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Wikimedia Foundation Report, September 2014

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of September (October 2, 2014)
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Global unique visitors for August:

418 million (+1.3% compared with July; -15.8% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects, not including mobile devices; comScore will release September data later in October)

Page requests for September:

23.129 billion (+9.4% compared with August; +28.5% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation content projects including mobile access, but excluding Wikidata and the Wikipedia main portal page.)

Active Registered Editors for August 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

78,645 (+3.4% compared with July / +2.4% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects):

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

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Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of August 31, 2014
 
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of August 31, 2014

(Financial information is only available through August 2014 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date August 31, 2014.

Revenue 6,852,023
Expenses:
 Engineering Group 3,311,321
 Fundraising Group 480,442
 Grantmaking Group 465,676
 Grants 226,245
 Communications Group 193,662
 Governance Group 171,443
 Legal/Community Advocacy Group 547,370
 Finance/HR/Admin Group 1,836,578
Total Expenses 7,232,737
Total deficit (−380,714)
in US dollars
  • Revenue for the month of August is $3.87MM versus plan of $2.00MM, approximately $1.87MM or 93% over plan.
  • Year-to-date revenue is $6.85MM versus plan of $4.01MM, approximately $2.84MM or 71% over plan.
  • Expenses for the month of August is $4.25MM versus plan of $5.26MM, approximately $1.01MM or 19% under plan, primarily due to lower capital expenditures, internet hosting expenses, grants, outside contract services, personnel expenses, and travel & conference expenses offset by higher accounting and legal fees.
  • Year-to-date expenses is $7.23MM versus plan of $9.12MM, approximately $1.89MM or 21% under plan, primarily due to lower legal fees, capital expenditures, grants, outside contract services, personnel expenses, and travel & conference expenses.
  • Cash and Investments - $46.84MM as of August 31, 2014.


Highlights

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Beta test of HHVM

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After several months of preparation by WMF engineers, editors were invited to beta-test Wikimedia servers running on HHVM, the alternative runtime environment for PHP that speeds up MediaWiki. It decreases the loading time for any page viewed while the user is logged in, and for saving pages, whether the user is logged in or not. To make it easier to find bugs in advance of deployment to all servers, edits made via HHVM were tagged with a "HHVM" label in the edit history.

Greek Wikipedia user wins key hearing in court case

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Supported by the Foundation's Legal Fees Assistance Program, Greek Wikipedia user Diu won a key hearing in a lawsuit brought by Greek politician and academic Theodore Katsanevas. The dispute involves what was written in the first will of the late Andreas Papandreou, former father-in-law of Mr. Katsanevas and former Prime Minister of Greece. The court declared that the content appearing in the Wikipedia article did not differ from the content of the will and that the formulation of the article did not indicate an intent to disparage the reputation or honor of Mr. Katsanevas.

Community consultation in Brazil

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The Foundation's Grantmaking department participated in a community consultation on the future of Wikimedia work in Brazil, where the Foundation had been funding a one-year project with local partner Ação Educativa since 2013.

Damon Sicore joins WMF as Vice President of Engineering

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At the end of September, Damon Sicore joined the Foundation in the newly created role of Vice President of Engineering, reporting to Executive Director Lila Tretikov. Simultaneously, the Foundation's technical department was split into separate Product and Engineering departments.

Engineering

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A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for September 2014 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/September
Department Highlights

Major news in September includes:

  • a call for candidates for the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women;
  • a roundtable discussion between the Language engineering team and editors from the Catalan language Wikipedia, focusing on the Content Translation tool.

Mobile Apps

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In September, the Mobile Apps Team released a new version of the iOS app containing the Nearby feature which shows you articles about things that are near your location, and a references panel that pops up whenever you tap a reference. The team also released an iOS 8 compatibility build to market, and spent time performing code quality improvements and refactoring on both the iOS and Android apps.

Mobile Web

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This month the Mobile Web team focused on the first prototype of WikiGrok, a new contribution feature that asks users who are reading Wikipedia articles to help add Wikidata content that is missing about the article subject. Over the course of the month, we built and user-tested the first experimental interface for allowing users to input Wikidata: a simple binary question mode that provides the user with a suggested occupation on biographies that are missing this information in Wikidata but contain a possible occupation in the Wikipedia article. In this early test phase, we are storing the replies in a separate database, not pushing to Wikidata. We plan to add suggestions for more Wikidata fields and test this version against a slightly more complex tagging interface in beta in October.

Flow

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In September, the Flow team enabled new test pages on the French and Hebrew Wikipedia. The French test is for the Forum des Nouveaux, a help space for new contributors (similar to the Teahouse on the English Wikipedia). The Forum des Nouveaux hosts reached out to the Flow team after Wikimania, excited to try out the new discussions system. The Hebrew Wikipedia test is helping the team diagnose problems for Right-to-Left languages, and general internationalization issues.

The team also refined the new Echo notifications functionality, with lots of feedback from contributors on mediawiki.org and the English Wikipedia. New topic notifications are now bundled in Echo, and we fixed several bugs related to the behavior of the Alerts and Messages tabs, and getting excess mention notifications.

VisualEditor

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The team working on VisualEditor expanded browser support, improved some features, and fixed nearly 60 bugs and tickets.

Users of Internet Explorer 10, who we were previously preventing from using VisualEditor due to some major bugs, will now be able to use VisualEditor; this follows on from Internet Explorer 11 support last month. When editing a template with a required field, VisualEditor now warns you to avoid leaving it blank, and you can now create auto-numbered links using VisualEditor.

Improvements and updates were made to a number of interface messages as part of our work with translators to improve the software for all users, based on feedback from users and user testing. We made progress on table structure editing and auto-filled citations, both of which will be coming soon. The deployed version of the code was updated five times in the regular release cycle.

SUL finalization

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In September, the team wrapped up the feature development for SUL finalisation. The steward end of the rename request form is outstanding and will be finished in October. In October, the team is planning to proceed into deployment and testing of the features.

Phabricator migration

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phabricator.wikimedia.org was set up with tickets imported from the previous Labs instance (public registration will be enabled once all remaining tasks have been sorted out). Restricting access to Phabricator tasks based on project membership was implemented. Inbound email was configured so Phabricator can let you interact with external (non-Phabricator) users via email. Furthermore, we improved the Phabricator documentation and help and showed the very basics of Phabricator in a video. A new Phabricator test instance was also set up at https://phab-01.wmflabs.org/.

Metrics and dashboards standardization

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We completed the definitions, documentation and requirements for a new set of metrics to be implemented in Vital Signs. We completed a first draft of a page view definition, which is currently being discussed. We supported the mobile team with baseline traffic reports for Apps and Mobile Web.

Content API

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September saw a lot of activity on the RESTBase storage and API service. A new 'pagecontent' composite bucket type using revisioned blob buckets was introduced. This uses the by-now fairly rich table storage backend to provide functionality similar to MediaWiki's revision table, and supports any number of revisioned types of content (like HTML, wikitext, JSON metadata) associated with each revision. Work on secondary index updates continued at full steam, and is now close to being merged.

Fundraising

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Department highlights

The collective fundraising team raised $11 million in Q1.

Major Gifts and Foundations

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  • MGF team held a successful fundraising event at the main branch of New York Public Library in New York City.
  • We received a $5 million, 5 year general support grant from an anonymous donor.

Online Fundraising

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  • The online fundraising team ran full-scale campaigns in the Netherlands and Austria. We ran an email campaign in Italy and prepared for an Italian banner campaign. Low-level banner tests continued world-wide throughout September. Approximately $3.5 million USD was raised in September through these campaigns (preliminary numbers as donations are still settling).
  • The team prepared translations of fundraising messages into multiple languages for upcoming international banner campaigns. If you would like to help with the translation process, please get involved.

Grantmaking

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Department highlights
  • Community consultation on Future of Wikimedia work in Brazil.
  • A Gender Gap Strategy page has been created on Meta, listing initiatives prioritized at the Wikimania strategy session, and inviting signups for the teams being formed to work on each initiative.
  • Over 40 proposal drafts were submitted to IEG during September's open call. Everyone is invited to share feedback on proposals during the community comments period, October 1-20.
  • Project and Event Grant proposal and report forms have been revamped.
  • 12 organizations are confirmed eligible to submit Annual Plan Grant proposals by the 1 October proposal deadline.
  • The Evaluation portal on Meta has new resources for program and project leaders in the Wikimedia movement. In a context where Global Metrics are now in effect for any ongoing grant, these new tools will help in report writing and bringing the stories forward. Everyone can now consult Measures for Evaluation and Quantitative vs Qualitative.

Annual Plan Grants program

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  • Eligibility confirmed and announced on 15 September: 12 organizations are eligible (WMAT, WMAR, WMCH, WMCAT, WMDE, WMEE, WMIL, WMNL, WMRS, WMSE, WMUA, WMUK) and 3 are not eligible at this time (WMIN, WMHU, WMHK).
  • New version of the Staff Proposal Assessments Form is finalized, developed in consultation with the FDC.
  • A pilot program for multiyear grants is being launched, and included with the new version of the proposal form.
  • 2012-2013 Round 2 impact reports were submitted on 28 September: WMNO, WMFR. Reports will be reviewed in the coming months.

Project and Event Grants

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Wikipedia Schools in Athens
  • 6 new requests were funded in September 2014.
  • PEG proposal and report forms have been revamped. A new Probox has been implemented to better handle structured data, some less-useful proposal sections have been removed to save proposers' time, and Global Metrics have been included. See these proposal and report templates for the new formats.

Grants funded in September 2014

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  • Iberoconf 2014: To support the organization of Iberoconf 2014 in Buenos Aires, Argentina with over 13 Iberocoop countries participating.
  • Egyptian WikiWomen Prize: To support an online writing competition in Egypt focused on increasing female participation and creating content about women.
  • Athens Wikipedia School: To support four "Wikipedia Schools" in Athens, Greece, training students and adults how to edit Wikipedia.
  • Project Québec: To support Wikisource outreach activities in Québec, Canada.
  • WLM Spain 2014: To support the organization of Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Spain.
  • WLM BeLux 2014: To support the organization of Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Belgium and Luxembourg.

Individual Engagement Grants

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  • The round 2 2014 Open Call for proposals ended September 30th. Over 40 proposal drafts were submitted. Eligibility checks begin October 1, and the community comments period on eligible proposals will run from October 1-20. Everyone is invited to share feedback on proposals before the committee begins its formal review on October 21.
  • We've published key take-aways from the past round of IEG proposal submission and review. Overall, the process seems to be working well, and we've identified a few areas for future improvements. Motivations of community commenters are included in this report for the first time.
  • A new proposal scoring tool is under development to replace the use of Google Forms for scoring IEG proposals. The open-source tool is based on the Wikimania Scholarships scoring application, and will be beta-tested by the round 2 2014 IEG review committee.
  • In other Individual Grants news, the Arabic microgrants book pilot is coming to a close and a report is in development for publication in early October. Shipping books across countries in the Arabic-speaking world has proved to be quite difficult, and further consultation with the community is needed to determine future directions for the Arabic Wikipedia Library.

Travel & Participation Support

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  • 4 new requests were funded and 2 reports were accepted in September 2014.

Requests awarded in September 2014

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Reports accepted in September 2014

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Wikimania Scholarships

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  • Through the Learning & Evaluation team, we have begun analyzing the effort and resulting impact from the 2014 Wikimania scholarships. This analysis will be based on the survey of applicants that was conducted in September, interviews with staff and committee members involved in the process, and the 2014 reports from Wikimania scholars. Results and recommendations will be published for further discussion in late October, paving the way for improvements to the 2015 scholarships process.

Wikipedia Education Program

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Global Education Team

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Floor Koudijs was confirmed as Senior Manager and team leader of the Wikipedia Education Program at the Wikimedia Foundation. Floor was named interim Senior Manager for the Education Program in July 2014.

Wikipedia Education Collaborative

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The Wikipedia Education Collaborative welcomed 1 new member. Fernando de la Rosa Morena will represent Uruguay, and will join us in Edinburgh in early November for the Collaborative's next in-person meeting.

Arab world programs

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  • Summer editing in Egypt came to an end this month, with 155 students contributing over 11 million bytes of new content to the Arabic Wikipedia for the period from March through September 2014. Wikipedia editing was extended through the summer because of a shortened semester in Egypt in the Spring due to unexpected changes in the academic calendar.
  • The committee that is being formed to run the Wikipedia Education Program in Jordan had a second organizational meeting, bringing together professors, student volunteers and local Wikipedians to guide the upcoming activities for the academic year.
  • Local volunteers organized a two-day workshop in Amman, Jordan, to train teachers and professors about Wikipedia and get them involved in the education program at the high school and university level.

The Wikipedia Library

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  • After running as an Individual Engagement Grant for the past year, The Wikipedia Library has come on board with WMF under a 6-month contract starting this September. The contract will fund Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi) full-time, and Alex Stinson (Sadads) half-time, to continue their work expanding the number and global reach of partnerships that give active editors free access to reliable sources through donations from publishers, journals, and research databases.
  • TWL received a pilot donation from leading academic publisher Elsevier to distribute 30 college-edition accounts in the areas of physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities (signups coming soon).
  • TWL received a very broad donation from top German publisher De Gruyter which will give 1000 qualifying editors access to all of its online resources, with more available upon demand (signups coming soon).
  • To help process these and other partnerships, we brought on 3 new volunteer coordinators to manage account signups and distribution: Philg88, HazelAB, and Gamaliel. They are being on boarded by TWL's new Head of Volunteer Coordination, Nikkimaria.

Communications

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The September issue of the education newsletter, This Month In Education, featured an update about The Wikipedia Education Collaborative along with articles from education programs in Sweden, Czech Republic, Mexico, and Germany. Also included in this issue was media coverage of education initiatives in the Philippines, Argentina, and Brazil.


Learning & Evaluation

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  • Published results of IEG round 1 2014 post-decision survey.
  • Started working on a 'dashboard for grantmaking and evaluation metrics.
  • Activated Google OAuth on Fluxx, and fixed a few remaining issues and bugs.
  • Closed the Wikimania scholarship survey and started working on its results analysis.
  • Initiated a research study on content gap around global regions (Global North vs. Global South) and gender gap.
  • Moved the Global South user survey questions to meta, and launching the translation phase.
  • Started working on the Global South strategy by performing internal interview and data collection.
  • Concluded a study on using Dedoose as a qualitative data analysis tool to analyze reports from Wiki loves monuments grant reports.
  • Sati Houston has joined the Learning & Evaluation team to work on Wikimania Scholarships revamp and the Global South research mapping.


Program Evaluation & Design

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  • Launched Global Metrics, along with hangouts and IRC chats. After two years of promoting self evaluation, the Grantmaking department has worked intensely on Global Metrics, a set of core metrics that emerged as the most commonly used.
  • Launched the Round II of Data Collection. As we did during fall last year, we reach out to program and project leaders and evaluators across the movement to share the data about their programs, and help us build a bird's eye view of Wikimedia programs. Anyone interested in sharing their information can also submit reports in other formats. Reach out to eval@wikimedia.org to learn more about this.
  • Blog posts. During the past month, we focused our stories around new evaluation resources. Global Metrics for Grants: One way of doing, reporting and learning together (657 page views) focuses on the newly released set of metrics for all grant holders around the movement. We also developed learning patterns to help understand how to calculate these metrics, available on the Evaluation portal. Quantitative vs Qualitative: More friends than enemies (901 page views) addresses the differences between the two types of measures and evaluation, and gives substantial advice on how to evaluate on a mixed methods world. These two resources are particularly relevant in the new reporting the grants team is asking from the community.
  • Social Media. Twitter: 80 tweets that made 18,673 impressions, 162 engagements (37 retweets, 4 replies, 25 favorites, 43 URL click; 53 other kind of user engagement) and 26 new followers (171 total followers); Facebook: 16 posts, seen by 576 users, with 36 likes and 13 comments; Google+: 675 post views, 48 profile views, 21 engagement actions, 9 new followers (92 total followers); Youtube: 94 views, 8 subscribers.
  • Measures for Evaluation. This new resource on the Evaluation portal aims to help a program leader find the most appropriate evaluation journey to best capture the achieved results and the stories involved.
  • Quantitative vs Qualitative. This new resource on the Evaluation portal helps program and project leaders understand the importance of both types of data and evaluation methods.
  • Virtual meet-ups. During September, our team hosted Wikimetrics Overview and Setting Goals and Targets in your FDC proposal: A SMART Annual Plan Approach, now available online. The first virtual event went over Wikimetrics, the tool that allows program leaders measure the online impact their activities have on the Wikimedia projects. The second virtual event aimed at helping aiding program leaders and coordinators make an annual plan following the SMART criteria. More resources on this are available online, in the Plan section of the Evaluation portal.
  • Portal Space Metrics: In September, 351 edits were made by 11 non-WMF users to the portal main space and portal talk page, and 97 edits by 10 non-WMF editors to Grants:Learning_patterns with 9 endorsements. For page views, there were 1965 total views of the portal's main pages Portal landing page (943), News (268), Connect (263), and Grants:Learning_patterns (491).


Human Resources

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Presentation slides

We've hired a new Vice President of Engineering! Many thanks to all the staff, especially Erik Moeller, for their efforts in finding us this critical leadership role. Part of that is heavy hiring and onboarding. We finished the second cohort of our WikiLeads leadership development program, and we also conducted two strategy meetings to support the organization in thinking through our process and key issues in preparation for wider engagement. We are also undergoing our first 401k (retirement planning) audit, and also we began the data migration from Jobvite to Greenhouse as our applicant tracking system for jobs, in the hope that it will significantly help us streamline our recruiting process. We also filed our Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data with the United States government and publicizing our demographics data shortly.

September Staff Changes

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New Requisitions Filled
  • Ellery Wulczyn
  • Marti Johnson
  • Damon Sicore
  • Bartosz Dziewonski
  • Bahodir Mansurov
  • Jeff Hobson
Conversions (Contractor to Requisition)
  • Anne Gomez
  • Rachel Stallman
  • Joel Krauska
Requisition Departures
  • Steven Walling
  • Juliusz Gonera
  • Jessie Sneller (leave of absence)
  • Sumana Harihareswara
  • Benny Situ
New Interns
  • Hilary Richardson
  • Blayne Kercher
  • Camille Desai
  • Lene Gillis
  • Walter Segura
  • Oluwaseyi Olukoya
  • Mustafa Elmas
  • Athena Palijo
  • Ambrosia Lobo
New Contractors
  • Paul Campbell
  • Sati Houston
  • Shaila Nathu
  • Jake Orlowitz
  • Alex Stinson
Contracts Ended
  • Carlos Monterrey

September Statistics

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Total Requisitions Filled
August Actual: 194
August Total Plan: 217
August Filled: 9, Month Attrition: 5
FYTD Filled: 18, FYTD Attrition: 6
FY positions planned: 243 (correction)

Finance and Administration

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  • A group of fellows will be working with the CFA on preparing a financial report on the Wikimedia movement as of December 31, 2013.
  • US Trust was selected to be the 'investment advisor for the Wikimedia Foundation. They were selected from 22 responses to the RFP based on price, services, team and reporting.
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  • WMF together with Wikimedia Chile obtained a clarification from the Chilean telecommunications regulator that its Circular No. 40 did not prohibit Wikipedia Zero, as previously reported in media.
  • WMF continued support for a Greek user who won a key hearing in his defense.

Contract metrics

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  • submitted: 36
  • completed: 32

Trademark metrics

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  • submitted: 17
  • approved: 4
  • pending: 5

Domains obtained

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wikimania.org, wikimania.com

Coming & going

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  • LCA welcomes new legal interns: Hilary Richardson, Camille Desai, Blayne Kercher, and Natalie Kim.

Other activities

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  • Yana Welinder spoke about Wikipedia Zero and its Operating Principles at a panel the Internet Governance Forum.
  • Legal team worked with the Wikipedia Zero team to enable three new partnerships in the Philippines and Myanmar.
  • Yana Welinder and Stephen LaPorte wrote a guest blog for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Many thanks to Joseph Jung, former Wikimedia Legal Intern, for his help in preparing this post.
  • Yana Welinder taught two continuing legal education classes with our outside counsel Carrie L Kiedrowski at Jones Day on Brand Protection in the Digital Age.
  • WMF amended the Political and Policy Advocacy Guidelines for limited position letters.
  • Yana Welinder and Stephen LaPorte presented about trademark challenges for collaborative communities at the 2nd Thematic Conference on the Knowledge Commons at NYU Law School.
  • Legal interns prepared two new Wikilegal posts:
  • Maggie Dennis wrote a blog post about the Wikimedia Foundation’s emergency response system.
  • The Legal and Community Advocacy teams hosted a San Francisco meeting for the community administrators of the Volunteer Response Team (OTRS) and 6 of the 9 admins attended from 4 different countries. The admins were able to meet, in person, much of the staff they work with remotely on a regular basis and strategize about the help needed for important goals such as technical upgrades and agent training. The admins also got to work with each other and the CA team on ways to grow the team of agents and help the entire team work more efficently to provide the best quality service.

Communications

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After an IP from the U.S. Congress was blocked again, proving that vandalism isn’t just the stuff of summer interns, Wikimedia DC invited Congress to edit as long as it abides by policies and guidelines. DC-based media covered the exchanges with glee. A report by the UK’s Oxford Internet Institute on geographic distributions of articles underscored the unequal nature of the encyclopedia’s composition. Wikipedia Zero launched in the Philippines, bringing free Wikipedia to a 70 million person market. Traffic spikes: Wiki Loves Africa and Wiki Loves Monuments kicked off, people dumped buckets of ice over their heads and flocked to the ALS article, and WikiProjectMed translated the ENWP article on Ebola into many of the indigenous African languages of the affected regions. A debate over the fidelity of Neil deGrasse Tyson quotes led to accusations of liberal bias among the community, and Wikipedia’s most prolific editor, Justin Knapp, defended the health of the project. The team launched a weekly editor and reader profile series on the blog and attended the Clinton Global Initiative in support of the Executive Director.

Major announcements

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Major Storylines through September

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U.S. Congressional editing

Wikimedia DC reminds Congress anyone can edit, as long as they respect policy
The Hill (02 September, 2014) "Wikipedia tries to mend fences with Congress"
Nextgov (02 September, 2014) "OK, Feds: Go Ahead and Edit Wikipedia"

Unequal geographic article distribution

Oxford Internet Institute uses geotagging to assess unequal Wikipedia article distribution
The Conversation (08 September, 2014) "Why Global Contributions to Wikipedia are so Unequal"
Vox.com (14 September, 2014) "Wikipedia's geography problem: There are more articles about Antarctica than Egypt"

Wikipedia Zero launches in the Philippines

Mobile network operator Smart begins offering Wikipedia Zero
InterAksyon (04 September 2014) "Smart offers free access to Wikipedia until February next year"
Inquirer.net (05 September, 2014) "Smart subscribers may soon access Wiki for free"

Wiki Loves Africa

Wiki Loves Africa launches with focus on African cuisine
Ghana Web (15 September, 2014) "Ghana To Take Part in Wiki Loves Africa 2014"

Wiki Loves Monuments

Wiki Loves Monuments launches around the globe for 2014
htxt.africa (01 September 2014) "Help Wikimedia South Africa with photos and win prizes"
WWWhat's New? (04 September, 2014) "Wikimedia España organiza el concurso fotográfico 'Wiki Loves Monuments'"
Amateur Photographer (05 September, 2014) "Wikipedia's 'Wiki Loves Monuments' competition calls for photos of UK landmarks"

Wikipedia Ebola article translation

WikiProjectMed supports the translation of English Wikipedia's Ebola article into affected indigenous African languages
Health 24 (10 September, 2014) "Translations of Ebola health info on Wikipedia"
IT Web Africa (16 September 2014) "Wikipedia's Ebola information translated into SA languages"

Neil deGrasse Tyson & The Federalist

The Federalist magazine highlights controversy over NDG quote
The Federalist (18 September, 2014) "Why Is Wikipedia Deleting All References To Neil Tyson's Fabrication?"
Daily Kos (18 September 2014) "The Federalist vs. Wikipedia"
Yahoo! (29 September 2014) "Conservative Website 'The Federalist' Targeted for Wikipedia Deletion After Criticizing Neil DeGrasse Tyson"

Justin Knapp defends the health of English Wikipedia

Business Insider (19 September 2014) "Wikipedia's Most Prolific Editor Explains Why The Site Is Stronger Than People Realize"

Other worthwhile reads

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Scottish referendum

NPR (September 21, 2014) "A Forgotten Referendum On The Union Of Scots And English"

Wikipedia 'hivemind' study

VICE Motherboard (02 September, 2014) "An Ethnographic Study of the Wikipedia Hive Mind"

Weird Wikipedia Facebook club

Betabeat (04 September, 2014) "'Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club' Is the Only Facebook Group You Need"

This month in Congressional vandalism

New York Magazine (22 September, 2014) "Someone in Congress edited Mitch McConnell's Wikipedia to say he's a turtle"

Wikimedia blog posts

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Blog.wikimedia.org published 22 posts in September 2014. Two posts were multilingual, with translations in Greek and Spanish.

Some highlights from the blog include::

Damon Sicore joins WMF as Vice President of Engineering (September 29, 2014)
Chilean regulator welcomes Wikipedia Zero (September 22, 2014)
Emmanuel Engelhart, Inventor of Kiwix: the Offline Wikipedia Browser (September 12, 2014)
Will you join in celebrating the 10th anniversary of Wikimedia Commons? (September 5, 2014)
Sixty ways to help new editors (September 4, 2014)

Coming & Going

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The Communications team said goodbye to Carlos Monterrey, who left us for the sunnier climes of Los Angeles.

Media Contact

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Media contact through September 2014: wmf:Press room/Media Contact#September 2014

Wikipedia Signpost

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For detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for September 2014:

Communications Design

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We started work with Fundraising and UX on a plan to refresh the Wikimedia shop and merchandise. A design meeting was held where some great new ideas were discussed to develop the identity and purpose of the store and our products. We also gave brand support to Fundraising’s big donor events, where some exciting new gifts are in the works.


Editorial note

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From October 2014 on, the Wikimedia Foundation is switching from a monthly to a quarterly reporting schedule, with the first quarterly report (for Q2 FY2014-15, i.e. October to December 2014) scheduled to be published in February 2015.

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