Fundraising 2011
2011 Fundraiser Noticeboard
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 This noticeboard was for announcements, updates and testing news related to the 2011 Fundraiser from staff at the Wikimedia Foundation and from representatives of the Wikimedia Chapters. Thank you to everyone who helped make the 2011 Fundraiser such a huge success! Updates on our current testing and preparations for the 2012 Fundraiser will be posted at Fundraising 2012. |
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Wikimedia Fundraiser Concludes with Record Breaking Donations
editOur annual fundraising campaign reached a successful conclusion on January 1, 2012 having raised a record-breaking USD 20 million from more than one million donors in nearly every country in the world. It is our most successful campaign ever, continuing an unbroken streak in which donations have risen every year since the campaigns began in 2003.
Wikimedia Foundation websites serve more than 470 million people every month. It is the only major website supported not by advertising, but by donations from readers. From Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, "Our model is working fantastically well. Ordinary people use Wikipedia and they like it, so they chip in some cash so it will continue to thrive. That maintains our independence and lets us focus solely on providing a useful public service. I am so grateful to our donors for making that possible. I promise them we will use their money carefully and well."
The number of Wikimedia Foundation donors has increased ten-fold since 2008 and the total dollar amount raised in the campaign has risen to over $20 million from $4.5 million. Funds raised in this campaign will be used to buy and install servers and other hardware, to develop new site functionality, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects, and support the large global community of Wikimedia volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation’s total 2011-12 planned spending is 28.3 million USD. The bulk of that is raised during the annual campaign and the remainder comes throughout the year in the form of grants from institutions (such as the Sloan Foundation) and many other small donations year round.
This year’s campaign highlighted staff and volunteers who help to create Wikipedia. It featured testimonials from volunteer editors in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States ranging in age from 18 to 76, explaining why they edit Wikipedia and why they think readers should support the Wikimedia Foundation. More than 100 volunteers translated the banners and appeals into dozens of languages, reaching hundreds of millions of people.
A special thanks goes to all the contributors who work on the fundraiser year-round, the editors who helped tell their story, the translators who helped spread the message of the fundraiser, Wikimedia Foundation employees, and to the readers of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for their support.
With over 20 million articles in 282 languages, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in human history. Over 100,000 volunteers work on Wikipedia and its 10 sister projects (including projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, and Wiktionary), furthering the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission to freely share the sum of all human knowledge. On January 15, 2012, Wikipedia will celebrate its 11th anniversary.
A Parade of Appeals! December 22, 2011
editThese past few weeks, we’ve rotated through a couple dozen appeals with people from different parts of the world with unique Wikipedia experiences and personal stories to tell. It honestly has been so fun and inspiring to help tell their stories. Right now and for the next few days, we have all the appeals up live together.
We owe a huge thank you to everyone who has helped make this campaign so special by showing readers how incredible our community is.
Brandon Harris is a Senior Designer at the Wikimedia Foundation and he has worked at Wikimedia since the Spring of 2010. He was raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he has spent most of his adult life in San Francisco, CA. He is aggressively passionate about his work and loves feeling like he is making the world a better place. He listens to heavy metal, plays guitar, and hosts an ongoing RPG night.
Susan Hewitt is originally from England and has lived in the US for more than half of her life. She does volunteer work of different kinds, she loves to write (including Wikipedia articles, of course!) and she loves to teach. She also enjoys doing field research and writing papers on mollusks. She is fond of swimming and being in the ocean. At home you might find her reading a stack of science magazines or studying Buddhism. She thinks the most important thing any of us can do is try to make the world a better place for everyone else.
Karthik Nadar is from Mumbai, India. He is a student and he works part-time. His favorite part of his job is he has enough time to contribute to Wikipedia. He contributed a lot to the 2011 Mumbai bombings article, including adding a picture he took after a bomb blast. In his free time, other than editing Wikipedia, he enjoys playing the drums and playing cricket. He also enjoys photography.
User GorillaWarfare is a student at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. She began editing Wikipedia when she was in high school and currently she mostly focuses on anti-vandalism editing on Wikipedia. Her main interest is Wikipedia and she considers it to be more of a hobby than volunteer work. She remarked that some people think it's a "weird way to spend her time," but when they see what she is actually doing, especially with anti-vandalism, "they almost see it as kind of a game where I’m reverting the bad guys."
Bruno Linhares is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and a Ph.D. in Practical Theology. In all of his many activities, he finds research to be the most enjoyable part for him. He enjoys reading about aviation and 20th century world literature and journey accounts. He enjoys film and he goes to the movies every week. He also enjoys walking, hiking, and photography.
Dr. Sengai Podhuvanar is from Chennai, India. He is currently retired after having many jobs: he worked on a rural farm, as a school teacher, as a state-appointed journal editor, and as a PhD expert on indigenous Indian games. He "was born a poor farmer, and still considers [himself] a farmer with a single plow." Currently he enjoys his retirement by reading, writing, taking walks and adding lots of his knowledge to Wikipedia.
Maryana Pinchuk is a Community Organizer at the Wikimedia Foundation. She works with editors to support the growth of all the Wikimedia projects. Her favorite thing about her job is getting to work with an international team of "brilliant, crazy, fearless people who are completely rabid about the goal of sharing knowledge with everyone in the world for free." She is originally from the Ukraine and has spent time living in many places in the US including Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, and Mississippi. She is a fan of going to bookstores and picking up classics and science fiction, and she likes motorcycle riding.
Basil Soufi was born in Washington State, spent the first few years of his life in Saudi Arabia, then moved to Canada, and later moved to California. Basil realized the power of Wikipedia when, in 2004, a high school assignment led him to Google "John Kerry." The encyclopedia in his home library was printed in 1993 and did not have much information on John Kerry who was not as notable at the time. He needed current information that can be found on the Internet but he also needed an encyclopedia, so Wikipedia fit the bill. Basil speaks several languages including Arabic, French, and English and he owns and operates a diversified media company.
Alan Sohn grew up in Lawrence, NY, lived for a decade in Manhattan, and then moved with his wife and children to Teaneck, New Jersey. It was the article for Teaneck that was Alan's first experience with Wikipedia, launching thousands of new articles and over 300,000 Wikipedia edits. Aside from his passion of editing Wikipedia articles, Alan has a penchant for puzzles, both in his work as a financial systems analyst, and crossword puzzles, namely the famous NYT crossword puzzle. Alan plays in a softball league with one of his sons, has coached his kids in various sports, and spent 3 years as a bicycle commuter riding 16 miles daily from NJ to NYC.
Akshaya Iyengar is a donor from India. She grew up in Solapur, a city in Maharashtra state. She moved to the US for graduate school and now lives and works in Seattle, WA. Akshaya is a Software Developer for a technology company. She likes the fact that the software she writes is directly used by many, many people. In her free time she enjoys ballroom/latin dancing, playing the guitar, and solving jigsaw puzzles.
Aniruddha Kumar is from New Delhi, India. He is is a blind Wikipedia editor who finds it important that Wikipedia remain ad-free because he does not have to waste time listening to advertising text on the site. He also likes that there is no barrier of nationality, ethnicity, religion, cast, or gender for editors or readers of Wikipedia; it is information for all written by all. He is a research scholar in Jawaharlal University, New Delhi. He enjoys the art of winning a debate and convincing others to see his point on topics, spreading information, and eating tasty food.
Ward Cunningham is computer programmer and the inventor of the wiki. He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. (c2.com) and currently resides in Oregon, USA. Read more about him on Wikipedia.
Isaac Kosegi Kips is from Kenya and he's a recent graduate from Egerton University in Nakura, Kenya. Isaac is a Wikimedia volunteer and his major project is distributing offline versions of Wikipedia to several schools in Kenya that do not have Internet access. He is also working on improving Wikipedia in Africa's native languages. When he is not editing Wikipedia he loves to read, and he loves soccer.
Pepe Robles currently works as a consultant for international unions. Pepe grew up in Argentina and he has seen the fall of an oppressive dictatorship and the rise of democracy in his country. During the dictatorship when he was still a young man, after painting political slogans on a wall he and his friends were subjected to a mock execution from paramilitaries. Wikipedia is a part of a new open world that he dreamed about when he was younger.
Stacey 23:17, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
A week of new appeals December 18, 2011
edit The personal appeal rotation continued throughout this past week.
During our pre-fundraiser summer testing, we wrote an appeal with Wikimedia Foundation staff member, Maryana Pinchuk, describing her motivation for working at the WMF. When Maryana first came to Wikimedia for a summer job, she was "inspired by the passion and curiosity of the people here who don’t want to keep knowledge shelved in a library or a university, but want to put it out there for everybody on the planet to use."
Maryana's message certainly resonated with donors. One reader wrote in, "Her story of commitment and her belief in Wikipedia really moved me." Another wrote, "I think the personal stories are effective. Maryana Pinchuk's story pushed me over the edge and made me answer that little voice inside that said, "You should donate" every time I clicked on Wikipedia."
We moved on later in the week to run an appeal from editor, Basil Soufi, which describes discovering Wikipedia as the greatest "eureka moment" of his life. Here's just one donor's reaction to his appeal, "Basils pitch for funds hit home with me. I didn't realize how often I pick up my iPad and check out a phrase that is unclear to me."
Next up was another appeal we wrote during our pre-fundraiser weekly testing from editor Alan Sohn. Alan is a systems consultant, working with very large-scale financial computer systems. In his appeal, he says, "The information is gladly provided by me and thousands of other editors who are happy to create it. We all know the world is better off because that information is freely available."
This week was also the first time during the fundraiser that we ran an appeal from a donor. Akshaya donated to the 2010 fundraiser and we followed up with her on a comment she sent in about why she supports Wikipedia. Check out a powerful quote from Akshaya's appeal: "Growing up in a small city in India, not all books were available there, and the libraries not always too well equipped. Later, when I was working on a technical degree, it was almost impossible to get all the information I needed from standard textbooks alone. For people everywhere, it’s indispensably useful to have a site like Wikipedia." It was really neat to include a donor in the mix of appeals to show a different perspective during the fundraiser.
Right now, we're running an appeal from editor Aniruddha Kumar. He is a blind editor and his appeal emphasizes the importance of Wikipedia being ad-free to him because he doesn't have to waste his time listening to advertising text on the site. One donor identified with Kumar's story and wrote in, "I am blind and love your website. I use it all the time and it is user friendly. I also appreciate there are no ads that I have to listen through every time. I planned on supporting this website no matter what because I appreciate everything about this website."
Everyone who has helped writing appeals has really contributed a lot of time and energy into making these messages just right. There's no way we would be able to run a fundraiser like this without you, thank you so much.
Campaign Update December 10, 2011
editWe're about half way through the fundraiser, here's a quick look at where we're at.
| Metric | Date range | Dollar Amount Raised | Number of Donations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year to Date Total | July 1,2011 - December 10, 2011 | $19,558,237 (USD) | 799,625 |
| November 2011 Total | November 1, 2011 - November 30, 2011 | $12,026,396.52 (USD) | 625,091 |
We started the fundraiser with Jimmy's appeal. Since the first week, we have run appeals from Brandon Harris, Susan Hewitt, Karthik Nadar, a student editor, and Dr. Sengai Podhuvan.
This editor appeal phase that we're in right now is a very valuable part of the fundraiser. It's really important to highlight our editors and share their stories with readers as well as to give Jimmy's appeal a break. Readers seem to appreciate this variety as well. Here are just two campaign comments from donors:
"The appeals are well-done. I like the variety of solicitors -- ages, backgrounds, reasons. It was the collective voice that moved me to donate, not just one person."
"It's a good idea to show/tell stories from different people, not just the founder, but regular people, like you're already doing."
We still have a ways to go, more editors' stories to tell, and more money to raise. Thank you to all the editors who are working with us to write appeals, to volunteers who are translating these messages and to readers who have shown their support already.
Dr. Sengai Podhuvan Appeal December 10, 2011
edit Dr. Sengai Podhuvan is the latest editor to appear in a fundraising banner.
His story of being a rural farmer in India and becoming a Wikipedia editor is pretty incredible and donors have been sending in warm comments in response to his appeal:
"The story by Dr. Podhuvai was so human and touching, I was drawn in and had to respond. It was very well done, but genuine and not contrived."
"The appeal from Dr. Sengai Podhuvan moved me to contribute. I like the idea of a guy in Tamil Nadu being able to contribute something to the world."
This appeal has only been shown in the US so far, but we're looking forward to seeing the reaction to a local appeal in India. We owe a huge thanks to Dr. Sengai Podhuvan for sharing his unique story with readers.
Editor Appeals December 8, 2011
edit We ran a new editor appeal this week from a university student. When we put the appeal live in the US on Monday morning, we saw a boost in donations, so we have been working on putting up tests with this appeal in other countries as well.
Donors have sent in positive feedback about her appeal. One donor wrote in: "I was intrigued by the testimonial of the student who contributed 18,000 edits. I am a student myself."
Another wrote: "The student whose contribution I read inspired me to donate after she stated that textbooks cost $500 but she has access to all the information she needs through Wikipedia."
This morning we introduced another appeal from Brazilian editor, Bruno Linhares. Bruno is a transportation engineer who primarily edits articles about air transportation in Brazil.
In response to his appeal, a donor wrote in: "Bruno's letter reminded me that I can find answers to most anything because of the passionate people that write the articles."
More editor appeals are in the works and you'll see them up live over the next few days. Thank you to everyone who is working with us to create different drafts of the appeals. Collaborating on these appeals is one of the most fun parts of the fundraising process.
Karthik Nadar's Appeal December 3, 2011
edit Karthik is the latest editor to share his story with Wikipedia readers. He is an editor from India and his fundraising appeal describes the work he did on the 2011 Mumbai bombings article.
Karthik's appeal has only been up live for a day, and already readers are sending in lovely comments about his message:
"It was Karthik Nadar's msg that finally got me to quit procrastinating and donate. So, yeah, I think personal stories from users are good."
"I like the information about how streamlined the operation is and all the different ways the web site is used by different people all over the world. The idea that this young man was able to share information about the bombings in India makes the web site a source for news, which I like."
One more: "Tell us more about important authors like Karthik."
You got it. More editor appeals on the way!
Seeing these editor appeals materialize is truly incredible. Thank you so much to Karthik and all the other editors who are working hard on this project. Your work is really inspiring for the fundraising team and it's what keeps us motivated to share your stories with the world - while still raising the money we need to keep it going.
Susan Appeal November 30, 2011
edit Yesterday, we introduced an appeal from our first editor in the 2011 fundraiser. Susan Hewitt is a long time editor of articles about gastropods and was excited to participate in the fundraiser this year. Thank you, Susan!
We've tested a few versions of her appeal and are currently running the best performing appeal that highlights the multiplying effect of thousands of dedicated editors contributing articles on the topics they are passionate about.
Readers have been sending in great feedback on why they were inspired to donate to Susan's appeal. As one donor put it, "I was struck by the idea that someone would write almost 600 articles for a non profit without payment - from the heart - and as a writer - I wanted to keep that alive."
There will be more editor appeals in the coming days. Again, we owe a big thanks to Susan for sharing her knowledge over the years as well as her story with readers.
2011 Fundraiser Launch Update
edit
The 2011 fundraiser kicked off with a strong start. In the first 24 hours, Wikimedia donors worldwide showed their support by donating USD $1.2 million. Yes, this is a record number of dollars raised in a single day by the Wikimedia Foundation (previous record was $790,853.48), but the bigger accomplishment is the number of supporters. Over 65,000 Wikipedia users donated in a single day from over 150 countries around the world. Our previous record number of donors in a single day was 26,082 from December 31, 2010.
We're now about one week and nearly $7 million into the fundraiser. Last year, it took about 25 days to raise this much.
We launched this year's campaign with the appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Throughout these past few months of testing many different messages, we found that Jimmy's appeal was the strongest message to kick off the fundraiser. In the last days before the launch of the campaign, we discovered that adding a green background to Jimmy's photo had a big boost for click and donation rates. We're still experimenting with designs and messages and will discover plenty of improvements to make along the way.
Just last night, we put up an appeal from Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris and the message is performing on par with Jimmy's appeal. We're now at the phase in the campaign where we will be highlighting stories from many different Wikimedians to help raise our budget. Over the past several months, Wikipedia volunteer editors and Wikimedia Foundation staff members have been working with the fundraising team to craft appeals so the 2011 fundraiser can rely as much as possible on a variety of voices from Wikimedians around the world. We owe a big thanks to everyone who has participated so far.
There are plenty more stories to look out for in the coming days. We're also still working on adding in more stories we haven't found yet to this year's campaign. If you're game to share your story to appeal to readers for donations, please sign up to get involved or channel your creativity and help draft an appeal from the Wikimedia community.
We still have a long way to go but we're feeling really thankful to Wikipedia users and contributors who have shown their support and pushed us off with a strong start.
Pre-fundraiser Testing Recap
editWe’re quickly approaching the launch of the 2011 Wikimedia annual fundraiser. These past few months have been critical to ramp up our operation in preparation of the year-end campaign.
Last year, after testing hundreds of banner messages, we saw the appeal from our founder, Jimmy Wales, was the most effective message in compelling readers to donate. This year, we have been committed to breaking the dependence on Jimmy’s appeal and expanding the range of voices and faces from our community to reach our fundraising goals. And we’re going to do it.
Throughout our summer testing, we found new stories from different members of the Wikimedia community that perform as well as or better than our successful Jimmy appeal. We’re still gathering more stories, but so far, we have seen successful appeals from Wikipedia editors and several Wikimedia Foundation staff members. Please take a look at our test updates below for results on specific tests.
The Storytellers traveled to Wikimania and kicked off our interviewing sprint with over 50 editors and contributors. The story-gathering mission has continued since then, and will continue throughout the fundraiser so we can have a truly global fundraiser with a wide variety of personal appeals. We still need unique stories from contributors all over the world, please sign up to get involved or visit the meta page to help draft an appeal from the Wikimedia community.
What have we learned so far about what makes for a successful appeal? That authenticity matters. Our successful personal appeals have all been written using people’s own passionate words to tell readers what’s so incredible about Wikipedia and why it is personally invaluable to them. Using that genuine message, we also highlight a few key points:
- Beauty: Wikipedia is an amazing, beautiful thing run by volunteers doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and for the love of free knowledge.
- Tell a story: Clarify people's understanding of Wikipedia and that it needs them to keep the story going.
- Free and ad-free: People love that it's free to use, free to be used in any way, and ad-free.
- Importance: We're #5 and everyone uses us!
- Efficiency: Compared to the other top sites, we run on a shoestring budget.
- Strong, quick start: Opening line is key. It must be straightforward and compelling.
- Ask: tell people where the money goes, be specific and concrete.
To build out our global campaign, we have spent the past several months working to set up the systems to accept more currencies and local payment methods in different countries than we ever have in the past. Our tech team is currently pouring an enormous amount of work into this goal to optimize our donations worldwide.
Wikimedia chapters have also started diving into testing to prepare for the fundraiser. The German, UK, and French chapters have held successful tests and are in the midst of numerous other preparations.
Over the summer, we launched a translation outreach campaign to build up a team of volunteers to localize different messages into as many languages as possible. So far, over 1,000 people from over 80 languages have signed up to help localize our campaign. That might sound like a lot, but believe me; we still need a lot more. Please help us out by signing up to get involved.
Here’s where we’re at now: Starting Monday November 7, we would like to launch the fundraiser to only logged-in users. Last year, we took down banners for logged in users about a month into the fundraiser. This year, we want to take the banners down even earlier for logged in users and starting next week will allow us to do that.
We’re asking every community member who is planning to donate, to make their donation in this first week to help us test our donation forms in all different countries and languages. We’ve put a lot of effort into localizing our messages and forms. If you see any errors or ways we can improve the setup in your country or language, please let us know over the next week so we can make these improvements before we put up banners for all users on Wednesday, November 16.
We’ll be sending out notices about the logged-in launch/test to mailing lists and village pumps this week. Please help us spread the word!
Thanks for helping us get off to a strong start.
Bug Triage, 5 October, 2011
edit- What: Fundraising bug triage
- When: Wendesday, October 5, 2011, 17:00UTC (10:00am PDT)
- Where: #wikimedia-dev on irc.freenode.net
Wednesday, October 5, we will be conducting a bug triage for open engineering issues relating to the Wikimedia Fundraiser. We will be tackling some low-hanging fruit focusing mostly on some of the fundraiser metric reporting tools, as well as some non-Mediawiki related tools.
This is a great opportunity for new devs to get involved with MediaWiki development as well as for veterans to help out with one of the most critical projects for the Wikimedia Foundation. We also have some CiviCRM related bugs - so if you're a CiviCRM hacker or interested in exploring another awesome open source project, this is for you!
Please take a look at some of the open bugs we'll be addressing during the triage.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
September 27–30, translation banners
editThis week we will be running banners to recruit translators in many different languages. The banners will, like the previous times, only run for logged-in users; they will target (a) wikis in specific languages and (b) English wikis geo-targetted to specific countries. The schedule is as follows:
- Tuesday 27th
- Languages
- 15:00–21:00 UTC: Afrikaans, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Swedish, Welsh
- 17:00–21:00 UTC: German, Dutch, Italian
- Countries
- 17:00–21:00 UTC: Andorra, Aruba, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, the Faroes, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, Norway, San Marino, South Africa, Suriname, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Sweden, Switzerland, Vatican City
- Wednesday 28th
- Languages
- 17:00–22:00 UTC: Portuguese, Spanish
- Countries
- 17:00–22:00 UTC: Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Mexico, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Puerto Rico, São Tomé and Príncipe, Spain, Uruguay, Venezuela
- Thursday 29th
- Languages
- 06:00–20:00 UTC: Cantonese, Chinese, Korean, Malay, Min Nan, Indonesian, Japanese, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese
- 12:00–23:59 UTC: Arabic, Estonian, Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish
- Countries
- 06:00–20:00 UTC: China, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macau, Malaysia, North Korea, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam
- 12:00–23:59 UTC: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Moldova, Morocco, Oman, Poland, Palestine, Romania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Western Sahara, Yemen
- Friday 30th
- Languages
- 12:00–23:59 UTC: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Ukrainian
- Countries
- 12:00–23:59 UTC: Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine
- Monday 3rd
- Languages
- 00:00–23:59 UTC: Bengali, Esperanto, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Russian, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu + languages we didn't get enough translators from before
- Additional languages: Afrikaans, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Malay, Min Nan, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Portugues, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Welsh
- 00:00–23:59 UTC: Bengali, Esperanto, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Russian, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu + languages we didn't get enough translators from before
- Countries
- 00:00–23:59 UTC: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore?, Sri Lanka + countries of languages we didn't get enough translators from before
- Additional countries: Brazil, Denmark, Estonian, Faroes, Finland, Greenland, Hungary, Malaysia, Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand
- 00:00–23:59 UTC: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore?, Sri Lanka + countries of languages we didn't get enough translators from before
- Thursday 6th–Friday 7th
- Languages
- 03:00–03:00 UTC: Esperanto, Estonian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, Thai
- Countries:
- 03:00–03:00 UTC: Estonia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Thailand
September 21, translation banners
editOn Wednesday September 21 we will run two-hour banner campaigns to recruit translators. The banners will be run in two different campaigns: One targetting wikis in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish; and the other targetting users of English-language projects located in Denmark, the Faroes, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The banners will run for two hours from 17:00 to 19:00 UTC.
Statistics from the banners will be available at Fundraising 2011/Translation/Recruitment.
September 15, translation banners
editOn Thursday September 15 we will run one-hour banner campaigns to recruit translators. This will be a test to see what banners we should use, but also a real call for action. The banners will be run on French- and Romanian-language projects, and also for users of English-language projects who are located in France, Belgium, Romania and Moldova. The banners will only be shown to logged-in users, for one hour some time between 15:00 and 17:00 UTC.
Some statistics from the banner tests are available at Fundraising 2011/Translation/Recruitment.
Fundraiser engineering heats up: Sprints 5 & 6 update
edit- (Cross posted from the Wikimedia Foundation tech blog)
The last three weeks have flown by as fundraiser engineering starts to heat up. Aside from the usual bug fixes and cool new features, we added a new member to the team, made some modifications to our development process and began tackling one of our biggest challenges this year: integrating with a new payment service provider.
Highlights
edit- Jeremy Postlethwaite joined the engineering team and is quickly getting up to speed.
- We had our first “tech showcase”, where we demoed all of the functionality we’ve developed to date *. The showcase provides an opportunity for project stakeholders to see progress in near real time, which allows for better decision making as well as more effective change/risk management. This will be a regular part of our sprint wrap-ups.
- First production-level test of the RapidHtml system, which is very light-weight solution that allows for quick html-based credit card form development and provides template tokens for dynamic form elements. This was tested during last week’s weekly fundraising test, when we tested the efficacy of collecting the donor’s billing information from the landing page rather than on the credit card form.
- The Mingle engineering team over at ThoughtWorks Studios invited us to visit and see what the their development cycle is like. Seeing what their processes are like proved valuable. It hammered home that agile development is more about the mindset and values found in the Agile Manifesto than about any specific development practices. We will continue to collaborate with their engineering team to share informatoin/ideas and hope to have the opportunity to do so with other engineering teams in the future.
Sprints 5 & 6 wrap up
edit- Increased logging of changes that happen in mw:CentralNotice, including interfaces and filters to search and review those changes.
- Added an API to ContributionTracking which allows us to bypass the interstitial page that a donor gets sent to prior to donating when they choose to donate via PayPal.
- Began abstracting and refactoring DonationInterface (links to current development branch) in preparation for adding an additional payment provider.
- Bug fixes to the RapidHtml form delivery system in the DonationInterface extension.
- Bug fixes to our contribution auditing framework (which ensures our contribution records in CiviCRM align with accounting, etc.).
You can view sprint 5 and sprint 6 in Mingle *, and view our notes from the retrospectives.
* For access to Mingle, log in with username/password of guest/guest.
Sprint 7 kick-off
editFor Sprint 7, we are going all-in on integrating with Global Collect, a new payment processor which will allow us to take donations in more currencies and with more region-specific payment methods. Work will continue abstracting/refactoring the DonationInterface extension, as well as building a payment notification listener compatible with Global Collect’s “Payment Status Communicator”.
Get Involved
editIf you are not interested in getting involved, help smash our hopes and dreams.<3 open bugs and/or visit us on IRC in #wikimedia-fundraising.