Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Wikimedia Foundation Report, November 2011

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Global unique visitors for October:

477 million (+4.9% compared with September; +16.7% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)

Page requests for November:

16.8 billion (-0.1% compared with October; +12.3% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for October 2011 (>= 5 edits/month):

84,426 (+1.4% compared with September / +0.8% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for October 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_10_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

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(Financial information is only available for October 2011 at the time of this report. All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 - October 31, 2011)

Revenue: $4,253,486

Expenses:

  • Technology Group: $3,021,534
  • Community/Fundraiser Group: $1,066,080
  • Global Development Group: $1,116,890
  • Governance Group: $336,150
  • Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group: $1,989,659

Total Expenses: $7,530,312

Total surplus/(loss): ($3,276,826)

Revenue was ahead of plan due to grants of $2.8 million and additional donations ahead of plan of $385,254.

Expenses were below plan at $7.5 million actual versus $9.1 million plan. Expenses were below planned due to lower than planned expenditures in capital expenditures, chapter grants, recruitment cost and other activities due.

Cash of $14.9 million, which is six months of cash reserves at current spending levels.

Highlights

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WikiConference and Hackathon in Mumbai, India

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Participants of the Mumbai Hackathon

From November 19 to November 20, Wikimedia staff and volunteers gathered together in Mumbai for the India Hackathon 2011, focusing on mobile access, localization, and offline distribution. The hackathon was held simultaneously with WikiConference India 2011, an event organized by Wikimedia India. The WikiConference had nearly 700 participants, making it one of the largest Wikimedia events ever, and certainly the largest so far in India. More than 50 sessions provided insights on community building, improving project quality, establishing partnerships, best practices in outreach and opportunities for general experience sharing.

A new tool for helping new editors

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Since August, the experimental "Moodbar" function has invited new users on the English Wikipedia to quickly and easily provide feedback on their editing experience by entering a 140 character comment. All these comments are posted as a public feed on the Feedback Dashboard. In November, we added a new functionality that enables experienced editors to easily respond to this feedback without leaving the dashboard. Wikimedia Foundation Community Organizers Steven Walling and Maryana Pinchuk have started a Response Team of experienced editors willing to help out new users in this way.

We're continuing to improve this system and assess its impact; specifically, whether new users read the messages they receive, and whether editing activity increases as a result of active coaching.

Fundraiser

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The annual Wikimedia fundraiser launched on November 16th with over $1M donated on the first day. $10,433,402.89 were donated by the end of the month, from a total of 545,362 donations. The significant increase in contributors across more regions of the world can largely be attributed to the increase in the number of currencies Wikimedia is able to accept this year - more than 80.

In addition to the annual personal appeal from Jimmy Wales, this year's fundraising campaign features new voices, including community members and Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Compared with the previous year, four times as many volunteers are contributing to the translation of banners and appeals, including over 700 logged out users (readers?). The Article Feedback Tool enables anyone to rate the quality of the translations.

 
Discussion of the image filter in Hanover

Sue Gardner visits European Wikimedia chapters

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Award of Wiki Loves Monuments and Heritage Day. November 17th, 2011 in the offices of the Federal Monuments Office Vienna, Hofburg

In November, the Wikimedia Foundation sent a delegation to Europe, in which Executive Director Sue Gardner, her assistant James Owen, General Counsel Geoff Brigham and Community Organizer Maryana Pinchuk visited seven cities in three weeks. The main purpose of the trip was to spend time with chapters, with the goal of listening to chapters' hopes and fears, particularly with regards to fundraising and funds dissemination. A secondary purpose was to spend time with the German community, with the goal of improving mutual understanding particularly with regard to ongoing controversy about the possible implementation of a personal image filter.

The trip also involved a number of other activities, such as meet-ups, talks and media interviews. The delegation visited Paris, Utrecht, London, Vienna, Hanover and Berlin. The trip included meetings and/or meals with five chapter boards, as well as four community meet-ups, and a variety of other small informal gatherings with chapters people and/or editors. The group visited the UK National Archives with members of the UK Board, and helped present awards to the winners of the Wiki Loves Monuments competition in Vienna. Sue Gardner gave three presentations, to the UK Board, the German chapter, and to Imperial College in London, and did six media interviews, in London and Berlin.

The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful to the boards of Wikimédia France, Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Österreich and Wikimedia Deutschland, for their hospitality, openness and candour. Our particular thanks to the following individuals: Christophe Henner, Rémi Mathis, Adrienne Alix, Ziko van Dijk, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Roger Bamkin, Andrew Turvey, Andy Mabbett, Jon Davies, Fiona Apps, Marek69, Kurt Kulac, Manuel Schneider, Barbara Neubauer, Jo Pugh, Pavel Richter, Sebastian Moleski, Julia Kloppenburg and Catrin Schoneville.

Technology

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A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for November 2011 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2011/November
Department Highlights

Major news in November include:

  • The completion of the coding challenge, and two coding events in India and the UK;
  • Continued infrastructure work in our data centers to improve performance and reliability, and on the Labs project;
  • Progress on the Visual editor and its back-end;
  • New versions of the Feedback Dashboard and the Upload Wizard, bringing new and long-awaited features;
  • Fundraising engineering going full-swing, in parallel with the annual fundraising campaign;
  • The final release of MediaWiki 1.18.0.

Operations

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  • Data Centers — Eight new database servers for external storage were deployed in our Ashburn and Tampa data centers (EQIAD and SDTPA), to retire about 30 aging servers. The goal was to add capacity, improve performance, consume less power and provide cross data-center data recovery and redundancy. This gave us back one rack of server space, which is significant given the space constraint at SDTPA. In Amsterdam, SSDs were added to the Squid servers to improve read performance, and we upgraded the core switch. In Tampa, 66 servers were retired, donated and shipped to various non-profits. More generally, our configuration management tool Puppet was upgraded and deployed to all of our lab and production servers.
  • Wikimedia Labs — OpenStack Nova was upgraded from cactus to diablo. A GlusterFS filesystem was added on all compute nodes via puppet, to act as storage for the instances. A default sudo policy was also added for instances: project members now have sudo permissions, excluding global projects. Shared home directories are also available in a per project manner. 15 projects and 36 instances have been created, and 46 people have been given Labs accounts so far.

Features Engineering

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  • Visual editor — Trevor Parscal fixed issues blocking the synchronization of structural edits to the user interface, refactored and cleaned up the code, and mapped out tasks and features to be supported. He also finished the document transaction functionality and made progress on an undo/redo system. Roan Kattouw added tests, rewrote some code to make the tests pass, and fixed a number of bugs and issues, notably in Internet Explorer. Inez Korczynski continued to work on content insertion, deletion and selection and fixed numerous bugs. Gabriel Wicke improved WikiDom compatibility, and evaluated alternatives to the PEG parser for robust larger-scale parsing. He defined an interface between the tokenizer and HTML parsers and started to improve the parser test system. He also implemented several wikitext features (lists, nowiki, pre, italics, bold) as token stream transformations.
  • Feedback Dashboard — Dario Taraborelli updated the research page dedicated to MoodBar to include responses. Benny Situ fixed bugs, and implemented and deployed the feedback response API. Rob Moen deployed in-line reply functionality, giving experienced editors the ability to respond to MoodBar feedback while staying on the dashboard, as well as bug fixes and admin action enhancements. (see also "Highlights" section above)
  • UploadWizard — Neil Kandalgaonkar and Ian Baker deployed a set of important improvements, including multi-file selection for browsers which support it, custom wikitext licenses, an improved licensing workflow, basic support for location data extraction, and more. Support for chunked uploading (which improves reliability of large file transfers) was temporarily backed out and is still being worked on.

Mobile

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  • MobileFrontend — Phil Chang announced that all Wikimedia wikis would see their mobile version converted to the new mobile platform by the end of November, and explained how to make home pages compatible with it. This prompted a discussion about the design choice to hide any content on the main page that isn't specifically labeled for mobile display. Mobile was also a focus of the India hackathon, during which new features were developed.

Special projects

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  • 2011 Fundraiser — The annual fundraiser launched, with support for 76 new credit card currencies, including some which have been long-desired: Rupees, Russian Rubles, and Brazilian Reals. The fundraising engineering team added support to the DonationInterface extension for JCB credit card donations, BPay in Australia, three new real time banking options including iDeal, direct debit for six countries, manual bank transfers in more than 50 countries, and Webmoney, with more on the way. DonationInterface also benefited from enhancements to the RapidHtml credit card form templating system. From an operations perspective, databases were migrated for increased capacity and stability and the data center failover capacity was consolidated. We also added the ability to have translated 'thank you' emails. The ContributionReporting extension was enhanced to allow custom selection of fundraising years to display, but the entire feature was disabled after it caused a brief site outage due to cache stampeding. The FundraiserLandingPage extension was developed and deployed, making it easier to dynamically construct template calls for fundraiser landing pages depending on a potential donor's country. Last, the team fixed a number of new bugs and issues, surfaced because of the increased usage of the donation pipeline.

Platform engineering

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  • MediaWiki 1.18 — Developers sprinted to fix the last blocker bugs, and the ones uncovered by testers. Sam Reed announced the first beta release and first release candidate of MediaWiki 1.18. Mark Hershberger followed up on comments on the English Wikipedia's Village pump related to the deployment of 1.18, bugs reported in Bugzilla, and installation and upgrade reports. Sam announced the final 1.18.0 release on November 27th, as well as the 1.17.1 security release.
  • Git conversion — Chad Horohoe got a lot of help from the community on identifying unknown committers; user mapping is now complete. Gitorious was installed on a virtual machine, and a test git conversion of the MediaWiki code repository is now imminent. Meanwhile, there have also been discussions about e-mail aliases for LDAP users, to avoid disclosing private e-mail addresses. Chad and Brion Vibber worked on changes to the development workflow introduced by the move to git (e.g., when continuous integration tests get run).
  • SwiftMedia — Ben Hartshorne set up the initial development environment for Engineering to have a platform on which to test and continue development of the SwiftMedia extension. Ben and Mark Bergsma continue to do performance testing on Swift prior to using it in production. Aaron Schulz started to refactor the FileBackend extension, a requirement to using SwiftMedia.

Research

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  • We held the 7th Research Committee Meeting (full minutes are available at [1]), where a proposal was discussed to launch a Wikimedian in Residence program targeting scientific institutions, modeled around GLAM and supported by the RCom. RCom members Daniel Mietchen, Yaroslav Blanter and Cheryl Moy are leading this initiative.
  • Former Summer of Research fellow Melanie Kill [2] joined the Research Committee as a full member in November.
  • We reviewed and supported research proposals on an ongoing basis [3] and provided technical support for the launch of a large-scale study by Harvard University and Sciences Po, due to go live in December. The launch of the study will be announced on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog. [4]
  • We published the 5th issue of the monthly Wikimedia Research Newsletter (WRN), covering 13 scholarly works on Wikimedia projects published recently [5].

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Meetings/Meeting_2011-11-03

[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Drkill

[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects

[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Dynamics_of_Online_Interactions_and_Behavior

[5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2011-11-28

Community

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Department Highlights
  • Launched Fundraiser with $1M +/day on the first 3 days (see "Highlights" section and details below)
  • New editor feedback response team created (see "Highlights" section)

Projects

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Editor Retention
  • In early November, Steven and Maryana invited community members to join a new taskforce dedicated to answering the feedback of new editors that appears on English Wikipedia via the experimental FeedbackDashboard created by the features team (see also "Highlights" section). This is the first time experienced Wikipedians may find the real-time feedback of new editors aggregated in a single place ready for help.[1] With more than 30 team members, we are still far from our goal of getting a response to every single piece of feedback, so please join! [2]
  • Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling expanded their A/B testing of the content of template notifications to new editors,[3][4] including with new community-created templates and with the extremely active XLinkBot, which reverts users adding potentially inappropriate external links on English Wikipedia. The first month-long test in Portuguese Wikipedia was also wrapped up and data analysis begun, and the testing project was also expanded to the German Wikipedia [5]. Last but not least, plans were laid on the English Wikipedia for a test of the automated archiving of old, stale notifications on the talk pages of shared or dynamic IP addresses of anonymous editors. This project is designed to see whether providing a clean slate on the talk pages can increase account registrations and constructive edits from shared IP addresses.
  • Maryana accompanied Sue Gardner and Geoff Brigham on their tour of Europe (see "Highlights" section), where she met with Wikimedians in the Netherlands, UK, Austria, and Germany and started a dialog with those communities about expanding editor retention initiatives.

1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/30/helping-new-editors-by-responding-to-their-feedback/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_editor_feedback/Response_team

3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:UWTEST

5. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Projekt_Warnhinweise

Fundraiser

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Fundraiser
  • The 2011 fundraiser launched on November 16, bringing in over USD 1.2 million in the first 24 hours.
  • Donations have been received from 205 countries and territories, from donors from 122 languages, in 66 currencies.
  • The fundraiser launched with banners featuring Jimmy Wales, before starting a phase with appeals from editors. Testing continues, see updates on Meta (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011 )
Fundraiser Translations
  • The fundraiser launched this month with full-force localization, and Jon Harald Søby's fellowship project has boosted translation participation four-fold for the annual fundraiser so far. 1371 translators are actively contributing to the effort (including 795 IPs), which is over 1000 more than the 361 active translators who contributed in all of 2010.
  • We have translations in 112 languages (compared to 83 languages in 2010), and 461 translations have been completed and published so far - this is more than all translations that were begun but not necessarily completed in 2010 combined.
Major Gifts and Foundations
  • Announced a $500,000 general support grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation
  • Submitted reports for the Hewlett Foundation and the Stanton Foundation

Fellowship Program

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  • In preparation for a December recruitment drive to bring new fellows for 2012, program pages and process have been overhauled.[1]
  • Planning and discussions are underway for WP:TEAHOUSE, a fellowship project to be piloted in early 2012 and aimed at improving new editor retention by modeling a social approach to newbie support, help and socialization into the community distinct from existing 1-on-1 models and self-support options. Women are a particular target for this peer and group-mentorship style support system. [2]
  • See Fundraiser translations section above for updates on Jon's fellowship project [3]

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

2. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Teahouse

3. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011/Translation

Global Development

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Department Highlights
  • WikiConference India (see general "Highlights" section)
  • Visits to Asia for chapter development and mobile partnerships

Grants Awarded and Executed

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East Asia Visit

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Brazil Catalyst [1]

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Research on Portuguese Wikipedia

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Finalizing the Portuguese Wikipedia research project, we have come out with a few conclusions and recommendations, which can be seen in more detail here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Portuguese_Wikipedia_trends_and_behavior/Suggestions

  1. Make editing more fun!
  2. Welcome new users
  3. Improve techniques to fight vandalism
  4. Re-evaluate methods of dealing with conflict

Hiring National Program Director

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We opened the position for the national program director: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/RFP/Brazil_National_Program_Director

We are working in conjunction with recruiter Michael Page in order to fill this position, with an anticipated start date mid-January 2012.

Arabic Catalyst

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Wikimania Scholarships

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Scholarship committee is beginning to kick off work again. Goal is to broadcast the scholarships more broadly and try to get increased applications from developing countries.

Mobile and Business Development

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  • Completed Proof of Concept SMS/USSD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Service_Data) testing on Tata Docomo's network, with the help of the Praekelt Foundation, at the Mumbai Hackathon
  • Other tech dev for partners accomplished at Hackathon with help from India community developers: localization of Android app into Turkish & Russian; localized landing pages on mobile; frames on mobile site for operator partners on Wikipedia zero
  • In discussions with multiple operators in India and SE Asia to extend free access to Wikipedia to their customers throughout those regions. Looking at launching pilots beginning of Q1

Offline Wikipedia

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  • Significant volunteer recruitment effort took place at the WikiConference and Hackathon in India.
  • Usability testing on Kiwix (offline reader) identified a few key areas of needed improvement
  • Met with potential partners throughout India about distribution of offline Wikipedia throughout education system. Of note:
    • Pratham Foundation - install offline Wikipedia into their computer labs; incorporate into the curriculum for the "Education for Education" which is training for their volunteers
    • Akshara Foundation - install offline Wikipedia into their computer labs and incorporate into their library lessons
    • Aakash tablet - working with government and manufacturers on how to incorporate offline Wikipedia into the distribution of the $35 tablet

Global development research

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  • Editor survey version 2.0 is in translation, and will be launched next month. We worked out an agreement with Qualtrics -- a proprietary survey vendor in absence of Lime Survey. Ayush is working on programming the survey, along with two interns.
  • India + Brazil mobile report is finished. We are working on making the findings available in a wiki format. Parul and Mani did a presentation to all the stakeholders of the research. At the India hackathon, developers worked on creating a new landing page for India for mobile site as per the recommendation of the report.
  • Mobile survey data is being cleaned.
  • Mani + Ayush continued to share findings from the readers study on the blog. http://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/readers-survey/
  • See "Brazil Catalyst Project" for the Portuguese Wikipedia research summary

Wikipedia Education Program

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  • The team – together with volunteers in different parts of the world – held the second metrics and activities meeting for the Wikipedia Education Program. All participants shared the lessons and best practices of the past couple of months.
  • Annie Lin and Frank Schulenburg are working on preparing the start of a pilot in Cairo, Egypt. They reached out to the local community of editors on the Arabic Wikipedia, explaining the concept of the pilot and asking for feedback. Annie also reached out to a number of professors at different universities in Cairo in preparation for a trip to Egypt in early December.
  • Ayush Khanna created a survey to be conducted among the students who participated in the Education Program in fall 2011. The survey has been sent to students in India; students in the U.S. and in Canada will answer the survey questions in December.
  • Led by Rod Dunican, the team is working on a revised version of the orientation for Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors and Regional Ambassadors. A new orientation for professors participating in the program will be added to the list of training modules. All training modules will be hosted on the outreach wiki, so they can be modified and adapted to the local needs.
  • LiAnna Davis and Frank Schulenburg are working with design strategist David Peters and Head of Communications Jay Walsh on a new visual identity for the Wikipedia Education Program. The visual identity will follow the open approach of the Wikipedia Ten campaign.
  • Annie Lin hired Jami Mathewson. As the U.S. Education Program Associate, Jami will facilitate the growth and improvement of our activities in the United States, to make sure that the U.S. wing of the Global Education Program remains high-quality. In particular, she will work through the Wikipedia Regional Ambassadors – volunteer leaders in the Wikipedia Ambassador program – to both deepen and broaden the support that we give to professors, Campus Ambassadors, and Online Ambassadors regarding Wikipedia's use in the classroom.
  • LiAnna Davis and Frank Schulenburg interviewed experienced Wikipedia editors from India and educated WMF staff about India as part of the post-mortem analysis of the India Education Program. Campus Ambassador Abhishek Suryawanshi volunteered to conduct interviews with students, professors, and Campus Ambassadors in Pune. Based on these interviews, LiAnna Davis worked on an analysis of the issues encountered during the Pune pilot.
  • Frank Schulenburg and Rod Dunican provided the Wikimedia Tech Team with a requirements document for engineering support. After a meeting with members of the Tech Team, Frank is working with tech to build MediaWiki extensions that enhance our ability to measure the outcome of the program and that will also improve the on-wiki experience for professors and students.
  • Rod Dunican, Jami Mathewson and Frank Schulenburg met professors and students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). NJIT is planning start a pilot in spring 2012 in order to explore the option of further institutionalizing the program later that year.

India Programs

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Global Education Program

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  • Students in the program have now stopped editing.
    • Most classes at Symbiosis School of Economics (SSE) reached their deadlines and have finished working on their wiki assignments.
    • Because a lot of students were still carrying out some forms of plagiarism, we had to conclude the program at College of Engineering at Pune (CoEP).
  • We are currently working on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the pilot. Looking for patterns across classrooms, batches, schools etc.
    • Qualitative Analysis: Tory Read is coming to Delhi & Pune to interview Campus Ambassadors, students, professors, involved in the India Education Program (IEP). She will also be interviewing several community members and English Wikipedia admins to do a thorough analysis of the pilot.
    • Quantitative Analysis: Frank's research team will help us put together numbers that will be used to draw out qualitative analysis.
  • Will be using our analysis to inform the way forward.
  • Online Ambassadors are working on the review project - working on articles that IEP students have written and removing any copyvios or poor quality content.
  • The community would like Contributor Copyright Investigations (CCI) to take over the review project. They believe that CCI being the expert can do a better job in cleaning up the articles than the Online Ambassadors, although they acknowledge that what the Online Ambassadors have already done will be very valuable to the CCI process and to Wikipedia in general.

Communications

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November saw much of Communications work focussed on preparations for the launch of the 8th annual fundraiser, including press release work, media strategy, and fielding a wide array of media requests (see storylines below). Work proceeded (and is now almost complete!) on the 2010-11 WMF Annual Report. Considerable communications support to the important positioning around the proposed internet blacklist bill being discussed in Washington, for Sue's visit to Europe, and also considerable work on hiring for the manager, global communications post now that Moka Pantages has moved on from WMF.

Major announcements

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Wikimedia kicks off its eighth annual fundraiser (November 16)

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikipedia%E2%80%99s_Contributors_and_Authors_at_the_Center_of_Wikimedia%E2%80%99s_Eighth_Annual_Fundraiser

Brin Wojcicki Foundation Announces $500,000 Grant to Wikimedia (November 18)

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Brin_Wojcicki_Foundation_Announces_$500,000_Grant_to_Wikimedia

Major Storylines through August

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SOPA/Internet blacklist bill

Wikimedia announced its opposition to an internet blacklist bill being reviewed in Washington DC in November. WMF joined dozens of other popular web properties and free-culture organizations in protesting the destructive bill, and the topic received wide (and continuing coverage) through November - mostly opposing and criticizing the bill.

Wikimedia launches its 8th annual fundraiser

Wikimedia's annual campaign launch drew considerable media interest, particularly this year in the social media space. Though the campaign kicked off with several days of record-breaking successes, there was less coverage of the kickoff than in previous years. A related announcement of a $500K grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation garnered far more positive and highly visible coverage. Significant social media coverage focussed on the quirks of the Jimmy Wales (and/or Brandon Harris) image placement atop article names.

http://allthingsd.com/20111118/wikipedia-gets-500k-from-brin-and-wojcicki-but-what-it-really-wants-is-small-donors/

http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/11/18/googles-brin-wife-donate-500000-to-keep-wikipedia-going/

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/27/creepipedia/

Wikiconference Mumbai and maps protests

The first-ever major wiki conference in India kicked off in November, and resulted in considerable media coverage - much of it focussing on the presence of youth protesters challenging the presence of what they believe to be illegal maps and renditions of India. Most coverage was fairly balanced of the protests, and focussed on Jimmy Wales opening keynote insisting that Wikipedia is a place for sharing viewpoints and staying neutral.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2640098.ece

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15803308

http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/mumbai/WikiConference-concludes-with-a-call-for-more-editors/Article1-771925.aspx

Other worthwhile reads

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Sue's travels in Europe (see also "Highlights" section) resulted in some great coverage in the UK and Germany:

On BBC Radio 4's World at One

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qptc

Detailed interview from Zeit Online

http://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2011-11/sue-gardner-interview

From Heise online

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Wikipedia-Lexikon-sucht-Frau-und-einfacheren-Zugang-fuer-Autoren-1382960.html

From Berliner Morgenpost

http://www.morgenpost.de/newsticker/dpa_nt/infoline_nt/computer_nt/article1834082/Neuer-Wikipedia-Editor-soll-mehr-Frauen-locken.html
Other reads

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/st_essay_wikipediawonders/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-02/wikipedia-india-office-will-help-boost-fundraising-founder-says.html

http://www.economist.com/node/21536580

Wikipedia Signpost

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WMF Blog posts

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http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/

Media Contact

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http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#November_2011

Human Resources

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HR has accelerated recruiting as promised by adding another recruiter to the mix. Karen Chelini is a very experienced recruiter, working with the team primarily on the tech team's hires. She is a contractor and will be with us through January.

We have several ongoing searches right now, including the CTCO role, that are turning up some great candidates, so we hope to have more hires rolling in soon. We continue to fill open slots, and this month there were several key hires that we put a lot of work into. Welcome all!

We also reviewed and approved a new benefits broker for the Foundation who has helped us find most cost efficient, and better, pricing for our employee benefits. This is especially important as we grow not only to remain competitive in the market, but to also ensure that we are in compliance with labor laws that may have different requirements depending on the size of our organization.

New Perm Position Hires
  • Karyn Gladstone, Director of Community Operations (Community)
  • Yue Qiang (Benny) Situ, Features Software Developer Back-end (Technology)
  • Andrew White, Office IT Manager (Administration)
New Contractors
  • Karen Chelini
  • Miguel Fonseca
  • Diogo Gouveia
  • Jami Mathewson
  • Rob Moen
  • Sara Oliveira
  • Linda Pennington
  • Crystal Shackleford
  • Gayle Young
Contract Extended
  • Aaron Halfaker
  • Sumana Harihareswara
  • Rayne MacGeorge
  • Jonathan Morgan
  • Guillaume Paumier
  • Neel Punatar
  • Angela Robeson
  • Heather Walls
  • Daniel Zahn
Departed
  • Moka Pantages
  • Carrie Smith
Contract Ended
  • Daniela Fiejó
  • Anthony Riley
  • Sara Yap
New Postings
  • Mobile Partner Development Technical Manager
  • Director of Human Resources
RFPs
  • Brazil Education Program Contractor
  • Brazil National Program Director
  • Global Education Program Online Communications Contractor

Total Employee Count

November Plan: 108, November Filled: 3, November Attrition: 2
YTD Filled: 24; YTD Attrition: 8, Actual: 90

Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 27

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

Finance and Administration

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  • The audited financial statements of the Wikimedia Foundation and frequently asked questions for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2011 were posted to the Wikimedia Foundation website.
  • Andrew White has joined the team as the Manager of Office Information Technology
  • Getting ready for the Finance office to take over payroll from Human Resources as of the first payroll in January with ADP as our new payroll provider
  • Leslie has begun the upgrading conference room R33 on the 3rd floor to make it more usable for the Technology team.
  • Brittany (a work-study student) has begun the organization of the Foundation library to make it more usable.
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  • General Counsel traveled with Sue in Europe to learn more about chapters and communities.
  • Investigating the suspicious deaths of thousands of turkeys in the United States near the end of the month
  • Engaging in a privacy review with the possibility of updating our privacy policy
  • Interviewing for our legal internship program for the Spring semester
  • Starting review of legal issues related to setting up in Brazil
  • Working on internal governance efficiencies with Finance
  • C&D program for trademark enforcement
  • Engagement of pro-bono counsel for maintenance of 501(c)(3) status and corporate governance
  • Interesting movies trademark licenses issued (e.g., Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Friends with Benefits, Seven Psychopaths)
  • Strong support of fundraiser as well as work on Brazil and India catalysts
  • Ongoing implementation of 2011-2012 legal strategy
  • number of contracts signed - 12
  • number of trademark requests - 7
approved - 2
denied - 1
approval not needed - 1
pending - 3

Visitors and Guests

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  1. Susan Lyster (Egencia)
  2. Beverly Ho (Thoughtworks)
  3. Hai Ton (Thoughtworks)
  4. Tom Staut (CEO, Global Collect)
  5. Pier Iberti (Global Collect)
  6. Carl Miller (Global Collect)
  7. Patrick Dennis (Paul Hastings)
  8. Benjamin Mako Hill (Advisory Board Member)
  9. Newyorkbrad (ArbCom)
  10. Coren (ArbCom)
  11. Karen Rustad (author of a paper on outreach and diversity in FOSS communities)
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