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 March 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

MediaWiki development switching to distributed revision control

The MediaWiki code repository was converted from Subversion to Git (a distributed version control system originally developed by Linus Torvalds and others for the Linux kernel) for the MediaWiki core and for those MediaWiki extensions that are in use on WMF sites. The expected improvements are: A lower barrier for contributing code, avoiding certain technical flaws of Subversion that made life difficult for developers, and getting improvements to users faster.

Presentation at Arabnet, explaining “Why the Arabic world needs a strong Arabic Wikipedia….”

Arabic outreach tour encourages participation in Wikipedia

At the end of March, Barry Newstead and Moushira Elamrawy from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Development department visited several Arabic language countries (Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon and Egypt). They connected with local Wikipedians and various potential partner institutions interested in helping to enhance the Arabic Wikipedia. The Arabic Language Initiative is a strategic priority.

Design improvements for Wikipedia mobile

The beta version of the mobile Wikipedia site saw several changes to achieve a more professional look and a better user experience. These include changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a redesigned full-screen search. An experimental new feature makes it easier to access reference footnotes.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for February:

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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 March (April 5, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for February:

476 million (-1.3% compared with January; +25.4% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for March:

17.3 billion (-4.7% compared with February; +13.6% compared with the previous year)

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

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

85,163 (-3.6% compared with January / -1.7% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for February 2012: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

Financials

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

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – February 29, 2012.

• Revenue for the month is $824K vs plan of $272K, approximately $552K or 203% over plan.

• Year-to-date is $30.2MM vs plan of $24.6MM, approximately $5.6MM or 21% over plan.

• Expenses for the month is $2.1MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $49K or 2% lower than plan.

• Year-to-date is $17MM vs plan of $18.9MM, approximately $1.9MM or 10% lower than plan.

• Cash position is $31.4MM as of February 29, 2012 – approximately 13 months of expenses.

Highlights

MediaWiki development switching to distributed revision control

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Wikimedia sites will gradually be upgraded to version 1.20 of MediaWiki in April 2012.

Wikimedia engineers have finished up the latest version of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia and its sister sites. We have begun deploying this version, labeled “1.20wmf1,” to all Wikimedia sites in stages. We started on April 10th and will continue until April 25th.

Yes, we only deployed MediaWiki 1.19 a few weeks ago. This new update is part of our effort to get you fixes and improvements much more regularly (a reason we recently switched from Subversion to Git).

We plan to deploy the latest software every two weeks. Rather than calling each version of the deployed software 1.20, 1.21, 1.22, etc every two weeks, we’ll be using a variation of the “1.20″ moniker for the next few months.

We’re decoupling our deployment process (to Wikimedia sites like Wikipedia) and our release process of standalone MediaWiki installer for use on third-party sites. We plan to have MediaWiki 1.20wmf1 and 1.20wmf2 in April, 1.20wmf3 and 1.20wmf4 in May, etc., until we actually release a new MediaWiki 1.20 installer this fall (probably October).

Only after this point will we start referring to deployments as “1.21″ deployments. The cycle will repeat approximately every six months, with Wikimedia deployments every two weeks, and installer releases every six months.

We’ve already tried out the 1.20wmf1 version on a test wiki and on mediawiki.org, and things are looking good. But the schedule may change based on unexpected issues, so you should refer to the MediaWiki 1.20 roadmap for an up-to-date schedule of when your wiki will be affected.

What’s new

This is a fairly small set of changes, compared to the March deployment of MediaWiki 1.19. This is intended to minimize disruption and possible issues, and make it easier to identify the cause of problems, since the possibly problematic code will be much more recent.

The biggest thing you’ll notice is the new diff style (example on mediawiki.org), designed to improve the experience of color-blind and partially sighted visitors.

More polish you’ll notice: There is a new option on Special:Prefixindex and Special:Allpages to hide redirects (addressing bug 30963). New edit emails for watched pages always provide a link to the edit which triggered the mail (fixing bug 32210).  And “Creating” is now given in the page title instead of “Editing” when you are creating a page (fixing bug 22870).

And, of course, developers have improved the software “under the hood” in many ways. A list of all changes is available in the draft release notes.

Snags and glitches?

If, despite our efforts, you encounter issues due to the upgrade, we’ll try and fix them as soon as we can. Get an account and report issues in our bug tracker, which is where we look for reports of problems. And the faster you tell us about problems, the faster we can address them.

Thanks!

Sumana Harihareswara, Volunteer development coordinator
Rob Lanphier, Director of Platform Engineering
Images contained in this blog post are available under CC-BY-SA

The Wikimedia Foundation continues to build momentum around activities focused on the Arabic language region. At the end of March, Barry Newstead visited the region and Moushira Elamrawy (Consultant, Arabic Language Initiative) conducted a number of outreach activities in various Arabic speaking countries. The Arabic Language initiative is a strategic priority for the movement and the Foundation. The visit sought to establish relationships with potential partners and to begin a dialogue on the importance of building Arabic Wikipedia as part of regional efforts to expand Arabic language content on the Internet.

The first stop was at the Dead Sea in Jordan.  Moushira was invited by the e-mediat program to conduct a workshop for participants from more than 20 NGOs from Lebanon and Jordan.  Several Lebanese and Jordanian NGOs working in the areas of history preservation, video blogging, and human rights showed interest in organizing Wikipedia sessions for their members and incorporating their up-to-date, sourced data from their research into Wikipedia articles. According to a recent study, Jordan’s contribution to online content is mainly in Arabic, and the country is one of the main contributors to the 3 percent of global online content that is in Arabic, an interesting fact which opens doors to fruitful activities.

Session about Wikipedia in Tetouan

Next Moushira traveled to Morocco, which, despite its reputation as a francophone country, is the 4th largest content contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia. Her first stop was Tetouan, in northern Morocco, where she hosted a session at The National School of Education, a government-funded higher education institute. It included a talk about Wikipedia by Fayssal, a local of Tetouan and a longtime Wikipedian (formerly a member of the English Wikipedia’s arbitration committee), and Zack, a significant contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia from Meknes, who led a workshop on how to edit Wikipedia. The attendees asked rich and diverse questions, e.g. on neutrality, fundraising, and how the Arabic Wikipedia could be improved. The school administration was excited about hosting more sessions and about considering how Wikipedia could be efficiently incorporated in their curriculum.

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Photo: Lane Hartwell, CC-BY-SA

After the recent SOPA/PIPA blackout, many media outlets characterized the debate as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood for clout in Washington DC. Lost in this myopic narrative is the truth: the millions of regular Internet users who called and wrote their congressional representatives were giving a collective voice to their individual demands that Congress not enact legislation, written by industry, that would harm the free and open web. They spoke up to support those innovative websites and online communities that are possible only through a free exchange of ideas and information.

Congress, the media, and many others do not always understand or appreciate the meaning and power of the free-knowledge movement, nor the community that nurtures and supports it. For this reason, we offer a summary on free knowledge. Much will be familiar to Wikimedia project contributors and our peers in the free-knowledge community, but we hope to say something useful for our other readers — and legislators — who have not previously explored the issue or who have found themselves surprised by the backlash when they have ignored it.

As you can guess, we are quite protective of the Internet, which is a great facilitator of the free-knowledge movement, and we are suspicious when others seek to ram through legislation in their private interests without proper reflection on the values that are vital to our mission.

What you need to know about free knowledge

The mission of the free-knowledge community is to create and share informational resources and cultural works in full compliance with copyright laws. When offering works to the world, however, their creators guarantee five freedoms: the freedom to use, the freedom to study, the freedom to copy, the freedom to redistribute, and the freedom to improve those works.[1] Authors, artists, photographers, researchers, and others who have joined the worldwide free-knowledge community are committed to these freedoms, and in turn they produce media that hundreds of millions of people can use. The result: freely-licensed and valuable materials for education, business, technology, science and culture around the world.

The creators in the free-knowledge community are in fact copyright holders, just like the creators in the media industry, but unlike most industries, creators in the free-knowledge community volunteer to promote progress and innovation by releasing their content under a free license that provides their creations to the world for no cost.

The free-knowledge community is worldwide, diverse and growing. There are nearly 200 million free-knowledge works now available, and the amount of new, freely-licensed content is growing rapidly.[2]  Many organizations[3] now have large repositories of freely-licensed content, including C-Span,[4] YouTube,[5] Vimeo,[6] and Flickr.[7] Wikipedia has more than 21 million articles in 283 languages.[8] The Wikipedia community is built on the work of hundreds of thousands of contributors from around the world. Wikimedia Commons hosts over 12 million files, including more than 10 million images and photographs, more than 100 thousand sound files, and more than 20 thousand scans of freely-licensed and public domain documents.[9]
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Predicting admin elections by editor status and similarity; flagged revision debates in multiple languages; Wikipedia literature reviewed

With contributions by: Tbayer, DarTar, Jodi.a.schneider, Njullien and Piotrus

How editors evaluate each other: effects of status and similarity

A team of social computing researchers based at Stanford and Cornell University studied how users evaluate each other in social media.^[1] Their paper, presented at the 5th ACM Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM ’12), focuses on three main case studies: Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Epinions. User-to-user evaluations, the authors note, are jointly influenced by the properties of the evaluator and the target; as a result, differences in properties between the target and the evaluator should be expected to affect the evaluation. The study looks specifically at how differences in topic expertise and status affect peer evaluations. The Wikipedia case focuses on requests for adminship (RfAs), the most prominent example of peer evaluation in Wikipedia and a topic that has attracted considerable attention in the literature (Signpost research coverage: September 2011, October 2011, January 2012). Similarity is measured based on article co-authorship, and status as a function of an editor’s number of contributions. Previous research by the same authors showed that the probability an evaluator will evaluate a target user positively drops dramatically when the status of the two users is very similar, and there is general evidence that homophily and similarity in editing activity have a strong influence on peer evaluation in RfAs. The study identifies two effects that jointly account for this singular finding:

• “Elite” or high-status users are more likely to participate in evaluations about other users who are active in their areas of interest or expertise.
• Low-status users tend to be judged differently than those with moderate or high status

In a direct application of these results, dubbed ballot-blind prediction, the authors show how the outcome of an RfA can be accurately predicted by a model that simply considers the first few participants in a discussion and their attributes, without looking at their actual evaluations of the target.

Sociological analysis of debates about flagged revisions in the English, German and French Wikipedias

At the center of debates on “Coercion or empowerment”: Icons signifying accepted (left) and not yet accepted (right) revisions under a flagged revisions scheme

In an article to appear in Ethics and Information Technology, Paul B. de Laat analysed debates occurring in the English, German and French Wikipedias about the evolution of the rules governing new edits.^[2] As noted by the analysis of the English Wikipedia’s rules, by Butler et al., 2008,^[3] these rules are numerous and have increased in number and complexity; they range from the more formal and explicit (intellectual property rights) to the more informal.

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the national public broadcaster, turns 80 this year. To celebrate it has launched a new website called “80 Days That Changed Our Lives“, giving 80 pieces of audio visual content from the ABC archives a new lease on life. Today, the ABC has also announced that it has gone a step further by releasing some of these historical news reports to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons free license. This release of highly encyclopedic audiovisual history is not only a first for Australia, it is a first for Wikimedia.

1940s Mobile studio caravan, provided by the ABC

While this is the first collection of broadcast “packaged” footage released to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, the leader in the field for several years has been Al Jazeera, which has been sharing some of its contemporary footage on its own Creative Commons portal. With the Open Beelden project, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has also shared online many historical newsreels. Both of these collections have since been copied into Wikimedia Commons. The ABC is also following in the footsteps of Radio y Televisión Argentina, which has previously released some of its archival recordings and parliamentary speeches.

You can view the collection of files on Wikimedia Commons – all are available to be used, remixed and shared — at Category: Files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the important pieces of Australian history that now have freely licensed multimedia for the first time include:

• The “Tampa affair” (2001)
• The “Waterfront dispute” (1998)
• The release of Lindy Chaimberlain from prison (1986)
• The floating of the currency (1983)
• The introduction of World Series Cricket (1977)
• Intriguingly, an interview with Arthur C. Clarke predicting the Internet in 1974.
• and, the first ever broadcast from ABC Television (1956).

You can check where these files are already being used within Wikipedia articles on the toolserver project. You can also read the press release by the ABC about this project and the blog post by Creative Commons Australia (which is hosted by CCi).

As a non-profit operated collection of educational and freely-licensed media,  and as the repository that serves the 283 language editions of Wikipedia, we believe that Wikimedia Commons is a perfect place for broadcasters and other GLAMs to share their archival content. Hopefully this release from the Australian public broadcaster will be the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia community,  and will encourage other broadcasters – especially those that are publicly funded – to join us.

Sincerely,
Liam Wyatt / Wittylama – Project officer, ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi)

Figure 1. One of the feedback forms tested in the AFTv5 experiments (Option 1).

The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with editors of the English Wikipedia, is developing a tool to enable readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia. To that end, we started development of a new version of the Article Feedback Tool (known as AFTv5) in October 2011. The original version of the tool, which allows readers to rate articles based on a star system, launched in 2010. The new version invites readers to write comments that might help editors improve Wikipedia articles. We hope that this tool will contribute to the Wikimedia movement’s strategic goals of increasing participation and improving quality.

Testing new feedback forms

On December 22, 2011, we started testing three different designs for the AFTv5 feedback forms:

• Option 1: Did you find what you were looking for? (shown above)
• Option 2: Make a suggestion, give praise, report a problem or ask a question
• Option 3: Rate this article

The purpose of this first experiment was to measure the type, usefulness and volume of feedback posted with these feedback forms. For example, does asking a reader to describe what they were looking for (option 1) provide more actionable feedback than asking them to make a suggestion (option 2)?

We enabled AFTv5 on a small, randomly selected set (0.6%) of articles on the English Wikipedia, as well as a second set of high-traffic or semi-protected articles. A feedback form, randomly selected from the above three options, was placed at the bottom of each page. The feedback form was also accessible via a link docked on the bottom right corner of the page.  The resulting comments were then analyzed along a number of dimensions.

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Download the complete Volume 1 (PDF)

The success of Wikipedia continues to attract an enormous amount of attention from researchers who are trying to understand what made this one of the most remarkable collaboration projects in history, and unearth valuable insights that may help to improve it. The monthly Wikimedia Research Newsletter launched in mid-2011 – shortly after the announcement of the Wikimedia Research Index – with the aim of covering recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Published jointly by the Wikimedia Research Committee and the Signpost (the English Wikipedia’s community-edited newspaper), it has established itself as a comprehensive outlet enabling both researchers and Wikipedians to stay on top of current research, aiming to facilitate exchange between these two communities.

The inaugural Signpost edition

The six issues published in the first volume (July-December 2011) featured 87 unique references (93 citations) and attracted altogether more than 17,000 pageviews in 2011, not counting the WMF blog edition. The complete Volume 1 is now available as a downloadable 45-page PDF, and a print version can be ordered from Pediapress. The full list of publications reviewed or covered in the Newsletter in 2011 can be browsed online or downloaded (as a BibTeX, RIS, PDF file or in other formats), ready to be imported into reference managers or other bodies of wiki research literature. Open access papers in this collection have been marked with a special open_access tag in the reference list and with an OA icon in the body of each issue.

We are also happy to announce the launch of @WikiResearch: a news feed on Twitter and Identi.ca, covering new preprints, papers or research-related blog posts, before they are reviewed more fully in the Newsletter.

Follow @WikiResearch for fresh Wikimedia research news

What’s more, the Newsletter is now also available in the form of an HTML email newsletter (in addition to the announcements of each new issue on the Wikiresearch-l mailing list, which only contain the table of contents). Sign up here to receive a copy of each new issue in your inbox as soon as it comes out.

The Newsletter is a collaborative effort and would not exist without those who have contributed reviews and summaries so far: Boghog, DarTar, Drdee, Hfordsa, Jodi.a.schneider, Junkie.dolphin, Lilaroja, Mietchen, Phoebe, Piotrus, Romanesco, Steven Walling, Tbayer. We are also grateful for the help of several Signpost collaborators in copyediting and preparing the final publication every month.

Finally, thanks to everyone for reading the Wikimedia Research Newsletter, and please
consider contributing by pointing us to new research we should cover, or by volunteering to review new publications.

The editors of the Wikimedia Research Newsletter:

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst, Strategy
Tilman Bayer, 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.

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

Legal and Community Advocacy department launched

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

Teahouse project kicks off

Logo of the “Teahouse”

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

MediaWiki 1.19 deployed

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

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