy team (Howie Fung and Erik Moeller) began drafting
a whitepaper analyzing both the Wikimedia projects in their
environmental context, and current numerical trends with regard to
community health and community development. The whitepaper further
offers hypotheses as to how different product development priorities
(e.g. focus on rich-text editing, focus on discussion systems, focus
on interaction between new and experienced editors) are likely to help
the Wikimedia movement achieve the strategic priorities identified
through the strategic planning process and most sharply articulated
through the five-year targets established by the Board of Trustees (
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Five-year_targets ).
The paper will be complemented with results from the Editor Trends
Study currently conducted by Diederik van Liere on contract with the
Wikimedia Foundation (
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study ).
The working draft of the whitepaper can be found at:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper
Erik Moeller researched issues around upload of restricted filetypes,
and management of large inflows of multimedia contributions (such as
smartphone uploads). Related initial proposals can be found here:
*http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Restricted_uploads
*http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Media_review
==Community==
With the exception of the public policy initiative, the community
department was mainly preoccupied with coordinating 2010 fundraiser
and with supporting the preparation of the 10th anniversary (see
above). The two Russian Wikimedia fellows continued their development
of a history of the Russian Wikipedia.
===Public Policy Initiative===
November started with Frank Schulenburg and Rod Dunican attending the
Open Educational Resources 2011 conference and presenting the Public
Policy Initiative at the Mozilla Drumbeat conference in Barcelona for
learning innovation. While students in classes worked on articles,
Frank created a new tool, the "PPI Leaderboard", to track student
contributions and provide a level of competition between classes. The
leaderboard tracks not just edit counts but also overall quantity of
material added to articles. (Qualitative measures are coming.)
: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol…
In November, the PPI team met with Liz Allison of the Stanton
Foundation for the mid-point stagegate meeting. She was very happy
with where the project is to date and at the end of the meeting said,
"This is exactly what we expected from the initiative. This is what we
wanted. Keep going."
==Global Development==
===Grants and related funding===
We contracted with Liam Wyatt to support preparatory work surrounding
the GLAM-WIKI conference in the UK. WMF also approved and paid grants
to the Argentina chapter. For more information on grant status and
reports, please always consult:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index
===Offline===
We made further progress on the development of our offline strategy:
namely, to approach those without Internet access primarily through
offline computer-based programs via education channels. In the
developing world, the total number of primary and secondary students
and teachers with access to computers is approximately 550M. See below
for details:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline/Target_Market
===Mobile===
Our team continued work on researching and developing strategies for
mobile with a focus on the needs and opportunities in the Global
South:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile
We worked with Orange and Telefonica to continue and enhance our
mobile partnerships.
===International visitor===
Siska Doviana from Wikimedia Indonesia visited for the last part of
the month. She worked on a variety of projects, including documenting
the history of Indonesian chapter, creating a skeleton of an
international visitor program, and providing suggestions for a
potential global campus program.
===India planning===
Barry Newstead, supported by Bishakha Datta and Achal Prabhala,
continued work on the recruiting for India National Program Director.
WMF worked with legal counsel on options regarding the potential setup
of our office in India
===Brazil planning===
Carolina Rossini continues to work with the Wikimedia community in
Brazil to understand the opportunities for growth of the community and
readership; her first interim report has been submitted and is, or
will soon be, available on the Brazil Catalyst Project page (which is
written in both English and Portuguese) on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project
Kul Wadhwa and Jessie Wild made arrangements for a visit to Brazil in January.
===Recruiting in Global Development===
Winifred Olliff was recruited as Program Assistant to support the
Chief Global Development Office and the team including work on the
grants process, merchandise management and other GD activity areas. We
continued discussions with candidates regarding Chapter development.
==Communications==
During November, Wikimedia spokespeople worked with over 45 global
media outlets, including: CBC Radio, BBC Radio and TV, Channel One
Russian TV news, Charlie Rose, NPR, Business week, CBS interactive,
Canadian Business Magazine, Slate Magazine, Cinco Dias, and The Daily
Telegraph.
:http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#November_2010
:http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/
Please also see the detailed weekly news summaries by the Wikipedia Signpost:
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-01
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-08
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-15
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-22
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-11-29
===Communications products===
* Work continued in November on the refining and editing of the WMF
Strategic Plan document. Design concepts were finalized and text was
finalized in draft state.
* The WMF Annual Report was supported by an outside design strategist
and journalist/writer. The report format was streamlined and visual
research for photographs and charts began.
* Through November, communications worked with a design strategist and
WMF merchandise/printing supplier, Social Imprints, to refine a series
of branded Wikipedia merchandise products, and start formulating an
online webstore strategy.
==Human Resources==
New Hires
*Dario Taraborelli, Research Consultant (Tech/Product)
*Winifred Olliff, Program Assistant (Global Development)
*Bryony Jones, Program Assistant (Community)
New postings
*HR Generalist (HR)
*Controller (Finance)
*Data Analyst (Tech)
*Software Developer, Features (Tech)
*Performance Engineer (Tech)
Events
*November was mostly about clean up in preparation for new processes,
the HRM system, and getting ready for the end of the year. November
and December are slow hiring months, and we will need to get better
processes in place to support the hiring we need in order to make
thoughtful choices about onboarding and good hiring. Since we have
such an ambitious hiring plan, we need better infrastructure to
support that.
*Much movement on the General Counsel front as we ramped up the search
and did several long panel interviews with 10+ candidates, which
netted us some good prospects. We are being thoughtful about the type
of hire we make here, and have gone through an extensive (and at times
exhaustive) search to make just the right match for the rest of our
team.
*Bill Gong, Accounting Manager and Financial Analyst departed.
:Total Employee Count:
:Plan: 76, Actual: 63
:Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 29
Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
==Finance and Administration==
===Finance===
The Finance Team updated the Finance Corner on the Office Wiki with an
updated Purchasing policy as well as updated procedures for
Purchasing, Contracts and Expense Reports. The Finance Team also
conducted trainings on the new policies and procedures with both new
and existing staff.
===Administration===
Office: The 6th floor build-out for the Community Department was
completed ahead of the rest of the build-out so that they could be
settled to focus their efforts on the Fundraiser. The general 6th
floor build-out continued.
Office IT: The stability of the wireless network was increased. Six
laptop models were evaluated for future hardware standardization, and
a presentation was given on Google Apps.
==Office of the Executive Director==
Between November 20 and December 6, Sue Gardner visited Stockholm,
London, Dubai and Delhi. She spoke at three conferences, was
interviewed by 16 journalists, met with about 50 Wikimedians as well
as a few supporters and friends at cultural institutions, and
interviewed candidates for the Wikimedia Program Director for India.
The trip had multiple overlapping goals - to advance awareness of
Wikipedia (particularly during our fundraising season), to encourage
people to try editing, as well as to support chapters and find out a
little more about the challenges and opportunities faced by editors in
the Middle East. On the whole, the trip was successful and we’ll
probably aim to do similar ones in future, building on lessons learned
this time.
==Visitors and Guests to the SF Office==
#Matias Attwell (Terra)
#Cristiano Perozzo (Terra)
#Maximillian Klein (Public Outreach)
#Siska Doviana (Volunteer Global Development)
#Professor David Silver (University of San Francisco (and his daughter Siena))
#Professor Crispin Thurlow (University of Washington (Dept of
Communications) and Professor Irina Gendelman from Saint Martin's
University (Instructional Design)
#Denny Vrandecic
#Anya Shyrokova
#Liz Allison (Stanton Foundation)
#Phoebe Ayers (Board member)
This version is for e-mail consumption. Formatted, living version:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_October_2010
All best,
Erik
==Highlights==
* Wikimedia Foundation projects serve more than 400 million unique visitors
* Events: Hack-a-Ton in Washington, DC; Inside the Globe event in New York
* Board meeting in San Francisco
==Data and Trends==
:The monthly report card for October 2010 (partial data) can be found at:
:http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/
: Global unique visitors:
: 408 million (+2.6% compared to previous month, +18.5% compared to
previous year)
: (comScore data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects)
: Page requests:
: 14.5 billion (no change compared to previous month / +18.6% compared
to previous year)
: (Wikimedia Foundation data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects
including Wikipedia mobile)
: Note: Page request data now includes all projects (previous months
only reported Wikipedia pageviews), including the mobile site. Source
data can be found at
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjects.htm
and http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyMobile.htm .
:Full community metrics for the month of October are not available as
of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump
production server that provides the underlying source data.
==Financials ==
:Operating revenue for October: $3.2MM vs plan of $750K
:Operating revenue year-to-date: $3.6MM vs plan of $1.4MM
The MTD and YTD overages were due to unrestricted gifts including an
anonymous $2MM gift and several hundred thousand dollars of revenue
related to community gifts as a result of pre-fundraiser testing.
:Operating expenses for October: $1.4MM vs plan of $2.0MM
:Operating expenses year-to-date: $4.6MM vs plan of $6.5MM
For MTD, underspending was due to: timing of capital expenditures and
internet hosting ($180K-capex and internet hosting-amounts were
budgeted evenly over 12 months rather than reflecting the timing of
the data-center build-out and consequent increased hosting costs),
timing of office expansion ($250K-costs incurred in Nov and Dec) and
underspending in staff-related costs ($218K-salaries, taxes and
benefits due primarily to hiring delays as well as staff development
partially offset by immigration expenses). Overspending for the month
primarily in travel and conference expenses ($50K).
For YTD, underspending is also due to above items of timing of capex
and internet hosting ($1.3MM) and staff-related costs ($0.7MM) as well
as outside contract services and volunteer development ($0.2MM
combined). Overspending YTD is primarily in travel and conference
expenses ($80K) as well as grants and awards ($165K) related to
Wikimania scholarships, grant to Wikimania Poland and sponsorship of
WikiSym Poland (scholarships were budgeted over 12 months instead of 1
month).
Cash and investments as of October 31 totaled $11.6MM.
==Board of Trustees Meeting==
In October, the Board of Trustees met in San Francisco. This was the
first time the full 10-person board met in San Francisco, and included
new board member Phoebe Ayers. The meeting was chaired by our new
chair, Ting Chen.
Major agenda items included:
*'''Governance Committee update and board member evaluation
process:''' The board was joined by Jim Schwarz, a consultant from
BoardSource who is helping with board development work. Major
outcomes included (1) extending the terms of appointed "expertise"
seats to two years from one year, and (2) a plan to run a
self-evaluation process, in which all board members, as well as Sue
Gardner, fill out detailed questionnaires assessing the performance of
the individual board members. The assessments are meant to allow
individual board members to strengthen their performance, as well as
provide Ting and the governance committee with a more holistic picture
of the board.
*'''Chapters, financial controls and movement-wide transparency:'''
The board was joined by staff members Erik, Barry, Veronique and Zack
to discuss the legal status of the chapters, current fundraising
practices, and the current state of chapters’ reporting mechanisms for
both activities and financial reporting. The board passed a resolution
that you can read here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_princi…
. It essentially called for the Wikimedia Foundation to ensure that
agreements with chapters for money transfers coming out of the 2010
fundraiser be based in sound legal frameworks and be vetted to ensure
they're legally valid, enforceable and responsible. It also called for
adherence to donor privacy policies and high standards of transparency
and accountability, and it amended the audit committee's charter to
add responsibility for ensuring transparency WRT how donations are
used by all Wikimedia entities, including chapters.
*'''Controversial content:''' The board was joined by consultants
Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris. Robert and Dory's observations
and recommendations can be read here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimeda_Study_of_Controversial_Content
. To move the work forward, the Board appointed a working group led
by Jan-Bart (as group chair), Phoebe and Kat, to work with Robert and
Dory to figure out next steps, which will include communications with
the Wikimedia community as well as specific discussions with the
Commons community and development of a draft specific for the proposed
new feature.
*'''Movement Roles II:''' The board was joined by consultant John
Huggett, and long-time Wikimedian, Austin Hair. The purpose of the
Movement Roles II project is to draft a "Wikimedia Charter" clarifying
the roles of different parts of the Wikimedia movement – basically,
roles-and-responsibilities among the various organizational entities
such as the Wikimedia Foundation, the chapters, and less-official
associations such as wikipods, wiki-projects and student groups. The
board voted to approve this resolution:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vote:Movement_Roles_October_2010 .
Read more about Movement Roles II here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles_working_group
*'''Strategy update and review:''' At the board meeting, Sue Gardner
gave the board a near-final version of the strategy document, which -
once finalized - is intended to be published as a booklet which will
be given out to chapters, foundations, partners, donors, and anyone
else who wants it. The board voted to approve the final text, which
means the document itself will be printed as soon as the final design
is completed and approved.
*'''Community health:''' The board held a broad discussion, led mainly
by Samuel Klein, about community health. This included a discussion
about development of a policy prohibiting both on- and off-wiki
harassment of Wikimedia project participants, and responding to it it
with global locking-out from the projects. Currently, board member
Phoebe Ayers is working with Steven Walling to develop the draft
policy, and hopes to have a near-final version of the policy available
for the board to review in early November.
==Technology==
Critical improvements were made to fundraising infrastructure in
preparation for the 2010 fundraising campaign. The features team
geared up for a deployment of the new upload wizard for Wikimedia
Commons, and continued testing the Article Feedback tool (which
enables readers to assign star ratings to articles) on a subset of
Wikipedia articles. We've also been aggresively testing new versions
of both the ResourceLoader (which will reduce page load times) and
Pending Changes in preparation for production deployments this
quarter.
We're in the final phase of selecting a new primary data center
location in Virginia. The new data center will mitigate our Tampa data
center as a single point of failure for all Wikimedia Foundation
projects.
The technology department ran a Hack-A-Ton (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hack-A-Ton_DC ) in Washington, DC. This
event was a great success for getting our volunteer development
community together and squashing lots of bugs.
We also began interviewing for the Director of Technical Operations
position, as well as preparing a number of new job openings.
:For more information, please read the October engineering update:
:http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/10/october-2010-wmf-engineering-update/
== Research and Strategy ==
A new research project, the Editor Trends Study, was launched to
better understand patterns of growth and change in Wikipedia's
communities. Diederik van Liere was contracted to undertake this
study, and its results as well as code will be made available at:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
A canonical list of Wikimedia research projects which are underway was
launched at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research/Projects
==Community==
===Fundraising===
October included frenetic preparations for the 2010 fundraiser. We
picked up the pace of our testing to improve messaging and the
efficiency of our forms. The tech team assigned to fundraising solved
several critical problems to enable fundraising and testing at a
larger scale and higher speed than in years past.
===Fellows===
Our Community Fellows studying the Russian Wikipedia completed the
first draft of their narrative history of the project. The team has a
plan for releasing the history to the Russian and Meta communities
soon and have moved on to a new phase of the project involving
one-on-one interviews and a Russian community discussion.
===Public Outreach===
October saw lots of continued activity in the development, pilot and
research plans for the new Article Feedback Tool. We began the Public
Policy Initiative weekly newsletter, communicating updates on key
project and related activities. To help with in-class teaching
support, we finalized several brochures (e.g. "Evaluating Wikipedia
Article Quality," "Introduction to Free Licenses," "How to Cite
References on Wikipedia") and completed two Wikipedia screencast
tutorials ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Resources
). We continued travel to universities, participating in workshops,
recruiting new professors and checking with our current PPI
professors.
The Initiative launched a scaled-up version of its portal on Wikipedia
that includes information about all of the different classes whose
students are participating in the Public Policy Inititative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol…
===Inside the Globe Event===
On October 7th, more than one hundred Wikipedia editors, donors, and
readers gathered in New York City for Inside the Globe, a celebration
of the dynamic community that has helped build the world’s largest
free-knowledge resource.
Wikipedia editor and Wikimedia Foundation fellowship recipient Steven
Walling presented a talk regarding the identity and culture of the
most involved editors, highlighting the motivations and methods behind
their amazing accomplishments. Founder Jimmy Wales also spoke about
the enormous impact of Wikipedia and the importance of continued
support.
== Global Development==
===Capacity building===
The new Global Development department continued building capacity (see
HR update below). Interviews were held for the positions of Program
Assistant, Chapter Development Director, and National Program Director
for India.
===Offline and Mobile strategy focus===
October was spent assessing the state of the offline and mobile work
across the communities, and building on the strategic planning task
force work in these areas in order to develop a scalable, strategic
direction for investment.
*Offline: We worked on strategy for the Wikimedia movement with a
focus on scalability: i.e., how to get the best offline product
available to the largest number of people. Some strategic direction is
built out at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Offline
*Mobile: Based on secondary research, we developed some strategic
directions for Wikipedia's mobile platform. The strategy is being
developed at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile
===Data Analytics===
Mani Pande helped set into motion data analytics and key metric
tracking for different geographies and key programs.
==Communications==
===Media contact===
Through October, WMF reported media contact with Swedish Educational
Broadcasting, BBC World, Wired Magazine, MSNBC, BBC Arabic Services,
and The Ubyssey. While in India, Barry Newstead and other Wikimedia
figures, including Board member Bishakha Datta met with a number of
local media, including CIOL.com, Economic Times of India, Hindustan
Times, and Asian News International.
For more: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#October_2010
===Valuable reads===
*http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gQPPK9VHdDGurS0y4u_r1GF5TgtQ
*http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11653349
*http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/in-rancorous-times-can-wikipedia-show-us-how-to-all-get-along/64783/
*http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/what-if-we-ran-universities-like-wikipedia/27612
===Ten Year Anniversary===
Communications worked on a special global global branding design
concept for Wikipedia 10 in October, and began work on related
merchandise to help celebrate the anniversary. See more at
http://ten.wikipedia.org. On a related note, the Wikimedia Foundation
has begun to explore the needs and requirements for a Wikimedia
merchandise storefront. We also supported the work of the multimedia
upload team with coordination of design strategy. Work also kicked
off on global communications and media strategy planning for the
annual fundraiser and for Wikipedia 10.
===Other Communications Topics===
:Blog posts for October 2010
:http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/10/
Major issues and media-interest topics:
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-04
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-11
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-18
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-10-25
==Human Resources==
:Total Employee Count:
:Plan: 72, Actual: 61
:Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 31
:Process improvements should speed up the hiring over the rest of the
fiscal year.
:Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
In October the Wikimedia Foundation added 2 permanent hires (Jessie
Wild - Special Projects Manager, Global Development and Mani Pande -
Senior Research Analyst, Global Development) and 4 temporary hires
(Christine Mollenberndt - Community Associate, Dan Rosenthal -
Community Associate, Ryan Faulkner - Research Analyst, Community
Department, and Michelle Paulson - Associate Counsel).
Also in October the following employees left the Wikimedia Foundation;
Rand Montoya - Head of Community Gifts, Aradhana Ravindra - Bookshelf
Project Manager, and Mike Godwin - General Counsel. An announcement by
Sue Gardner regarding Mike Godwin's departure can be found here:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2010-October/00006…
Wikimedia organized an overnight offsite all-hands in Half Moon Bay.
Board member Phoebe Ayers gave the opening presentation. We had two
days of meetings, with an evening dinner and social events. The venue
donated meeting space to us and reduced fees for the rooms; the entire
event came in significantly under the established budget.
Following the departure of Mike Godwin, we engaged Alisa Key as
interim General Counsel. Alisa has worked with us extensively in the
past, and brings a broad-based knowledge of our particular legal
challenges. She is working with Michelle Paulson, who has done pro
bono legal work for the Wikimedia Foundation; Michelle is running our
daily triage and more tactical engagements, and Alisa is overseeing
Michelle and determining our interim strategy, as well as taking care
of any legal challenges during this interim timeframe.
We opened a General Counsel search this month, working with
m|Oppenheim recruiting. The process included a reworking of the job
description by Sue, Cyn, Erik and Lisa Grossman, recruiter. We will
engage with several candidates in a few rounds of interviewing that
will include the C-level team and a few board members. We are
regarding this both as a process for finding a GC, and as an
opportunity to engage with the legal community.
==Finance and Administration==
===Finance===
Audited financial statements were approved by the audit committee and
published.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/cc/FINAL_09_10From_KPMG.…
The Question and Answer sheet was also posted on the Foundation wiki at:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2009-2010_Financial_Statements_Question…
===Administration===
In October, work began on the office expansion to the 6th floor.
Admin provided support for the Hack-A-Ton (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hack-A-Ton_DC ) in Washington D.C. and
the All-Staff Retreat.
===Office IT===
A beta help desk ticketing system was launched. There were 186 tickets
open during the month, and by the end of the month, 166 were resolved.
This system is going to be expanded to include general administration
needs as well.
We continued to work on a Google calendar migration and LDAP central
authentication. We also created a local Ubuntu repository.
===October 2010 Visitors to the San Francisco Office===
#David Peters (Bolt|Peters)
#David Weir
#Phoebe Ayers (Board member)
#Jimmy Wales (Founder/Board member)
#Samuel Klein (Board member)
#Jan-Bart de Vreede (Board member)
#Kat Walsh (Board member)
#Arne Klempert (Board member)
#Matt Halprin (Board member)
#Ting Chen (Board member)
#Bishakha Datta (Board member)
#Jeff Gray, Andrew Clarke, & Cassie Shum (ThoughtWorks)
#Jeff Wishnie
#Tom Taylor
#Craig Newmark (Advisory Board)
#Audit Team (KPMG)
#Steve Crocker
#Jim Schwarz (consultant from BoardSource)
#Robert Harris, (consultant for Board Meeting)
#Dory Carr-Harris (consultant for Board Meeting)
#Jon Huggett (consultant for Board Meeting)
#Austin Hair (consultant for Board meeting/long-time Wikimedian)
Wikipedia Celebrates 10 Years of Free Knowledge
Wikipedia users and contributors mark the project's first decade with events around the world
San Francisco, January 12, 2011 -- Almost ten years ago, on January 15, 2001, a website with a funny name invited people everywhere to come together to create a free encyclopedia. The initial results were underwhelming. The article "Astronomer" simply said: "Scientist whose area of Research is Astronomy." Sweden: "Country in Northern Europe. Inhabitants are called Swedes. Language spoken is Swedish. Capital is Stockholm." Physics: "Physics is a very broad subject."
Following these humble beginnings, Wikipedia grew quickly, and 1,000 articles were written in less than a month. Over the next five years, many new language versions were launched, and Wikipedia began to surpass traditional reference sources in breadth and depth. The secret to its success: anyone can edit any article. In January 2006, Wikipedia volunteer Gareth Owen wrote on his user page: "The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it's a total disaster."
Wikipedia is now consulted by more than 400 million people every month (comScore, Nov 2010). It provides instant access to high quality and in-depth information, free of charge and free of advertising. In the last decade, a vast and unique global volunteer community has come together to create more than 17 million articles in 270 languages, advancing the cause of free knowledge for every person on the planet.
On January 15, the Wikipedia community is coming together in more than 300 locations all over the planet to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the free encyclopedia. From a conference in New York to a concert in Prague, from the launch of a new school project in Nairobi to a museum bootcamp in Amsterdam, from a beer-meet in Bucharest to a film screening in Tel Aviv, the events are organized by volunteers and Wikimedia chapters, as well as independent supporters. The events are open to participation by anyone and reflect the diversity of the community.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, recalled: "It's hard to imagine that it's been 10 years since I first edited Wikipedia. I remember that first day. I clicked on 'Edit' and I wrote 'Hello World', and that was the beginning of Wikipedia and all the things that have come since then. I want to thank everyone who has helped. I want to thank all the people who have edited Wikipedia, who have contributed to this great knowledge base. I want to thank everybody who is reading Wikipedia, who is really engaging with ideas and knowledge. That's what we made it for: we made it for you to read."
Wikipedia is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization established by Wales in 2003. It is entirely supported by donations, and just completed the most successful fundraiser in its history, with more than 500,000 individual donations totaling more than $16 million.
Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, has ambitious goals for the future. "We want to reach a billion people by 2015. We want to persuade more readers to edit. More women. More people from the Global South. We know that the more diverse the editing community becomes, the more comprehensive, accurate and rich the encyclopedia will be."
Jimmy Wales joined her call to action: "Even though we've got millions of articles, even though we're in hundreds of languages, there's still a lot of work to do. So, I want everybody out there, if you've never edited Wikipedia, try it - just click 'edit'."
For more information about Wikipedia 10 events
http://ten.wikipedia.orghttp://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline
About the Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive 410 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property world-wide (Nov, 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 17 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Contact:
Moka Pantages
WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839-6885 x 6745
communicationswikimedia.org
For more information about Wikipedia 10 events
• http://ten.wikipedia.org
• http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_timeline
About the Wikimedia Foundation
• http://wikimediafoundation.org
• http://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive 410 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property world-wide (Nov, 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 17 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Contact:
Moka Pantages
WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839-6885 x 6745
communicationswikimedia.org
(to be unsubscribed from this list, please reply with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line)
Wikimedia and British Library join forces to improve content relevant to the Library on Wikipedia
The British Library, home to some of the world’s unique printed and written collections, is hosting a two-day Wikipedia ‘editathon’ on Friday 14 and Saturday 15 January. Co-organised by Wikimedia UK and the Library’s new Digital Research & Curator team, the event is aimed at sharing the expertise of real-world cultural institutions with wiki-knowledge. Details about the event can be found here - http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editathon,_British_Library
Using the resources of the British Library and guided by the expertise of its curators, the Editathon will aim to update Library treasures on Wikipedia. Library curators will be on hand to guide Wikipedia editors, some of whom have already expressed an interest in improving the entries on Magna Carta and the King James Bible.
Chris Clark, the British Library’s Head of Digital Research and Curatorial Team commented: “There is a great deal of interest in the Library’s collections, both physically and digitally and we are pleased to be able to help Wikipedians add value to the information about our collections.”
Mike Peel, organiser on behalf of Wikimedia UK, commented: “Wikipedia gets 410 million views per month and they will benefit greatly if we are able to update even just a little of the information about the British Library’s unique resources. This is a marvellous way to celebrate Wikipedia’s tenth birthday”
Thanks,
Mike Peel
Wikimedia UK
Welcome to the first issue of Open Access, a revived Wikimedia UK newsletter reporting on the activities of the UK chapter, members and supporters and on all matters of interest to them. This month, we have a number of dates for your diary for events celebrating Wikipedia's 10th birthday; features on Yeonpyeong and Visual Arts on Wikipedia; and short summaries of the last Cambridge meet-up, a talk given to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, and our Microgrants.
Next month, we'll be doing a round-up of recent GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) activity - including the GLAM-WIKI conference that took place at the British Museum last November.
As a Chapter we want members to get involved as this is your newsletter. We want to learn about our members and what they are working on. We want to hear what you think, learn about your ideas on how to improve things for all, or otherwise listen to what you think about the topics covered here. You can leave general comments at the bottom of the wiki page, or send them to the editor (Charles Matthews, on editor(a)wikimedia.org.uk).
Follow Wikimedia UK also on http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk , and for general discussion join the mailing list athttp://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l .
... for the full newsletter, please visit:
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Open_Access/2011/January
Thanks,
Mike Peel
on behalf of Wikimedia UK
Wikimedia Estonia report July-December 2010
==Meetings==
*July 25. Founding meeting in Tallinn with 10 Wikipedians. Our
bylaws<http://et.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bylaws>were signed and first three
board members elected.
*August 20-22 . Summer meeting in Kuigatsi library (South Estonia) with 6
Wikipedians. (page in Estonian and some
photos<http://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipeedia:Suvep%C3%A4evad_2010>
)
*September 24. Board meeting in Tartu.
*December 18 . General meeting in Tallinn with over 20 people including
members and guests. One new board member was elected, membership fee and
board member compensation were fixed. (page in Estonian and
photos<http://et.wikimedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cldkoosolek_2010>
)
==Other milestones==
*August 31. Wikimedia Foundation
recognized<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Approval_of_Wikimedia_Estonia>Wikimedia
Estonia as an official Wikimedia chapter.
*October 6. Wikimedia Estonia was added to the register of non-profit
organizations in Estonia as "Mittetulundusühing Wikimedia Eesti".
==Projects==
*June 3 – October 3. HELP (Head Eesti Looduse Pildid – 'Good pictures of
Estonian nature') was a contest calling users to upload their own good
quality photos taken of Estonian nature – landscapes, plants, animals,
objects etc. 26 contestants uploaded a total of 507 photos during the
contest. Best photographers were awarded with subscription to journal "Eesti
Loodus" ('Estonian Nature') and gift coupons by Photopoint company. Also an
article appeared in "Eesti Loodus" about that contest.(contest page in
Estonian <http://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipeedia:HELP> and gallery of
photos <http://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipeedia:HELP/Pildid>)
*"Wikipedia in schools" is a project which started in September and is
planned to continue through the school year. Project consists of visits to
various schools in Estonia (about 35 of them in different parts of Estonia)
during which a Wikipedian is conducting a survey among students and teachers
about their knowledge of Wikipedia and also giving lectures about how to use
Wikipedia and how to contribute to it. From September to December, 14
schools were visited. (project page in
Estonian<http://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipeedia:Vikipeedia_koolides>
)
--
Teele Vaalma
MTÜ Wikimedia Eesti
teele.vaalma(a)gmail.com
58145381