For versions in other languages, please check the wiki version of this report, or add your own translation there!

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for May 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

From the Fundraising report: The “facts” banner (listing some basic facts about Wikipedia) was tested in many different versions and eventually performed better than all previous fundraising banners

Fundraising report released

The Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising team published a report from the 2012-2013 fundraiser. The report reviews the evolution of banner design and includes data about the 2012 year-end English campaign and the 2013 multilingual campaign, which raised a total $35 million USD from over 2 million donors.

Community invited to discuss trademark practices

The Legal and Community Advocacy (LCA) team published a statement on trademark practices, which requests community feedback on the Wikimedia trademark policy, procedure, and other questions. The objective is to balance the interest in licensing the brand for mission-aligned activities, with the necessity of preventing misuse and “naked licensing” (licensing without quality control). This is the opportunity to provide ideas as the team considers updating the trademark policy and practices.

Wikipedia Zero launches in Pakistan

Wikipedia Zero, the program to give people around the world mobile access to Wikipedia free of data charges, is now available in Pakistan, in partnership with Mobilink (Vimpelcom). The company’s user base of over 32 million people makes this the second largest Wikipedia Zero launch to date.

The “Nearby” feature in Vatican City. The camera icon (bottom) indicates an article which misses images, inviting users to contribute one.

“Nearby” feature shows Wikipedia articles in the reader’s vicinity

On location-aware devices (such as smartphones with GPS), a new “Nearby” page lists articles close to the reader’s current location. The feature is designed for mobile devices, but also works on the desktop version of Wikipedia.

Presentation slides with the Tool Labs logo

New hosting environment for community-developed tools

The Tool Labs, an environment for community developers to provide external software tools supporting work on Wikimedia projects, is now operating. With the support of the German Wikimedia chapter, many existing tools have already migrated from the Wikimedia Toolserver to Tools Labs.

Search for new Executive Director begins

The job opening for the Wikimedia Foundation’s new Executive Director has been posted. This starts the search for a successor for Sue Gardner, who will step down later this year. Board of Trustees chair Kat Walsh asked Wikimedians for help in finding the best possible candidate, by spreading the news in their networks.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for April:

(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 May (June 6, 2013)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for April:

517 million (-0.17% compared with March; +9.16% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release May data later in June)

Page requests for May:

21.0 billion (+0.8% compared with April; 16.5% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for April 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

82,553 (+0.86% compared with March / +4.38% 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

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of April 30, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of April 30, 2013

(Financial information is only available through April 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date April 30, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of April is $8.87MM versus plan of $9.78MM, approximately $908K or 9% under plan.

• Year-to-date revenue is $50.44MM versus plan of $45.52MM, approximately $4.92MM or 11% over plan.

• Expenses for the month of April is $5.78MM versus plan of $4.10MM, approximately $1.68MM or 41% over plan, primarily due to higher grant expenses (timing of FDC grants), legal fees, and personal property tax expenses partially offset by lower personnel expenses, internet hosting, and bank fees.

• Year-to-date expenses is $30.84MM versus plan of $34.07MM, approximately $3.24MM or 9% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, outside contract services, and personal property tax expenses.

• Cash position is $45.6MM as of April 30, 2013.

Highlights

From the Fundraising report: The “facts” banner (listing some basic facts about Wikipedia) was tested in many different versions and eventually performed better than all previous fundraising banners

Fundraising report released

The Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising team published a report from the 2012-2013 fundraiser. The report reviews the evolution of banner design and includes data about the 2012 year-end English campaign and the 2013 multilingual campaign, which raised a total $35 million USD from over 2 million donors.

(more…)

 
After several years of development and testing, VisualEditor, the new visual interface to edit Wikipedia pages, will soon be available in “beta” form for all users. This lets Wikipedia editors create and modify articles visually, using a new system where the articles they edit will look the same as they show for reading, and their changes show up as they enter them — like writing a document in a word processor.

VisualEditor removes the need to learn complex wiki markup, and so simplifies editing for both new and experienced editors. We hope that this will open up editing to more people, and along with other efforts will encourage more editors to start and continue to contribute.

We plan to enable it for all logged-in users of the English Wikipedia in early July, later that month extending it to logged-out users, and then the other Wikipedias. Ahead of rolling out VisualEditor in July, we will be carrying out a test of VisualEditor for some randomly-selected new accounts on the English Wikipedia beginning on 17 June. During this testing period, we will be monitoring the impact on users, listening to feedback, and solving problems.

The “alpha” prototype was previously available only to users with a registered account who opted in to test out VisualEditor. First made available on the English Wikipedia in December 2012, it was extended to 16 more language editions in April, and will be made available on all remaining Wikipedias later this week. A lot of valuable feedback has been provided by the early testers of this alpha, and we would like to thank them for their help.

Visual HTML editors are now common on the Web, but building one for Wikipedia (and its sister sites) has been a challenge in itself, due to our specialized requirements and the need to integrate with our existing software, MediaWiki. Behind the scenes, VisualEditor heavily relies on Parsoid, a new complex software component for MediaWiki that translates between wiki markup and annotated HTML+RDFa.

We need your help!

What you can do to help: over the past few months, we have asked you to try out the alpha version of the VisualEditor, and many of you did. Since then, it has changed significantly, and so we’re asking that you try it again. It’s very important that we fix as many critical issues as possible prior to the deploying for everyone in a few weeks’ time — of course, we’d love to fix them all, but that may not be possible. So please, enable the VisualEditor (it’s in your preferences, under the editing tab — check the box labeled “Enable VisualEditor”) and submit any bugs that you find. Your early testing means that we can ensure a better VisualEditor and a smoother deployment for everyone.

Philippe Beaudette, Director, Community Advocacy
James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor and Parsoid
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Vol: 3 • Issue: 5 • May 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Motivations on the Persian Wikipedia; is science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than the English Wikipedia?

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Aaron Halfaker, Taha Yasseri, Daniel Mietchen and Tilman Bayer.

Motivations to contribute to the Persian Wikipedia

A chart adapted for use in the Persian article on human evolution.

An article in Library Review titled “Motivating and Discouraging Factors for Wikipedians: the Case Study of Persian Wikipedia”^[1] offers a much needed comparison of data from a population of editors outside the English Wikipedia. Most findings related to reasons people start and continue contributing confirm previous studies – important reasons for contributing include the desire to share knowledge and gaining recognition, and are reinforced by friendly interactions.

The authors find that “content production and improvement of Wikipedia in local language” is a significant motivation too, something missing or seen as mostly irrelevant for contributors to the English Wikipedia. The authors also look at reasons for editors to become less active, an area that is not as well understood. Their findings confirm previous research – editors may leave because they find rules too confusing or other editors too unfriendly, or because they do not have enough time. They list some additional reasons not mentioned significantly in the existing literature, such as “issues with Persian script; sociocultural characteristics, e.g. lack of research-based teaching instruction and preference for ready-to-use information; strict rules against mass copying and copyright violation; small size of Persian Web content and a shortage of online Persian references.” The paper suffers from small sample size (interviews with 15 editors) and does not report statistics or rankings for some of the data, making it difficult, for example, to conclude or verify which motivations are more and less important. (Reviewer note: the reviewed pre-print copy did not include figures, which may contain the missing data.)

Science eight times more popular on the Spanish Wikipedia than on the English Wikipedia?

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This post is available in 4 languages:

English  • Svenska • Deutsch • 中文

English

I got an idea in May, 2012, as the Eurovision Song Contest was ending and Loreen had just been named the 2012 winner, with her song Euphoria. Because Loreen represented Sweden, the 2013 contest would be held in my country. This would create an exciting opportunity for me and Wikipedia, because my home is in Gothenburg, and I could take really good photos for the Wikimedia Commons database.

Loreen after she won in 2012.

Photo: Vugarİbadov

Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

Eurovision Song Contest is well documented on Wikipedia. The contest was started in 1956, and currently has Wikipedia articles in 91 languages^[1], many including information on artists and their songs, statistics, voting history, the rules and points awarded. My idea started here because there are not many photos and the quality varies; occasionally someone sitting in the audience at the show manages to take a photo with their phone, but there were not many quality images. Using the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license, anyone would be free to copy, distribute and edit my photos, as long as I am attributed and new versions of the photos have the same license.

The most common use of photos on Wikimedia Commons is in Wikipedia articles, and photos enhance the articles. My goal was to make it possible to have really good, professional photos of every artist in the Eurovision Song Contest 2013. Newspapers, magazines, websites and other media outlets that did not send a photographer to Malmö could also use my photos from the database.

I applied for photo accreditation and, at first, my application was denied because the Head of Delegation saw me as a fan and not as a serious photographer. Then some members of Wikimedia Sverige managed to explain my intentions and the purpose of my application. When I was finally approved, it meant that I had the same rights as all the other 1700 photographers and journalists at the contest.

Emmelie de Forest after winning the Eurovision Song Contest 2013.

Photo: Albin Olsson

License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported

It has been an amazing week, and a very successful project. I took thousands of photos and right now over 500 are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. They are categorized under: contestants, countries, rehearsals and/or press conferences. All of them are also under the category Photos taken by Albin Olsson during the Eurovision Song Contest 2013. There are close-ups of almost all of the artists, photos of the artists performing their songs on stage, and also videos I filmed.

The 2013 Eurovision Song contest winner was Emmelie de Forest, from Denmark, with her song “Only Teardrops.” My photograph of de Forest has already been used in 36 different languages on Wikipedia, including Japanese and Chinese.

Since non-freely licensed material is not permitted on Wikimedia Commons, I couldn’t upload the songs or videos containing the songs, but I filmed more than 32 clips where 12 of the artists present themselves. All in English, but 11 of them in at least one other language (you can find the videos in the commons category Videos from Eurovision Song Contest 2013 and I might add a few more). It feels really cool that the Wikipedia articles don’t just have a nice photo at the top of their infoboxes, but a short video too.

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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 April (May 2, 2013)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for March:

517 million (+7.17% compared with February; +5.76% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release April data later in May)

Page requests for April:

20.8 billion (-3.4% compared with March; +20.1% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for March 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

82,105 (+5.67% compared with February / +2.15% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for March 2013:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of March 31, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of March 31, 2013

(Financial information is only available through March 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date March 31, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of March is $5.92MM versus plan of $5.28MM, approximately $647K or 12% over plan.

• Year-to-date revenue is $41.57MM versus plan of $35.74MM, approximately $5.83MM or 16% over plan.

• Expenses for the month of March is $3.09MM versus plan of $4.04MM, approximately $943K or 23% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, and grant expenses offset by higher bank fees.

• Year-to-date expenses is $25.06MM versus plan of $29.97MM, approximately $4.92MM or 16% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants executed, WMF project grants, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.

• Cash position is $41.02MM as of March 31, 2013.

Highlights

Screenshot: This user has received four new notifications

New notifications system launches on the English Wikipedia

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This post is available in 3 languages:

English  • Polski • Español

English

Wikiexpedtion logo

A Polish national railways class EU07

Wikimedia Polska, the Polish Wikimedia Chapter, is about to organize a Railways Expedition in collaboration with the Polish Railways Company. The photography expedition is devoted to train infrastructure in Poland and will give participants unprecedented access to sites they wouldn’t otherwise see so closely.

Polish Railways has offered the opportunity to teach Wikipedians to navigate the railway premises, after which they will receive ID cards entitling them to enter and photograph objects normally inaccessible to the public. Polish Railways will provide us with free monthly railway tickets for all participants and special passes to legally enter and photograph rail tracks, workshops, rail yards, cargo railway stations and museums belonging to Polish Railways. Wikimedia Polska will cover the costs of accommodation and food (travel to Poland is not covered).

We are looking for people interested in this form of Wikiexpedition. We want to form 2-3 person teams, with Polish-speaking leaders and participants from other countries. We’d like to underscore the fact that you will not need to speak Polish to participate; we’re happy to help you navigate the language. Teams would be moving independently, both in terms of time and location. We think it would be useful to organize several teams that could work in different areas of Poland. The Wikiexpedtion will take place this summer, sometime between June and September, 2013.

If you want to join the railways expedition, just add yourself to the list on the Wikimedia Polska wiki. Basically, the only requirements are that you a) have an obsession with trains and railways and b) that you are excited to spend around a week (or more) traveling in slow trains that stop at all manner of tiny stations around Poland.

Tomas Ganicz, Wikimedia Polska

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Vol: 3 • Issue: 4 • April 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Sentiment monitoring; Wikipedians and academics favor the same papers; UNESCO and systemic bias; How ideas flow on Wikiversity

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Oren Bochman, Taha Yasseri, Jonathan T. Morgan and Tilman Bayer

Too good to be true? Detecting COI, Attacks and Neutrality using Sentiment Analysis

Traditional methods for detecting sentiment are less objective

Finn Årup Nielsen, Michael Etter and Lars Kai Hansen presented a technical report^[1] on an online service which they created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies. It performs sentiment analysis of edits, filtered by companies and editors. Sentiment analysis is a new applied linguistics technology which is being used in a number of tasks ranging from author profiling to detecting fake reviews on online retailers. The form of visualization provided by this tool can easily detect deviation from linguistic neutrality. However, as the authors point out, this analysis only gives a robust picture when used statistically and is more prone to mistakes when operating within a limited scope.

The service monitors recent changes using an IRC stream and detects company-related articles from a small hand-built list. It then retrieves the current version using the MediaWiki API and performs sentiment analysis using the AFINN sentiment-annotated word list. The project was developed by integrating a number of open source components such as NLTK and CouchDB. Unfortunately, the source code has not been made available and the service can only run queries on the shortlisted companies which will limit the impact of this report on future Wikipedia research. However, it seems to have potential as a tool for detecting COI edits that tend to tip neutrality by adding excess praise or attacks which tip the content in the other direction. We hope the researchers will open-source this tool like their prior work on the AFINN data-set, or at least provide some UI to query articles not included in the original research.

“A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking”

A paper^[2] with this title investigates the relation between the scientific reputation of scientific items (authors, papers, and keywords) and the impact of the same items on Wikipedia articles. (more…)

For versions in other languages, please check the wiki version of this report, or add your own translation there!

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Lua speeds up pages and empowers Wikimedia’s technical contributors

On March 13, Lua was enabled for templates on all Wikimedia wikis. The existing syntax for wikitext templates is complicated and limited: it does not offer loops, for example. With Lua, editors can now use a real programming language, in which they can also contribute to programming projects outside Wikimedia. For Wikimedia wikis, Lua means a big performance gain in widely used templates, such as citations. For example, 300 citations on an English Wikipedia article now render in 3 seconds instead of 18 seconds.

The new image upload button in an article on the mobile version of the English Wikipedia

Mobile uploads launch for apps and the mobile web

On the mobile version of Wikipedia, smartphone users can now easily upload a lead image to Wikipedia articles that lack one. Also in March, the Mobile team released a dedicated app for Wikimedia Commons, allowing media uploads from Android and iOS devices.

First Individual Engagement Grants awarded to innovative community projects

The recipients of the first Individual Engagements Grants were announced on March 29. These grants fund projects by individuals or small teams for a duration of six months. Among the largest of the eight funded grants are “The Wikipedia Library” ($7500), which aims to give editors access to reliable sources, donated by publishers, “The Wikipedia Adventure” ($10,000), an on-wiki game for new editors, and a project to collaboratively define a vision for the future of Wikisource (10,000 Euros).

Wikipedia Zero wins award, reaches new users

Wikipedia Zero, which gives people around the world mobile access to Wikipedia free of data charges, won the 2013 SXSW Interactive “Activism” award, beating four other finalists. Also in March, Wikipedia Zero became available to more than 55 million additional subscribers in Russia, as part of a partnership with Beeline (VimpelCom). This was the biggest launch for the Wikipedia Zero team to date. The same month, a new Wikipedia Zero partnership with Axiata Group was announced, which will expand the program in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh this year.

Four of the Ombudsmen during their visit at the WMF office

Ombudsmen meet, might expand mandate

In March, the Foundation’s LCA team hosted five out of seven members of the Ombudsmen Commission in San Francisco, where these community members from around the world met with each other in person for the first time. They consulted with various WMF departments and provided input regarding privacy topics and the work of administrators. Formed in 2006, the Ombudsmen Commission is currently tasked with investigating complaints of alleged Privacy policy violations on behalf of the Board of Trustees. It has been proposed that the Commission should also be allowed to handle complaints about the global CheckUser policy and Oversight policy. An RfC (request for comment) about this is being prepared.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for February:

(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 March (April 4, 2013)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for February:

483 million (-1.12% compared with January; +1.53% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release March data later in April)

Page requests for March:

21.5 billion (-1.1% compared with February; +24.8% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for February 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

78,083 (-7.53% compared with January / -2.43% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for February 2013:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of February 28, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of February 28, 2013

(Financial information is only available through February 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date February 28, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of February is $1.89MM vs plan of $276K, approximately $1.61MM or 585% over plan.

• Year-to-date revenue is $35.65MM vs plan of $30.46MM, approximately $5.19MM or 17% over plan.

• Expenses for the month of February is $4.25MM vs plan of $4.03MM, approximately $215K or 5% over plan, primarily due to higher capital expenses offset by lower personnel expenses, internet hosting, and grant expenses.

• Year-to-date expenses is $21.96MM vs plan of $25.94MM, approximately $3.98MM or 15% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants executed, WMF project grants, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.

• Cash position is $40.68MM as of February 28, 2013.

Highlights

Lua speeds up pages and empowers Wikimedia’s technical contributors

(more…)