cc by-sa 3.0 Dilly Boase

You’ve probably heard the saying, “In theory, Wikipedia shouldn’t work, but in practice it does.” Three of the things that contribute to make Wikipedia work are topic-specific WikiProjects (“let’s write about a town), Wikimedia chapters (“let’s organize throughout the United Kingdom”), and unique ideas (“let’s use QR codes to share content”). This week these three things successfully came together to create Monmouthpedia, “The World’s First Wikipedia Town” in Monmouth, Wales.

The idea for Monmouthpedia began at a TEDx talk in Bristol when John Cummings, an occasional Wikipedia editor, suggested from the audience that the UK Chapter use QR codes to “do a whole town.” That challenge was handed to Cummings when the Wikimedia UK chapter backed the idea. He then moved to his home town of Monmouth where he assembled an ad hoc group of supporters who wanted to participate, including the local County Council.

Click image for Monmouthpedia video

The project has taken six months of preparation, including a commitment by the town to install a free, town-wide wi-fi network (the first of its kind in Wales). On 19 May the entire town will be bedecked with banners declaring Monmouth as the first Wikipedia Town in the world.

The Monmouthpedia project uses QRpedia to allow visitors to scan QR codes that link directly to the Wikipedia article in their own language. Because of Monmouth’s efforts to provide free wi-fi and implement QRpedia, the town is likely the only place where a visitor can tour in Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Welsh, or numerous other Wikipedia languages using QR codes.

A plaque on Monmouth Shire Hall

Much of the success of Monmouthpedia comes from its ability to capture the imagination of the Wikipedia community, which has embraced the town virtually. Wikipedia volunteers have contributed nearly 500 new articles in over 25 languages, as well as videos on topics such as the historic Chartists movement.

The project also has a long list of partners, including 200 businesses, several universities and nearly every school and community group in the area. Wikipedia has partnered with museums and other institutions before, as in Derby, but in Monmouth you will see over 1,000 QR codes on every school, every important building, and hundreds of shops. The County Council itself has a QRpedia code in its reception that takes you to their Wikipedia article.

Lest you think this is a passing interest, the town of Monmouth is in it for the long haul. Many of the QRpedia codes are printed on ceramic plaques that should last for decades. The information in articles is backed by the Wikipedia community and will be continually improved and expanded. Physical guides and maps will become outdated, but the Wikipedia articles will always be able to be updated. This potential for on-site access to up-to-date information in any language is what makes the Monmouthpedia model so exciting.

How long can Wikipedia defy the theory and continue to deliver free information to the planet in over 280 languages? We think the Monmouthpedia story provides a very optimistic outlook.

If you want to find out more, visit the Monmouthpedia website and take a look at the associated articles on Wikipedia.

- Roger Bamkin, Director of Wikimedia UK (Victuallers)

Malware installed on your computer may inject advertising into a page on popular websites, such as this Wikipedia article. This is an example that we've seen in the wild. Note the tiny text "ads not by this site" immediately below the ad, which may or may not appear next to these types of injected advertisements.

One example that we have seen installs itself as a browser extension. The extension is called “I want this” and installs itself in Google Chrome. To remove it:

• Open the options menu via the “pipe-wrench” icon on the top right, and choose Settings.
• Open the Extensions panel and there is the list of extensions installed.
• Remove an Extension by clicking the Remove button next to an item.

There is likely other similar malware that injects ads into Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and other popular browsers. If you see examples that you can document, please point them out in the comments.

Ads injected in this manner may be confined to some sites, even just to Wikipedia, or they may show up on all sites you visit. Browsing through a secure (HTTPS) connection (which you can automate using the HTTPS everywhere extension) may cause the ads to disappear, but will not fix the underlying problem.

Disabling browser add-ins is a good starting point to determine the source of these types of ads. This does not necessarily fix the source of the problem either, as malware may make deep changes to your operating system. If you’re comfortable attempting a malware scan and removal yourself, there are various spyware/malware removal tools. Popular and well-reviewed solutions include Ad-Aware and Malwarebytes. But be aware that these types of tools may also bundle software, or leave your computer in an unusable state.

If in doubt, have your computer evaluated for malware by a competent and qualified computer repair center.

There is one other reason you might be seeing advertisements: Your Internet provider may be injecting them into web pages. This is most likely the case with Internet cafes or “free” wireless connections. This New York Times blog post by Brian Chen gives an example.

But rest assured: you won’t be seeing legitimate advertisements on Wikipedia.

We’re here to distribute the sum of human knowledge to everyone on the planet — ad-free, forever.

Philippe Beaudette, Director of Community Advocacy
Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development

Campus of Médéa University

As part of the Arabic Language Initiative, I had the chance to visit Algeria in the last week of April, where I had the privilege to speak to students at Médéa University (Médéa Province) about Wikipedia and invite them to contribute to it.

With a size of almost 2,400,000 square kilometers, Algeria is the largest country in Africa and the Arab World, and the tenth-largest country in the world. Algeria has about 4.1 million internet users (12% of the total population of 35 million), however they contribute only 0.08% of the total global edits on Wikimedia projects. While the official language of Algeria is Modern Standard Arabic, French as the ”de-facto” co-official language is still widely used in government, culture, media, and education due to the country’s colonial history. This fact can be clearly noticed in the readership numbers of Wikimedia projects in Algeria: While 52.2% of Wikimedia traffic from Algeria went to French language pages in the first quarter of 2012, Arabic language traffic shared only 30.7%. Having said this, the share of Arabic language traffic has almost doubled in the past three years, from only 17.0% back in mid 2009.

In particular, I could feel the passion for reading and adding content to Arabic language Wikimedia projects during my visit to Médéa University, where I delivered a lecture about contributing to Arabic Wikimedia projects, followed by an editing workshop over two days organized by Dr. Fareh Abdelhak. The introductory lecture laid out the current situation of Wikipedia contributions from Algeria, and a few thoughts on how Wikipedia works, and why is it important to contribute new content to Wikimedia projects. The lecture ended by giving the attendants (about 130, most of them students) a homework exercise: To think of one person they respect and one of their famous quotes, in addition to translating a topic from the English or French Wikipedia or writing an article based other sources that does not exist on the Arabic Wikipedia. Later on, I was informed that the students posted a report in Arabic about the lecture, and shared the homework on Facebook, so more interested people would be able to join the workshop on the next day.

Students attending the editing workshop at Médéa University

Although Friday was a day off at the university, about 30 students managed to come in the morning to attend the editing workshop. Unfortunately, since most of the university facilities were closed, we couldn’t use the PC rooms and provide every student with a PC. However, this situation did not preclude students from joining the workshop using their private portable PCs, where each group of 3 to 4 students had to share one PC with their colleagues.

The session started by registering a user account on the Arabic Wikiquote. Wikiquote was chosen as a start for two reasons, first to raise awareness about Wikipedia’s sister projects, and secondly in order to enable students adding content directly in their first edits without much interference from the larger Wikimedia community. Most students managed to register an account smoothly, and we started adding pages with the texts that most of the students had prepared as their homework. After students had learned the wiki basics on Wikiquote, we moved to the Arabic Wikipedia to start adding new articles there.

The workshop session resulted in creating 8 new articles on Wikipedia and 10 new pages on Wikiquote. At the end of the workshop, most of the students answered positively to a question on whether they will continue to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia. Indeed, in the evening I noticed that some of the students who attended the workshop went back to the Arabic Wikipedia and Wikiquote and continued improving their previously added articles, and also added new content. Later on, I received a message on my discussion page saying “When we meet next year, I will have already created a number of pages that exceeds yours!”… I really wish you will!

Haitham Shammaa, Editor Growth and Contribution Program consultant

Kiril Lazarov, Macedonia national handball team captain.

German Wikipedia contributor and handball aficionado Armin Kübelbeck routinely takes pictures of sporting events, where he captures what he calls “unrepeatable moments,” or candid expressions that capture a sliver of time that will not come again. “I can’t tell a player, ‘Can you do it one more time, but now with a smile on your face?’” he said. “I have to take the available light and the moments as they come.”

In the unrepeatable moment above, which was the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day on 10 May, 2012, Kübelbeck captured Kiril Lazarov, the captain of the Macedonia national team and one of the most notable Macedonians in the history of the sport, right before he took a seven-meter throw. Unlike many of his images of players in action, this shot shows a much more interesting human element and very little movement.

“For me this smile shows resoluteness and a good portion of slyness and self-confidence. I’m not sure to whom he was looking: his coach, the other team’s coach, a teammate or an opponent,” said Kübelbeck, who was sure Lazarov was not looking at the goalkeeper, who stood in front of him at the time. “But the message is clear: I’ll throw that ball behind the line.”

Adult European Robin.

Kübelbeck began taking photos in the 1980s with a Canon A-1 with a 50mm 1:1.4 lens. He developed the black-and-white images he took in the basement of his parents’ home, where he set up a studio and experimented with many kinds of chemical processing effects, such as sepia toning and solarization.

On December 31st, 2006, he uploaded his first photo to Commons, which he refers to as an archive for his pictures. Kübelbeck said he is not active in the Commons community nor does he submit his own photos for consideration as Featured Pictures.

He is committed, however, to improving the encyclopedic content of Commons and Wikipedia. He also contributes self-made illustrations when his photos don’t successfully capture the meaning of the article he is editing.

He did also admit to enjoying the attention his photos get when they are featured: “Where else would my images and writing have such an audience? A dilettante’s work!”

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager

The Architecture of Open-Source Applications is a collection of technical essays detailing the architecture of twenty-four major open-source applications.

The second volume of the Architecture of Open-Source Applications book, which includes a chapter on MediaWiki, is now available online and on lulu.com.

The Architecture of Open-Source Applications is a collection of technical essays detailing the architecture of twenty-four major open-source applications. This is the second volume of a series that aims to help developers understand how great and large programs are constructed, and the decisions (or accidents) that led to the way they now work. The series draws inspiration from books used by architects that feature case studies of the great buildings of history.

This volume contains a chapter detailing the inner workings of MediaWiki, the wiki software that powers all Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia.

The writing of the chapter was coordinated by myself and Sumana Harihareswara. While I put together the majority of the content, it wouldn’t have been possible without the initial knowledge-sharing effort made by many Wikimedia engineers and volunteer MediaWiki developers, who also reviewed and improved the several revisions the text underwent.

The chapter on MediaWiki is available on the book’s website, along with the other chapters from both volumes. Its content was integrated into the documentation on mediawiki.org (at MediaWiki history and Manual:MediaWiki architecture) when it was completed in November 2011.

Greg Wilson and Amy Brown, the book’s editors, contacted the Wikimedia Foundation in August 2011 to offer to feature MediaWiki in the second volume. We chose a very collaborative approach to writing the chapter to ensure that the content was accurate and thorough, and also to split the workload among subject matter experts.

This volume dives into the inner workings of other tools familiar to the Wikimedia community, like Git, GNU Mailman, nginx and Puppet.

All of the book’s content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, similar to the license used on Wikimedia sites. It is freely available for reading online at http://www.aosabook.org, and you can also order a print from lulu.com. E-book and PDF versions will be available for purchase shortly. All royalties from purchases are donated to Amnesty International.

This is the second book published this year that contains a chapter written by Wikimedia staff, after the publication of Open Advice, a collection of essays, stories and lessons learned by members of the Free Software community.

I hope the chapter on MediaWiki, and also the rest of the book, will prove useful and interesting to the Wikimedia community and other developers. If you enjoyed it, learned from it, or would like to see more publications of this type, let us know!

Guillaume Paumier
Technical communications manager

a. 59 percent of editors edited Wikipedia anonymously before creating an account

b. Decline in edit activity is more pronounced for experienced editors

c. Edit history influences editors’ views on problems with Wikimedia culture as well as desired solutions

a. 59 percent of editors edited Wikipedia anonymously before creating an account

59 percent of respondents pointed out that they had edited Wikipedia anonymously before they set up a login account on Wikipedia. (The survey was only announced to logged-in editors.) Portuguese (70 percent) and Spanish (66 percent) Wikipedia editors were more likely to have edited anonymously in the beginning compared to English (60 percent), Russian (58 percent) and German (59 percent) editors. Among editors, the three biggest motivators for setting up a login account are: tracking their edit history (54 percent), creating new articles (54 percent) and having a watchlist of articles to follow (49 percent). Interestingly, while the English Wikipedia makes it mandatory to obtain an account before one can start a new article, respondents there cited this reason less often (39 percent). Among Spanish (67 percent) and Portuguese (68 percent) language editors this percentage was much higher, even though these Wikipedias allow creation of new articles without being logged in.
76 percent of those respondents who had started anonymously said that they had made between one and 50 anonymous edits before they registered a user account. The majority of these respondents (54 percent) saw the benefit of having a user account only after editing Wikipedia anonymously for more than 10 times.

QD3b. What prompted you to set up a user account? n=6378

b. Decline in edit activity is more pronounced for experienced editors

When asked about their level of activity in 2011 compared to the previous year (2010), 30 percent of respondents said that they were less active, another 30 percent stated that there was no change in their activity and 41 percent said that they were more active. However, more experienced editors (with 100+ edits) were more likely to point out that they were contributing less often. The most common reasons reported for becoming less active on Wikipedia are: Having less time (59 percent), spending more time on other offline activities like reading (44 percent), spending more time on school or academic work (34 percent), spending more time on other online activities like Facebook or Twitter (23 percent), and rules and guidelines for editing becoming too complicated (17 percent).

QD7a: Thinking about this year (2011) how active were you on Wikipedia compared to the previous year? (ratio of 'less active' answers) n=3890

c. Edit history influences editors’ views on problems with Wikimedia culture as well as desired solutions

We asked editors to choose the top three problems with Wikimedia culture that have affected them personally, making it harder for them to edit. The most commonly picked responses were: Other editors who feel that they own specific articles and don’t want others to collaborate (46 percent), too many rules and policies (41 percent), editors who are not fun to work with (39 percent) and lack of access to research materials like scholarly articles or books (39 percent).
When we sliced data through edit counts, we found that experienced editors are more likely to identify issues with other editors as the biggest problem that plague Wikipedia culture, while newer editors are more likely to identify complicated policies and software. For example, 45 percent of emerging editors (1-9 edits), 48 percent of aspiring editors (10-50 edits) and 44 percent of new Wikipedians (51-100 edits) said that too many rules and policies were the main problems that they faced in Wikimedia culture. But these numbers were significantly smaller for more experienced editors: 39 percent for active Wikipedians (100+ edits), 36 percent of very active Wikipedians (1000+ edits) and 34 percent of highly prolific Wikipedians (5000+ edits). Correspondingly, 59 percent of highly experienced Wikipedians, 53 percent of very active Wikipedians and 47 percent of active Wikipedians pointed out that editors who are not fun to work with formed one of the main problems that they were facing. But only 22 percent of all newer editors (emerging, aspiring and new Wikipedians) reported this as an issue.

Q23: Please pick the three most important problems that have affected you personally, making it harder to edit. n=5962

Similarly, when asked about changes that might make it easier to contribute to Wikipedia, newer editors were more interested in simpler policies and rules, and a more user friendly editing interface. On the other hand, more seasoned editors are looking for improvements in editor behavior. All editors, irrespective of their edit history, agree that they need access to better research materials for writing articles.

Q24. Please pick three changes that you believe will make it easier for you to contribute. n=6176

If you are interested in more information about Wikipedia editors, please check out the topline findings from the survey.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research
Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

In December 2011, we conducted an online survey of Wikipedia editors in 17 languages. This is the third in a series of blog posts summarizing our findings. If you are interested, you can find out more about the methodology of the survey here.

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

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Expanding fundraising and affiliation models

After the resolutions of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees at its meeting in Berlin, work is ongoing to implement a new model for distributing the money raised via Wikimedia project sites. Except the costs for the core operations and operating reserves of the WMF, all of it (including funds for chapters and non-core operations of the WMF) will be distributed based on the recommendations of the new volunteer-driven Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). Another resolution of the Board recognizes new models of affiliation with the Wikimedia movement: “Movement Partners” (like-minded organizations that actively support the movement’s work), “National or Sub-national Chapters” (which includes the existing chapter model), “Thematic Organizations” (non-profits representing the movement and using the Wikimedia trademarks, which are supporting work focused on a specific topic), and “User Groups” (open membership groups which may or may not choose to incorporate).

Indic language outreach

Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead visited India meeting Wikimedians in Bangalore and attending Wikisangamotsavam, the Malayalam community conference, as part of work to support Indic language projects. The India team is working actively with seven Indic language communities on outreach, social media strategy and initiatives to build community momentum.

Page views to the Wikipedia mobile site (red: non-English versions) compared to the 2 billion target from the annual plan

Mobile pageviews target reached

At the end of April, the Wikipedia mobile site reached the milestone of 2 billion monthly page views – one of the goals for the 2011/12 WMF annual plan.

Towards a rapid software deployment cycle

Wikimedia engineers have begun switching to a more rapid deployment cycle, starting to deploy the latest MediaWiki software to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites every two weeks.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for March:

489 million (+2.7% compared with February; +22.3% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for April:

17.3 billion (+0.4% compared with March; +18.2% compared with the previous year)

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

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

85.09K (+0.2% compared with February / -4.5% compared with the previous year)

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

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

Financials

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

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – March 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month is $1.9MM vs plan of $3.9MM, approximately $2MM or 53% under plan.

• Year-to-date is $32.1MM vs plan of $28.6MM, approximately $3.5MM or 12% over plan.

• Expenses for the month is $2.3MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $112K or 5% higher than plan.

• Year-to-date is $19.3MM vs plan of $21.1MM, approximately $1.8MM or 8% lower than plan.

• Cash position is $30.6MM as of March 31, 2012 – approximately 13 months of expenses.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of April (May 3, 2012)

Other movement highlights

“Wikipedian in Residence” model comes of age

The British Library recently became the latest cultural institution to announce (together with Wikimedia UK) a Wikipedian in Residence, supporting connections between the British Library’s staff and the Wikimedia community. At the prestigious 2012 American Association of Museums conference, five Wikipedians in Residence from around the world presented this collaboration model. The April issue of the “This Month in GLAM” newsletter reports open Wikipedian in Residence positions at state institutions in Israel, Germany and Sweden.

The very first screenshot of Wikidata

Wikidata starts working on interwiki links

During its first month, the Wikidata team has started coding for the first phase of the project, which will allow the central storage of interwiki links. Two MediaWiki extensions are being developed as the base for Wikidata: Wikibase Client and Wikibase core. A demo version will be available soon.

Multilanguage contest from Monmouthpedia project

As part of Monmouthpedia – “the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town” – the Charles Rolls Challenge awarded prizes to Wikimedians who had written, improved or uploaded content about Monmouth in multiple languages. Also, the town saw the first ever Welsh meetup in April.

One of the two first prize winning entries from the Tamil contest: A Rekla race (Ox cart race) in Tamil Nadu, India

Tamil media contest

The Tamil Wikimedia community completed its “Tamil Wiki Media Contest“, which led to 15,000 media contributions from 307 individuals.

Database company donates free access to Wikimedians

Over 600 Wikimedians have received free access to the HighBeam Research database for one year, to support their work on Wikipedia and its sister projects. Active editors can still apply at en:Wikipedia:HighBeam/Applications.

2012/05/14: Edited to correct an error in the “Financials” section (changed “5% lower than plan” to “5% higher than plan”)

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of April (May 3, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for March:

489 million (+2.7% compared with February; +22.3% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for April:

17.3 billion (+0.4% compared with March; +18.2% compared with the previous year)

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

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

85.09K (+0.2% compared with February / -4.5% compared with the previous year)

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

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

Financials

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

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – March 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month is $1.9MM vs plan of $3.9MM, approximately $2MM or 53% under plan.

• Year-to-date is $32.1MM vs plan of $28.6MM, approximately $3.5MM or 12% over plan.

• Expenses for the month is $2.3MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $112K or 5% higher than plan.

• Year-to-date is $19.3MM vs plan of $21.1MM, approximately $1.8MM or 8% lower than plan.

• Cash position is $30.6MM as of March 31, 2012 – approximately 13 months of expenses.

Highlights

Expanding fundraising and affiliation models

After the resolutions of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees at its meeting in Berlin, work is ongoing to implement a new model for distributing the money raised via Wikimedia project sites. Except the costs for the core operations and operating reserves of the WMF, all of it (including funds for chapters and non-core operations of the WMF) will be distributed based on the recommendations of the new volunteer-driven Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). Another resolution of the Board recognizes new models of affiliation with the Wikimedia movement: “Movement Partners” (like-minded organizations that actively support the movement’s work), “National or Sub-national Chapters” (which includes the existing chapter model), “Thematic Organizations” (non-profits representing the movement and using the Wikimedia trademarks, which are supporting work focused on a specific topic), and “User Groups” (open membership groups which may or may not choose to incorporate).

Indic language outreach

Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead visited India meeting Wikimedians in Bangalore and attending Wikisangamotsavam, the Malayalam community conference, as part of work to support Indic language projects. The India team is working actively with seven Indic language communities on outreach, social media strategy and initiatives to build community momentum.

Page views to the Wikipedia mobile site (red: non-English versions) compared to the 2 billion target from the annual plan

Mobile pageviews target reached

At the end of April, the Wikipedia mobile site reached the milestone of 2 billion monthly page views – one of the goals for the 2011/12 WMF annual plan.

Towards a rapid software deployment cycle

Wikimedia engineers have begun switching to a more rapid deployment cycle, starting to deploy the latest MediaWiki software to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites every two weeks.

Technology

A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for April 2012 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/April

Department Highlights

Major news in April include:

• Substantial work on Wikimedia engineering’s goals for the next fiscal year;
• The selection of 9 Google Summer of Code students and the start of their work;
• The shift to a rapid deployment cycle;
• A new mobile skin deployed to Wikimedia sites;
• The Wikipedia mobile app for iOS switching to using OpenStreetMap data.

Operations

• Search — After months of preparation and refactoring work with our dated Lucene implementation at the Tampa data center, we are glad to report that Peter Youngmeister (with help from Asher Feldman, Robert Stojnic and Jeff Green) successfully built and deployed the new Search infrastructure at our EQIAD data center. The performance improvement is quite amazing; at the 99th percentile level, search latency dropped from a high of 9 seconds to 1 second, and the average search is only 100ms, down from 700ms. In addition, the new infrastructure addresses some of the previous single point of failures and capacity limitations.

• Wikimedia Labs — Ryan Lane released a new version of OpenStackManager, adding project filters for all interfaces, usability fixes and a number of bug fixes. OpenStackManager and LdapAuthentication were switched to Git, allowing a few more changes to be pushed thanks to being able to keep a stable master branch. Notable changes were per-project sudo management, allowing sysadmins in a project to manage who gets which sudo permissions in a fine grained manner for their projects, and a change in how groups are added to LDAP for projects. Sara Smollett added Per-project ganglia monitoring, displaying resource graphs for instances in projects. Andrew Bogott finished work on a plugin framework for OpenStack Nova, and has added an example plugin for a SharedFS driver, which would allow us to manage gluster volumes via an API.

• Data Dumps — The gluster share with the last 5 or so good dumps for all projects is ready for use by Wikimedia Labs projects. A first copy of uploaded media, accessible via rsync, was announced, and some work was done on the infrastructure to generate downloadable bundles of media per project. We’re working with the Internet Archive to produce media bundles that they can host for download as well. A new version of the dump scripts was deployed with some minor bug fixes. Christian Aistleitner wrapped up work on the PHPUnit tests for the dump maintenance scripts, and discovered a problem with the database schema, which we will need to discuss with the user community in order to find a resolution that works for everyone.

Features Engineering

• Visual editor — Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal are rewriting the underlying data model to achieve feature compatibility with the parser and correct a variety of problems that have been previously deferred. Inez Korczynski and Christian Williams have been continuing their work to stabilize and integrate the content editable layer and have been working with Rob Moen, who has focused on getting the user interface elements working with the content editable layer. Gabriel Wicke has been working on improving the parser‘s ability to parse pages more quickly as well as increasing compatibility with existing features such as thumbnails. A template-heavy page like Barack Obama can now be expanded in similar time as the production parser.

• Article feedback — Fabrice Florin worked with OmniTi to develop a range of new features for version 5 of the Article Feedback Tool (AFT5). This month, the team deployed the first versions of the abuse filter and the relevance filter, as well as new monitoring tools for editors, to help surface useful suggestions and reduce the noise on the feedback page where posts are listed for each article. Pau Giner started designing a new look and feel for that feedback page, as well as a final version of the feedback form, with guidance from Brandon Harris. We also finalized a set of special tools for oversighters, as well as new feedback links. Dario Taraborelli, Oliver Keyes and Aaron Halfaker collected and analyzed data on how prominent feedback links impact both volume and quality of user feedback. Roan Kattouw continued to review our code and help deploy weekly releases, and Matthias Mullie contributed new code for this project. We expect to complete feature development by the end of May, with full deployment in the summer.

• Article Creation Workflow — Ian Baker, Benny Situ, Ryan Kaldari and Brandon Harris have developed the Article Creation landing system, while focusing on deploying the New Page Triage (NPT) this month. Oliver Keyes prepared new templates for a proposed ‘Create a Draft’ section. Fabrice Florin created a workflow diagram to illustrate the interdependencies between ACW and NTP. The goal is to collect and analyze usage data on ACW in May with Dario Taraborelli, in order to plan our next steps for this project, which is likely to be deployed alongside NPT in coming weeks. The current ACW prototype is available for testing on Wikimedia Labs.

Internationalization and Editor Engagement Experiments

• Internationalization and localization tools — The team has completed the first round of UI designs for a Universal language selector (ULS) for desktop and mobile. UI/UX team members (Pau Giner and Arun Ganesh) are now implementing a prototype to showcase the first version of ULS. The team also added keymaps for language support to Narayam, added notification support to Translate, fixed bugs, reviewed code for localization support in MediaWiki 1.19, and discussed language support metrics.

Mobile engineering

• Mobile design — The final selection of section styles was supported by user experience testing. We also added switches between Mobile/Desktop view and Images on/off to the footer. These changes have now been deployed as the default view of mobile Wikipedia. The first working prototype of the new navigation UI has been completed in rough form and sent out for feedback.

• Wikimedia Apps — Yuvaraj Pandian released new versions of our Android app and our first ever PhoneGap version of the iOS app. Issues were identified with iOS 4.x and we released a update to fix them. Yuvaraj also continued work on the API move branch. Brion Vibber pushed out a final build of the Wikipedia App to the BlackBerry market, and started experimenting with a Windows mobile version.

• MobileFrontend — Patrick, Arthur Richards and Max Semenik continued work on moving MobileFrontend to MediaWiki core. We’ve updated its skinning, internals, and general architecture to make it more core-friendly.

Platform Engineering

• MediaWiki 1.20 — As of April 2012, core software deployments to Wikimedia sites are done from git (instead of Subversion) through incremental “wmf”-branches. The first deployment of the 1.20 release cycle, labeled 1.20wmf1, was deployed to all Wikimedia sites this month; it notably brought new diff colors for improve readability. The 1.20wmf2 deployment cycle began on April 30. The 1.20.0 stable tarball is expected to be released in fall of 2012.

• Lua scripting — Tim Starling started the implementation of a replacement for MediaWiki markup-based template programming, using the Lua scripting language, embedded via the Scribunto extension. The current roadmap aims for a deployment to Labs in May 2012, then to mediawiki.org; full deployment to Wikimedia sites is scheduled for 2013. Tim will lead tutorial sessions at the Berlin Hackathon 2012.

• Summer of Code 2012 — Wikimedia engineers have chosen nine students for this year’s program. For the next few weeks, until May 21st, the students and their mentors are working together to train the students in MediaWiki development, so that they’ll have all the basic domain knowledge they’ll need to succeed during the summer.

Fundraising

Major Gifts and Foundations

• Secured a sponsorship from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation for Wikimania.
• We began our push to renew Benefactors who gave in FY2010-11, but not yet in FY2011-12 by June 30.

Fundraiser

• Posted a full report from the 2011 fundraiser
• Researched improvements to make for the fundraiser in Spain, Italy and Belgium. Held focus groups with donors to optimize messaging, payment methods offered, donation forms and translations.
• Heavy research on the new payment methods to be added in 2012. Roadmap and timeline to be released soon.
• Held a one hour systems test in the US.
• Continually iterating on forms and landing pages as well as the A/B testing infrastructure.
• Implemented GlobalCollect recurring payments, bringing our recurring monthly income up to approximately $40K/month, nearly a half-million dollars a year.

Global Development

New fellowship launched to focus on EN:WP help pages, good progress on Teahouse projects and welcome Siko and fellows to global development team!

New grants to the community in support of activities in seven countries

Barry attends the Malayalam community conference in Kollam, India and visits with chapter and community in Bangalore (see also general “Highlights” section)

Grants Awarded and Executed

• WM NO/Outreach GLAM
• WikiSangamotsavam 2012:Malayalam_Wiki Conference 2012
• WM AR/Wikigenero GroupLens Participation
• Glam/Batak
• WM US-DC/Events 2012
• WM CA/Quebec Programs 2012
• Sofia Zoo and Bulgarian Wikipedians/Sofia Zoo Powered by Wikimedia
• WM CL/Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit 2012

Fellowships

Updates

Gender Gap – Fellow Sarah Stierch completed wrap-up documentation of outcomes and lessons learned from WikiWomen’s History Month.

New Fellowships

• Peter Coombe was announced and started work this month as our newest Wikimedia Community Fellow. Pete’s fellowship project is piloting a data-driven approach to reorganize and rewrite key help pages on English Wikipedia in order to make them more usable, particularly for new editors. His work can be followed on the Help redesign project page.
• Two new 2012 Fellowships will be announced in May.

Teahouse Project

The Teahouse has been live on English Wikipedia for two months and we’re beginning to see evidence of the project’s impact for participating new editors. Some relevant metrics from April’s report include:

• In April, the Teahouse had an average of 50 questions posted in the Q&A forum per week and served about 20-30 new editors visiting for the first time each week, in addition to repeat visitors (the average guest asks 1.5 questions, 22% of guests asked more than one question, and many guests return to the Teahouse more than once). The median response time for questions is 30 minutes. The project’s greatest challenge continues to be making Teahouse known to all new editors in need of help, as our hosts have capacity to assist more new editors than are making their way to the space via personal invitation.
• Comparing a sample of 75 new editors who participate in the Teahouse with a control group (of equivalent size and similar first-day editing activity) points to Teahouse having a positive impact on new editor engagement: New editors who participate in Teahouse edit 10x the number of articles than the uninvited control group and make on average 6x more global edits. The average participant adds 26x more bytes of content that survive on Wikipedia (i.e. content that isn’t reverted or deleted) than the uninvited control group.
• Among the 224 editors in our three experimental groups, 28% of new editors who participate in the Teahouse were still active on Wikipedia at least 10 days later, compared with 12% of new editors who receive an invitation but don’t actively participate in the Teahouse, and only 5% from a similar uninvited control group.

Editor Growth and Contribution Program

• The Global Development Department launched the Editor Growth and Contribution Program in mid-April, and announced Haitham Shammaa as program consultant. This program will focus on designing, testing, and implementing online programs to attract and retain new editors in small-to-medium sized Wikimedia projects.

Arabic Language Initiative

• Haitham Shammaa visited Algeria to meet Wikipedians and other supporters who can sustain Wikipedia activities in the future. The visit included a lecture and Wikipedia workshop for students of Médéa University in northern Algeria.
• Currently, we are working with a number of associates and NGOs in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia to explore the possibility of supporting Wikimedia program activities with grants.

Brazil Catalyst

Summary: A rich month for outreach and institutional relations, as well as advances in the institutional of scenario establishing the representative office in Brazil: a relatively good start in community engagement process

Brazil background notes

1. Brazil is a huge country with 27 states: São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast have the highest populations, the strongest economies, and stronger infrastructure.
2. São Paulo also has the greatest number of Wikipedia-PT editors, followed by Rio de Janeiro. Minas Gerais curiously doesn’t play a significant role in editorship now, but should be explored.
3. Until now major work has been done with the Wikimedia Brasil community, but plan to increase focus in relationship building with the Wikipedia-PT community.

Brazil outreach

• Trip to São Paulo to talk with community members, investigate locations for the office, meet with lawyers, and meet with potential partners
  • Learnings: need to generate more compelling agendas for community meetings to generate more interest and also need to work with the community to find times/locations that would make it more convenient to increase attendance
  • Recommendations: set up a programatic agenda to organize meetings objectively to highlight their value and in advance and focus on mapping real resources based on what the community will actually do.
• Trip to Uberlândia to participate in event at the Computing College of the Federal University of Uberlândia. Jonas from Recife joined the activity and contacted local editors, but no local editors showed up.
  • Learnings: students don’t know much about free licensing or Wikipedia, bringing volunteers to events like this fosters trustful relationships within the community.
  • Recommendations:follow up to encourage future participation and gather contact details of participants.
• Trip to Goiânia to bring community members together and participate in an event at the Federal University of Goiânia, no community members showed up but the event was successful (popular with students and professors).
  • Learnings: There’s a possibility to develop the education program in the communications college of the Federal University of Goiania. We can’t miss the chance to get local editors’ contacts. Alexandre Guiote (another lecturer in the event), living in Spain, has done very interesting research on Wikipedia.
  • Recommendations: consider developing an education program here and maintain contacts.
• Second trip to São Paulo to attend a community workshop at Casa Fora do Eixo and met with community members, as well as meet with Banco do Brazil Foundation.
  • Learnings: community members have a lot of knowledge (editing, licensing, etc.), but outreach methodologies might be improved to improve results.
  • Recommendations: work with the community to build and share methodologies and build outreach materials.

Brazil program updates

• Possible coworking places have been explored: the Hub in São Paulo seems to be the most neutral, but no decision yet
• Partnerships update: Discussion of partnerships with Fiocruz (institution related to the Ministry of Health for research and development) to develop a validation process based on social participation, the National Library is excited about doing things together on access to books/reading programs and digital archives

India Programs

Indic Languages

• Kannada: Support for translated articles enhancement project and enabling transwiki export
• Assamese: Medicine project outreach support at Jorhat medical college. Ideas for 10th anniversary, Community translated outreach ppt to Assamese, Ideas and inputs for a potential Assamese Wikipedia CD project
• Odia: Helping Odia community for a medical project including outreach at SCB Medical College. Supported 3 outreach events in Odisha
• Hindi: conducted Hindi Wikipedia outreach at Delhi University
• Bengali: support to enable sub pages in bn wikisource, support to enable proof read extension in bn wikisource
• Malayalam: ad hoc support for Malayalam community conference

India Outreach

• Commons outreach handbook that community members can adapt/adopt
• Worked on train-the-trainer program design
• Documented outreach correspondence with all institutes
• Supported outreach in four communities – AS, GU, MR, ML
• Translation work on outreach documents being done by community members. 4 Indic languages have successfully finished translating.

Communications, Wikipatrika

• Work on the Wikipatrika newsletter is in progress
• First set of mails to contact previous issue coordinators
• Received response, initiated GU,NE,OR,AS pages on wiki
• Tech news done, AS,MR done
• Hope to publish it by May first week

Storytelling for community building

• Gujarati WikiSource blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/04/realizing-the-dreams-of-communities-3-years-6-users-1000-articles-counting-the-source-of-gujarati-wikisource/
• Tamil Wiki Media contest blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/20/postcard-from-the-tamil-community/
• Initiated Digital Outreach plan via Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediasupport/
• Initiated Social Media pilot plan

Internal communications

• Announcement for Communications + Outreach IRC meeting: India Program#IRC_Meetings
• Supported Malayalam community with press release draft and journalist contacts
• Supported Kannada Translation project with messages for social media
• Started journalist database
• Contacted Indic journalists
• Made brief digest to post on all village pumps
• Supported Ahmedabad meetup with local press contacts
• Worked on train-the-trainer program design for outreach capacity building

Wikimania Scholarships

Scholarship recipients for Wikimania were announced! We have 130 scholars from 57 countries around the world. Chapter scholarships are also being organized now.

For more information, see the blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/25/wikimania-2012-scholarships/

US Cultural Partnerships

• Final preparations for the American Association of Museums conference, which took place April 29 – May 2. Wikimedia will be represented throughout the conference, including in a traditional and a virtual Wikipedian in Residence session, a Wikipedia basics table, a nomination for QRpedia at the MUSE tech awards, and highlights in the Association of Children’s Museum’s session.
• Featured on the Library of Congress blog in the post “Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums with Wikipedia (GLAM-Wiki): Insights Interview with Lori Phillips“
• Coordination and updates to the GLAM/US portal in preparation for the American Association of Museums conference
• Ongoing coordination with US cultural organizations, including support and advisement for early stages of planning processes. (Partnerships not yet publicly announced.)
• Ongoing coordination on recommendations for technical tools from cultural professionals
• Preparations for the Wikipedia Lounge at the MuseumNext conference in Barcelona in May and session proposal writing and coordination for the Museum Computer Network conference

Mobile and Business Development

This month has been primarily dedicated to testing and implementation of our new Free Access to Mobile Wikipedia programs with Orange and Telenor. This has been a very complicated process as we work through bugs and other technical problems but we have made great progress with our first territories. We’ve spent most of this month on working through browser support issues, landing pages, translation, banners, caching issues, etc.

• Orange status update: Tunisia and Uganda are both live, although features still need to be implemented
• Telenor status update: Digi Malaysia is ready from a technical perspective. Currently preparing for a market launch.

Global development research

• Editor Survey: results from the December Editor Survey are available: http://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/december-2011-editor-survey/

Our gender ratio held steady with only 9% of editors being women. We also found that compared to other countries US fares better on the gender divide, 14% of editors from US being women compared to other countries for which we had a significant sample.

Outreach results

• First report from outreach events was delivered to the India team.

Education program research

A quantitative analysis undertaken by Ayush Khanna and Mani Pande from the Global Development Research and Analytics team shows that Wikipedia Education Program participants from the United States added more than three times as much quality content as regular new users to the English Wikipedia. The data also shows that students who are introduced to editing Wikipedia through the U.S. Education Program are just as likely to continue editing as any other newcomer. Read more on the Wikimedia Foundation blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall-2011/

Wikipedia Education Program

• In order to determine the future of U.S. and Canada education programs, we invited Wikipedia Ambassadors, class instructors, and the Wikipedia community to contribute to an on-wiki application process for joining a “Working Group” that will meet in July 2012 for a kick-off meeting of the planning process. This is the first step in a year-long open and collaborative process to make the U.S. and Canada program more volunteer-driven and to discuss the creation of the Education Program Structure that will be in charge of the day-to-day operations of the program. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group

• Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the Fall 2011 term. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. See more of the survey results: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/23/students-see-benefits-from-wikipedia-assignment/

• University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor Edward Erikson wrote a post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog explaining why he is glad he is asking students to contribute to Wikipedia. He argues that Wikipedia is part of the classroom whether the professor likes it or not, and by making Wikipedia the destination rather than the route, students have a better learning experience. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/02/wikipedia-in-my-classroom/

• Canadian class adds two Good Articles: University of Alberta – Augustana Psychology Professor Paula Marentette asked her students to expand two articles on course-related topics this year for her Language Acquisition class. The result? The seven students in her class worked together to get two articles, “Vocabulary development” and “Joint attention,” to Good Article status on the English Wikipedia. In a blog post published on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, the students describe their reaction to the assignment, and Dr. Marentette describes the learning outcomes for her students: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/30/psychology-class-collaborates-on-two-good-articles/

• A lot has happened in the Cairo Pilot, with students contributing on-wiki at an increasing pace. Campus Ambassadors conducted several workshops this month, and some outstanding student articles are now live on the Arabic Wikipedia. Updates with the program are documented in detail on the Arabic Wikipedia. Annie is also putting together a document with more updates about the Cairo Pilot as a whole and each class individually (coming soon, in next month’s GD report).

• More than 200 students and faculty members at Ain Shams University in Cairo showed up to an in-person outreach event organized by Wikipedia Ambassadors from the Cairo Pilot and a local student group. Attendees learned how the Arabic Wikipedia works and how they could contribute to it. Check out the group’s photo album to see photos from this successful event

• Brazil education pilot continues with first semester: Report on the current status of the classes we are working with in the first semester of 2012 in Brazil

Communications

No major new projects, announcements, or media issues unfolded in April. Tech press and culture blogs, as well as some main stream media, continued to focus on the Wikipedia blackout and post-SOPA musings.

The communications team, along with the Wikimedia blogging and social media teams have been putting considerable work into an effort to increase the number and quality of Wikimedia blog postings. This month 37 posts hit the blog, including deeper profiles of active Wikipedians and media creators from Wikimedia Commons.

Over the next few months we hope to bring a basic metrics/traffic measurement tool back to the blog, bring in new volunteer contributors, and revise the structure and design of the blog to create a more engaging front page.

Major announcements

No major press releases or announcements in April.

Major stories through March

PRSA on Wikipedia accuracy (April 17, 2012)

In April, The Public Relations Society of America published a study by Marcia W. DiStaso, Assistant Professor of PR at Penn State University, surveying the wide range of views of PR practitioners and their experiences with Wikipedia. The original summary incorrectly asserted that ’60% of Wikipedia articles are wrong’ – an error that was repeated across dozens of global main stream media press (the actual claim was “60% of respondents found errors with their company’s articles”). PRSA, at the urging of Wikimedia community members, revised the study headline and press release (thank you!).

(updated PRSA survey data: http://media.prsa.org/article_display.cfm?article_id=2582)

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/04/60-percent-wikipedia-entries-about-companies-contain-errors/51236/

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/wikipedia-survey-shows-60-percent-of-entries-have-errors-and-public-relations-people-cant-correct-them/

Wikipedia Zero gaining attention in Africa (April 5, 2012)

February’s announcement from Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation about providing free access to Wikipedia on mobile devices in specific markets is beginning to get positive attention in the region. Regional programs advertising the service are appearing as Orange affiliates expand the program.

http://bikyamasr.com/65057/ugandans-access-wikipedia-for-free-through-orange-uganda/

http://allafrica.com/stories/201204220118.html

Wikipedia mobile switches to OpenStreetMap (April 5, 2012)

A large number of tech press picked up on the fact that a revised Wikipedia mobile app chose Openstreetmaps over Google maps in a recent update.

(original blog post https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/05/new-wikipedia-app-for-ios-and-an-update-for-our-android-app/ )

http://9to5google.com/2012/04/05/wikipedia-dumps-google-maps-for-openstreetmap-marks-industry-trend-to-alternative-service/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57410234-93/wikipedia-dumps-google-maps/

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/7/2931320/wikipedia-updates-mobile-apps-drops-google-maps-for-openstreetmap

Other worthwhile reads

Clips from the Malayalam Wikipedia gathering in April

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/malayalam-wikipedia-could-be-emulated/253196-60-116.html

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/youths-come-forward-to-fill-up-odia-wikipedia/247114-60-117.html

Download all of Wikipedia (from https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/09/download-the-text-of-the-entire-english-wikipedia/)

http://www.webpronews.com/download-wikipedia-in-english-all-9-7gb-of-it-2012-04

Sarah Stierch on bringing women to Wikipedia in the Smithsonian

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2012/04/how-many-women-does-it-take-to-change-wikipedia/

Guardian on the ‘mapping Wikipedia’ project

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2012/apr/04/wikipedia-world-language-map?newsfeed=true

AllAfrica.com on the recent visit of Jimmy Wales

http://allafrica.com/stories/201204090023.html

The UCLA ‘Daily Bruin’ on the Foundation’s Wikipedia Education Program

http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/04/professors_students_worldwide_work_to_improve_wikipedias_credibility_by_editing_articles

FastCompany also reported on the Wikipedia Education Program

http://www.fastcompany.com/1830315/wikipedia-education-program-college-university

Wikipedia Signpost

• Volume 8, Issue 18 – 30 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 17 – 23 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 16 – 16 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 15 – 09 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 14 – 02 April 2012

WMF Blog posts

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/

Media Contact

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#April_2012

Human Resources

“Work with Wikimedia” outreach video produced for the HR department, featuring WMF employees

This month, HR is experimenting with new metrics and presentation styles, depicting better views of Foundation staff and contractor composition as well as beginning to report on recruiting metrics.

On the jobs.wikimedia.org site, we premiered a new video created with the support of the Communications team. Victor Grigas and Matthew Roth did a fabulous job. See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us

We are still in the midst of implementing our Human Resources Information System (HRIS) system. We are set to complete that by end of June. We completed our bi-annual assessment of exempt/non-exempt employees. In terms of new policy, we initiated out a comprehensive Paid Time Off Policy, with an Immigration policy set to roll out next week. These policies will all be codified in an updated employee handbook. In the arena of benefits delivery, we kicked off a new 401K committee comprised of employees interested in managing and diversifying the retirement options for the organization.

HR is sponsoring the work of a qualitative, anthropological analysis of culture and also leadership profiling. This will support later work in leadership development. We have also initiated a coaching program for WMF managers.

Staff Changes

New Hire

• Renee Bracey Sherman, Development Associate (Fundraising)
• Andrew Otto, Software Developer – Analytics (Engineering)
• Chris Steipp, Security Engineer (Engineering)

New Other Position Hires

• Mathias Mullie, Contractor, Software Developer, Features (Engineering)
• Haitham Shammaa, Contractor, program consultant for the Editor Growth and Contribution Program (Global Development)

Conversions

• Rob Moen, Software Developer Front-end (Engineering)

Promotions

• Sumana Harihareswara, Engineering Community Manager (Engineering)

New Contractors

• Daisy Chen (Legal and Community Advocacy)
• Arun Ganesh (Engineering)
• Faidon Liampotis (Engineering)
• Tauhida Parveen (Engineering)
• Ricardo Saavedra (Fundraiser)
• Sandra Senderovich (Fundraiser)

Contract Extended

• Rayne MacGeorge (IT)

Exit

• Nimish Gautam
• Dana Isokawa

Contract Ended

• Farhan Choudary
• Emmanuel Engelhart

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled:

Actual: 106

April Plan: 115 April Filled: 6, April Attrition: 2

YTD Filled: 48, YTD Attrition: 16

Remaining open requisitions to fiscal year end: 16

Department Updates

Department Changes, effective April 15, 2012

• Siko Bouterse joins Global Development
• Karyn Gladstone, Ryan Faulkner, Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling join Engineering

Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

Independent contractors traveling on business for the Wikimedia Foundation, outside their home country now have limited medical and travel coverage.

Our search for a Director of Administration is continuing with final interviews in process.

We are beginning to look at the option of doing online expense reimbursements for employee exepenses.

Based on feedback received on her IRC office hours, the Chief Talent and Culture Officer is looking at socially responsible options for investing some of the reserve for the Foundation.

Legal and Community Advocacy

• Updated terms of use becomes effective May 25, 2012.
• Proactive trademark actions (e.g., successful challenge to third-party “Wikimedia UK” use & and winning globe logo in Mexico) and trademark review for Wikidata
• Finalizing decision on appropriate license for Wikidata (probably CC0)
• Kelly Kay, Deputy General Counsel, will represent WMF at the Open Source Initiative.
• Discovered and worked through backlog of trademark requests sent to wrong email address
• Two strong candidates identified for the junior legal counsel, including an active Wikimedian. Final decision: likely by May 15.
• Welcome to the newest Arbitration Committee, English Wikinews
• Working on electronic contract storage and approval process
• Agreed to support the Free Culture Conservacy through endorsement
• After winning signature issue as expected, we decided not to pursue appeal on German Loriot case regarding the stamps and public domain issue.
• Reappointed the ombudsman commission
• Ongoing legal and community work on a wide variety of issues and topics, including AFT5, CC 4.0, litigation, trademark portfolio, new fundraising agreement, template agreements, FDC, Wikipedia town, budget, privacy, internal policies, board issues and governance, etc.
• Daisy Chen joined as a paralegal (temporary contract) to help handle workload.
• New interns expected to start end of May. Our last semester interns have left (except for Stephen), and we wish them well. They did a great job. New full-time summer interns will be from Harvard, Stanford, and University of Minnesota.
• This month’s posted discussions on topics of community interest:
  • CISPA (not yet updated to reflect the final print of the bill)
  • SABAM v. Netlog
  • Copyright status of flags and logos from international organizations
  • Moral right of integrity
  • Copyright on utility items
• Metrics:
  • Number of contracts in April – 14 (159 contracts to date in FY 2011/12)
  • Number of trademark issues in April – 61
    • Number of backlogged trademark issues that were sent through to the team in April (included in above total count) – 50
    • Approved – 7
    • Denied – 8
    • Request Withdrawn – 7
    • Pending – 34
    • Approval not needed – 2
    • No known response – 1
    • Closed due to lack of response – 2

Visitors and Guests

1. Tammy Davidson (Chartis)
2. Jennifer Hills (Chartis)
3. Yanina Budkin (World Bank Senior Communications Officer for Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay)
4. Gabriele Niola (Italian tech journalist for Punto Informatico and Wired Italy)
5. Elisa Manheim (Institute for International Education)
6. Matjaz Panjan (Fulbright scholar, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
7. Cristiano Boccolini (Fulbright scholar, UC Berkeley)
8. Alona Sekan (Fulbright scholar, US Department of Agriculture, Western Research Regional Center, Agricultural Research Service)
9. Phoebe Ayers (board member)
10. Tom Simonite (Computing Editor, MIT Technology Review)
11. Frieder Bronner (writing dissertation on parts of Wikipedia)
12. Matt Zimmerman (Technical Leader of Ubuntu)
13. Craig Newmark (Craigslist founder, visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
14. Dan Perkel (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
15. Megan Finn (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
16. Nick Arnett (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
17. Aakash Desai (Product Manager, Mozilla)
18. Raj Ramabadran (Microsoft)
19. John P. Alioto (Microsoft)
20. Randall Benson (Benson Consulting)
21. Aaron Halfaker (WMF Research Analyst)
22. Ryan Merkeley (COO of Mozilla Foundation)
23. Faidon Laimbotis (visiting contractor)
24. Laura Lanzerotti (Bridgespan Group)
25. Libbie Landles-Dowling (Bridgespan Group)
26. Daniel Stid (Bridgespan Group)
27. Meera Chary (Bridgespan Group)
28. Divya Narayanan (Bridgespan Group)
29. Deborah Bezona (D. Bezona & Company)
30. Kelley Cope (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
31. Alice Komarnicki (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
32. Sandy Urgel (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
33. Kate Antonini (First Data)
34. Patricia Brizio (First Data)
35. Thomas Tucker (First Data)
36. Anne Hiaring Hocking (Hiaring Smith)
37. Vijay Toke (Hiaring Smith)
38. David Evan Harris (Global Lives Project and Institute for the Future)
39. Gavin McConnon (BoxPay)
40. Kyle Hitchcox (BoxPay)
41. Aaron Nobles (BoxPay)
42. Tim Otten (CiviCRM)
43. Anand Gupta (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
44. Benedikt Lotter (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
45. Brandon Paton (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
46. Brianna Smrke (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
47. Charlie Javice (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
48. Charlie Stigler (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
49. Chris Olah (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
50. Clay Allsopp (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
51. Connor Zwick (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
52. Dylan Field (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
53. Eric Chang (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
54. Henry Lui (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
55. Ilya Vakhutinsky (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
56. Isaac Dietrich (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
57. Jimmy Koppel (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
58. Jon Lim (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
59. Kettner Griswold (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
60. Kevin Ma (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
61. Lindsay Haskell (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
62. Michael Moore-Jones (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
63. Noor Siddiqui (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
64. Omar Rizwan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
65. Oskar Niburski (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
66. Param Jaggi (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
67. Paul Sebexen (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
68. Rebekah Austin (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
69. Rijul Gupta (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
70. Ritik Malhotra (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
71. Ryan Lelek (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
72. Saku Panditharantne (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
73. Samir Devalaraja (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
74. Semon Rezchikov (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
75. Shai Kiriati (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
76. Spencer Hewett (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
77. Tara Seshan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
78. Taylor Wilson (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
79. Tony Ho (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
80. Vaibhav Kumar (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
81. Vijay Viswanathan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
82. Wole Idowu (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
83. Yoonseo Kang (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
84. Maggie Dennis (visiting staff)
85. Sumana Harihareswara (remote staff)
86. Daniel Phifer and Kevin McCracken (Social Imprints)
87. Christina Dragwidge (Arthur J. Gallagher)
88. Henrik Bennetsen
89. Majd Abbar, Qatar Foundation
90. Ginny Jarrett (AJLI)
91. Alice Gardner-Boreta (AJLI)
92. Jodi Penn (AJLI)
93. Eileen Goodwin (AJLI)
94. Cynthia Foster (AJLI)
95. Olivia Thomas (AJLI)
96. Becker Holland (AJLI)
97. Delly Beekman (AJLI)
98. Sandra Thomas (AJLI)
99. Sarah Berthelot (AJLI)
100. Laurel Lee-Alexander (AJLI)
101. Liz Murley (AJLI)
102. Julie Siebel (AJLI)
103. Karla Wallace (AJLI)
104. Toni Freeman (AJLI)
105. Mary Jo Hunt (AJLI)
106. Kathy Rabon (AJLI)
107. Deann Cook (AJLI)
108. Liz Davis (AJLI)
109. Subha Lembach (AJLI)
110. Gwin Londrigan (AJLI)
111. Karen Miller (AJLI)
112. Terri Nass Reeder (AJLI)
113. Dona Ponepinto (AJLI)
114. Diann Rohde (AJLI)
115. Evelyn Zabo (AJLI)
116. Susan Danish (AJLI)
117. Anne Dalton (AJLI)
118. Maureen Mackey (AJLI)
119. Janine le Sueur (AJLI)
120. Carrie Holmes (AJLI)
121. Heather Mcleod-Grant (AJLI)
122. Rebecca Petzel (AJLI)
123. Kristin Cobble (AJLI)
124. Kat Walsh (Board Member)
125. Arthur Richards (Remote staff)
126. Martin Kalfatovic (Smithsonian)
127. Chris Freeland (Missouri Botanical Garden)
128. Diane Peters (Creative Commons)
129. Marion Strecker (Brazilian journalist)
130. Michiel Minderhoud (Mobile Code Challenge Winner)

2012/05/14: Edited to correct an error in the “Financials” section (changed “5% lower than plan” to “5% higher than plan”)

“The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful for this partnership with DigiCert, which will enhance our ability to secure the millions of online exchanges that occur with our websites each day,” said CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations for the Wikimedia Foundation. “It’s important for Wikimedia to identify like-minded partners that value transparency and the privacy of our users.”

DigiCert is an online security provider for many of the most recognized companies and web sites in the world, including four of the top 10 comScore-ranked sites. With 489 million unique visitors to the 285 language Wikipedias and sister sites each month, the Wikimedia Foundation seeks partners who share its mission to ensure transparency and privacy for its users.

DigiCert has seen consistent growth over time and is currently the world’s third-largest provider of enterprise authentication services and digital certificates, with numerous government, educational and business clients around the world.

“DigiCert is pleased to partner with the Wikimedia Foundation in recognizing the importance of the free and secure flow of information across the Internet and to support the Foundation’s mission,” said DigiCert CEO Nicholas Hales in a press release. “We’re excited to have another opportunity to demonstrate the quality, scalability and flexibility of DigiCert’s products for a continually expanding roster of globally leading organizations of all sizes and industries.”

CT Woo, Director of Technical Operations

The Tulip Folly, Jean-Léon Gérôme, from the Walters Museum collection

‪The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The Walters’ collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The images and their associated information will join our collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which serves as the repository for the 285 language editions of Wikipedia. ‬

‪The project began taking shape in February 2012, as part of the GLAM-Wiki initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). During GLAMcamp DC, a three-day conference hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., the Walters Museum worked with several Wikimedians to develop a documented process for uploading images to Commons. The basic details of the upload procedure were established during the conference, and during the weeks that followed, the uploads were conducted, monitored and tested, while collaboration continued online. ‬

‪”The Walters has gone above and beyond throughout this collaboration with the GLAM-Wiki community, working alongside Wikipedians to serve as a model for our mass image upload process,” said Lori Byrd Phillips, U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. “The release of these images will not only improve articles in Wikipedia, but will also have the potential to be used freely throughout the web.”

‪The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006. In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license. ‬

Sarasvati image from Walters Museum

‪”By uploading our information in this way, we can share items of cultural heritage from around the globe, directly with people in those parts of the world. Already our images have been used in 48 different languages. The Walters’ collection is well-suited for this project because of its size and its breadth of topic areas,” said Dylan Kinnett, Manager of Web and Social Media for the Walters Art Museum. “By developing documentation and tools for this type of work, we hope that our upload project can serve as a prototype for other cultural institutions.”

‪Already, the museum’s images have had an impact in improving content on Wikipedia, such when they are used as illustrations in entries whose topic is not the artwork itself, but a related idea, such as a mythological figure, or a time or place. The Walters’ painting of the Hindu goddess Saraswati, for instance, has been added to five different language Wikipedia entries about the goddess.‬

We would like to thank to the Walters Museum for their donation and their commitment to promoting free knowledge on Wikimedia Commons, and to the GLAM volunteers who helped make this endeavor possible.

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager