[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation Report, August 2010

[Erik Moeller]

(FYI)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>
Date: 2010/10/7
Subject: Wikimedia Foundation Report, August 2010
To: wikimediaannounce-l at lists.wikimedia.org


Hello all,

please find below the August 2010 report of the Wikimedia Foundation.
If you're so inclined, you can help us improve the wiki version, which
has nicer formatting, too:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_August_2010

All best,

Erik

== Highlights ==

*Usability improvements deployed to all remaining wikis
*[[Google Summer of Code]] participation completed with 6 projects
*Public Policy Initiative ramped up with training in Washington, DC
and the first advisory board meeting

== Data and Trends ==

:The monthly report card for August 2010 can be found at:<br/>
:http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_08_detailed.html

:Global unique visitors:
:373 million (+3.7% compared to previous month / + 21.4% compared to
previous year)

:Page requests:
:13.4 billion (-1% compared to previous month / + 23.9% compared to
previous year)

We experienced an unusually large drop in traffic during the summer. A
seasonal drop is to be expected, but there's no full explanation for
the magnitude of the drop; one hypothesis is that the 2010 World Cup
in South Africa drew a significant amount of attention from Wikipedia
and other highly multilingual websites. Beginning in August, we've
started to return to earlier traffic levels.

The following changes were made for the August 2010 report card:
* The content section now summarizes each project (Wikipedia,
Wikimedia Commons, etc.) as a line, as opposed to the more granular
project/language view (English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, etc.). The
default view shows a normalized growth line for each project,
indicating that Wikimedia Commons is currently our fastest growing
project in terms of content.
* The "active editors" section now no longer counts Wikimedia Commons
contributors, due to the significant number of users who are active on
a primary project like Wikipedia and who use Wikimedia Commons as a
support project. This leads to a slightly reduced total count.
Generally, the "active editors" count has always double-counted users
who are active on more than one project in a given month -- this is
expected to be fixed later this year.

See the synopsis page at
http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_08_synopsis.html
for more trends and notes.

== Financials ==

:Operating revenue for August: USD 131K vs. plan of USD 210K
:Operating expenses August: USD 0.9MM vs. plan of USD 1.4MM
:Operating revenue for year-to-date August:  USD 273K vs. plan of USD 398K
:Operating expenses for year-to-date August: USD 2.2MM vs. plan of USD 3.0MM.
:Unrestricted cash on hand as of the end of September: USD 9.0 MM

Revenue is under for the month and year-to-date primarily from
unrestricted revenue; additionally, revenue related to mobile (Orange)
has not been recorded pending finalization of contract re-negotiation
with Orange.

Expenses are under for the month and year-to-date due to:
* Capital expenditures and internet hosting (budgeted evenly over the
year but will start lower and increase as the additional data center
is built out and hosting costs increase)
* Salaries, taxes and benefits due primarily to hiring delays and
underspending in staff development
* Professional services including outside contract services

This underspending is partially offset by overage in grants and awards
due to grant to Wikimania Poland and sponsorship of WikiSym Poland and
Wikimania scholarships.

== Strategic Planning ==

During August, the Wikimedia Foundation began distilling the material
on the strategy wiki into a high-level document that could easily be
shared with Wikimedia partners and supporters. To that end, Jay Walsh
hired a writer to begin developing a first draft. The draft document
will be vetted and refined over the next several months, and then
presented to the Board of Trustees for approval in October. The final
outstanding piece of substantive work before the document can be
finalized, is the development of a small number of high-level targets
for the Wikimedia movement, to be achieved by 2015. The development of
the targets has been done on the strategy wiki to date: that work will
be supplemented and carried forward with an informal survey of Board
members, staff members and community members, the results of which
will be shared with the Board, and will influence our approach to
target-setting, as well as the final metrics. The targets are expected
to be approved by the Board by October 2010, and will then be folded
into the final strategy document.

== Technology ==

See http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/10/october-2010-wmf-engineering-update/
for the most recent Wikimedia Foundation engineering update, and see
individual project pages on MediaWiki.org for details.

'''Personnel:'''
* In August, we hired a new operations engineer, Ryan Lane.
* Six WMF engineers attended OSCON, the largest open source conference
in the US, on passes donated by O'Reilly. We were formally asked there
to submit content for two other O'Reilly conferences: a new conference
on Data and one called "Tools of Change" about alternative
publishing/distribution of knowledge

'''Operations:'''
* Planning work on Data Center continued: We made a second visit to
Ashburn, VA for final inspection of co-location facilities and Q&A
before final bids are submitted.  This was also a chance for our
employee Rob Halsell, who will be moving to Virginia to support the
new Data Center, to check out local housing.
* The Ops Team started using an open source tool called RequestTracker
to track all Ops related issues including CapEx bids & purchases and
Ops work to be done. http://bestpractical.com/rt/
* There was a global 1-hour editing outage relating to saturation of a
database server cluster that was remedied by rebalancing the load on
that cluster. Viewing pages was unaffected.
* We negotiated a deal for a two-year gratis license to use
Watchmouse, monitoring software that will help us validate our
performance in specific geographies. http://www.watchmouse.com/en/

'''Features:'''
* Development of the fundraiser systems continued, including
preliminary implementation of GeoIP lookup (to match donors to
location).
* The final Phase V rollout of the Vector skin (aka the UX project)
was completed on all remaining wikis.
* Work on the new Article Assessment feature pilot (in support of
Public Policy Initiative) began.

'''General Engineering:'''
* We had a first meeting with Peter Adams, creator of Open Web
Analytics http://www.openwebanalytics.com/.  OWA is an open source
platform for collecting data which we hope to extend to handle our
traffic load.  Initially we will test using the Fundraiser activity
since we already gather data for it.  We'll need to hold a "Data
Summit" to socialize the idea of collecting more data to support
better design of new features.  We are also conducting testing on
Piwik, a complementary project.
* Planning for the Data Summit began. It will probably take place in
November - but will be an invitational meeting to keep numbers
manageable.
* Development of monthly public posting about all Tech projects began.
September was first post.

'''Labs:'''
* We watched a demo by Microsoft Research engineers about WikiBabel
(recently renamed WikiBasha), an interface for human editing of
machine translations of Wikipedia content.  They are interested in
making a future open source release of this code. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kit_Lywait/WikiBasha
* We met with Wikia staff about investigating their Rich Text
Editingcode for possible use in WMF projects.

'''Outreach:'''
* We met with Greg DeKoenigsberg, formerly of RedHat's Fedora project,
about the joys and perils of wrangling communities.
* We concluded this year's Summer of Code participation with 6
projects out of 6 successfully completed. Three of our mentors will
attend the "Mentor Summit" in October in Mountain View (Google will
fund their travel). Details:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/08/gsoc-conclusion/
* We began work on expanding and hardening a Virtualization Test
Server cluster.  This system, when completed, will allow us to set
upsafe "sandbox" areas for volunteer developers as well as for
specific feature development teams.  This work is an expansion of work
previously done for sole use of UX project.
* We accepted code from researcher Andrew West as part of an English
Wikipedia Arbitration Committee decision against his unauthorized spam
experiments on Wikipedia.

== Global Development ==

The Global Development team continued to work on the formation of the
team during August.  We launched searches for key positions including
Senior Research Analyst and Chapter Development Director, and we hired
Egon Zehnder's India office to support our search for a National
Program Director in India. (Note: the Senior Research Analyst position
was filled in early October.)

On the business development side, we are in the initial stages of
increasing focus on mobile and offline partnerships.  Unfortunately, a
partnership to strengthen our offline capabilities fell through in
August; however, we are preparing an RFP with our technology
colleagues focused on adding to the software available to the
community for offline projects.  We will soon be initiating planning
around the WMF's offline work in support of the active work ongoing
within the community.  We think there are some big opportunities to
extend our reach via offline copies of Wikimedia content. As we begin
to explore the work, we see offline versions as a support for both
people who have no internet access AND people who might have
intermittent access OR have to pay for access on a per use basis. More
to come.

We are working on partnerships to support the work of our technology
operations team on the data center project - more soon on this front.

Our chapter relations benefited from a visit to San Francisco by our
colleagues from the German chapter. We also continued work with
chapters seeking grants for their activities.  See:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index

Moka Pantages was promoted to Global Communications Manager as part
ofa shift in our Communications work toward a more "Global" approach
to our communications work.  Moka's role will be  to enable us to
coordinate media and other communications in support of our Global
Development work as a movement. One key initiative is to broaden the
ComCom to encompass more geographic diversity and continue to
strengthen the cadre of community members working on media and
communications in support of the movement.

The Wikimedia Blog highlighted a Hungarian/Serbian Wikicamping trip
and the "Wiki Loves Monuments" competition by Wikimedia Nederland.
See: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/08/

== Communications ==

During August, Wikimedia spoke with the following media outlets:
Newsday (New York, NY), the Wikipedia Signpost, the New York Times
(New York, NY), WGBH (Boston, MA), Information Week (San Francisco,
CA), Corporate Counsel Magazine (New York, NY), Newsweek (New York,
NY), Newsday (New York, NY), Washington Internet Daily (Washington,
DC), Philanthropy 2173.com (San Francisco, CA), the National Post
(Toronto, ON), TheWikipedian.net, Opera Mundi (Sao Paolo, Brazil), the
BBC World Service (London, UK), Team Magazine (London, UK), Politico
(Washington, DC), CNET (San Francisco, CA), TVA (Montreal, QC), the
Washington Post (Washington, DC), Davis Enterprise (Davis, CA),
Pressan (Iceland), CNN (Washington, DC), CBC Montreal (Montreal, QC),
CNN Global Connections (London, UK), The Independent (London, UK),
Ciudad X (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Inside Higher Education
(Washington, DC), the Economist (New York, NY), Buzzmachine.com (New
York, NY), the Guardian (London, UK). See:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact

Communications provided support to the highly visible Public Policy
Initiative, which launched in August. Alongside the initiative,
Communications continues to support the creative operations around
public outreach's 'Bookshelf initiative.'

In August we commenced planning for two new Communications positions,
a movement communications officer and a global director of
merchandising and product.

Also in August we kicked off the writing and design management of the
WMF 5 year strategic plan and the Foundation's 09/10 Annual report.

Major issues and media-interest topics:
FBI Challenges Wikipedia on use of FBI shield (August 3) -
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03fbi.html

Please also see the detailed weekly news summaries by the Wikipedia Signpost:
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-08-02
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-08-09
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-08-16
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-08-23
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2010-08-30

== Community Department ==

'''Fundraising:'''

The Fundraising team built a network of community participants
representing many languages and projects who took on increasing
responsibility for driving this year's fundraiser. Volunteers are
engaged directly in the creation of messaging and testing strategy. A
large collection of fundraising banners were suggested by the
community and began to be tested live during weekly, one-hour tests.
The team also worked with technology staff to build out needed
infrastructure to support this year's larger finanicial goals.

Foundations and Partnerships staff submitted to the Hewlett Foundation
both a report that closed out our most recent grant, and a proposal
for future funding.

Major Gifts staff worked to design an experiment to test whether
improved stewardship of our $250-$1000 donors can result in
significantly increased support.

'''Public Policy Initiative:'''

The PPI team held its first Wikipedia Campus Ambassador training at
George Washington University in Washington, DC. Wikipedia Ambassadors
are volunteers that support new editors (either online or on campus).
Topics covered included Wikipedia editing skills, presentation skills
and classroom management. The program is experimenting with different
types of ambassadors, such as librarians, Wikipedians, students,
teaching/learning depts at universities. The Initiative hosted its
first Advisory Board meeting in San Francisco. (Attendees listed in
the Vistors section below.)

Public Outreach staff completed a welcome brochure and other printed
materials -- all available as open source DTP Scibus files. They also
launched Wikipedia on Campus on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/WikipediaOnCampus

'''Community Department Fellowship:'''

The Community Department developed a "Fellowship" program with the
intention of creating a space at the Foundation for leading
Wikimedians  and outside experts to research problems and seize
opportunities for the Wikimedia movement. As a small pilot, we hosted
Wikimedians Steven  Walling (Portland, USA) and Damian Finol (Caracas,
Venezuela) to work on  a "Contributor Taxonomy" research project.

== Controversial Content Study ==

During August, the Wikimedia Foundation continued work on the
Controversial Content Study. In June, the Board had asked the ED to
commission a study with the goal of figuring out what --if anything--
to do about controversial material in the projects. Sue hired Robert
Harris and Dory Carr-Harris to conduct the study, and they spent July
and August investigating: speaking with Board and some Advisory Board
members; reading thousands of wiki pages of policy and discussion;
having e-mail exchanges, Skype calls and wiki discussions with
community members; finding and reading dozens of research papers [1]
about how governments, industry organizations, technology companies
and parents grapple with these issues; and interviewing experts
including people from large websites, and interest groups on all sides
of the issue. They have not done any primary research: this terrain is
fairly well-studied, and they were able to find lots of relevant
material. Robert and Dory will continue their work for two more
months, whereupon their recommendations will be presented to the Board
of Trustees at its October meeting.

[1]  Specifically, literature
gathered and reviewed 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.

== Administration ==

The 2009-10 fiscal year audit work started in August (the audit field
work was completed at the end of September and the audit committee
will review/approve the audit report in late October).

A ticketing system has been implemented for use by staff who have  IT
Support needs/ requests-later this system will be expanded to include
requests/needs for help with other administrative tasks. The office
internet speed has been greatly improved and is now 20x faster than
before.

The interview process started for various new admin support positions.

== Human Resources ==

In August we added 1 permanent hire (Ryan Lane, Operations Engineer)
and 5 temporary employees who will be working on the Fundraiser as
Community Associates (Deniz Gultekin, Steven Ma, James Alexander,
Keegan Peterzell and Alex Zariv). Systems Administrator Fred Vassard
resigned from his position with Wikimedia.

In addition, the Human Resources department began sharing data on
staff and contractor comings and goings via social media at
http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork and
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork.

:Total Employee Count:
:Plan: 57, Actual: 54

== Fundraising, Grants, and Partnerships ==

During August, the Wikimedia Foundation received 887 donations, with a
combined total value of USD 41,623.  Year to date, the Foundation has
raised USD 105,915 in donations.

== Visitors and Guests ==

*Pavel Richter, Wikimedia Germany
*Sebastian Moleski, Wikimedia Germany
*Till Mletzko, Wikimedia Germany
*Steven Walling, Wikimedian
*Damion Finol, Wikimedian
*Gebruiker:Ciell, Wikimedian
*Victor Vasiliev, Wikimedian
*Thomas De Souza Buckup, Wikimedian
*[[Mimi Ito]], Advisory Board member
*[[James Gosling]]
*[[Timothy Garton Ash]]
*Laura Hill
*Microsoft Research India / WikiBasha team
*Tim Vollmer, Creative Commons
*Jana Hughes, University of Portland, State center for Women,
Politics, and Policy
*20 US State Department Fellowship recipients from Iraq, Lebanon,
Palestine and Iraq visited to share their perspectives on Wikimedia in
the Middle East
*PPI Advisory Board members: Robert Cummings, Mary Graham, Barry
Rubin, Rod Schneider, Wayne Mackintosh
*Bugzilla User Group attendees (August 4)