Hi all,
As a few of you know, I have a fellowship in the Wikimedia
Foundation's Community Department, working for Chief Community Officer
Zack Exley on a variety of projects. One of these projects is making
Wikipedia's 10th anniversary one to remember by supporting Wikimedians
who want to celebrate online and off.
To that end, we've opened up a new space for collaboration at http://ten.wikipedia.org/
. Many thanks to the editors who've already showed up to participate.
For who haven't had a chance to explore it yet, we started the wiki
for four core activities, which are outlined in our FAQ (http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ
). They are:
1. Gathering a single, detailed list of events that we can point
interested people to.
2. Hosting some interesting ways to reflect on the anniversary online,
across Wikipedia communities. If you have ideas for celebrating, this
is the place to share them.
3. Providing resources for organizers, including a press kit, freely-
licensed designs that can be localized, and instructions on how to get
a free set of t-shirts, stickers, buttons etc. for your event.
4. A place to document everything. This wiki will be a great place to
look back and see what we did to celebrate our first double digit
anniversary.
Hopefully that gives you a better idea of what we're working on. As
usual, please be bold and join in! If you have questions that can't be
answered on the wiki or mailing list (https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikix-l
), I am your best point of contact.
Thanks for reading,
Steven Walling
[[User:Steven (WMF)]] on ten.wikipedia.org
Seventh Annual Campaign to Support Wikipedia Kicks Off
/Yearly fundraising campaign sets goal of $16 million and invites
readers to become editors /
SAN FRANCISCO, November 15, 2010 --- The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the
non-profit behind Wikipedia, today announced the launch of its annual
fundraising campaign. This year's goal is to raise $16 million so that
Wikipedia and its sister projects can remain freely available to people
around the world. The $16 million raised in this campaign will help fund
the Foundation's total 2010-11 operating budget of $20.4 million. And
for the first time this year, the campaign will also invite readers to
donate time as well as money, by joining the Wikimedia community of
volunteer editors. Once the financial goal has been met, the campaign
will encourage Wikipedia's nearly 400 million monthly readers to become
editors.
"Over the past 10 years, Wikipedia has become a vital public resource
for hundreds of millions of people. We've come to depend on it being
there for us -- free to use, without any bias or interference, and
without advertising," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "If you can
afford to make even a small donation, that's important. You're helping
to keep Wikipedia available not just for yourself, but for others
--kids, people in poor countries-- who themselves can't afford to donate."
The 2010 campaign seeks to raise the funds needed to preserve Wikipedia,
the world's fifth-most-popular site, as a space for the free and open
sharing of human knowledge. As Wikipedia continues to grow in size and
readership, it needs to increase spending on servers and bandwidth, and
to invest in supporting the continued health and diversity of the
editing community.
"Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia: it's written by ordinary
people, and it makes sense that ordinary people would pay to support
it," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director. "Having a broad base of many
donors from everywhere around the world is important to us: it means the
encyclopedia is free to evolve to meet the needs of its readers, rather
than being distorted or thrown off course by special interests. I'm glad
so many people appreciate Wikipedia, and I'm delighted when they choose
to support it financially."
In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation raised just over $8 million from more
than 240,000 individual donations (up from 139,000 donations during the
2008 campaign). The average donation in 2009 was $33, and donations came
in from over 100 countries.
The 2010 campaign will run through January 2011, with notices at the top
of pages on Wikipedia and its sister sites, asking readers for their
support.
Make a donation now:
* http://donate.wikimedia.org
Follow us on:
* http://identi.ca//wikipedia
* http://identi.ca//wikimedia
* http://twitter.com/wikimedia
* http://twitter.com/wikipedia
Follow or share your thoughts with the tag #keepitfree
<http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23keepitfree>
or
Facebook.com:
* http://www.Facebook.com/Wikipedia
*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 398 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most
popular web property world-wide (Sept, 2010). Available in more than 270
languages, Wikipedia contains more than 16 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.org <http://WikimediaFoundation.org>
blog.wikimedia.org <http://blog.wikimedia.org>
+1 (415) 839-6885 x 635
moka(a)wikimedia.org
(To UNSUBSCRIBE from this mailing list, please reply to this note with
'UNSUBSCRIBE' in the subject line
Formatted and editable version here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_September_2010
== Highlights ==
* Videos of Wikimedians released:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/24/four-videos-of-wikipedias-volunte…
* Article feedback pilot launches:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/22/article-feedback-pilot-goes-live/
* Public Policy Initiative coursework begins:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/08/19/wikimedia-registers-for-classes/
== Data and Trends ==
:The monthly report card for September 2010 can be found at:
:http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_09_detailed.html
:Global unique visitors:
:398 million (+6.6% compared with previous month / +22.1% compared
with previous year)
:Page requests:
:13.7 billion (+5.4% compared with previous month / +20.2% compared
with previous year)
:Active Wikipedia Editors (>=5 edits/month):
:82,503 active editors (-3.3% compared with previous month / -5.6%
compared with previous year)
:New Editors (editors who completed their first 10 edits in a given month):
:15,805 new editors (-10.5% compared with previous month / -17.4%
compared with previous year)
== Financials ==
:Operating revenue for September: $156K vs plan of $233K
:Operating expenses for September: $1.1MM vs plan of $1.6MM
:Operating revenue year-to-date: $440K vs plan of $631K
:Operating expenses year-to-date: $3.2MM vs plan of $4.5MM
The MTD and YTD underages are primarily in unrestricted gifts. For
both MTD and YTD, more than half of the underspending continues to be
in capex and internet hosting primarily due to amounts being budgeted
evenly over the year thus not reflecting the ramp up in costs once the
Virginia data center is built out and operational. Other underages
included personnel (salary, wages and benefits) for several open
positions and staff development costs, partially offset by recruiting
expenses, and underages in outside contract services, mainly offset by
overage in grants and awards and much smaller overages in legal
expenses, facilities and travel.
Cash as of end of October (latest available) was $11.9MM.
== Technology ==
In September, the Engineering Programs Office started publishing a
monthly public update of all projects we are working on. The
September report can be viewed at:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering/
The most recent report can be found here:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/11/november-2010-wmf-engineering-update/
Notable in September, the Wikimedia Foundation published its roadmap
for the development of the "Pending Changes" feature, following
community discussion and trial of the technology. Pending Changes is
used on the English Wikipedia to moderate edits by new users on
selected pages. See the roadmap:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Pending_Changes_enwiki_trial/Roadmap
Also notable is the work done on CentralNotice in support of improving
banners for the Fundraiser. This work will be useful for any and all
banners needed in future on any Wikimedia Foundation site, including
better Geo-Location to target geographically relevant banners, and
much streamlined banner creatiion.
Another interesting bit of work in September was a new feature,
Article Feedback, which was rolled out as a pilot as part of the
Public Policy Initiative. We're watching this feature very closely to
see if it gives us plausibly accurate measures of the quality of a
given article based on reader feedback. The intention was to be
somewhat more sophisticated than a single "how many stars" popularity
measure. The team that worked on this pilot worked very quickly in
what we hope will be a more normal mode for initial features
development (to pilot stage), and are to be commended for getting to
an acceptable level of implementation on time.
What we learn from this pilot will feed into another iteration of the
feature in coming months, and possibly wider deployment. FAQs
regarding the feature can be found here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/FAQs
Work by both staff and community members has continued on deploying
Selenium, a software testing framework which will serve all MediaWiki
development, and should prove beneficial to Wikimedia for a long time
to come.
Interviews and Hires for this past month: promoted: Mark Bersgma to
Operations Engineering Program Manager, hired employee: Carrie Smith,
Assistant to the Office of the CTO, conducted interviews for Director
of Technical Operations.
Conversations: Final meetings with Co-Location providers and key
meeting with potential hardware donor for Virginia Data Center,
Meetings with Research Firm about project to look at future Mobile
trends in the developing world.
== Community ==
'''Fundraising:'''
Preparations for the fundraiser continued with short weekly tests. We
tested many different banners suggested by community members.
Unfortunately, no banner was found that beat last year's best: "Please
read: a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales". But it was found that
graphical versions of that banner performed almost twice as well as
text-only banners. More than $50,000 in revenue was raised in our
short hour-long tests in September. Several temporary staff were hired
to support the fundraiser, including Wikimedians living in India,
Egypt, and a few cities in the US. Several of these employees were
discovered through the "open call" posted on the site in July.
In September, we received 884 donations totaling $56,713.
'''Fellowship Program:'''
Also recruited through the "open call" were September's two Community
Fellows: Victoria Doronina and Maryana Pinchuk. They are working on a
history of the Russian Wikipedia. Victoria is a long time Russian
Wikipedian and former Russian Arbcom member. Maryana is a Phd
candidate at Harvard's department of Slavic Languages and Literature.
Our first fellow, Steven Walling dug into a couple of projects, one
supporting the Board in thinking about harassment policies, and
another to support organizing around 10th anniversary events.
'''Public Policy Initiative:'''
:http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy
The fall terms at US universities participating in the Public Policy
Initiative started in earnest in September. Most of the Wikipedia
Campus Ambassadors visited classes, giving students an introduction to
Wikipedia and answering their questions; several Ambassadors have also
led lab sessions or office hours, where students get a hands-on
tutorial of the first steps of becoming an editor. Many classes have
become active on Wikipedia, with students creating accounts, testing
the wiki in sandbox, choosing Online Ambassadors as mentors, and
selecting articles to work on.
Annie Lin has also been traveling throughout the eastern part of the
country, visiting most of the professors and Campus Ambassadors
participating in the fall semester as well as meeting with people
interested in coming on board for the spring semester. These
face-to-face conversations have served as effective check-ins,
allowing different parties to discuss what is working well and what
could be improved (and how).
Interest in article assessment for the Public Policy Initiative is
picking up. Amy Roth ran some preliminary data analysis which
indicates that Wikipedians are fairly consistent in their assessment
of article quality. A group of public policy expert volunteers has
started assessing articles, so there will some comparative results
soon. Also, the Article Feedback Tool is piloted on the public policy
and readers have started rating public policy articles on Wikipedia
(see [4] for first results)
'''Wikipedia Ambassadors:'''
The outreach team proposed a draft set of Wikipedia Ambassador
Principles [5], which we will work with the Ambassadors to refine and
hopefully officially adopt in the coming weeks. Frank, Annie and Sage
initiated the "Ambassadors Steering Committee" in mid-September, and
quickly added four Wikipedia Ambassadors to the committee. This is the
beginning of the process of turning control of the Wikipedia
Ambassadors program over to volunteers. The committee, chaired by
Campus Ambassador PJ Tabit, will be working with all the Ambassadors,
as well as the broader community, to chart the course of the Wikipedia
Ambassador Program, both in the next academic term as well as
subsequent terms after the Public Policy Initiative concludes. The
committee has been meeting weekly; meeting notes are available at [6].
'''Public Outreach Resources:'''
In September, we created a landing page for the bookshelf materials on
the outreach wiki. It contains all finalized materials of the
Bookshelf Project as well as other educational materials relevant to
our projects. The page can be reached through
http://bookshelf.wikimedia.org.
Also in September, Pete Forsyth organized and led the "Screensprint
meeting" in San Francisco. This screencast initiative is based on the
observation that there are some pretty big challenges involved in
producing a good screencast, especially if you're on a tight budget
and/or want to use free and open source software. Consequently, the
goal of the 3-day Screensprint meeting was to create a framework of
resources for creating screencasts on the English Wikipedia, intended
to serve as a model for other language versions. During the meeting, a
group of volunteers from different countries started the WikiProject
Screencast [7] and created a number of brief videos that demonstrate
how to create screencasts as instructional tools for Wikipedia
newcomers.
'''Account Creation Research:'''
Frank Schulenburg kicked off the new Account Creation Improvement
Project [8] on the outreach wiki. The project aims at increasing the
number of people who create a user account and actually start editing.
It is rooted in the observation that the current process of account
creation is not welcoming, it often looks complicated, it is
overwhelming, and there is no follow-up. During its 8 month timeframe,
the project will aim at improving the overall knowledge about what
drives people who create a user account to start editing. For this
purpose, it will experiment with different methods of welcoming and
supporting new editors.
:[1] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/07/wikipedia
:[2] http://www.foxprovidence.com/dpp/rhode_show/wildcard_93/collegebound-fixing…
:[3] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative#Media_coverage
:[4] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Early_Da…
:[5] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Ambassador_Principles
:[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Steering_Committee
:[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Screencast
:[8] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project
== Global Development ==
Barry Newstead visited India for introductory conversations with the
Wikimedia community in India. The community had the first ever
recorded meetups in Mumbai & Delhi. We had a meetup in Bangalore.
Barry, board member Bishakha Datta and advisory board member Achal
Prabhala met with the Wikimedia India chapter. In addition, Barry
held meetings with the Free Software Foundation, Microsoft Research,
Google, Omidyar Network, Ajay Sud (attorney), State of Karnatika's
Knowledge Commission and Indian Institute for Science & Technology.
We had a range of press interviews during the week
(http://wikimedia.in/wiki/In_the_news) and have begun to develop key
messages about Wikimedia's work in Inda. Barry also met with an
initial group of candidates for the National Program Director for
India.
WMF worked with several chapters on the legalities of our fundraising
relationship. WMF hired Jane Peebles as counsel and we have hired
counsel to support conversations with chapters in the United Kingdom,
the Netherlands, France, Italy and Switzerland.
WMF and Wikimedia Germany came to an agreement on a new arrangement to
support our fundraising relationship. Wikimedia Germany began work on
a new subsidiary to support the relationship.
Kul Wadhwa traveled to Germany, France, Greece and Japan to build
relationships to support global work in mobile and offline. He met
with our partner Orange, and also attended two technology conferences
where Mobile was a major topic of discussion. A key takeaway is that
data services are of growing importance for mobile providers in the
developing world, despite their immaturity. The challenge for mobile
users is that data plans may be expensive and for Wikimedia, we need
to figure out how to make access to Wikimedia affordable (ideally
free).
We had a visit from members of the Wikimania Haifa team as part of
their planning work. We also had a visit from Bruno Souza from
Brazil. Bruno is a leading innovator within the Java Users Groups
within Brazil and he provided us with helpful advice on Brazil.
== Communications ==
The communications team released four videos that highlight the global
volunteers of Wikipedia (
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/24/four-videos-of-wikipedias-volunte…
). These videos feature Wikimedians from around the world. The footage
was captured during Wikimania in Poland. Direct links:
* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_User_Name_MEDIUM.ogv
* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nice_People_MEDIUM.ogv
* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edit_Button.ogv
* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_Feeling.ogv
The purpose of these videos is to serve as an instrument for public
outreach, helping us to invite more people to contribute to our
projects. Beyond online use, they will be used by the Wikimedia
Foundation and Wikimedia chapters at conferences, in meetings, and at
other opportunities. Along with other public outreach resources, the
videos (and subtitled versions thereof) can also be found through the
Public Outreach Bookshelf: http://bookshelf.wikimedia.org/
The communications team also supported the development of the
strategic plan synthesis that was shared with the Wikimedia Board of
Trustees in advance of their meeting in October.
During September Foundation staff and spokespeople were in contact
with the following media outlets - note a particular concentration of
interviews in India during high profile visits: New York Times, NPR,
CEO Middle East magazine (Dubai), SEmana magazine (Colombia), Heise
(Berlin), SiliconFlorist.com (Portland, Oregon), Ars Technica,
Software Design Magazine (Tokyo), and Pagina 12 from Buenos Aires.
Interviews and coverage from India included Financial Express, Times
of India, Silicon India, DNA India, Business Standard (Mumbai), Daily
Bhaskar, Indian Express Buzz, and The Hindu.
:For a complete listing of media contact through September:
:http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#September_2010
:High profile media coverage through September:
:"Wikipedia reveals mousetrap finale"
:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/business/media/18spoiler.html
:"Wikimedia opening offices in India"
:http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article797083.ece
:http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/wikipedia-to-open-india-office-soon-54911
:"Wikipedia in the classroom" (coverage related to the Public Policy Initiative)
:http://www.sdsucollegian.com/opinion/wikipedia-cuts-through-bureaucracy-gets-down-to-the-meat-1.1654878
:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/07/wikipedia
:http://www.thehoya.com/news/Wikipedia-A-Class-Tool-917104/
:Other worthwhile reads:
:http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/42799/
:http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/i-stole-from-wikipedia-but-its-not-plagiarism-says-houellebecq-2073145.html
:Blog posts through September, 2010:
:http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/
:For lots of detailed coverage and news summaries, see the
community-edited Wikipedia Signpost editions for September 2010:
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-09-06
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-09-13
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-09-20
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-09-27
== Human Resources ==
In September the Wikimedia Foundation added four permanent hires (Cyn
Skyberg - Chief Talent and Culture Officer; Melanie Brown - Office
Assistant; Dana Isokawa - Assistant to the Office of the Executive and
Deputy Directors; and Carrie Smith - Assistant to the CTO) and one
fellowship recipient (Steven Walling).
The HR/Culture department spent some time this month planning and
preparing for the All Staff meeting in the last week of October. The
meeting was planned for Half Moon Bay, CA, and was a joint project
with the Admin department in terms of operations and logistics. We
met with the facilitator we ultimately ended up using for the All
Staff, and built a potential agenda and outline for the meeting. The
team also met with Phoebe Ayers, current board member, about
potentially doing the opening talk for the meeting, which she
evetually agreed to do.
Additionally, HR/Culture spent time reconciling the hiring plan and
creating processes for tracking, managing and planning for staffing
changes and development over time. In her new role, Cyn spent several
hours getting to know the existing processes and walking through
current procedures for hiring and onboarding. She and Daniel created a
framework for future development of the department and began a goal
setting exercise for the department for the month of October.
Further conversation for the month included the potential for an HRM
system, which we are just starting to investigate. OrangeHRM
(http://www.orangehrm.com/), is a serious candidate.
:Total Employee Count:
:Plan: 65, Actual: 59
:Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 27
Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
== Finance and Administration ==
General updates from Finance and Administration:
* Draft audited financial statements were completed in September (and
approved by Audit Committee in October).
* Upgraded broadband internet services to improve speed and capacity.
* Upgraded phone and voicemail systems to improve capacity and functionality.
* Drafted an initial floor plan for the 6th floor office space.
The audit committee requested that the finance department prepare some
information about chapters, financial controls and movement-wide
transparency. This was prompted by a desire to ensure appropriate
controls are in place to manage donations flowing into and throughout
the Wikimedia movement. In response to this request, the finance
department spent much of September pulling together basic information
about Wikimedia chapters (e.g., legal status, current fundraising
practices, current state of reporting), including an assessment of
potential risks associated with current roles-and-responsibilities
between chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation.
== Office of the Executive Director ==
Executive Director Sue Gardner spoke at the New York chapter's
Wiki-Conference
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC/Wiki-Conference/2009)
at the end of August, held at the Tisch School of Arts at New York
University.
Later in September, Sue returned to New York with Erik, Zack and Sara,
to present an update to the Sloan Foundation as we enter the final
year of Sloan's three-year three-million-dollar grant to the Wikimedia
Foundation.
In May, the board had asked Sue to commission a study of what, if
anything, should be done about controversial content on the Wikimedia
projects. During September, consultants Robert Harris and Dory
Carr-Harris continued their work, reviewing applicable research [1],
and consulting with community members and external experts. In the
final report, which can be read here,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_Content,
Robert and Dory recommend 1) that no changes be made to the way in
which text-based controversial material is handled in the Wikimedia
projects. They also 2) make a number of recommendations for action
that falls within the bailiwick of the Wikimedia community:
recommending that Wikimedia consider development of a Wikijunior
project and that Commons admins consider how to tighten up some
policies and their application, including elevating the 'principle of
least surprise' to the level of official policy. And, 3) they
recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation develop a feature to allow
Wikimedia project users to opt into a system that would allow them to
easily hide classes of images from their own view.
The controversial content study will be presented to the board at its
meeting in San Francisco, in October.
[1] This included examination of cultural attitudes, regulation and/or
filtering practices in over 70 countries including: Australia, Brazil,
Canada, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel,
Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia,
Singapore, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the
United Kingdom and the United States.
Throughout September, the Wikimedia Foundation continued the process
of distilling the material on the strategy wiki into a high-level
document to be shared with Wikimedia partners and supporters. To that
end, Sue proposed to the board, and received approval for, five
high-level targets for the Wikimedia movement, to be achieved by 2015.
Also in September, our external writer developed several further
drafts of the strategy document (including the targets), which were
reviewed and refined by various parties including senior staff and
board members. The near-final text of the strategy document will be
presented to the board at its meeting in San Francisco in October.
With new board member Phoebe Ayers, Sue went to the the Quaker Center
in Ben Lomond, California, attending a workshop called Business Among
Friends: Clerking as a Spiritual Discipline, to explore methods of
business decision-making used in the Quaker community. See Sue's blog:
* http://suegardner.org/2010/09/20/raw-notes-from-the-quaker-clerking-worksho…
* http://suegardner.org/2010/09/20/what-wikimedia-can-learn-from-the-quakers-…
==September 2010 Visitors to the San Francisco Office==
* Clay Shirky (Wikimedia Foundation- Advisory Board)
* Kate Filbert (Screen Sprint)
* Quiddity (Screen Sprint)
* Another Believer (Screen Sprint)
* Peregrine Fisher (Screen Sprint)
* John Broughton (Screen Sprint)
* Orangemike (Screen Sprint)
* Laura Hale (Screen Sprint)
* HJ Mitchell (Screen Sprint)
* Dave Cummings
* Mark Gibson
* Daniel Scarpelli
* Xochi Birch
* Itzik Edri (Wikimedia Israel)
* James Forrester
* Austin Hair
* Timothy Garton Ash
* David Munir Nabti
* Yasuda Yutaka
* Rose Shuman
* Special Agents from the San Francisco FBI Field Office,
Cybersecurity Division (invited brown bag presentation)
* Harel Cain (Wikimania Haifa Planning Team)
* Deror Avi (Wikimania Haifa Planning Team)
* Shay Yakir (Wikimania Haifa Planning Team)
* Amir Aharoni (Wikimania Haifa Planning Team)
This is the Chapters Report for Wikimedia Sverige, October 2010. It
can also be found on Meta.
== Internet dagarna ==
The Internet days is a conference arranged by the organisation that
runs .se, the Swedish top domain.It is the most important internet
conference in Sweden. Lars Aronsson, one of our board members, gave a
short talk there.
== Motion plagiarizing Wikipedia ==
Four members of the parliament submitted a motion that contained text
from Wikipedia without mentioning the source at all. Lennart
Guldbrandsson, our chairman, blogged about it in Swedish. [1]
== Board meting ==
We had one board meeting in October. Minutes are available in Swedish. [2]
== Numbers ==
The Northern Sami Wikipedia passed 3000 articles. [3] It is an
official minority language in Sweden.
== Coming up ==
* 5 November, Nordic chapter meeting (at Free Society Conference and
Nordic Summit).
* 25-26 November, Wikipedia Academy
== References ==
* [1] http://wikimediasverige.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/riksdagsmotion-plagierar-w…
* [2] http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6tesprotokoll/Protokoll_2010-10-11
* [3] http://se.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
Copied from the associated blog post:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/05/illustrated-licensing-tutorial-wi…
------------------------------------------------------------------
Free knowledge is the foundation of all Wikimedia projects: anyone is
free to use, modify and redistribute the content for any purpose. But
copyright and free licenses are very confusing for new users, especially
when they want to contribute pictures and other media files. A new
illustrated licensing tutorial will now guide new users through the
basics of copyright and free licenses to make their first steps easier.
You may remember that the Wikimedia Foundation unveiled a prototype of
upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons (the repository of freely reusable
media files used in all of our projects) a few months ago. The prototype
was developed as part of the Multimedia usability project, a
grant-funded, one-year project aiming to increase multimedia
participation on Wikimedia websites.
One of the main issues identified early on is that the current workflow
of the upload process attempts to provide an advanced course in
worldwide copyright when the user uploads a file. In reality, our
research showed (unsurprisingly) that most users either gave up in front
of the overwhelming instructions, or simply ignored them.
Our approach was to separate the “educational” part of the upload page
from the actual upload form. Copyright has proven to be one of the most
unappealing topics to new users, who simply want to share their
knowledge and artwork. For that reason, we created an illustrated
Licensing tutorial in a comic-strip format.
This licensing tutorial was developed with experienced Wikimedians, who
had both the expertise on copyright and licenses, and the experience of
guiding new users. They collaboratively improved the wording and
suggested many changes to the illustrator.
You will see that the tutorial features a new character, who was
developed specifically for this project. We experimented with several
others, but the puzzle-piece character was the one that worked the best.
Although developed primarily for Wikimedia Commons, both the tutorial
and the character are under a free license; we hope experienced
participants will reuse them for similar tutorials and across help
pages.
The tutorial was created by Michael Bartalos, a freelance illustrator
from San Francisco. Michael did an awesome job at illustrating complex
topics without sacrificing readability or accuracy.
I would like to thank him for putting up with our hands-on approach; it
surely wasn’t easy to accommodate our requests and all the little
details in wording, typography and graphics that Wikimedians are expert
at.
The tutorial is now available on Wikimedia Commons as an editable vector
graphics file (SVG) to facilitate localization. It will be included in
the Upload wizard’s interface when it is released at the end of
November.
In the meantime, Wikimedia translators are warmly invited to help
translate and localize the tutorial. If you don’t feel comfortable
creating the localized tutorials yourself, you can focus on the text.
We’ll seek help from the Graphic Lab on Commons to create the localized
artwork.
Main links:
* Licensing tutorial:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Licensing_tutorial_en.svg
* Translation & localization:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_tutorial
--
Guillaume Paumier
Product Manager - Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
I've just pushed live a new Wikimedia Foundation blog post that provides
an update on where we are with the Public Policy Initiative, the pilot
program to bring Wikipedia editing into university classrooms. Please
check it out if you're interested, especially if you know a professor
who would be a good fit for our remaining few slots for the spring:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/01/the-public-policy-initiative-midt…
LiAnna
--
LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate - Public Policy
Wikimedia Foundation
ldavis(a)wikimedia.org
Please find below the chapters report for Wikimedia Nederland on September
2010. The report is as usual also posted on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Nederla…
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Best, Lodewijk
Wiki Loves Monuments
September was Monument Month for Wikimedia Nederland, with Wiki Loves
Monuments as main activity. The photo-contest around rijksmonumenten (Dutch
national monuments) yielded more than 12.000 images from over 200
participants from all over the country. You can find more information about
the general outlines of the project in this blog
post<http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/08/29/a-monument-month-for-wikimedia-ne…>.
The biggest win in this project is perhaps not even so much the images
themselves but the awareness that has been created with the contestants and
the lesson that an extremely simplified upload form on Wikimedia Commons
helps a lot to lower the threshold for uploading. The jury is now going
through all these images and will announce the winners by November 20.
For more information, please take a look at
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.nl(in Dutch)
Wiki takes Haarlem
Haarlem is a province capital near Amsterdam, and a major city when it comes
to numbers of rijksmonumenten. The city has 1148 rijksmonumenten, of which
many had no photo before September. We organized as part of Wiki Loves
Monuments an effort to photograph as many monuments as possible within one
day - Wiki takes Haarlem. You can see the results in this google
map<http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.nsesoftware.nl%2Fwiki…>-
a yellow pin means there is a photo, blue means there isn't. 1064
images
have been uploaded thanks to Wiki Loves Haarlem.
Wiki Loves Vlissingen
The library of Vlissingen (Americans, you might find Flushing a more
recognizable pronunciation) has raised the stakes for photographers
participating Wiki Loves Monuments within the municipality of Vlissingen
even more. Besides the prizes that are already available through the general
competition, they put up an iPod Touch and an e-book reader for people
taking photos for Wiki Loves Monuments in Vlissingen! They created their own
local jury and will also announce the prizes on November 20.
Nationaal Archief
Nationaal Archief (the Dutch National Archive) and Spaarnestad Photo have
released some 1000 very relevant political images under a free license. This
release was announced in the international political Press Center
Nieuwspoort in The Hague with a panel of former and current politicians
present. These politicians shared with us their memories and thoughts with
the images, giving a lot of background information on the meaning of the
images. You can find more information about this collaboration in this blog
post<http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/13/dutch-national-archive-joins-wiki…>
.
Meetings, conferences etc
Besides what was already mentioned earlier in this report, there was also a
Summer Barbecue on September 4 in the southeast part of the country. Even
through the number of participants was moderate, the atmosphere was great.
Coming up:
- October: Europeana brainstorm meeting & conference
- October 9: General Assemblee, Fundraiser meeting
- November 20: Wikimedia Conference & Prize ceremony Wiki Loves Monuments
- January 15: Wikipedia 10 years anniversary
Hi folks,
I want to let you know that as of this Friday, October 22, 2010, Mike
Godwin will be leaving his role as General Counsel for the Wikimedia
Foundation. Mike’s transition out of the role will be a fairly lengthy
one: he will continue to be available to the Wikimedia Foundation to
provide information and advice for several months to come.
The search for his successor will begin immediately. It's being
conducted by the recruiting firm m|Oppenheim.
There's a detailed Q and A below that I hope will answer any questions
you've got.
Thanks,
Sue
Why is Mike leaving the Wikimedia Foundation?
Mike leaving the Wikimedia Foundation is a confidential personnel
issue, and the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t talk about confidential
personnel issues with anyone except the people directly involved. We
want to handle this kind of thing with respect for people’s privacy
and dignity, and we are hopeful we can do that in this instance. That
means, we’re not going to answer this question, and we hope you will
understand why.
Is Mike leaving the Wikimedia Foundation because of a change in
direction or policy, related to our legal context?
No.
Is Mike leaving the Wikimedia Foundation over a point of principle?
For example, because the Wikimedia Foundation wants to do something
that he disagrees with, or because it doesn’t want to do something
that he thinks it should do?
No. We’re not aware of any significant differences of opinion between
Mike and the Wikimedia Foundation, in terms of values, principles,
ethics, future plans, or anything like that.
Is Mike leaving the Wikimedia Foundation because he did something egregious?
Not at all. The Wikimedia Foundation believes Mike has always acted in
what he believes to be the Wikimedia Foundation’s best interests.
What is Mike going to do next?
We don’t know what he’ll end up doing next, but we wish him all the
best, and we hope that he will continue to do the same kind of work
he’s always done -- helping to advance people’s online freedoms. We
think he’s really good at that work, and we hope it’s what he
continues to do.
I like Mike, and I know that it’s a tough economy. Can I ask what the
Wikimedia Foundation is doing to ensure that Mike is okay while he
figures out his next steps?
Yes. The Wikimedia Foundation and Mike have figured out severance that
we all hope will protect Mike and give him time to think about what he
wants to do next. The terms of the severance are confidential: we
won’t talk about them now, or in the future. But you can rest assured
that the Wikimedia Foundation wants to see Mike continue working to
advance people’s online freedoms: everybody would like to see him
continue making an important contribution.
How will a new General Counsel be recruited?
The Wikimedia Foundation has hired m|Oppenheim to help us recruit a
new General Counsel. m|Oppenheim has done great work for us in the
past: they helped us recruit Zack Exley, Barry Newstead and Cyn
Skyberg, and they are currently helping us find a Director of
Technical Operations. We’ve been happy with them, and we’re confident
they’ll be able to help us successfully recruit a new General Counsel.
Who will be involved in the hiring process and how will it work?
Currently, m|Oppenheim is developing a job description for the role.
To that end, they’ve spoken with a number of board members, the
Executive Director, and some of the senior staff. At the same time,
m|Oppenheim is also developing a list of people to contact who might
be interested in the role, or who might know people who would be.
(This list includes people at all kinds of ideologically-like-minded
organizations, such as the EFF, Berkman, our Advisory Board, and so
forth, as well as people at large internet companies such as Google,
eBay, etc.) That “connector” list is being developed in consultation
with several board members, the ED and senior staff. By October 22nd,
m|Oppenheim expects to have the job description posted publicly, and
will begin generating a list of potential candidates.
Once a candidate pool is developed, interviews will be held. The
interviewing process will likely include at a minimum Sue Gardner,
Erik Moeller, Cyn Skyberg, Kat Walsh, Arne Klempert, and Barry
Newstead. There will probably also be others involved (e.g., possibly
additional board members, and possibly additional members of the
senior staff), but that’s the skeleton plan we have right now. We will
also aim to get a sampling of the legal needs of various stakeholder
parties such as chapters, probably by asking m|Oppenheim to interview
two or three chapters representatives and other relevant stakeholders.
If I am interested in the role, or know someone who might be, what should I do?
We welcome applications, and we also welcome ideas about where we
might find good candidates. Feel free to get in touch with Lisa
Grossman at m|Oppenheim, at lisag(a)moppenheim.com. She’d be glad to
hear from you.
Will the new General Counsel job description be significantly
different from Mike’s?
No. m|Oppenheim is having conversations with stakeholders about the
General Counsel role, and will update the job description based on
those conversations. But we don’t expect the resultant job description
to be substantially different from the existing one.
What is the gist of the General Counsel job?
Our General Counsel role is slightly unusual, in that it has a bit of
a double focus. First, the Wikimedia Foundation (and the Wikimedia
movement) are ideologically-motivated -- or if you prefer,
values-driven/agenda-driven. That means we need a lawyer who shares
Wikimedia’s ideological agenda: who, for example, supports people’s
right to access information online unimpeded by censorship, and who
supports a legal context that enables people to work collaboratively
online to develop educational and informational materials for other
people to read. And second, the Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)3
non-profit organization based in the United States that operates
international web properties, and interacts with non-American chapter
organizations. To that end, we need a lawyer who can be responsible
for all the legal terrain implied by that: somebody who understands
the legal issues relevant to the operation of a big website, to the
operation of a US-based non-profit organization, to the legal transfer
of funds among various international entities, and so forth. Clearly
no single person can be an expert in all of that. Which tells us that
we need a General Counsel who is 1) ideologically-aligned with our
work, and 2) capable of effectively outsourcing specialized legal work
to others, and ensuring it gets done well, consistent with our vision,
values and goals.
How long will it take before there is a new General Counsel in place?
We’re expecting a new General Counsel would likely start work sometime
in January. It’s possible the search would take longer, and we won’t
hire anyone until we have a candidate we’re happy with. But past
searches suggest to us that we can likely expect the search to wrap up
in January, or shortly afterward.
Who will look after the Wikimedia Foundation’s legal interests in the interim?
We’re currently talking with outside counsel that we’ve worked with in
the past to establish an interim presence to help us during the
General Counsel search time frame. We should have that in place by the
end of this week.
If I get a legal complaint or have a question that in the past I would
have forwarded to Mike, where should I now be sending it?
All legal information should be submitted in the same way that you are
doing so now: any changes to the process will be handled further
downstream.
Is it dangerous, for the Wikimedia Foundation to be legally exposed
during this period?
Obviously it would be ideal for us to have a General Counsel in place
consistently, with no interruption, and we wish that Mike had been
able to agree to stay on with us during the recruitment process.
Having said that, we’ve taken steps to protect Wikimedia, and we
believe we will be well-protected in the interim period. We believe
that because 1) the Wikimedia movement in general has developed some
pretty solid legal understanding over the years, which includes robust
processes for handling legal threats and problems of various kinds.
There is a good infrastructure for handling certain types of legal
risks, that’s not entirely dependent on a General Counsel for
day-to-day operations. 2) Over the past several years, we’ve developed
good relationships with a number of lawyers with specific
subject-matter expertise that we need. Those relationships will be
helpful for us in the interim period until a new GC arrives. 3) For
the transition period, we are lining up a good generalist lawyer, who
we’ve worked with in the past, and who has agreed to be the Wikimedia
Foundation’s single-point-of-contact for support until there’s a new
General Counsel in place. And 4) Mike has agreed to be available to
the Wikimedia Foundation for advice and support, for many months to
come. So all in all, we think the risk has been acceptably mitigated.
How was this Q and A document developed?
This document was written mostly by Sue Gardner, with some help from
Cyn Skyberg. It was reviewed in detail by Mike, and he's agreed to
have it published.
Why was this Q and A document developed?
We know that whenever someone leaves the Wikimedia Foundation, there
are always lots of questions. And we know that people have sometimes
been dissatisfied with how short and uninformative our answers are. We
sympathize with people who want to know what’s going on. This Q and A
is an attempt to balance Mike’s right to privacy, against people’s
desire to understand what’s going on, particularly because Mike is in
a high-profile role, and is well-known inside the Wikimedia community.
We wouldn’t have published it without Mike’s permission.
In general, when people leave the Wikimedia Foundation, they make the
decision about how much to say, when and to whom. So you should
assume, whenever anyone leaves, that what’s being said is what they’re
comfortable with: no more, no less.
If I have additional questions that aren’t answered here, where should
I take them?
If you have questions about the General Counsel role, please feel free
to ask them in any regular forum (e.g., foundation-l, internal-l) and
Sue or someone else will get them answered.
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
415 816 9967 cell
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
