[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation Report, February 2011

Erik Moeller erik at wikimedia.org
Sat Mar 19 08:18:29 UTC 2011


[FYI]


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>
Date: 2011/3/19
Subject: Wikimedia Foundation Report, February 2011
To: wikimediaannounce-l at lists.wikimedia.org


As always, you can find the formatted version on Meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_February_2011

Plain text below & feedback welcome :-)

All best,
Erik


   Contents

   * 1 Data and Trends
   * 2 Financials
   * 3 Highlights
         o 3.1 Strategic Plan Summary Published
         o 3.2 New General Counsel
         o 3.3 MediaWiki 1.17 Deployment
         o 3.4 Data Summit
         o 3.5 Gender Gap Conversations Begin
         o 3.6 History of the Russian Wikipedia Published
   * 4 Technology
         o 4.1 Conferences
               + 4.1.1 GNUnify 2011 (February 11-12, Pune, India)
         o 4.2 Operations
               + 4.2.1 Data Center Racking Party
         o 4.3 Features
               + 4.3.1 Personal Image Filter
               + 4.3.2 Community Feature Prototyping
         o 4.4 General Engineering
               + 4.4.1 Wikilytics
         o 4.5 Moblie/Offline
               + 4.5.1 openZim for Collections
   * 5 Research and Strategy
         o 5.1 Internal Research Progress
         o 5.2 Research Committee Activity
         o 5.3 Research Outreach Initiatives
   * 6 Community
         o 6.1 Wiki Guides Experiment
         o 6.2 New Account Creation Project
         o 6.3 Fundraising
         o 6.4 Public Policy Initiative
   * 7 Global Development
         o 7.1 Global Development Highlights
         o 7.2 Chapter Relations and Grants
         o 7.3 Brazil Catalyst
         o 7.4 India Programs
         o 7.5 Mobile Strategy
         o 7.6 Editor Survey 2011
         o 7.7 Offline
         o 7.8 Global University Programs
         o 7.9 Communications
               + 7.9.1 Major Stories and Coverage through February
               + 7.9.2 Major Announcements and Releases in February
                 2011
               + 7.9.3 Major Product Releases in February 2011
               + 7.9.4 Blog during February 2011
               + 7.9.5 Media contact through February, 2011
   * 8 Human Resources
         o 8.1 Staff Changes
         o 8.2 Statistics
         o 8.3 New Events
   * 9 Finance and Administration
         o 9.1 Finance
         o 9.2 Administration
   * 10 Legal
   * 11 Visitors and Guests

== DATA AND TRENDS ==

   Global unique visitors for January:
   414 million (+4.7% compared to previous month / +13.5% compared to
   previous year)
   (comScore for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will
   release February data later in March)

   Page requests for January:
   15.2 billion (+8.8% compared to previous month / +21.7% compared to
   previous year)
   Page requests for February:
   15.5 billion (+1.9% compared to previous month / +24% compared to
   previous year)
   (Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including
   Wikipedia mobile)

   Report Card for January 2011:
   http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_01_detailed.html

== FINANCIALS ==

(Financial information is only available for January 2011 at the time of
this report.)

   Operating revenue for January: USD 1.6MM vs plan of 1.7MM.
   Operating revenue year-to-date: USD 19.7MM vs plan of 16.8MM.

The successful 2010 fundraising campaign has resulted in the Wikimedia
Foundation exceeding its revenue targets year-to-date, despite lower
than planned revenue for the month of January. Revenue for January
includes a USD 108K donation from Wikimedia Switzerland.

   Operating expenses for January: USD 2.9MM vs plan of 1.8MM.
   Operating expenses year-to-date: USD 10.6MM vs plan of 11.8MM.

Expenses are over plan for the month due to data center purchases, which
were budgeted over 12 months but occured primarily in January, with some
additional spending in subsequent months. The Wikimedia Foundation is
underspent year-to-date due to the timing of additional capex spending
and Internet hosting, as well as under-spending in staffing costs.

Cash and investments as of January 2011 totaled USD $21.5MM
(approximately 13 months of expenses).

== HIIGHLIGHTS ==

     Strategic Plan Summary Published

On February 25, we released the summary report of the Wikimedia
Foundation's five-year strategic plan. It synthesizes the effort of the
collaborative strategic planning process that took place through 2009
and 2010 and involved more than a thousand participants. A wiki version
and links to the PDF can be found here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary

     New General Counsel

In February, Geoff Brigham was announced as the Wikimedia Foundation's
new General Counsel, replacing Mike Godwin who left the organization in
October. Geoff has been a lawyer for 20 years, including eight years at
eBay during its main growth period, which gives him important experience
managing the legal challenges and risks inherent in operating a popular
site. His work at eBay encompassed North America, Europe, Asia and
Australia. He held a variety of positions there, at offices in San Jose,
California, Bern, Switzerland and Paris, France: his most recent title
was Vice President and Deputy General Counsel.

     MediaWiki 1.17 Deployment

After a long wait, we deployed a new version of the MediaWiki software
to all our production sites, containing a vast number of small fixes and
improvements, and a new subsystem for more efficient delivery of
JavaScript and stylesheets, the ResourceLoader.

Deployment was initially problematic because of major performance issues
that caused an outage. The problems were investigated, and we decided to
try heterogeneous deployment (meaning not all wikis would run the same
version of the software). On February 11, a first wave of small wikis
were switched to MediaWiki 1.17. On February 16, other small and
medium-sized wikis were switched. In retrospect, the issues encountered
during deployment were due to the large amount of code changes since the
last release (almost 5,500 changes reviewed over 7 months). In the
future, MediaWiki release deployments should be smaller and more
frequent, reducing deployment pains.

Full list of changes in 1.17:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/REL1_17/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES?view=markup

     Data Summit

On February 3-4, 2011, the Foundation organized a Data Summit in
Sebastopol, CA, to present and formally discuss Wikimedia data-related
issues and ongoing projects [1].

The *Data Analytics session* (chaired by Rob Lanphier) presented results
from the fundraiser's analytics, discussed how WMF is planning to use
analytics to support its initiatives, how to address existing gaps in
information collection and analysis, and how to meet the needs of
different stakeholders (WMF, researchers, the community). Several
working groups were established for further progress on analytics
functionality focusing on: (1) how to make revision data more accessible
via a NoSQL database, (2) defining requirements for session tracking,
(3) improving the data dump generation process, (4) addressing privacy
issues in light of WMF's privacy policy, (5) defining the requirements
for a dedicated data mining infrastructure, and (6) assessing the
existing analytics system.

In the *Parsers session* [3] (chaired by Danese Cooper) a number of
demos were presented with examples of how to build and exploit new data
structures to provide a better understanding of Wikimedia content. The
session also discussed the design of a new parser which would support a
standard intermediary format for representing Wikimedia content. WMF
expects to continue the discussion on parsers and data structures at the
WMDE Developer Meetup, currently scheduled for May 2011.

In the *Structured Data session* [4] (chaired by Erik Möller), the
capabilities of existing structured data systems (such as DBPedia,
Freebase, Shortipedia, SMW and other) were reviewed and several
questions were formulated on the technical requirements to support and
enhance Wikimedia's Structured Data functionality. The discussion
started at the Data Summit will continue on wiki-research-l and
wikitech-l and open up to all interested parties.

   [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_summit_2011
   [2] http://eiximenis.wikimedia.org/DataSummitAnalytics
   [3] http://eiximenis.wikimedia.org/DataSummitParsers
   [4] http://eiximenis.wikimedia.org/DataSummitSMW

     Gender Gap Conversations Begin

On January 31, Noam Cohen of the New York Times published a piece about
Wikipedia's gender gap (13% of editors responding to the UNU-Merit
Survey of 2008 self-identified as female), which prompted dozens of
media stories and blog coverage in publications such as the Telegraph,
Mother Jones, Discover magazine, Jezebel, the Atlantic, and NPR. It also
gave rise to dozens of online comments and conversations from both women
and men, including readers, aspiring editors, current editors and lapsed
editors. Many women reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation offering
their help to fix the problem. As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation
created the “gender gap” mailing list, a place for Wikimedians and
interested outsiders to talk about strategies for solving the gender gap
problem. Since then, a number of initiatives have been undertaken to
drive up women's participation in the projects, including the
establishment of an Australian group called Women4Wikipedia, the staging
of a women editors meet-up in New York, discussions about Wikipedia and
gender at Recent Changes Camp 2011 in Boston, and the planning of a
women's wiki workshop in Kolkata, India.

In addition, in February, Sue was invited to join the board of the Ada
Initiative, a new non-profit aimed at promoting the visibility and
participation of women in open-source technology and culture.

Gender Gap community portal:

   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Gap

Related blog posts by Sue Gardner:

   http://suegardner.org/2011/02/19/nine-reasons-why-women-dont-edit-wikipedia-in-their-own-words/
   http://suegardner.org/2011/01/31/new-york-times-prompts-a-flurry-of-coverage-of-wikipedias-gender-gap/

     History of the Russian Wikipedia Published

One of the goals of the Community Department is to build a repository of
knowledge about practices and experiences in different Wikimedia
languages and projects, to inform both the work of the Wikimedia
Foundation and the larger community. For example, what is the experience
of a Wikipedia language that never created an Arbitration Committe? How
do processes like "speedy deletion" or "featured article candidates" get
handled in different languages? How did mass media attention affect the
development of our projects?

Within our large multilingual community, a diverse set of strategies to
solve similar problems have been attempted. Surfacing the hidden
knowledge about these strategies could be immensely valuable. To this
end, last year, the Community Department commissioned a first
"WikiHistory", a history of the Russian Wikipedia, written by Wikimedia
Foundation fellows Marayana Pinchuk and Victoria Dorovina. In February,
it was published on Meta and on the Russian Wikipedia:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History

It generated a considerable amount of interest both on Meta and in the
Russian community, where it was the subject of a lot of discussion,
which Victoria moderated and Maryana translated and moved to the talk
page of the English version. A methods page and discussion summary
postscript were also added.

Maryana worked in February to begin recruiting PhD candidates and
Wikimedians for a summer project to create at least a few more Wikipedia
histories, and to begin faciliating community-led processes for creating
project histories.

== TECHNOLOGY ==

As always, detailed info about the Tech Department's activities for
February 2011 can be found at

   http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/wikimedia-engineering-february-report/

Highlights below.

     Conferences

       GNUnify 2011 (February 11-12, Pune, India)

This year’s GNUnify Wikimedia track was an opportunity to present the
general Wikimedia technical architecture, how to hack MediaWiki, the use
of Drupal and CiviCRM at the Wikimedia Foundation, and the current and
future state of Wikimedia mobile. An Android prototype of WikiSnaps (a
mobile photo upload application) was also developed there. Along with
attending the technical tracks, numerous Wikipedians attended and gave
presentations on the Schools offline projects, challenges within India,
and basics on how to edit. Blog reports about the conference by an attendee:

   http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/gnunify-day-1/
   http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/gnunify-day-2/

     Operations

       Data Center Racking Party

By the end of February, nearly all hardware was delivered to the new
data center in Virginia. More than 50 pallets of equipment were unboxed,
stacked and installed in the 16 racks by a four person team. Almost
everything has now been cabled, and we are working on the finishing
touches, as well as the initial setup of all devices to make them
available for management on the network. In March, configuration of the
first clusters of servers and services will begin, while we wait for
network transport and transit services to be installed.

     Features

       Personal Image Filter

Following the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content, UI Brandon
Harris created mock-ups of a personal image/media filter in partnership
with the product strategy team, including initial UI design
recommendations. They will be presented to the Board of Trustees
controversial content workgroup for further discussion.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Personal_image_filter

       Community Feature Prototyping

In February, the Community and Tech departments started a joint
experiment in which engineers work even more closely with Community
department staff. Developers are “embedded” in the Community department
to try out a more agile way to prototype and A/B test features. Trevor
Parscal started in this role in February, and will continue in March.

     General Engineering

       Wikilytics

During the Data Summit, Diederik van Liere released and presented the
Python toolkit he developed as part as his work on data analytics for
the Editor Trends Study. It is now available in SVN at
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/tools/editor_trends/

     Mobile/Offline

       openZim for Collections

PediaPress has wrapped up their first development push for adding
openZim support to the collections extension. We are now collecting bug
reports before deploying it to the live site.

== RESEARCH AND STRATEGY ==

     Internal Research Progress

In February, Dario Taraborelli visited WMF and presented some
exploratory analysis of data collected as part of the *Article Feedback
project* [5], with the goal of informing the design of Phase 2 and
identifying possible issues in rolling out this functionality globally.

Erik Möller and Howie Fung started drafting a report of the Editor
Trends Study [6]. Work also continued on the drafting of the Product
Whitepaper [13].

     Research Committee Activity

The Wikimedia Research Committee (RCom) held its 3rd meeting on February
25, 2011 [9]. The meeting focused on discussing progress on a number of
initiatives run by the RCom, including: subject recruitment procedures
[10], the open-access policy for Wikimedia research [11], and the
current participation in a survey on barriers to expert participation [12].

The *survey on barriers to expert participation* in Wikipedia [14] was
formally launched on February 9, 2011 and disseminated via a number of
social media and scholarly outlets, including /PLoS/, the /Wellcome
Trust/, /Nature Blogs/, the /Encyclopedia of Life/, and the /Open
Knowledge Foundation/ among others. The survey is due to close in March
with the publication of early results.

     Research Outreach Initiatives

Diederik van Liere and Howie Fung started to define the goals, technical
requirements and submission procedure for a *data challenge* to be
hosted by /Kaggle/ [7] on behalf of WMF and focusing on statistical
models to predict editor participation. The call for contributions will
be formally announced in March or April. Winners will have the
opportunity of presenting their work at the /O'Reilly Strata Conference/
in New York [8].

Dario Taraborelli, Howie Fung and Felipe Ortega (WikiSym '11 general
chair) also started organizing a *visualization challenge* that will run
in Q2-Q3 of 2011. The challenge will focus on novel visualisations of a
number of datasets from Wikimedia projects that will be released in
April 2011. The winners will be announced in September 2011 and invited
to present their work at /WikiSym '11/ (October 3-5, 2011 – Mountain
View, CA) [15].

   [5]
   http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Early_Data
   [6] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
   [7] http://kaggle.com
   [8] http://strataconf.com/stratany2011
   [9] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meeting_2011-02-25
   [10]
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Subject_recruitment_processes
   [11]
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-access_policy
   [12]
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Expert_involvement/2011_survey
   [13] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper
   [14] http://survey.nitens.org/index.php?sid=21693
   [15] http://www.wikisym.org/ws2011/


== COMMUNITY ==

The Community Department made progress on several community organizing
and research projects in February.

     Wiki Guides Experiment

Philippe Beaudette and James Alexander began a project called "Wiki
Guides." This is an experiment designed to organize volunteers to
support and protect newbies through their first 100 or more edits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Guides

50 volunteer Guides joined the project and began their work with a
discussion of the newbie experience and potential interventions. One of
the early pages created by the Wiki Guides project is a place to share
stories of what it was like to be a new user:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wiki_Guides/What_was_your_new_user_experience

At the end of the month, each Guide was assigned a list of new users to
support. The project will change its tactics and structure weekly to try
out new approaches.

     New Account Creation Project

Community fellow Lennart Guldbrandsson published the results of an
additional account creation survey:

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Account_Creation_Improvement_Project#The_results_of_the_Account_Creation_surveys.2C_part_3

About 9,500 people who had previously created a new account, responded
to the survey. As a result, we have a better understanding of what
motivates people to create a user account on Wikipedia and what new
users' expectations are. Based on the survey results, Lennart started
testing the first iterations of improved account creation pages on the
English Wikipedia.

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Account_Creation_Improvement_Project

     Fundraising

The Fundraiser team continued their analysis of the 2010 fundraiser
testing experience and their work on a report to the community. Sara
Crouse completed new funding proposals.

     Public Policy Initiative

The Public Policy Initiative team started to plan the first "Wikipedia
in Higher Education Summit", an event to be held in July 2011. The event
aims at celebrating the volunteers who participate in Wikimedia's
university based program activities, building a community of educators
and Wikipedia volunteers, and sharing skills, best practices and success
stories. In 2011, the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit will also be
the final event for the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Inititative.



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