Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Wikimedia Foundation Report, February 2012

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of February (March 1, 2012)

Data and Trends edit

Global unique visitors for January:

482 million (+5.5% compared with December; +16.5% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release February data later in March)

Page requests for February:

18.1 billion (+0.5% compared with January; +16.2% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for January 2012 (>= 5 edits/month):

88,548 (+6.7% compared with December / -3.2% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for January 2012: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2012_01_detailed.html

The report card is currently undergoing a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects).

Financials edit

(Financial information is only available for January 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 - January 31, 2012.

Revenue: $29.4 million

Expenses:

  • Technology Group: $5,720,105
  • Community/Fundraiser Group: $2,828,009
  • Global Development Group: $2,459,774
  • Governance Group: $535,925
  • Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group: $3,375,754

Total Expenses: $14,919,567

Total surplus/(loss): $14,455,334

Revenue for the month is $3.8MM vs plan of $1.3MM, approximately 178% over plan. Year-to-date is $29.4MM vs plan of $24.4MM, approximately 21% over plan.

Expenses for the month is $2.1MM vs plan of $2.5MM, approximately 16% lower than plan. Year-to-date is $14.9MM vs plan of $16.7MM, approximately 11% lower than plan.

Underspending MTD is due to timing of capital expenditures ($160K - budget was spread evenly over 12 months), personnel expenses ($170K), recruiting fees resulted from timing of staff hiring ($176K), cash awards and grants ($45K – budget was spread evenly over 12 months), and volunteer development ($28K) offset by higher bank fees ($42K) and higher professional services ($168K).

Underspending YTD is due to timing of capital expenditures ($1.1MM - budget was spread evenly over 12 months), internet hosting ($50K), volunteer development ($169K), travel and conference expenses ($251K), personnel expenses ($754K), recruiting expenses ($300K), and IT desk equipment ($89K) offset by higher awards and grants ($217K – budget was spread evenly over 12 months), legal and accounting fees ($58K), professional services ($458K), and bank fees ($290K).

Cash of $32.6 million, which is fifteen months of cash reserves at current spending levels and fourteen months of cash per the annual plan.

Highlights edit

Legal and Community Advocacy department launched edit

We announced the formation of the new Legal and Community Advocacy group. Community consultation is ongoing, and everything is up for discussion, even the name of the new department. Help us brainstorm about how it can support the community, such as helping administrators and functionaries, and facilitating non-English participation in WMF initiatives (like policies and key projects).

Teahouse project kicks off edit

 
Logo of the "Teahouse"

On February 27th we launched the Teahouse, a peer support space designed specifically for new editors on the English Wikipedia. This pilot project is testing various social approaches to new editor support, to see if these methods improve our ability to retain more new editors and more female editors in particular. The project organizes a group of Wikipedians called “hosts” to reach out to new good-faith editors and invite them to a place where they can meet other new editors and experienced Wikipedians, build community relationships, find projects to participate in, and ask questions about Wikipedia. The pilot is scheduled to run with 25 trained hosts for 3 months. During this time we'll be working with the community and new editors to refine the experience and measure the project's impact.

MediaWiki 1.19 deployed edit

Version 1.19 of the MediaWiki software was gradually deployed to Wikimedia sites in February. It brings many new features and bug fixes. Some are back-end, behind-the-scenes changes, for example infrastructure work to support our ongoing move to Swift as our media storage platform. There are also more visible improvements, like better diff readability for colorblind people, and better support of the user's gender and language (internationalization) in the interface.

Technology edit

A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for February 2012 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/February
Department Highlights

Major news in February include:

Events edit

  • Pune hackathon (10–12 February 2012, Pune, India) — A few dozen participants came to this three-day developer outreach event cohosted with GNUnify. Participants focused on language support (internationalization and localization) and mobile applications. Some new translations were created and the Wikimedia Mobile team received improvements to the Android app for Wikipedia.

Operations edit

  • Media Storage — February saw Swift deployed to production to serve thumbnail requests. A few bugs were fixed, but one was serious enough to revert the deployment and fall back to the legacy thumbnail infrastructure. Once the issue is fixed and Swift serves thumbnails again, the next steps will involve documentation and maintenance procedures, creating a mirror cluster in Ashburn, setting up Swift in Wikimedia Labs, and handling original media (not just thumbnails) with Swift.

Features Engineering edit

  • Visual editor — Trevor Parscal did research on cursor interaction and selection rendering for RTL (right-to-left) and support for line breaks in PRE elements. Gabriel Wicke improved template expansion and parser function support, investigated Microdata and RDFa for WikiText-in-HTML-DOM embedding and added rough support for images and other files. Rob Moen committed a working Editable Surface IME prototype (bidirectional text not fully supported). Audrey Tang joined the team and worked on the sanitizer and the testing process.
  • Article feedback — This month, the team created a new feedback page, with special features to be tested with oversighters and rollbackers in early March. Roan Kattouw has completed code review for compatibility with 1.19 and will deploy a new release on March 8, as well as a new working test environment in coming weeks. Final reports for phase 1 of this project will be published in early March.

Mobile edit

  • Wikipedia Mobile App — In February, the Wikipedia Android app crossed over 1.8 million device installs. This is incredible growth as the app has been in the Android Market for just under two months. Yuvaraj Pandian announced a new beta version of both the Android app and the newly re-written iOS app. The re-written iOS version builds on our PhoneGap code base, and will allow us to deprecate our old objective C code. New features include: OSM integration, quick search integration, URL intents, search enhancements, bug fixes, and better developer attribution.
  • Mobile Designs — Philip Chang and Heather Walls worked on new design mockups for full screen search, contact us, navigation (ongoing), and references. Philip Chang also started the definition of Photo Upload as two workflows, Basic and Advanced. Basic is modeled after the current Upload Wizard as the basis of a mobile-friendly workflow, and Advanced uses a Wikipedia article (or other site content) as the starting point and incorporates game dynamics.

Platform Engineering edit

  • MediaWiki 1.19 — In February, MediaWiki 1.19 was gradually deployed to Wikimedia sites (see general "Highlights" section). Stages 1 through 4 of the deployment schedule have been completed; all sister projects, and a few Wikipedia wikis, are now running MediaWiki 1.19.
  • Git conversion — The migration of MediaWiki core and of extensions used on WMF sites is now tentatively scheduled for 21 March 2012. Sumana Harihareswara and Chad Horohoe wrote a blog entry to answer some common questions about the migration. WMF Engineering is making strong efforts to train the development community in using Git and Gerrit, including documentation and trainings via screensharing. We will be moving Gerrit infrastructure to Ashburn, as the Tampa server we're using can't handle the load.
  • Volunteer coordination and outreach — Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community (especially for commit and patch review), and mentor new contributors. Sumana also prepared for the June Berlin hackathon and the Wikimania hackathon in July and recruited participants for upcoming events. 13 contributors got commit access.

Research edit

  • Research Committee member Mayo Fuster visited WMF and met with Dario Taraborelli to discuss how to streamline RCom activity, plans for an RCom session at Wikimania 2012 and a pilot project to apply systematization of experiences methodology to Wikipedia participation though the Digital Commons process.
  • RCom members John Riedl and Dario Taraborelli and former member Luca de Alfaro participated in the Hypothes.is Reputation Workshop (22-24 February) to contribute to the design of Hypothes.is – an open source collaborative annotation tool – from Wikimedia's perspective. A report from the workshop is available.
  • We published the February issue of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter covering 22 recently published Wikipedia studies.
  • We continued experimenting with CKAN and the DataHub as a solution for open data hosting and worked with the OKFN to prioritize Wikimedia's requirements.
  • We continued reviewing and supporting new research proposals.
  • Former RCom member Milos Rancic announced his departure from the committee.

Community edit

Department Highlights
  • Teahouse Project - Fellows Sarah Stierch and Jonathan Morgan, with the help of the Head of Community Fellowships Program Siko Bouterse, launched the Teahouse project on the English Wikipedia on February 27th (see general "Highlights" section).
     
    San Francisco Wikimedia Meetup February 2012

  • SF Meetup - On February 4th, 2012, the Community Department hosted the first San Francisco meetup of 2012. There were a record 40 participants, including the Board of Trustees. (Blog post)

Community Organizing Projects edit

  • Brazil Community Engagement - In preparation for their tour of Brazil in March, Steven Walling and Maryana Pinchuk outlined a plan for working with the Portuguese Wikipedia community on pilot projects to improve editor retention.[2]
  • Template Testing - With Ryan Faulkner, the new Community Department Data Analyst, Steven and Maryana began a deeper exploration of template testing data. Results are encouraging in many cases: in a test of the first level English warning templates, increasing personalization and decreasing the number of links led to a 20% increase in edits to articles by Wikipedians who had passed the 10-edit threshold.[3] Our plans for the future include a report including more qualitative feedback from Wikimedians (see below), as well as working with the community to make more permanent changes based on test results.
  • New template A/B tests were started in collaboration with the Wikimedia Incubator.[4]
  • Over 40 English Wikipedians joined Maryana and Steven in a discussion about the effectiveness of deletion notifications on English Wikipedia.[5] This qualitative feedback has been distilled into a report on how our largest project communicates about article deletion.[6]
  • SF Meetup (see above)

1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/07/first-san-francisco-meetup-of-2012/

2. http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Wikipedia_community_pilot

3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing#English_Wikipedia_Huggle_test_.28September_25-October_10.29

4. https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Template_testing

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_user_warnings/Testing/Twinkle

6. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Deletion_notice_effectiveness

Fundraising edit

Fundraiser
  • As we said goodbye to the majority of our fundraiser contractors (Charles Barr, Joseph Seddon, Peter Coombe, and Alex Zariv), we said hello to three permanent additions to the team. Josh VanDavier, previously Development Associate, moved to Fundraising QA Associate, and will be optimizing donor experience through customer service and constant QA'ing of donor landing pages. Victor Grigas transferred into a permanent Storytelling position and will continue working closely with the fundraiser team and sharing the story of Wikipedia with the world. Peter Gehres, previously a Production Coordinator contractor, moved to Fundraiser Production Manager and will be providing strategic technical leadership for the fundraiser.
  • Though not new to the Fundraiser, Katie Horn has taken the mantle of Fundraiser Tech Lead from outgoing lead Arthur Richards.
  • Megan Hernandez and Victor Grigas are currently in Brazil for the first of four Portuguese language Donor Focus groups and one Argentine Donor Focus group aimed at optimizing the localized donor experience. Victor is also capturing imagery and Wikipedian stories for use in the Fundraiser. They are joined by Oona Castro, the new Brazil program consultant.
  • The Fundraising team completed the first A/B testing of banners for the 2012 Fundraising year with the new team in place.[1]
  • The fundraising team worked on a full report from the 2011 fundraiser to be posted publicly in March.

1. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012

Major Gifts and Foundations
  • We received a $1.25 million five-year grant from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
  • We hired consultant Sara Lasner to assist with major donor outreach.

Fellowship Program edit

  • Recruitment - The fellowship program has wrapped up an open call for community fellowship applicants and project ideas, resulting in applications from prospective fellows in 21 different countries, and 28 project ideas. Applicants are being interviewed and the community is being engaged to help evaluate project ideas on meta-wiki.[1]
  • Teahouse Project - Fellows Sarah Stierch and Jonathan Morgan launched the Teahouse project on English Wikipedia on February 27th (cf. general "Highlights" section). 23 volunteer hosts have been trained to provide outreach and support to new editors. 180 new editors have been invited to the Teahouse during the first 48 hours of the pilot, and new invitations are going out each day. We have also partnered with the Global Education Program to provide online support to students in 6 classrooms.[2]
  • WikiWomen's History Month - Wikipedians interested in encouraging women's participation have been invited to organize local meetups and edit-a-thons during March in honor of International Women's Day and Women's History Month. 10 offline events are currently being planned.[3]
  • Gender Gap Panel at CSCW - Sarah Stierch participated in a panel on Gender and Participation in Peer Production at the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.[4]
  • Translation Project - Fellow Jon Harald Søby traveled to Brussels to meet with the i18n team and plan usability improvements to the translate extension.[5] A simplified process for requesting translations and assistance loading texts into the extension is in progress.[6]

1. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Fellowships/Endorsements

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiWomen%27s_History_Month

4.http://cscw2012.org/program/panels.php#2

5.https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Translate

6. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jsoby/Request_translation

Community Relations edit

Philippe Beaudette (previously Head of Reader Relations) was promoted to Director of Community Advocacy. Philippe is working with Maggie Dennis, Community Liaison, to build the newly formed Legal and Community Advocacy Department. Please see the Legal Department section for additional information.

Global Development edit

Department highlights
  • Telenor makes Wikipedia available to 135 million customers in Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Serbia, Montenegro and India (press release: "Telenor and WMF partner on Wikipedia mobile")
  • Hiring and announcement of Brazil Program Consultant, Oona Castro [1] and joint community outreach efforts at Brazil Campus Party [2]
  • GLAMcamp DC (WMF blog summary) took place February 10-12 at the National Archives and Records Administration. GLAMcamp was supported by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation and by the Foundation's US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator. See details under US Cultural Partnerships below.
  • The Global Development department built out a hub page on Meta to make it easier to follow and connect into the work of the various teams within the department: Global Development

Grants Program edit

Grants Awarded and Executed edit

Brazil Catalyst edit

In February, Kul, Jessie and Pats spent time in Sao Paulo at the annual Campus Party conference. See the blog post for more detailed information. Highlights included a keynote speech by Kul Wadhwa and a brief editing competition hosted by Wikimedia Brasil.

The Brazil Education Pilot is ready to start for the first semester of the university system in March! February included a lot of prep work for this project, primarily conducted by Brazilian contractor Everton Alverenga. Five professors in Sao Paulo and Rio are going to be incorporating the editing of Portuguese Wikipedia into their classroom models.

In March, we are working with the Community team to do more research into editor retention and community health within the Portuguese Wikipedia.

Arabic Language Initiative edit

  • Currently in discussion with the National Library of Tunisia in order to release their historic content of digitized books, postcards, journals, etc. to Commons or Wikisource
  • Planned outreach events this March in Morocco, Lebanon and Jordan include Wikipedia training for TechWomen and joint events with Mozilla in Amman.
  • Working on a project with twitter Arabization group (taghreedat) to promote Arabic Wikipedia to their community

US Cultural Partnerships edit

 
A group discusses deliverables for the GLAMcamp DC weekend.

Outcomes:

  1. The GLAM/US portal was updated, with many new pages such as GLAM: Connect and GLAM: Bookshelf. An abundance of new documentation was added to these pages, including state-based resource pages for GLAMs and a new GLAM:Contribute page.
  2. The GLAM One-Pager was created as a sample handout for cultural institutions, and includes an overview of GLAM-Wiki information, case stories on current partnerships, pull quotes from GLAM professionals, and contact information.
  3. Tech-related outcomes included the OPAC Wikipedia citation tool browser extension for MARC records and new Bulk Upload Documentation that came out of close collaboration with Walters Art Museum staff in attendance.

Blogging summaries from attendees:

  1. Reports from GLAM camp, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities blog, Grant Dickie
  2. Planning GLAMcamp, Wiki Strategies blog, Pete Forsyth
  3. GLAMcamp DC summary, The GLAM-Wiki Experience blog, Alex Hinojo
  • Blog posts about Wikipedia in the cultural sector and the GLAM-Wiki movement:
  1. Wikipedians in Residence: Two Years of Open Culture, Open Knowledge Foundation.
  2. GLAMcamp DC adds sparkle to museum-Wikipedia partnerships, New Media Consortium.
  3. NARA plays host for Wikipedians at GLAMcamp DC, NARAtions blog.
  4. Open Authority and the Future of Museum Ethics, Center for the Future of Museums.
  • There has been ongoing follow-up on leads and expressions of interest from GLAM institutions. A consolidated master list of GLAM contacts was further compiled at GLAMcamp DC, which is now maintained by a small “GLAM Contacts Committee” that is made up of volunteers representing regions across the US.
  • There have been ongoing coordination talks between local museum technology contacts and Europeana, who will be collaborating on GLAM tools over the coming year.
  • In March, GLAM-Wiki will be shared via the Library of Congress blog and the Technology in the Arts blog. Coordination will continue for upcoming conferences in May, June, and July.

Mobile and Business Development edit

  • Telenor Partnership (see also Mobile_Projects/Partnerships/Q_and_A#Telenor_Partnership):
    • We just entered into a partnership with Telenor to provide Wikipedia Zero to 135 Million customers in Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Serbia, Montenegro and India.
    • Malaysia beta-launch is scheduled to happen by the end of Q1.
  • Orange Partnership
    • We are starting the implementation work to launch no-data charge access to Wikipedia on mobile in the first territory in Orange’s footprint: Tunisia.
  • While Kul Wadhwa was at Campus Party for the Brazil Catalyst Project, we met with various development groups (with the help of Pats Pena from the community department and Wikimedia Brasil) to plan for our first Hackathon in Brasil, focused on mobile, for later in the year for Sao Paulo and/or Nordeste.

Global development research edit

  • Finished series of blog posts from the readers study. The last blog post was well received with about 14 comments on the blog and many more on social media channels.
  • Created a tool for evaluating outreach events (i.e. whether attendees edit Wikipedia after the event). Tested the prototype of the tool with actual outreach data from India.
  • Wrapped up the mobile study with the mobile survey: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/19/wikipedia-at-no-data-cost-is-appealing-to-mobile-readers/
  • Working on a plan to evaluate the Cairo pilot of the Global Education program: it would be a combination of pre and post test surveys of different sample populations and analytics around key indicators.

Wikipedia Education Program edit

 
Wikipedia Education Program logo, part of the new visual identity
  • As part of the Cairo Pilot, Online Ambassadors have been trained by local Wikipedians. The orientation of the Online Ambassadors concludes the training of all Ambassadors for the pilot project on the Arabic Wikipedia. A total of 17 Campus Ambassadors and 11 Online Ambassadors are now ready to support student work during the spring 2012 term.
  • Classes started at Cairo University and at Ain Shams University. Among the first articles being improved on the Arabic Wikipedia was the article on civil disobedience: Students of Dalia Al-Tokhy's class from Ain Shams University added a section about civil disobedience in Egypt after being trained by Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors.
  • Essam Sharaf, a Wikipedian from Cairo, was hired as a part-time contractor for the on-campus outreach. In the first half of February, Essam visited the Wikimedia Foundation's office in San Francisco and started to work on a project plan for outreach events that will be conducted in Cairo between March and June 2012.
  • Visual Identity launched: Participants in the Wikipedia Education Program are now able to create logos and other designs for country, city, university, or other regional groups through a do-it-yourself manual and logo assets. The new visual identity for the program, designed by David Peters, allows a theme to permeate the entire program, while allowing individual regions to create their own logos with colors or symbols that have meaning for that region. The concept is based on the highly successful Wikipedia 10th Anniversary party designs. (https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program_visual_identity )
  • On February 15, the British newspaper The Guardian published a long article about the various facets of the Wikipedia Education Program in operation around the world. The reporter talked to Wikimedia Foundation staff and professors who had used Wikipedia as a teaching tool in their classes in the past. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/15/wikipedia-cairo-educational-initiative )
  • Volunteers around the world who are running their own programs and Education Program staff worked collaboratively on a post for the Wikimedia Foundation's blog on the current status of education initiatives in different countries. (http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/22/wikipedia-education-program-kicks-off-another-term/ )
  • Contractor Jeroen De Dauw is working on a new MediaWiki extension for the Wikipedia Education Program. The new extension will provide a framework for courses, instructors and students and increase transparency for on-wiki activities related to the Wikipedia Education Program. Community members are invited to participate in betatesting the extension: http://education.wmflabs.org/index.php/MW_1.18:Community_portal
  • Wikipedians from 9 different countries worked collaboratively on a submission for this year's Wikimania. The planned session intends to bring together those who want to share their experiences with Wikipedia in higher education and those who would like to hear what others have done in this field: http://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/The_Teaching-with-Wikipedia_cookbook:_recipes_from_countries_around_the_world

India Programs edit

  • Made offer for the last member of the India Programs team - Noopur Raval for Communications.
  • Initiated effort to align all India Program work around formal Program Design methods, including detailed design, learning criteria as well as performance measures.

Indic Languages edit

India Outreach edit

  • Effort to improve impact and increase the scale of outreach.
    • A handbook including best practices to conduct an effective outreach session: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Handbook
    • Standardised documents which may be adapted and adopted
    • Collating tips and advice for conducting an effective outreach event
    • Evaluating effective ways of capturing participants data with the help of Ayush, Nimish & Mani: building username & collection form
    • Evaluating how to stay in touch with outreach sessions attendees using a CRM system (with help from Philippe)
  • Evaluating how to measure outreach impact with the help of Ayush, Nimish & Mani: getting participants' edit counts over the course of 3 months after an event
  • Mail sent on the India mailing list on improving outreach efforts in India: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2012-February/006934.html
  • 15 outreach session conducted in 6 weeks: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Outreach_Sessions
    • >550 participants attended these sessions and we are tracking 100 of their progress.
    • Initial figures indicate relatively low "conversion" rates, but we are working how to improve this.

Communications edit

Communications work through February focussed on a large amount of media follow-up regarding the international reaction to SOPA/PIPA in the US, development of communications products for the WMF/Telenor announcement, streamlining of the Wikimedia store operation, and supporting internal communications efforts around HR and recruiting.

Major announcements edit

Telenor makes Wikipedia available to 135 million customers in Asia and Europe (Feb 28, 2012)

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Telenor_and_WMF_partner_on_Wikipedia_mobile

Major Storylines through February edit

Wikipedia and SOPA carry steam through February

By far the major storyline for Wikimedia in February continued to focus on the impact of the defeat of SOPA in the US. Global media continue to inquire about the details of the efforts, including speculation about how the decision will affect future SOPA-like initiatives.

Related op-ed from Jimmy Wales and Kat Walsh:

"We are the media, and so are you"

Jimmy Wales/Kat Walsh Op-ed in Washington Post, Feb 9, 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-are-the-media-and-so-are-you/2012/02/09/gIQAfNW81Q_story.html

Other worthwhile reads edit

The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Feb 12, 2012

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/

How Wikimedia Uses Nimsoft to Keep Track of Uptime, Feb 21, 2012

https://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/02/how-wikimedia-uses-nimsoft-to.php

Does Wikipedia have an accuracy problem? The Atlantic, Feb 16, 2012

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/does-wikipedia-have-an-accuracy-problem/253216/

Wikipedia donors most likely to be from India, study says, Huffington Post, Feb 7, 2012

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/06/wikipedia-most-likely-donate_n_1258575.html

One of the Nation's Top Historians Decides It's Time to Embrace Wikipedia, The Atlantic, Feb 4, 2012

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/one-of-the-nations-top-historians-decides-its-time-to-embrace-wikipedia/252576/

Wikipedia Signpost edit

WMF Blog posts edit

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/02/

Media Contact edit

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#February_2012

Human Resources edit

Staff Changes edit

New Hires
  • Christine Bocknek, Senior Accountant (Finance)
  • Terry Chay, Director of Features Engineering (Engineering)
  • Nathan D'Annibale, Staff Accountant (Finance)
  • Charles Deubner, Office IT Support Specialist (Office IT)
New Other Roles Filled
  • James Alexander, Wikimedia Merchandise Manager (Communications)
  • Victor Grigas, Storyteller: Content and Video Producer (Community)
Conversions
  • Maggie Dennis, Community Liaison (Community)
  • Peter Gehres, Fundraiser Production Manager (Community)
  • Ryan Faulkner, Research Analyst (Community)
  • Roan Kattouw, SW Developer, Back-end (Engineering)
New Contractors
  • Mariel Bird (Administration)
  • Mark Holmquist (Engineering)
  • Sara Lasner (Community)
  • Essam Sharaf (Global Development)
  • Lindsey Smith (Engineering)
  • Audrey Tang (Engineering)
Contract Extended
  • Michael Beattie (Community)
  • Karen Chelini (HR)
  • Farhan Choudhury (Global Development)
  • Jeroen DeDauw (Engineering)
  • Rodney Dunican (Global Development)
  • Moushira Elamrawy (Global Development)
  • Emmanuel Engelhart (Engineering)
  • Rayne MacGeorge (Office IT)
  • Stacey Merrick (HR)
  • Sam Reed (Engineering)
  • Angela Robeson (HR)
  • Jon Harald Soby (Community)
  • Santhosh Thottingal (Engineering)
  • Heather Walls (Engineering)
  • Daniel Zahn (Engineering)
Exit
  • Parul Vora
Contract Ended
  • Peter Coombe (Community)
  • Aaron Muszalski (Community)
  • Joseph Seddon (Community)
  • Alex Zariv (Community)
New Postings
  • Technical Product Analyst
  • Development Associate
  • Data Analytics Manager
  • Counsel
RFPs
  • Production Support, Fundraiser
  • Lucene Search Operations Engineer

Statistics edit

Total Employee Count:

Actual: 99
February Plan: 110, February Filled: 6, February Attrition: 2
YTD Filled: 38, YTD Attrition: 13

Remaining open positions to fiscal year end: 19

Department Updates edit

It's our second month working as a fully staffed HR team and we've identified three core changes in the way we work. We need to get clearer in our processes and our work prioritization. We need our outward facing communications to be more consistent and better. We also need to have some boundaries in how we respond to requests, so that our overall service quality is higher.

On the recruiting front, we have Stacey Merrick supporting us in doing social media outreach about jobs and other opportunities to work with WMF. She will also be doing some redesign work on the HR corner of the office wiki to make information more easily accessible. We also welcome Michelle Collins, who is helping us with recruiting on a part-time basis in a coordination role.

Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration edit

We welcome Christine as our new Senior Accountant who will also work with chapters on reporting for both chapter agreements and fundraising agreements.

Office improvements for this month were a new tile floor in the 6th floor kitchen.

Volunteers who travel on behalf of the Foundation now have limited travel accident insurance when traveling outside of their home countries. Please contact Garfield <gbyrd at wikimedia dot org> to get additional information.

Legal and Community Advocacy edit

  • We announced the new Legal and Community Advocacy group. Community consultation is ongoing, and everything is up for discussion, even the name of the group. Some initial community responses suggested that the key purpose of this department might be for legislative activities, but, in fact, we are thinking more about ways that we can support the community, such as helping administrators and functionaries and facilitating non-English participation in WMF initiatives (like policies and key projects). Help us brainstorm this new department. We are thrilled to have Philippe and Maggie with us!
  • Legal and Global Development worked together to get the Telenor contract done on a tight deadline to allow for an announcement during a large telecommunications conference.
  • Our legal interns have been answering a lot of community questions via memos and white papers. While the team may only represent the Wikimedia Foundation on legal matters and is not able to give legal advice to the volunteer communities, it does offer generalized informational resources so that volunteers can craft their own approaches to these complicated issues. For example, the Commons community was exploring questions related to the public display of art and its impact on copyright in the United States; the document that our legal intern produced is displayed on its own page there. Both Commons and the English Wikipedia have also been struggling with questions related to international copyright. In January, Commons approached us about a recent US court decision which may impact thousands of images hosted on Commons. The research produced by the legal interns is published in the community deletion discussion. The English Wikipedia is attempting to reach a consensus for handling content that is public domain in the United States because the United States does not have copyright relations with the country in which it was published. Our intern's work is published as part of that discussion. Many thanks to them for their hard work.
  • Our team has been working on building a centralized "legal corner" for internal & external use. We hope to create and compile useful resources for both staff and community members.
  • Stats
    • Number of contracts signed - 12
    • Number of trademark requests - 10
      • approved - 6
      • denied - 2
      • approval not needed - 1
      • pending - 1

Visitors and Guests edit

 
Six members of the German parliament's sub-committee on new media visiting the Wikimedia Foundation's Office on February 13
  1. Christian (Wikia)
  2. Andrew Lih (Wikipedian/Author/Journalist/Professor)
  3. Stan van de Burgt (founder of Watchmouse)
  4. Jeroen Borgsteede (Manager of products & Services, Kennisnet)
  5. Renee Blodgett
  6. Mayo Fuster Morell (Amical, RCom member, User:Lilaroja)
  7. Sebastian Blumenthal (Bundestag)
  8. Dr. Reinhard Brandl (Bundestag)
  9. Thomas Jarzombek (Bundestag)
  10. Lars Klingbeil (Bundestag)
  11. Herbert Behrens (Bundestag)
  12. Dr. Konstantin von Notz (Bundestag)
  13. Dr. Franca Wolff (Bundestag)
  14. Consul General Peter Rothen
  15. Michael Ahrens, Consul Cultural and Press Affairs at the German Consulate General
  16. Brigitta Richman, a translator
  17. Dwight Wilson (WorldCorp Interns)
  18. Mike Hegazy (Crunch Gym representative)
  19. Grant Joung (ThoughtWorks)
  20. Latoya Peterson (http://latoyapeterson.com/about/)
  21. Sarah Stierch (WMF Community Fellow)
  22. Jonathan Morgan (WMF Research Fellow)
  23. Grant & Marie Claire (Thoughtworks)
  24. Otavio Good (Wikipedian)
  25. James Cullen Heaphy III (Wikipedian)
  26. Essam Sharaf (Wikipedian)
  27. David Munir
  28. Terry Brodt (CWT travel)
  29. Tilman Bayer
  30. Andrew Garrett
  31. Linda Chang (Design MBA program at California College of the Arts)
  32. Rana Cho (Design MBA program at California College of the Arts)
  33. Ali Musleh (Design MBA program at California College of the Arts)
  34. Arash Shirinbab (Design MBA program at California College of the Arts)
  35. Max Klein (Wikipedian)
  36. Valerie Ball (KPMG)
  37. Stu West (WMF Board of Trustees member)
  38. Ting Chen (Chair of WMF Board of Trustees)
  39. Jimmy Wales (WMF Board of Trustees member)
  40. Jan-Bart de Vreede (Vice Chair of WMF Board of Trustees)
  41. Kat Walsh (WMF Board of Trustees member)
  42. Arne Klempert (WMF Board of Trustees member)
  43. Matt Halprin (WMF Board of Trustees member)
  44. Bishakha Datta (WMF Board of Trustees member)
  45. Phoebe Ayers (WMF Board of Trustees member)
  46. Deborah Bezona (D. Bezona & Company)
  47. Juan Carlos Guaqueta (Chile)
  48. 20 community members (English Wikipedians, editors of Wiktionary, Wikisource, as well as Portuguese and German Wikipedia)
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