Here’s a brief update on the status of our recently launched usability improvements.

Since the launch of the beta invitation to the first set of usability improvements on August 6th, about 173,000 people tried out the beta and about 134,000 people continue to use the beta as of September 12th.

Beta retention rate is interpreted roughly 77%. These numbers are aggregation of all Wikimedia projects in all available languages. If we look at the retention rate by project or by language, the number varies significantly. For example, the beta retention rate of English Wikipedia is 82% and Spanish Wikipedia is 80%, while the beta struggles to retain beta trial users of the language communities such as Japanese and Korean at the retention rate of 59% and 54% respectively.

We are reviewing the survey feedback and trying to isolate specific issues of languages whose retention rate is below average. If you are curious about how the beta opt-in and opt-out look like at daily or weekly basis, you can visit the preference statistics page. Here is the example link to English Wikpedia. Just change the language prefix or project name to get to the project of your preference.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager
Wikipedia Usability Initiative

The open source movement is not only about software and knowledge base creation. There are active movements in user interface design as well. tango! is one of the neatest projects in design collaborative world, contributing in the creation of open source software such as Open Office and Ubuntu. We, the usability team, also benefit from such open source design projects which allow us to reuse their icons by modifying to meet our needs. For example the icon on the right is the new reference tool icon which can be found in the enhanced toolbar. It is the reuse of Gnome Desktop icons from Wikimedia Commons.

The first set of usability enhancements, new tab layout, enhanced toolbar, and reorganized search page, are now available in MediaWiki projects except for right-to-left language wikis such as Arabic and Hebrew. The support for right-to-left languages should be available in a few weeks, so just hang in there. We welcome you to try out the usability enhancements by going into your preferences and enable ‘Vector’ and the enhanced toolbar from Appearance and Editing menus.

I hope you find the new interface easy to interact. Let us know your feedback in the discussion page of the most recent release page.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager, Usability Initiative

Here at Wikimedia we’ve been avidly using CiviCRM for over two years now. Over that period we’ve seen it grow and mature as a platform for fundraising, contact tracking, mailings and have been wanting to make the platform evolve even more. Together with Civi community, we’ve worked to organize the early release of the CiviReport architecture for the 2.2 branch. Thanks go to the core Civi team for doing the backport and FourKitchens for contributing a wealth of new reports for us. You can read a full write up of the release at the CiviCRM blog.

For those of our readers who are interested in CiviCRM and are in the Bay Area, we’ve also started to organize regular user meetups. The first one had a great turn out and we’d love for both developers and users of CiviCRM to attend the next one on August 4th at 6pm.

Tomasz Finc, Software Developer

We’re excited to release ‘Inside Wikimedia‘ -  our first video showcasing the people, projects, and the environment of the Wikimedia Foundation.  It’s short, but you can get a sense of who is behind the Foundation and what exactly we do on a day to day basis.  All of this video was shot on-location in our San Francisco offices.

Of course it’s a CC-BY-SA 3.0 work (with free music from Jamendo!), so feel free to remix and distribute far and wide.  The video is available in the formats below, and is hosted on Wikimedia Commons and on the Internet Archive.  We’re working on localized versions with alternate language subtitles as well.  Appreciate any comments or feedback.

Via…

Internet Archive (Quicktime, highres, 1GB) (MPEG4, 9MB) (OGG, 9MB)
Wikimedia Commons (OGG, 9MB) (OGG, 106MB)
Vimeo, and YouTube

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Following up on the success of last Fall’s Wiki Takes Manhattan, the project goes National with Wikipedia Loves Art, taking place all month.  As you can find on its page on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009. Although there are planned events at each location, you can go on your own at any time during the month.

The event opened up last Sunday at London’s  Victoria and Albert Museum, and is coordinated by the Brooklyn Museum, with the participation of the V & A, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Taft Museum of Art. There are totally 15 different museums and cultural institutions participating.
Fred Benenson of  Creative Commons spoke with Jimmy Wales about the event, and produced this quick video where Jimmy explains how excited he is about the event.

For details, and to see if a museum near you is participating, see the Wikipedia page devoted to the event.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

Yesterday we discovered that WikiHow, a wiki neighbor of ours that provides user-generated ‘how-to’ info has hit the admirable 50,000 article milestone.

WikiHow provides their content freely in a creative commons license, they publish in multiple languages, and they run MediaWiki, the same open-source software that powers Wikipedia and thousands of other wikis around the world.  They’ve also been a hugely generous financial sponsor of previous Wikimania conferences.

Congrats to WikiHow and their dedicated volunteers.  Here’s to 50K more how-to articles!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

A printed book ordered through PediaPress.com

A few weeks ago, we rolled out a feature to allow users to generate PDF files, OpenDocument word processor files, and on-demand printed books in one of our smaller sister projects, Wikibooks. This same technology has now also been experimentally enabled on the German Wikipedia (thanks to Frank Schulenburg for creating a beautiful help page). Essentially, you can compile a wiki-book from any number of Wikipedia articles, download a PDF or OpenDocument version, or order a printed version from our technology partner, PediaPress. And if you like your book remixes, you can save them for others to use and share.

If you want to take your favorite Wikipedia articles with you on the go, or if you want to have a nicely formatted PDF version, or you want to edit them further in a word processor, this technology is for you. The reason this is being tested on the German Wikipedia, in case you were wondering, is that PediaPress is a German company, and they will be able to respond quickly to feedback directly from the German Wikipedia community. With more than 1.4 billion pageviews a month, the German Wikipedia is also the second most viewed language edition, right after English with 5.2 billion pageviews. We’ve dedicated some hardware to this feature, and testing it on the German Wikipedia will give us a good idea how it behaves under high traffic characteristics.

It should go without saying that all the code developed through this partnership is open source. In other words, if you want to set up your own wiki with PDF support, OpenDocument support, or connectivity to the PediaPress on-demand printing service, you can install the Collection Extension and enable it on your wiki. When we say free, we mean it.

If all goes well, this feature will become available in all Wikimedia projects where it makes sense. This technology has been developed with the generous support of the Commonwealth of Learning and the Open Society Institute.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

PS: In unrelated tech news, our CTO Brion Vibber has blogged about the AbuseFilter extension, an important tool whose development we’re supporting, which will help Wikipedians to deal more effectively with spam, vandalism, and other destructive user behavior. And if you haven’t seen it, also note his recent post about the Drafts feature that’s being tested, and which should help against accidental loss of edits.

Mozilla has awarded a grant of $100,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies. Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards. Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats. All audio and video in Wikipedia is stored in these formats. Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla has blogged about this great news, as has Chris Blizzard, Director of Evangelism for Mozilla.

Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets. Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation.

The $100,000 grant will be used to support the work of long-time contributors to the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codebase and related tools, such as libraries for network seeking. The improvements will be made over a 6 month period.

Erik Möller,
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation<

I hope you all had started the year 2009 with a positive note. I have a lot to be hopeful for 2009, but the most exciting thing for me is to launch the long-waited the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. This initiative became reality by the grant from the late Frank Stanton (the president of CBS between 1946 and 1971) through the Stanton Foundation.

The purpose of this initiative is to reduce the barriers for new users in editing Wikipedia and boost the participation in editing Wikipedia. I am currently focusing on bringing in talented minds.  On the space front, we had outgrown our current space in the South of Market area of San Francisco, and we were in search of space specifically for this project. I am happy to announce that Wikia has agreed to sublease two of their conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the project duration (Jan’09-Mar’10). Daniel collected a dozen bids for the space in SOMA, and Wikia matched the best offer. Wikia is only two blocks away from the office of the Wikimedia Foundation, so having a satellite office so close by works great for us.

Wikia has been doing intensive work on the usability front and making the code available to public, so I look forward to collaborating with the Wikia technical and product teams to exchange ideas and learn from their work. The Wikpedia Usability Initiative page where we can exchange ideas and share the status is up. I look forward to your ideas there.

May the force be with us,

Naoko Komura

Program Manager<

Do people read site notices?

Yes.  Absolutely.  Our users respond to different messages… and we continue to test what messages resonate and drive donations.   Reflect back to my previous post and you’ll see that site notices with the thermometer had much higher click through rates than those without.

We decided that we wanted to test the impact of the meters over a few days (generating several million page views) to see how different notices performed with and without thermometers.  Phase 1a, below, we went down to 3 notices in random cycling.  One had a meter, the other two did not.

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In Phase 1b, we completely reversed the placements of the thermometer from our initial run.  As expected, those with meters had significantly higher clicks and donations.

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Now, over the last few days, we’ve gone with all meters on all notices.  Not only has there been a nice spike in donations, but it seems that people are reading the messages.  In particular, the educational notice, “Wikipedia is a non-profit project” has done significantly better from our initial run.

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We’re now going to focus on improving our conversion rate:  fewer and fewer people are donating after a click-through.  It’s expected as the fundraiser goes on, but we need to find a better way to get people to donate once they’ve shown interest.

Our next steps include testing a new “Learn More” link on all the notices (maybe people need more information before they give) and other Phase 2 notices.   We’re also going to test some different looks and images in an attempt to draw in new and different donors.

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving<