You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for December 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Visual Editor opt-in launch on English Wikipedia

An alpha version of the VisualEditor, the upcoming rich-text interface which will make it easier to edit wiki pages, was enabled on the English Wikipedia in December. Experienced editors can now test it and provide feedback on problem and priorities.

“The Impact Of Wikipedia” (video produced for the fundraiser, with subtitles in various languages)

Record donations in shortest ever fundraiser

The fundraising team reached their end-of-year goal of US $25 million early this year, making 2012 the shortest fundraiser to date. We also had a record-breaking total number of contributions: 1.484 million donations since July 1. The campaign ended with a “Thank You” banner that introduced readers to a diverse group of editors through written messages and video interviews. About half a million people watched a four-minute video introduction to Wikipedia editors and we saw an increase in account creation.

First round of the new funds dissemination process ends

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees approved the recommendations of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), allocating $8.43 million to 11 Wikimedia organizations. This marked the successful conclusion of the first round of the new FDC process. This change in how money is distributed within the Wikimedia movement was described by Trustees Jan-Bart de Vreede and Patricio Lorente as “a significant devolution of power to the global volunteer community of Wikimedians”. The committee was formed earlier in 2012 and consists of seven volunteers from seven different countries, who have editing experience on several Wikimedia projects, and have founded or have been Board members of five Wikimedia chapters.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for November:

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You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of December (January 10, 2013)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for November:

484.5 million (-0.79% compared with October; +2.06% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release December data later in January)

Page requests for December:

20.2 billion (-0.8% compared with November; +23.5% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for November 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,532 (-0.03% compared with October / +0.59% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for November 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of November 30, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of November 30, 2012

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

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date November 30, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of November is $11.26MM vs plan of $10.29MM, approximately $964K or 9% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $16.61MM vs plan of $15.50MM, approximately $1.11MM or 7% over plan.
• Expenses for the month of November is $2.83MM vs plan of $3.12MM, approximately $290K or 9% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses and capital expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, outside contract services, and operating grants.
• Year-to-date expenses is $12.76MM vs plan of $14.64MM, approximately $1.88MM or 13% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, and awards and grants.
• Cash position is $28.06MM as of November 30, 2012.

Highlights

Visual Editor opt-in launch on English Wikipedia

(more…)

This post is available in 2 languages:

Deutsch  •  English

(This is a guest post from Dirk Franke, German Wikipedian)

In English:

This Monday, I – Dirk Franke – started a Community Project about the future of paid editing on the German Wikipedia. For one year, as a kind of a fellow of the German Wikipedia community and the German Wikimedia chapter, I will be exploring the risks and opportunities posed by the writing of Wikipedia articles for personal financial gain, and discussing possible policies in dealing with this.

Wikipedia articles are a way to reach many, many people. Most companies have discovered that their clients and business partners look them up on Wikipedia. Many cultural institutions have made this discovery, too. These institutions are actually being guided by several GLAM projects worldwide. Many universities now know that students not only look up their homework on Wikipedia, but also their prospective place of study. Next to the volunteers who edit Wikipedia, the number of PR people, company employees, people working for museums, cultural institutions, universities and the numbers of students working in course assignments has steadily increased. Motivations, incentives and goals of these people are vastly different. But all of their participation changes Wikipedia as we know it.

I am Dirk Franke – Benutzer/User:Southpark – Wikipedia editor since January 2004, Wikipedia admin since February 2004, former member of the board of Wikimedia Deutschland (2005 and 2012), and former member of the German ArbCom. Some of you might know me from my blog iberty.net or from my recent Wikimania presentations about Chiara Ohoven/notability or White Bags/the image filter. And I am the author of about 35 featured and good articles on the German Wikipedia about oceans or strange cultural phenomena. These articles have nothing to do with my present project, but I’m terribly proud of them.

My fellowship project, called “The Limits of Writing Articles for Financial Gain“, was approved by the Community Project Budget. This is a program where Wikimedia Deutschland gives money to the community to spend on their own projects to support free knowledge, and Wikimedia projects in particular. A committee of community members and chapter members determines on what to spend it. Luckily for me, they decided to fund my project. So right now I have a kind of community fellowship to investigate and explain, and to help the community in making up its mind. This special status also means that all opinions I state, mails and texts I write, mistakes and brilliant discoveries I make, will fall solely into my own responsibility and not that of Wikimedia Deutschland.

Opinions on how to deal with these authors differ vastly even within a single Wikipedia. Internal rules are often contradictory. The rules become even more contradictory when one looks at different language editions of Wikipedia. My project is designed to unify discussions, find and detect paid editing already there, talk to GLAMs, companies, and many many Wikipedians, to help Wikipedia to stay a neutral, balanced encyclopedia with a lively community even when facing the money challenge. The fellowship will last a year, and it will involve a lot of talking, writing, listening and most of all reading.

For a lot of reasons like practicality, insider knowledge, and community trust, my project will focus onto the German Wikipedia. But of course the challenges and risks are similar across the language spectrum. As always in wikiworld, collaboration and communication can only help. So I am happy, happy, and happy to hear from any experiences, opinions, best and worst practices or whatever you have to say about this topic.

Right now at the beginning, the acts of reading and listening are even more important. Who has experience with paid editing in Wikipedia? What are your local rules on paid editing? How do the people of your local recent changes patrol deal with conspicuous edits? How do the people of your local quality control react to conspicuous edits? What tools and help do they need? Who has already received offers to write for money? Who has agreed on such an offer? Who has an opinion about or experience with the various cooperations with GLAMs? Who has experiences or opinions about Wikipedians-in-residence at non-profit or for-profit organizations?

Links:

• My user page: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Dirk_Franke
• Project description: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community-Projektbudget/Limits
• Blog: http://dirkingofranke.tumblr.com/
• E-Mail: dirk.frankewikipedia.de
• IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/Wikipedia-de User:dirkfranke

P.S.: I try to be as open as possible in this project and to talk in an unbiased way to anybody willing to talk to me. But of course I’m a human being and you may be curious about my own position. On an emotional level I want my Wikipedia from 2004 back and feel that paid editing is eeeeeeeevil. On a rational level I’m afraid the whole subject matter is way more complicated.

Dirk Franke (Southpark)

German Wikipedian

Auf Deutsch:

Community-Projekt zum professionellen Editieren gestartet

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Wikipedia Support Team meeting in the office of Wikimedia Germany

Over the first weekend of December, the German-language support team met in Berlin for their second workshop of 2012. Commonly referred to as the “volunteer response team” (or formerly “OTRS team” after the software it uses, the ”Open-source Ticket Request System”), the team handles a wide range of emails from Wikimedia users and the public, including complaints about Wikipedia articles, inquiries about the Wikimedia projects in general, and statements of permission for images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Originally established in 2008, the workshops have since become an integral part of our efforts to improve coordination and enhance understanding of legal as well as technical aspects of our work.

This time, the workshop was hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter. Our thanks go specifically to Christoph Jackel of their Team Communitys, who organized all we needed, be it accommodation for participants or the set-up of the venue at the chapter′s office. We are also, as always, very grateful to Wikimedia Deutschland for reimbursement of transportation and accommodation costs.

The weekend started out with a dinner on Friday evening, attended by about 15 team members. Even though the team is relatively small in size and collaborates smoothly online most of time, it is always a great pleasure to meet in real life, especially for new team members.

On Saturday, the workshop began with a short presentation by Jan Engelmann, head of the Politics & Society department of Wikimedia Deutschland, about a proposed European Union data privacy law designed to implement a “right to be forgotten” for EU citizens, and the potential implications of such legislation for the Wikimedia movement. Following this, Dr. Ansgar Koreng of JBB Rechtsanwälte, a Berlin-based law firm advising the German chapter, talked about issues related to personality rights and copyright that regularly come up on Wikipedia and as part of our work. As the de facto primary point of contact for complaints related to personality rights, we have always found it important to be able to properly react to such issues and support people affected by violations against Wikipedia′s policy on biographies of living persons. As a side effect, this also helps to avoid legal disputes before they have a chance to arise. Dr. Koreng stood ready for numerous questions from our side.

Throughout the entire event, we documented our discussions in real time using a private Etherpad. This also enabled those team members to participate who could not spare the time to come to Berlin.

Later on Saturday, Alice Wiegand, Board of Trustees member since 2012 and a long-time member of our team, talked about developments within the Wikimedia movement and their link to our work in the support team. On the initiative of one team member who gave a short introductory talk, we proceeded to discuss the potential of using flowcharts to document processes commonly employed when handling specific types of requests. Martin Edenhofer, the inventor of the OTRS software, who was scheduled to give a talk about tweaks of the system and recommendations on its use, unfortunately could not attend for personal reasons, but we very much hope to be able to welcome him at a future workshop.

Sunday was mostly devoted to internal processes. We first spent about two hours on a number of questions we had collected in the months preceding the workshop. After lunch, we went on to fill in the details of a member’s proposal to rename and modify response templates we use for very common or difficult-to-respond-to requests. Both topics of the day were aimed particularly at improving the quality of our responses and the efficiency of our handling thereof. Many of the issues that came up had previously been attempted to be addressed online but could not be resolved—showing yet again how productive it can be to discuss face-to-face. The event ended at 2 p.m. on Sunday, leaving time for participants to wade through a snow-covered Berlin and make their way home.

Raimond Spekking
User:Pajz

Vol: 2 • Issue: 12 • December 2012 [archives]

Wikipedia and Sandy Hook; SOPA blackout reexamined

With contributions by: Daniel Mietchen, Piotrus, Junkie.dolphin, Taha Yasseri, Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw, Tbayer, DarTar and Ragesoss

How Wikipedia deals with a mass shooting

Northeastern University researcher Brian Keegan analyzed the gathering of hundreds of Wikipedians to cover the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. The findings are reported in a detailed blog post that was later republished by the Nieman Journalism Lab.^[1] Keegan observes that the Sandy Hook shooting article reached a length of 50Kb within 24 hours of its creation, making it the fastest growing article by length in the first day among recent articles covering mass shootings on the English-language Wikipedia. The analysis compares the Sandy Hook page with six similar articles from a list of 43 articles on shooting sprees in the US since 2007. Among the analyses described in the study, of particular interest is the dynamics of dedicated vs occasional contributors as the article reaches maturity: while in the first few hours contributions are evenly distributed with a majority of single-edit editors, after hour 3 or 4 a number of dedicated editors show up and “begin to take a vested interest in the article, which is manifest in the rapid centralization of the article”. A plot of inter-edit time also shows the sustained frequency of revisions that these articles display days after their creation, with Sandy Hook averaging at about 1 edit/minute around 24 hours since its first revision. The notebook and social network data produced by the author for the analysis are available on his website. The Nieman Journalism Lab previously covered the role that Wikipedia is playing as a platform for collaborative journalism, and why its format outperforms Wikinews with an interview of Andrew Lih published in 2010.^[2] The early revision history of the Sandy Hook shooting article was also covered in a blog post by Oxford Internet Institute fellow Taha Yasseri, however with a focus on the coverage in different Wikipedia language editions.^[3]

Network positions and contributions to online public goods: the case of the Chinese Wikipedia

A graph with nodes color-coded by betweenness centrality (from red=0 to blue=max).

In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Management Information Systems (presented earlier at HICSS ’12^[4]), Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang and Chong (Alex) Wang use a natural experiment to demonstrate that changes to the position of individuals within the editor network of a wiki modify their editing behavior. The data for this study came from the Chinese Wikipedia. In October 2005, the Chinese government suddenly blocked access to the Chinese Wikipedia from mainland China, creating an unanticipated decline in the editor population. As a result, the remaining editors found themselves in a new network structure and, the authors claim, any changes in editor behavior that ensued are likely effects of this discontinuous “shock” to the network. (more…)

Each year on January 1, Public Domain Day is celebrated in many countries around the world – the date where numerous works enter the public domain as their copyright expires (often according to the formula “life of the author plus 70 years”).

See for example this year’s overviews by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Public Domain Review and COMMUNIA, or the notes by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University.

For Wikimedia projects that curate public domain works, such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, Public Domain Day means that many works become available to be uploaded under each project’s copyright policies. Community members have already started compiling lists to identify poems, novels, paintings and other works that can now be added to each project’s growing repository of free content.

Happy Public Domain Day, and a Happy New Year!

Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for November 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

New HTML5 video player

A new video player was enabled on Wikipedia and its sister sites, promising to bring free educational videos to more people, on more devices, in more languages. The player is the same HTML5 player used in the Kaltura open-source video platform. Its many new features include advanced support for subtitles, support for the royalty-free WebM video format, and server-side transcoding, i.e. the ability to convert from one video format to another, in order to deliver the appropriate video stream to the user depending on their bandwidth and the size of the player.

Usability testing of the new translation interface at the Bangalore DevCamp 2012

Developer meetup and language summit in India

On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India. The Engineering DevCamp focused on language support, development for mobile devices, and user interaction and user experience design (UI/UX). More than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators attended the event. It was preceded by an Open-Source language summit that the Foundation organized together with Red Hat in Pune, India.

Fundraiser launch

The Foundation’s ninth annual online fundraiser officially launched on November 27, 2012 and raised a record breaking $2.3 million in a single day: a 59% increase over our biggest day in 2011. See the Fundraiser Statistics page for a view comparing this year to previous years. Banner design progressed from last year’s “Jimmy appeal” ([1]) to variations on a new “Facts banner” ([2], [3], and [4]) which are more oriented towards informing users about the Wikimedia Foundation.

Due to the very successful start, it was decided to show banners only in the following five English-speaking countries through December 31: US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand (in addition to the banners for fundraising chapters). The fundraiser will be re-launched in all remaining countries in the spring of 2013, with improved translations.

Proposed new logo for Wikivoyage

Beta launch of Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage, the project to create a free world travel guide which anyone can edit, launched on Wikimedia Foundation servers on November 10, migrating text content and accounts from the old servers run by the Wikivoyage Association. The community is working on the review and transfer of media files, and the site remains in “beta” until this and other cleanup tasks are completed.

Data and Trends

(more…)

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of November (December 6, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for October:

488.4 million (+2.84% compared with September; +2.46% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)

Page requests for November:

20.3 billion (+2.7% compared with October; +16.8% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for October 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,964 (-2.73% compared with September / +0.59% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for October 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of October 31, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of October 31, 2012

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

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date October 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of October is $1.24MM vs plan of $0.85MM, approximately $396K or 47% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $5.36MM vs plan of $5.21MM, approximately $151K or 3% over plan.
• Expenses for the month of October is $2.53MM vs plan of $2.84MM, approximately $305K or 11% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and operating grants.
• Year-to-date expenses is $9.93MM vs plan of $11.52MM, approximately $1.59MM or 14% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and awards and grants.
• Cash position is $20.76MM as of October 31, 2012 which is approximately 5.92 months of expenses.

Highlights

New HTML5 video player

(more…)

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for October 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

The design changes to the Wikipedia mobile site include new navigation and updated typography.

Mobile Wikipedia redesigned

The mobile gateway to Wikipedia was updated with several features that had earlier been tested on the mobile beta site. The new navigation system aims to make mobile features and settings easier to discover. In the coming months, the mobile team will work on adding possibilities to contribute on mobile devices. In the previous month, the Wiki Loves Monuments app had already introduced a mobile photo upload function, as the first such possibility. For readers, the new design offers fonts that make the content easier to read.

First in-person meeting of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

The nine members of the new volunteer-run Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) met for the first time in October, preparing their recommendations about funding requests by 12 organizations (11 Wikimedia chapters and the Foundation) from a pool of more than $10 million of Wikimedia donations. In this new model, the funding requests have to be submitted in public, enabling a community review period that lasted until October 22.

The staff which supports the FDC scored each request according to a criteria list:

• estimates for the potential impact,
• the organization’s ability to execute the planned activities,
• their expected financial efficiency,
• the quality of the proposed success measures
• the potential benefit for the Wikimedia movement

The Signpost (the English Wikipedia’s weekly community newspaper) has published an overview of these scores and of the requested sums.

The Board of Trustees will announce its decision about the FDC’s recommendations in December.

Wikipedia Zero now available to 230 million people after Saudi Arabia launch; has already grown Wikipedia readership in Africa and Asia

Wikipedia Zero, the program offering mobile Internet users access to Wikipedia without data charges, added Saudi Telecom Company (STC) to the list of partners. With STC’s 25 million subscribers in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait, altogether 230 million mobile users in 31 countries have now access to the program, half a year after its worldwide start. A preliminary evaluation of its effect on readership is promising: Wikipedia pageviews from Orange Niger customers grew by 77% and those from Orange Kenya customers grew by 88% in a four-month period including the launch in these countries. In Malaysia, unique visitors to Wikipedia from local operator Digi jumped by 42% after it joined Wikipedia Zero.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for September:

(more…)

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

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

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for September:

474.9 million (+4.08% compared with August; +4.47% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release October data later in November)

Page requests for October:

19.8 billion (+3.4% compared with September; +15.8% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for September 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

82,582 (+4.08% compared with August / +2.98% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for September 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of September 30, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of September 30, 2012

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

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date September 30, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of September is $2.36MM vs plan of $2.44MM, approximately $81K or 3% under plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $4.11MM vs plan of $4.36MM, approximately $245K or 6% under plan.
• Expenses for the month of September is $2.20MM vs plan of $2.77MM, approximately $577K or 21% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher expenses for the annual all-hands meeting.
• Year-to-date expenses is $7.40MM vs plan of $8.68MM, approximately $1.3MM or 15% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, legal expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services.
• Cash position is $22.0MM as of September 30, 2012 which is approximately 6.29 months of expenses.

Highlights

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