Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.  Telefónica will be working with the Wikimedia Foundation to increase the reach and accessibility of free knowledge for millions of their customers.  Through their mobile, IPtv, broadband, and other platforms they will soon begin to provide fast and innovative access to educational information from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Telefónica has a particularly strong presence in Latin America, a part of the world experiencing an incredible rise in access to the internet, and a place where we hope to see considerable increases to our free knowledge materials.

Over the course of this three-year partnership we plan to jointly develop new approaches to sharing Wikimedia project information, particularly through Telefónica’s very large base of mobile subscribers. Telefónica has also expressed a strong interest in working with local chapters to support local outreach and education activities.  Last year they supported Wikimania in Buenos Aires.

Sharing in the sum of all human knowledge requires us to go to the sources. Beyond citations to books, journals, and websites, knowledge comes alive through images, video, and audio footage. We can travel to the beginnings of human history and admire the beauty of the Venus of Brassempouy carved from mammoth ivory 25,000 years ago. We can marvel at 2000-year-old mummy portraits that capture the dead in vivid colors. We can immerse ourselves in an Easter procession of the 19th century painted in incredible realism by Ilya Repin. We can listen to the earliest sound recording of a human voice, which could only successfully be played back two years ago for the first time.

Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (a collective we refer to as “GLAM”) document, showcase, preserve and protect our cultural treasures. The Internet gives us the opportunity to share digital entry points to the fuller experience that cultural institutions can offer. With more than 340 million unique visitors every month, Wikipedia is the central entry point for research in the Internet-connected world.

The international Wikimedia volunteer movement is therefore naturally aligned with the public service mission of cultural institutions. Over the last year, we have seen an acceleration of partnerships to bring content online. This is also a result of the emergence of Wikimedia’s world-wide presence through chapter organizations founded by volunteers, which exist in 27 countries.

For the first time, we now have compelling data that shows the success of these partnerships, and the virtuous circle they can inspire. We also can use the same metrics to track the success of Wikimedia’s other content outreach initiatives.

Measuring success

Developing improved content usage metrics was one of the key priorities identified at the Multimedia Usability Meeting in Paris (see previous report). Thanks to the work done by Bryan Tong Minh, who attended the meeting, the usage of every media file in our media repository is now fully tracked across different Wikimedia projects and languages. Based on this, Magnus Manske, another volunteer and Paris attendee, developed two useful scripts that help us track the usage of entire collections of content:

• “Glamorous“, which enumerates where media from a collection are used (e.g. which Wikipedia languages);
• “Amalglamate“, which tracks comparative collection usage data over time (starting January 12).

Using these scripts, we can analyze the impact of our content partnerships in real-time. For example:

In December 2008, Wikimedia Germany developed a partnership with the German Federal Archives resulting in the donation of 80,000 images, most of which relate to German history. As required by Wikimedia policy, these images were donated under a free content license which allows anyone to re-use them, provided proper credit is given.

Of the 82,458 images uploaded, 18.3%, or 15,109 images, are in active use in Wikimedia’s projects (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikibooks).

The most frequently used [1] photograph from the collection is the photograph of Willy Brandt, German Chancellor from 1969 to 1974. It is used in 60 language editions of Wikipedia, with a total of 83 uses.

Effectively, this photograph of Willy Brandt becomes an iconic image that web users from around the world will see when researching the politician, in any of these languages: Aragonese, Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Breton, Bosnian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Fiji Hindi, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Icelandic, Ido, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kurdish, Latin (!), Lithuanian, Low Saxon, Lower Sorbian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh. And it’s just one of more than 15,000 images from the collection that are already in active use, about a year after first being made available.

These tools do not yet show the number of pageviews of the articles in question, although that data is available. For example, the German Wikipedia article about Willy Brandt was viewed 38,449 times in December 2009. Considering the combined language usage of Wikipedia, the use of images in many articles creates a large aggregate impact.

Like all media files in Wikimedia Commons, the image is available under a free content license, the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. This means that it is usable by third parties as well, provided that proper credit is given. Tracking third party usage is, of course, more difficult. The MediaWiki software powering Wikimedia projects has built-in support for Wikimedia Commons (called “InstantCommons“), meaning that any wiki, anywhere, can immediately use files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons if this feature is enabled. For example, you can view the Willy Brandt image on WikiEducator (not a Wikimedia project), with all the same metadata, even though it has never been uploaded there. In the future, we may be able to track image usage across third party MediaWiki installations as well.

The Virtuous Circle

Not only do these images enrich articles in many languages, they also make it easier for people in languages that don’t have an article to get started. And, importantly, they drive awareness of the cultural institutions that provided them — as each and every image carries a visible seal when clicked:

Note how even the seal itself has been translated into 23 languages already. The images carry the original metadata provided by the Bundesarchiv:

This links back to a copy hosted on the archive’s servers. Because the descriptions and other data in the records of the German Federal Archives sometimes contain errors, there’s a dedicated page that lets volunteers submit corrections. This page is regularly reviewed by the archive’s employees, and corrections are incorporated into its records.

The usage of the images therefore drives interest in the content, awareness of the institutions, improvements of the metadata — and hopefully incentivizes other institutions to follow. Since the German Federal Archives, several large content partnerships have been established:

• The donation of 250,000 historic images by the German “Fotothek” (more info)
• The donation of 39,000 images about Suriname and Indonesia by the Dutch Tropenmuseum (more info), with more to follow

• “Wiki Loves Art Netherlands“, a large-scale competition to take photos of artistic objects, with more than 40 participating cultural institutions, resulting in more than 4,000 image uploads to Wikimedia Commons
• The upload of 140 videos from the Dutch newsreel Polygoon-journal
• The upload of more than 30,000 images of ants from the open AntWeb archive by its maintainers

Beyond partnering with cultural institutions, Wikimedia chapters have also taken a leadership role in documenting the world around us through picture competitions, expeditions, and workshops. The aforementioned metrics can be used to track which models produce content that ends up being widely used in Wikimedia’s projects. Examples include:

• a project by Wikimedia Česká republika to document Czech municipalities (funded through WMF’s chapters grants program), which so far has resulted in more than 2,000 uploaded photographs;
• the Israeli “Pikiwiki” project, a dedicated platform for donating photographs from Israeli history and society, which has resulted in more than 5,000 uploaded photos;
• financial support by chapters for travel, event attendance, etc., such as Wikimedia France’s funding program, which has resulted in nearly 5,000 uploaded photographs.

The usage of images from these and other initiatives will now be tracked over time. Of course, having such metrics is only the beginning, and WMF will invest in global program support capacity to ensure that we learn from, document, and incentivize best practices.

Managing growth

Altogether, Wikimedia Commons has achieved extraordinary growth over the past year. Launched in September 2004, it took two years for the multimedia repository to reach the milestone of one million files. We’re now at almost six million files, two million of which were added in the last 12 months.  More content partnerships, new video functionality, and improved usability (see earlier post) will further accelerate this growth.

Thanks to Wikimedia’s large network of supporters, we can keep up with this growth. It’s been a much closer call this time than we would like, as the chart below showing our recently shrinking media storage capacity illustrates (out of a total of 8 terabytes):

But yesterday, we put into service a new media storage server which more than triples our total storage capacity (it will be redundantly mirrored to a second server with the same capacity). This, too, is likely only the beginning. Wikimedia Commons is not comparable to websites like Flickr or Picasa: it does not aim to document vacations, parties, and precious life moments. It is a repository of educational media. But there’s a world full of riches waiting to still be brought closer to the minds of millions.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

[1] excluding the use of images for purposes of navigation and topical representation on a large number of articles

Contact a local Wikimedia chapter

Further reading:

• In August 2009, Wikimedia Australia organized the “GLAM-Wiki” conference, bringing together 170 representatives of the Australian and New Zealand cultural sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums – GLAMs). One of the work products of the conference was a series of recommendations to Wikimedia, to cultural institutions, and to policymakers. These recommendations show that our work is far from complete. They are also an example of transparent and honest dialogue.
• The Wikimedia Outreach team is developing resources and documentation to help Wikimedians in their work with cultural institutions:
  • Case study of the Tropenmuseum partnership
  • Case study of the German Federal Archives partnership
  • In a nutshell: How to build a content partnership

Upcoming events:

• On April 13, 2010, Wikimedia volunteers and Wikimedia Foundation representatives will participate in a one-day workshop as part of the “Museums and the Web 2010” conference (“Wikimedia@MW2010“) to further explore and promote the active engagement between the communities.
• On January 31, 2010, Wikimedia UK will kick off Britain Loves Wikipedia, a month-long photo competition that invites the general public to take photos of cultural treasures in participating institutions, for the primary purpose of illustrating Wikipedia articles

Some new faces have joined the Foundation’s multimedia usability project, and important developments are underway to improve uploading and sharing of multimedia materials on Wikimedia’s projects.

We are excited that Guillaume Paumier, Product Manager of the Ford multimedia usability project , has moved from Toulouse, France and joined the Wikimedia usability team at our San Francisco office. We are also excited that Neil Kandalgaonkar has joined the multimedia usability project as a software developer. Neil brings in rich technical background from major social networking sites such as Flickr and Upcoming.org.

The multimedia usability project will focus on the following three areas:

• Simplify and streamline the media uploading process to Wikimedia Commons
• Create a staging area where incomplete work can be reviewed and amended
• Integrate interwiki uploading so that uploads from Wikimedia projects are directed to Commons (the binary repository for all Wikimedia projects) seamlessly, and support moving of existing files from Wikimedia projects to Commons

These focuses were determined based on the discussion at the multi-media usability meeting in Paris with active Wikimedia Commons contributors and the objective of the Ford grant to increase participation to Wikimedia Commons.

We have a lot of ideas and features we would like to improve, but our resources are limited; we need to prioritize and focus on a few core changes. In order to accomplish various aspects of the usability of Wikimedia Commons, collaboration with the volunteer contributor community and partnership with our global chapters will be vital to achieve successful results. The multi-media usability meeting in Paris sponsored by Wikimedia France was immensely valuable to set the groundwork for this project. Wikimedia Deutschland is leading an initiative in the development of multi lingual search so that rich internationalized content can be retrieved by a global audience.

Guillaume has been actively publishing his initial research work, the survey result, user interviews and domain research to the multimedia hub of the usability wiki. He is also working on the initial mock-ups of simplified user work flow for uploading media files to Commons. Have a look and post your feedback on the discussion page.

We are also working with Michael Dale to integrate an Add-Media-Wizard into the enhanced Wikimedia project toolbar which is currently offered as a part of the usability beta. Add-Media-Wizard allows users to search relevant media files from Wikipedia articles and insert into the article without leaving the editing window. Michael’s work is already available as a gadget, but the plan is to offer to wider audience by integrating into user preferences. To have a sneak peek of this feature, you can visit the usability sandbox. Just click the image icon in the toolbar, and you can experience the intuitive way of including media assets. Please be aware that the sandbox is an experimental area, so the condition of the software changes constantly.

If you’re online and have access to IRC you can join the multimedia usability team for ‘office hours,’ where we’ll be available live to take questions and discuss ongoing work around the usability project. The next office hours take place Thursday, February 4 at 9AM to 10AM PDT (16:00 to 17:00 UTC). Visit the IRC Office Hours planning page for more info and for assistance in joining the conversation.

More usability improvements are coming! Stay tuned.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager
Wikimedia Usability Inititative

We’re very pleased to announce the release of the Foundation’s second annual report, covering the 2008/2009 fiscal year.  The Foundation’s annual report covers a full year of activity, highlighting our fiscal operations, programs and outreach successes, major milestones, and of course the work of thousands of volunteers and chapters around the world.

This year you’ll find a new annual time-line that showcases major events through the year, and also a center spread featuring details and facts about an incredible article created during the previous fiscal year.

As always, the images and information in the report are all under the creative commons CCBYSA 3.0 license, including images from many Wikimedia volunteers with principal photography by Lane Hartwell, a San Francisco-based photographer.  This year’s report was designed by Exbrook, a design strategy firm based in San Francisco led by Rhonda Rubenstein and David Peters.

Thanks to all who supported the production – looking forward to hearing your comments and suggestions.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Wow!  We’ve just closed the most successful fundraiser in the history of the Wikimedia Foundation thanks to our  amazing donors. Over 230,000 people came together and showed their support for our project and mission: to provide free and open knowledge to everyone around the world. Thank you!

Again, we’re ending our annual fundraiser early due to the overwhelming and rapid support from everyone.   We’ve hit and surpassed our fundraising goal of $7.5 million, raising over $8 million in just two months.

Even more, we’re humbled by the fact that during serious global economic stress, folks were still willing to help out and contribute.  More than 230,000 donors have shown that they want Wikipedia to continue to be a place for free and open information.  More than 230,000 have joined together to keep Wikipedia free of ads.  We are extremely grateful for your generosity.

I cannot say enough about how amazing the steadfast support from everyone has been: our donors, our contributors, our chapters; everyone involved directly influenced the immense success of this year’s effort. Again, a huge thank you from me and everyone from the Wikimedia Foundation.  We look forward to sharing some more detailed findings about this year’s fundraiser in the coming weeks.

Happy New Year,

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Thank you for your feedback and comments about the usability beta through the survey and via the usability project wiki. The usability beta initially started off with the new skin called Vector and the toolbar (release nickname: Acai) in early July and it was enhanced with the navigable table of contents within the editing box and dialogues for links, tables, and search & replace (release nickname: Babaco) at the end of September.

The Babaco features have to be activated through the user preferences. The most recent enhancement was to move the tool for watching and unwatching pages into the top navigation (star icon). This feature was implemented based on a high volume of related user feedback. Navigation tabs now collapse in case tabs start overlapping when the screen resolution is reduced, or where tab widths are wider because of language specific characters.

The usability beta was visited and tested by close to 380,000 users by the end of November 2009. The beta has been drawing roughly 100,000 users every month, and close to 300,000 users have kept the beta enabled as of December 1, 2009. As I briefly summarized in my blog post in September, the beta program was adopted relatively well by the beta users of English Wikipedia (83% retention rate), and in other English language projects such as the English Wikinews (95% retention rate). Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedia beta users have the second highest retention rate at 81%. German, Russian, Chinese, French and Italian Wikipedia beta users are retained in the range between 70% and 79%. Retention rate for Polish and Japanese was relatively low, with 65% and 60% respectively.

The list of the beta retention rates for the top ten most visited Wikipedia languages is summarized in this table and the list of all projects in all languages can be found here. The opt-out survey and feedback forms were available to beta users and the survey responses provided rich quantitative and qualitative data to understand how the beta is received and understand the reasons for what people like about the beta and leaving the beta.

One of the questions we sought to answer via the opt-out surveys was the impact of different browser types. The usability tech team has been pounding on Internet Explorer related problems and we thought the browser type will have significant impact on the beta adoption pattern. According to our own browser statistics, about 56% of users access Wikipedia through a version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, and about 30% of users use a version of Mozilla Firefox. The browser distribution pattern for the beta users for the ten mostly visited Wikipedia language family indicates stronger favor towards Firefox over Internet Explorer except for Japanese and Chinese Wikipedia whose browser distribution is dominated by Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. If we slice the beta retention rate by browser distribution, we see the the repeated low retention rate for Internet Explorer users. However the variance of retention rates by browser types is not significant enough to conclude that browser distribution has a substantial impact on the beta adoption.

The qualitative survey responses brought up language-specific issues. Japanese Wikipedia beta users found the font used in the new interface is too small. Chinese beta users also expressed the difficulty adjusting to the smaller font in addition to the perceived slowness of the new interface. Switching between Traditional and Simplified Chinese was not well supported. We hope issues with overlapping tabs expressed by German users have been addressed by the recently released collapsible tabs. Finally, we are aware that we often break popular user gadgets, and we appreciate that developer communities gradually embrace the usability updates so that the gadgets are compatible with the usability beta. The survey comments are available in ten languages so far, and we will continue making the surveys available for more languages.

The usability beta continues to evolve and the usability team is actively working on the next release, Citron. This release will have the new features such as collapsed templates, form interface for editing templates, and side-by-side preview. Citron is currently scheduled to be available in January. Beta feedback will be incorporated in this release to address language specific issues which were surfaced from the survey.

As the general acceptance of the usability beta is supported by a majority of beta users, we would like to start discussing the timing of making the new editing interface and the toolbar the default interface after resolving any remaining language specific issues.

This survey data was analyzed and put together by the team effort. I would like to thank Howie Fung, Product Consultant, for organizing and analyzing the survey data, Nimish Gautam, for integrating machine translation into the qualitative survey, and Roan Kattouw for tracking and normalizing the data.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager
Usability Initiative

From November 6 to 8, a group of about thirty people met in Paris to discuss how to improve the processes and technologies for contributing multimedia to Wikimedia projects. It was the first meeting of its kind, sponsored and organized by one of Wikimedia’s chapter organizations, Wikimedia France, in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation.

In July, the Wikimedia Foundation received a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to make it easier to add multimedia to our projects (see previous blog post). The purpose of our meeting in Paris was to support the kick-off of this initiative, and to bring volunteers doing multimedia-focused work together with software developers. Beyond the scope of activities within the Ford grant, we hope to see a large number of volunteer projects flourish that will enrich the Wikimedia experience beyond text.

We used the three-day meeting to both plan specific projects and activities, and to actually develop working code. Among the outcomes:

• Increased awareness of our shared activities through demonstrations and discussions (list of projects we reviewed).

• Experimental roll-out of functionality to track usage of media from Wikimedia Commons across other Wikimedia projects; a first implementation of wiki-editable subtitles for videos, and smaller hacks and improvements.

• Draft ideas and concepts for improving the user experience on Wikimedia Commons as a whole: upload, site experience, metadata, search, third party use of Commons content, education about the project mission.

• A clearer articulation of the needs that are specific to working with cultural institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – “GLAM”): case studies and success stories (a first case study was developed at the meeting), metrics, mass uploading tools, support processes, etc.

Developers developing

Summaries and notes from the respective work groups are available. If you’re interested in participating in any of these efforts, feel free to add yourself to the relevant “movers” section.

Unlike Wikimania and other larger Wikimedia gatherings, this meeting was a rare opportunity to focus on one specific problem area, and the first international gathering of this type. This approach turned out to be highly productive, and we hope to be able to use it in other problem areas in the future.

Because it’s rare for such an international and diverse group to meet, some participants met prior to the multimedia meeting to support the Wikimedia-wide strategic planning process; notes from this pre-meeting can be found on the StrategyWiki.

We want to thank all the participants of the Multimedia Usability Meeting for attending, and hope to organize similar meetings focused on other challenges and opportunities in the future. The Wikimedia Foundation wishes to thank Wikimédia France for sponsoring and organizing the meeting. Furthermore, we are grateful to Wikimedia Nederlands, Wikimedia Deutschland, and Wikimedia Polska for additional travel sponsorships. Your donations to the Wikimedia Foundation and to Wikimedia chapters help us to support future meetings like this one.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Delphine Ménard, Treasurer, Wikimédia France

What’s happening to Wikipedia’s volunteer community? Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages”. The article is a comprehensive description of the challenges and opportunities facing the Wikipedia community. Among other things, it describes recent research findings regarding the number of Wikipedia editors. A quote from the article: “In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega.”

Other news stories have further focused on this particular number, some going so far to predict Wikipedia’s imminent demise, others highlighting its strengths and resilience. It’s understandable that media will look for a compelling narrative. Our job is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of what’s going on. This blog post is therefore an attempt to dig deeper into the numbers and into what’s happening with Wikipedia’s volunteer community, and to describe our big picture strategy.

In a nutshell, here’s what we know:

• The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow.  In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September.  Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world.
• The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing.  There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day.
• The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then.  Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people.

The numbers quoted in the Wall Street Journal are the result of analysis by Spanish researcher Dr. Felipe Ortega. Dr. Ortega has conducted valuable research on a wide range of aspects of the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.  It is, however, important to understand the meaning of the cited numbers.  Dr. Ortega’s findings are described in his doctoral thesis “Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis.”

Even more importantly, the findings reported by the Wall Street Journal are not a measure of the number of people participating in a given month. Rather, they come from the part of Dr. Ortega’s research that attempts to measure when individual Wikipedia volunteers start editing, and when they stop. Because it’s impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again, there are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving: Dr. Ortega qualifies as the editor’s “log-off date” the last time they contributed. This is a snapshot in time and doesn’t predict whether the same person will make an edit in the future, nor does it reflect the actual number of active editors in that month.

Dr. Ortega supplements this research with data about the actual participation (number of changes, number of editors) in the different language editions of our projects. His findings regarding actual participation are generally consistent with our own, as well as those of other researchers such as Xerox PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition research group.

What do those numbers show?  Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak 2.5 years ago, and has remained stable since then. (See WikiStats data for all Wikipedia languages combined.) On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000. (See WikiStats data for the English Wikipedia.) Many other Wikipedia language editions saw a rise in the number of editors in the same time period. As a result the overall number of editors on all projects combined has been stable at a high level over recent years. We’re continuing to work with Dr. Ortega to specifically better understand the long-term trend in editor retention, and whether this trend may result in a decrease of the number of editors in the future.

Let’s move on to the bigger picture.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, is to ensure that every single human being can share in the sum of all knowledge. Both the health and growth of our volunteer community are key to succeeding in that endeavor. This is why the Wikimedia Foundation works with researchers from around the world to understand what is happening in its projects, supports comprehensive analytics work, and is pursuing long term initiatives to recruit new editors and support the development of its communities:

• Our usability initiative is making it easier to contribute to Wikipedia and its sister projects by improving the underlying open source technology. Removing barriers is key to recruiting new editors.
• Our outreach initiative is developing a comprehensive set of training and outreach materials that will help us to recruit new volunteer editors.
• Our strategic planning initiative is a unique community-driven process to identify how we can maximize our impact. One of its task forces is specifically studying community health.

Wikimedia chapter organizations around the world are supporting our technology work, our outreach initiatives, and strategic partnerships; their activities are documented in the archive of chapter reports.

The Wikimedia volunteer community is also engaged in important discussions and experiments. A community-initiated project in the English Wikipedia, for example, tried to assess the typical experience of new Wikipedia editors when trying to contribute useful content. This newbie treatment study is directly informing community discussions about community processes. Similar experiments and large strategic discussions are happening in other languages.

These discussions and projects are important. Wikimedia is a unique global volunteer movement to share what we know, to make and keep it available. We need your help and your participation in these initiatives – please follow the above links and get involved.

We want more people to join us, to edit Wikipedia to make it richer and better and more comprehensive. We don’t know what the “perfect” number of Wikipedia volunteers is, but we do know that we want to significantly increase it from where it is today.

In addition to direct volunteer participation, Wikimedia depends on public support. If you share our goal of bringing free knowledge to every person on the planet, please make a donation today.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director
Erik Zachte, Data Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

The first ever Wikimedians’ conference is taking place in Tokyo this weekend. A group of Wikimedians, who were inspired by Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt, gathered in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan in the late summer of 2008. Those who traveled to Alexandria shared their excitement and inspiration gathered from Wikimania, and others listened. The excitement in the room turned into collective will power, determined to form a Wikimedians’ conference in Japan within a year from the meeting.

Wikimedia Conference Japan (WCJ) is happening this Sunday, November 22nd, at the University Tokyo’s Hongo Campus. The Center for Knowledge Structuring of the University Tokyo offered the space for this conference. Japanese National Institute of Informatics also supports this conference and invited Jay Walsh, Head of Communications, to give the keynote speech. WCJ will cover a number of topics including academic research, wiki workshops, introduction of Wikimedia projects, language support and education.

The goal was to draw 150 participants, however due to overwhelming interest, 180 have already registered with more expected on the day of the conference. As a volunteer organizer, I am sending my cheers to WCJ organizers from San Francisco. I hope this conference will create synergy among Japanese Wikimedians and who knows, Wikimania 2011 could take place in Tokyo.

Naoko Komura

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative partnered with Bolt Peters and Davis Research to evaluate the changes we’ve implemented so far and inform our work moving forward.  If you don’t know what changes we are talking about, check out our Beta (including a new skin, new toolbar, improved search, and more) by following these instructions.

Overall, the study confirmed that we are on the right track with our beta features – showing us room for improvements, maybe a bug or two along the way, and work yet to be done!  You can view the full report (and soon the full videos) on our project wiki, but we thought we’d share with you some highlights:

Success

“It was easy, and I wouldn’t have thought it would be that easy.”

“Before there were a lot of tools, and I liked that they were all spread out in front of you, but this actually makes a lot of sense. I had to muddle my way through the older system, but this one seemed fine.”

“Websites don’t have common sense, but programmers do.”

The majority of our 8 interview subjects found and used our features and tools without instruction and with success.  Special victories go to our more spacious and grouped tabbed navigation, improved search and new searchbox location, and built-in toolbar.  In using these features, users were not only less intimidated, but also showed a greater ease of use and increased performance.  All of the 8 users successfully found the “edit” tab with a minimum of hunting; no one resorted to Google to get to the Wikipedia article they were seeking; two of our users even expressed pleasure and delight in the process!  Perhaps small victories, but a major change from our first study if you remember!

Needs Improvement

“Uh-oh, I think I may have made the wrong kind of link before. I’ll go to the preview window to see if this is a link. It would have been nice to just edit it in the preview.”

“This is different, it’s got these hot-links [the table of contents]. That’s nice.”

“Links are so easy to screw up. I’m not sure if we’ve correctly typed the link markup. Ah, there are these buttons…”

Some of our tools are definitely still rough around the edges – their flaws and failures were seen in technicolor when observing people using them.  Our link dialog caused the most confusion.  6 of our 8 users initially made some errors in using it, and some received a false positive assurance when they had not actually accomplished the link behavior they were attempting.  Oops!  Our features need to err on the side of a user’s expectation rather than giving users access to the technical structure or wiki syntax, which they did not in this case.  For example, to create a new link in our prototype, users were asked to specify whether they wanted to create an “external link” (to a website) or “internal” link (to a different article) – a differentiation that exists in wiki code, but not in the eyes of a novice user.  Additionally, our toolbar buttons need to behave consistently and be grouped accordingly.  Having dialogs for links and tables, and not having one for a reference was not acceptable and led to some quite confused and persistent button pushing by our subjects.

Speaking of buttons, our “Bold” and “Italics” toolbar buttons use the roman character “a” – the result of our struggled effort to be accessible to an international community while attempting to take advantage of software standards.  In our effort to generalize, we became too general – even those users who correctly guessed the purpose of these buttons had to hover over or use them to confirm their assumptions.  We’re going all in – look out for our efforts to make our toolbar icons language specific soon!

As if we didn’t already know it – adding media or “embedding a file” was the least understood toolbar action of our study.  Most users avoided it, but when they did the sample text that it inserted provided no additional insight.

Moving Forward

“I’m completely intimidated by that [template].”

“I’m not sure what that is. I’m going to save it and then see, because this preview is too confusing.”

Our study illustrated how large an effect a small change can have and brought to our attention tweaks and enhancements that need to be made to our current features.  It also showed us that we are just a slice of what is a very, very large pie.  We had many deja vu moments seeing users flounder around previewing and saving, many times adopting strange techniques and multiple windows to add a simple sentence.  The terms “code,” “computer lingo,” “html” often came up and highlighted the separation users feel from their content while editing.  The expectation for editing a wiki to be similar to editing a blog or word processing document was still prevalent.  And though our Table of Contents and built-in cheat sheet put out some small fires, when navigating an lengthy article or searching for help, we again heard “there sure is a lot of stuff to read” and “this is where I’d give up.”

As we’ve mentioned before, we cannot tackle the full scope of issues that our study participants surface.  But I think I can speak for our team when I say we all felt a certain amount of satisfaction in the results of those problems we did address and it has only made us more eager to attack new problems and iterate on solutions we’ve proposed.  As always, we look forward to your comments, insights, and feedback!  We also appreciate your contributions during our fundraiser – it’s in part community support like this that makes the Foundation’s work possible.

Parul Vora + the Wikimedia Usability Initiative