Talk:Wikimedia Highlights, September 2014

Translations?

Wikimedia Foundation Report, September 2014 states: You are more than welcome to edit this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the ““Wikimedia Highlights” excerpt.

This however does not appear to be a translatable page. Is the report wrong, or are the highlights not marked up? Siebrand (talk) 21:04, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

The report is correct in stating that translations of the Highlights are welcome, although I have not sent out a wider translation notification here since translators might want to focus on newer issues first. I agree it's easier for people to contribute translations if the page is entered into the Translate extension's system and might still do that myself if I find some time. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 02:54, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

September highlights published in February?

It appears to be that the report is lagging quite a bit. Is this correct? If yes, what should be a regular lag for a report? Assuming that the current lag is not the expected lag, are measures being taken to speed up reporting so that it will be at the expected lag again? Thanks. Siebrand (talk) 21:04, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

I see that a load of these were published today. Remarkable! Will things be back to normal from there on? Siebrand (talk) 21:06, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi Siebrand,

Yes, that September report, and thus the September Highlights, had been blocked on some missing pieces until sometime in January (and then I needed to find some free time myself to finalize the report and carry out the publication steps). As indicated in the editorial note in this report, it was decided several months ago that the Foundation would switch from a monthly to a quarterly reporting schedule, in alignment with the existing quarterly planning and review rhythm. The September report was the last one under the old model and had become a bit of a legacy piece, which of course still needed to be published as a matter of record.

Re "a load of these were published today", that edit actually also added issues that had already been published months ago, but were just missing from the list of links.

As for which measures are being taken about the lag:

• For the Highlights: From the October issue on, the Highlights have been decoupled from the reports and focus now on concise, translatable summary of the most interesting blog posts from that month (i.e. on material that is already available right after the month has ended), as mentioned in the editorial note in the October Highlights, which indeed came out much earlier than the September one.
• For the reports: As Erik mentioned in his fall announcement, the first report in the new model, for Q2 of FY2014-15, is scheduled to come out in mid-February. By reusing existing material from the quarterly reviews as much as possible instead of continuing to ask teams to write up their report themselves, we both ease their reporting workload - in particular for non-Engineering teams - and reduce the possibility of one missing piece of input blocking the entire report, which had become increasingly likely as the organization has grown from about 20 employees (when this monthly reporting model was started by Sue Gardner) to over 200.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 02:54, 2 February 2015 (UTC)