Yesterday we launched an alpha, opt-in version of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia. This will let editors create and modify real articles visually, using a new system where the articles they edit will look the same as when you read them, and their changes show up as they type enter them — like writing a document in a word processor.

Why launch now?

We want our community of existing editors to get an idea of what the VisualEditor will look like in the “real world” and start to give us feedback about how well it integrates with how they edit right now. We also want to get their thoughts on what aspects should be priorities in the coming months.

The editor is at an early stage and is still missing significant functions, which we will address in the coming months. Because of this, we are mostly looking for feedback from experienced editors at this point, because the alpha VisualEditor is insufficient to really give them a proper experience of editing. We don’t want to promise an easier editing experience to new editors before it is ready.

As we develop improvements, they will be pushed every two weeks to the wikis, allowing you to give us feedback as we go, and tell us what you want us to work on next.

How can I try it out?

The VisualEditor is now available to all logged-in accounts on the English Wikipedia as a new preference, switched off by default. If you go to your “Preferences” screen and click into the “Editing” section, it will have an option labelled “Enable VisualEditor.”

Once enabled, for each article you can edit, you will get a second editor tab labelled “VisualEditor” next to the “Edit” tab. If you click this, after a little pause you will enter the VisualEditor. From here, you can play around, edit and save real articles and get an idea of what it will be like when complete.

At this early stage in our development, we recommend that after saving any edits, you check whether they broke anything. All edits made with the VisualEditor will show up in articles’ history tabs with a “VisualEditor” tag next to them, so you can track what is happening.

We would love your feedback on what we have done so far — whether it’s a problem you discovered, an aspect that you find confusing, what area you think we should work on next, or anything else, please do let us know.

James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor and Parsoid

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

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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 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

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German courts handed down two decisions this summer that represent significant legal victories for the Wikimedia community and the entire free-knowledge movement in Germany. The District Court of Tübingen in Prof. Dr. Matthias Asche v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. and the District Court of Schweinfurt in Peter Deeg v. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. each issued rulings in two different cases in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation. The former case concerned the German right of personality of a living person; the latter concerned the post-mortem right of personality. Both decisions contain several insightful legal observations on the right of personality online, which we feel are worth highlighting and sharing with the Wikimedia community.

Asche v. Wikimedia Foundation

In June 2012, Professor Matthias Asche brought suit against the Wikimedia Foundation, objecting to content in a German-language Wikipedia article and asserting a violation of his personality rights.[1] In particular, he wished to eliminate any mention of his membership in several Catholic student associations.

Asche offered to settle the suit if the Foundation would remove the content that Asche found objectionable, thereby circumventing community processes. We could not consent to a settlement that set the precedent of censoring lawful and accurate content, which community members had already determined to meet the high standards of sensitivity, veracity and neutrality laid out in Wikipedia’s Biographies of Living Persons (“BLP”) policy. It was also undisputed that the information at issue was both accurate and freely available on several other websites under Asche’s authorization.

With this lawsuit, the right of individuals and entities to publish and disseminate truthful biographical information on the Internet came under attack. The Foundation’s mission is to facilitate the robust exchange of ideas and information and, more ambitiously, to provide global unfettered access to free knowledge. Thus, rather than compromise on the movement’s core principles, we chose to defend our community’s right to contribute factual information to biographical articles.

The German right of personality is broader than the analogous U.S. right of publicity. U.S. law prohibits unauthorized commercial use of individual’s name or likeness,[2] but German law goes further in securing an autonomous area of private life for the individual regardless of commerciality. To that end, Germany often protects the right to informational self-determination, i.e. the right of the individual to decide when and to what extent personal facts are publicly disclosed. Asche argued that, under German law, it was unlawful to make content available concerning an individual without that individual’s prior explicit consent in spite of the availability of that same information elsewhere on the Internet.

However, the Foundation maintained–and the court ultimately agreed–the right of personality in Germany is not absolute; rather, the subject’s interest in informational self-determination must be weighed against the interests of Wikimedia users and the general public.[3]

As the German Federal Constitutional Court has previously ruled, absent a truly compelling justification, the individual must tolerate adverse effects resulting from third party reactions to publication of true facts.[4] “Compelling” justifications may include discrimination against the individual in question, social exclusion and isolation, and likeliness of a widespread impact. Such justifications were absent in this case.

Furthermore, the court recognized that the rigid enforcement of the right of personality would inevitably impede the shared mission of the Wikimedia movement to create and grow, among other projects, a “free encyclopedia.” The court determined that the public has a significant interest in having a comprehensive and freely accessible source of knowledge[5] and Wikimedia similarly has an interest in making available truthful facts under freedom of the press. The court found that this public interest and the need to preserve the freedom of the press constituted substantially important interests that outweighed Asche’s right of personality.

Thus, in a victory for our community and the wider Wikimedia movement, the court ruled that the balance of interests favors the Foundation and that the content at issue could remain in the article undisturbed.

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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.

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:

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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 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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Vol: 2 • Issue: 11 • November 2012 [archives]

Movie success predictions, readability, credentials and authority, geographical comparisons

With contributions by: Piotrus, Benjamin Mako Hill, Tbayer, DarTar, Adler.fa, Hfordsa, Drdee

Early prediction of movie box-office revenues with Wikipedia data

An open-access preprint^[1] has announced the results from a study attempting to predict early box-office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box-office revenue for highly successful movies.

The authors contrast their early prediction approach with more popular real-time prediction/monitoring methods, and suggest that movie popularity can be accurately predicted well in advance, up to a month before the release. The study received broad press coverage and was featured in The Guardian, the MIT Technology Review and the Hollywood Reporter among others. The authors observe that their approach, being “free of any language based analysis, e.g., sentiment analysis, could be easily generalized to non-English speaking movie markets or even other kinds of products”. The dataset used for this study, including the financial and Wikipedia activity data is available among the supplementary materials of the paper.

Readability of the English Wikipedia, Simple Wikipedia, and Britannica compared

The automated readability index, one of the readability metrics used in the study^[2]

A study^[2] by researchers at Kyoto University presents a detailed assessment of the readability of the English Wikipedia against Encyclopedia Britannica and the Simple English Wikipedia using a series of readability metrics and finds that Wikipedia “seems to lag behind the other encyclopedias in terms of readability and comprehensibility of its content”. (more…)

This post is available in 3 languages:

Español  •  Català  • English

English

In Wikimedia México, we have had success partnering with groups and initiatives that share our values of freedom and the commons. One of those initiatives is Procommons Mexico Lab, a project supported by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), where our member Alan Lazalde works.

Recently, we developed the idea to conduct an editathon at the Spanish Cultural Center in México, and we welcomed the cooperation of Wikimedia España as our partner in the first editing marathon between two Spanish-speaking countries. This was also an important demonstration of work between members of Iberocoop — an initiative of Wikimedia chapters that share Iberoamerican cultural heritage. The members of the Mexican and Spanish Wikimedia chapters had already talked months ago about doing common projects because of our shared history.

The editathon at the Centro Cultural de España en México

For the members of the Mexico chapter, we had the opportunity to conduct the event at the Spanish Cultural Center in México, an epicenter of cultural activities in Mexico City. I contacted María Sefidari and Santiago Navarro, both members of Wikimedia España, and through our respective channels of communication and social media, we publicized the event to gain more participants, both in person in Mexico and remotely from people’s homes in Spain.

On Sunday, November 18th, at 10 am, María gave a short greeting vía Skype, and then editors from Wikimedia México and the student club Wikimedia Amoxcalli started writing about topics related to the Spanish Cultural Center in México, adding more information and updating what was already existing on the Spanish Wikipedia. We also wrote about its museum, cultural offices and programs.

Throughout the day, we worked on other  topics related to Spain and Mexico: the Knife rebellion, which happened before the War of Independence between both countries; the Spanish soldier Torcuato Trujillo; contemporary artists like María La Ribot and Magda Donato; and the Spanish Ateneum of México. There was also a translation of a new article to the French Wikipedia by El Caro, and several to Catalan Wikipedia, thanks to GLAM promotor Àlex Hinojo and also to Gustavo Góngora writing from Catalonia.

We coordinated via the IRC channels of both chapters, and kept updating our progress on Facebook and on Twitter with the hashtag #EditMXES. In all, we had event participants in México at the venue and in Guadalajara; participants in Spain from Barcelona, Ferrol, La Seu, Madrid, Palencia, Vila-real and Zamora; and we were joined by the coordinator of Wikimedia Colombia from Bogotá .

By 4 pm, when we ended the editathon, we had written 18 new articles and expanded two more on Spanish Wikipedia. Plus we added seven new articles on Catalan Wikipedia and one new article on French Wikipedia. What had started as an initiative between Wikimedia México and the AECID resulted in a wider collaboration between many countries. We hope to hold more events like this soon.

• Link to the event on Spanish Wikipedia

Iván Martínez, President of Wikimedia México
Translation to English by María Sefidari and translation to Catalan by Santiago Navarro
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Lakshmi Valsalakumari is an IT professional who wants to expand her horizons. She attended the recent Wikimedia Developers Camp in Bangalore and had this story to tell:

Lakshmi with Santhosh Thottingal, the lead developer of Wikimedia’s font and keyboard tools

I have been an Information Technology professional working with well-known software organizations over the last 15 years. While IT has been keeping me busy, productive and happy, I have also all along harbored an interest in history and the humanities. I have recently decided to pursue these interests full-time, joining a research program at the Centre of Exact Humanities, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India.

With my recent shift into academics and research, I have been referencing Wikipedia quite a bit in the last two to three months, and I have been amazed at the sheer magnitude of information found on it. While I have been reading the Wikipedia pages extensively, I had never yet considered editing it, not even in English, the language I reference Wikipedia most in, and the one I use most on computers.

Editing and contributing content in Malayalam, my mother tongue, had not really occurred to me either—Malayalam being a language I hardly used on my computers—until I attended the Bangalore Wikimedia Dev Camp.

I have tried typing Malayalam using my regular browser, but I have not been very happy with the effect. This was not the way I liked to see Malayalam written and rendered, so I had not made any further efforts to write Malayalam online. At the camp, I met Santhosh and Manoj—avid Malayalam Wikipedia contributors—and they persuaded me to give it another shot.

The first step was to download the Meera Unicode font for Malayalam, then to change my default browser to one of those that can render Meera well (I tried out Google Chrome; Firefox was even better, I was told), and then to try out typing Malayalam using the regular English keyboard.

I liked what I saw. When I typed the suggested key combinations, even complicated Malayalam letter combinations were being rendered the way I would have written them using pen and paper. I tried more and more combinations—ta, tha, tta, Ta, tma, thra, tya, zha—and was pleased with the effect. This was fun!

Demos of how transliteration keyboards for Malayalam work

Soon, I was creating my first article. I noticed that on the main Wikipedia page, an article on Barcelona mentioned Catalonia as a red link, meaning that no further information was available in the Malayalam Wikipedia on it, whereas there was plenty of information on the same subject in the English Wikipedia. Manoj guided me through the steps as I created my first page in the Malayalam Wikipedia, copied the template information over from the English article and saved the heading, trying to get it right in Malayalam. I viewed my saved efforts, and with a sense of achievement, I went to grab a coffee.

Back online with my coffee, I was surprised to find a message on the article Talk page—someone had already posted a comment on the page I had just saved, chiding me for the lack of content and references. “This will drive away people from Wikipedia,” the post read. “Please ensure I get enough content on the page!”

Man, that was fast! I had no idea people were watching and following Wikipedia edits this closely. Manoj encouraged me to type more, so I returned to my effort. While I was getting comfortable with the typing, I was still grappling for suitable words in Malayalam for the content I was reading in English. Manoj suggested Olam, an online dictionary, and sure enough, I was able to find several of the Malayalam equivalents I was searching for.

And so, I typed on. Again, to my surprise, I found people editing the content and giving helpful suggestions even as I was still typing—one person told me to leave native names as such and not translate those, and another formatted some of the changes. By the end of the day, I had posted a decent amount of info, although there remained much more to be added.

I was happy with my day’s work. I had never imagined that using Malayalam on my computer and editing the Malyalam Wikipedia content would be such a pleasant and enjoyable experience, one that I was actually looking forward to!

Another point I must mention here is the sheer volume of Malayalam content that I have started seeing online, on Wikipedia pages and elsewhere. This must be due to the attention paid to this field of languages, literature and culture online by movements like Wikimedia. In 2005, I remember searching online for a well-known Malayalam lullaby Omanathingalkkidavo by Irayimman Thampi, but could not find anything. I had then resorted to the memories of my immediate relatives to try and pen the forgotten lyrics. Now, when I search for the same, the amount of material that comes up on that lullaby is amazing!

My heart-felt appreciation to Wikipedia and all its online community members who have made all of this possible. I hope to be part of this movement myself and do my bit toward furthering easy availability of multi-lingual content online

Lakshmi Valsalakumari

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is developing technologies that make it possible to speakers of all languages to contribute to Wikipedia in their language as easily and naturally as possible. Lakshmi’s story is an example of how these technologies enable people to develop reference and educational content that makes Wikipedia useful to people in the whole world. These technologies are deployed in Wikipedias in most languages of India, and more languages and projects are being added all the time.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

Later today, Wikimedia’s newly established Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) will be publishing its first-ever recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees about how to distribute money to organizations in the Wikimedia movement. This is an important step for the movement, marking a significant devolution of power to the global volunteer community of Wikimedians, in which the FDC will give away as much as $11.2 million in 2012-13. We wanted to take a moment today to reflect on why the Board chose to create the FDC, and what has happened over the past seven and a half months since we made that decision.

First, a little background. The goal of the FDC is to help the Board make decisions about how to effectively allocate movement funds to achieve Wikimedia’s mission, vision, and strategy. Last March in Berlin, we called for its creation.

We did it because we believe that a global body of committed, experienced Wikimedians, supported by a well-designed process and a dedicated staff, will be perceived by the Wikimedia community as fair, transparent and accountable, and will be able to make decisions about where the Wikimedia movement should spend its money to accomplish three important goals:

• Ensure the money is put towards activities aligned with the Wikimedia movement’s strategic objectives;
• Ensure the money is spent effectively, supporting greater impact and enabling us to make faster progress towards our goals;
• Gather and publish information that helps anyone interested to get smarter faster about which programmatic activities are effective, and why.

The FDC process was set into motion following a Board resolution in March 2012, which said that going forward “all funds raised via the Wikimedia project sites will be distributed via the recommendations of the FDC, with the exception of Wikimedia Foundation core operating costs and the operating reserve.”

After an invitation to serve on the inaugural FDC was posted on all the Wikimedia projects, 43 people self-nominated to serve on the inaugural FDC, and of those, the Board selected seven.

They are from seven different countries, and have worked on Wikipedia, Commons, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Meta-Wiki. They are or have been editors, patrollers, bureaucrats, administrators, stewards, strategy project contributors, and members of the Ombudsman Commission, the English Wikipedia ArbCom, the Funds Dissemination Advisory Group, the Chapters committee, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Audit committee and the Grant Advisory committee. They have also founded or have been Board members of five chapters: Bangladesh, India, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Among them all, they speak 13 languages. They were chosen for their experience within and outside of the Wikimedia movement, including familiarity with grantmaking, finance and project management. Both of us (Jan-Bart and Patricio) sat on the committee as non-voting observers on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

Since the launch of the FDC, they’ve had weekly orientation meetings and continuous communication via Skype, IRC and mailing lists, leading to the committee’s first in-person meeting at the end of October.

On August 1st, a public FDC wiki page was established, upon which fund-seeking Wikimedia organizations were invited to submit their first proposals in public and on the wiki. On October 1 the Wikimedia Foundation and eleven Wikimedia chapters submitted twelve proposals for the first round of funding.

The process allowed everyone in the community the chance to examine and comment on the proposals, alongside the assessments by the FDC supporting staff at WMF and according to pre-defined, public criteria that are the same for each applying organization (the community-written newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” summarized the criteria and resulting assessments in an overview article).

Why is this important? Because it’s a lot of money. In this fiscal year, the FDC will make recommendations for how to give out as much as $11.2 million. To give that responsibility to a volunteer-driven body is a major step towards increased transparency, accountability, fairness and open collaboration in the Wikimedia movement.

We’d like to thank the people who have spent so much time making this whole process possible: the Wikimedia Foundation staff members who have been supporting the process, and the FDC members themselves. We believe this process shows great promise thus far, and we are excited to be getting the FDC’s recommendations later today.

If you have questions or wish to share feedback, you can do so on the FDC portal. We encourage you to read more about the process, and to get involved with it. All the proposals are open to your questions and feedback: we would welcome your contributions.

Jan-Bart de Vreede, Vice Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees,
Patricio Lorente, Member, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees