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

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

WMF staff preparing for the anti-SOPA blackout

Foundation supports historic anti-SOPA Wikipedia blackout

On January 18, the community of the English Wikipedia made history with its decision to black out its entire project for 24 hours in protest of two proposed US laws — SOPA and PIPA — that would have seriously damaged the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. The communities of over 30 other Wikimedia projects supported the protest. Many Foundation staff assisted in the effort, handling the technical side of the blackout as requested by the community, providing code and design, facilitating discussions, contributing legal analysis and handling an unprecedented amount of press coverage.

During the blackout, more than eight million US-based readers used the CongressLookup tool to find their political representatives. A blog post by Sue Gardner received more than 13,000 comments, with the overwhelming majority supporting the blackout. Google News listed over 11,000 media stories about the Wikipedia blackout and the other Internet protests of January 18, and #wikipediablackout was tweeted almost 1 million times. Support for both SOPA and PIPA has since dwindled. Observers expect that they will not become law in their proposed form.

Participants at the San Francisco Hackathon

San Francisco Hackathon

The first San Francisco Hackathon was attended by 92 participants, many of them complete newcomers. They attended training sessions about Wikimedia technology, followed by team work on demo projects which were then presented in a showcase session and judged by a jury. The first prize went to “SMSpedia”, which allows the user to text a page title to a phone number; the user is then called back by the service and can listen to the Wikipedia entry read aloud.

Mobile announcements: Official Android app, and Orange partnership for free Wikipedia access in Africa/Middle East

In the first partnership of its kind, mobile operator Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation will provide more than 70 million Orange customers from 20 countries in Africa and the Middle East (AMEA) with mobile access to Wikipedia — without incurring data usage charges. Also in January, the official Wikipedia Android app was announced. It was installed more than half a million times within the first two weeks.

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

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of January (February 2, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for December:

457 million (-3.7 percent compared with November; +15.6 percent compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release January data later in February)

Page requests for January:

18.0 billion (+10.4 percent compared with December; 16.4 percent compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for December 2011 (>= 5 edits/month):

83,293 (+0.1 percent compared with November; +1.6 percent compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons) Report Card for December 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_12_detailed.html

The report card is currently undergoing a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects).

Financials

(Financial information is only available for December 2011 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – December 31, 2011

Revenue: $25.6 million

Expenses:

• Technology Group: $4,801,082
• Community/Fundraiser Group: $2,501,444
• Global Development Group: $2,154,912
• Governance Group: $464,533
• Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group: $2,916,686

Total Expenses: $12,838,657

Total surplus/(loss): $12,784,247

Revenue was ahead of plan due to grants of $2.8 million and additional donations ahead of plan of $2 million.

Expenses for the month is $2.9MM vs plan of $2.6MM, approximately 11% higher than plan. Year-to-date is $12.8MM vs plan of $14.2MM, approximately 10% lower than plan.

Underspending YTD is due to timing of capital expenditures ($989K – budget was spread evenly over 12 months), internet hosting ($64K), volunteer development ($142K), travel and conference expenses ($233K), personnel expenses ($584K), recruiting expenses ($124K), and IT desk equipment ($77K) offset by higher awards and grants ($261K) budget was spread evenly over 12 months), legal and accounting fees ($81K), professional services ($293K), and bank fees ($248K).

Cash of $30.6 million, which is thirteen months of cash reserves at current spending levels and fourteen months of cash per the annual plan.

Highlights

WMF staff preparing for the anti-SOPA blackout

Foundation supports historic anti-SOPA Wikipedia blackout

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Major news in January include:

• Tech support for the black-out protesting SOPA & PIPA;
• The successful San Francisco hackathon;
• The release of the official Wikipedia Android app;
• A new beta cluster for Wikimedians to test upcoming software before it’s deployed to production.

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Please find below the summary part of the mid-year status report from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Development department, regarding the 2011-12 annual plan. The full report including the core activity review and priorities for next six months can be accessed on Meta.

Overall, the global development team continues to make progress in building our team, however we are moving more slowly than would be preferred in some areas. I’m happy that we have made a huge amount of progress in Mobile over the past six months. I would like to be further along in deploying pilot programs in India and Brazil as well as in expanding our grants program. The slower than desired pace is a result of our desire to do a better job of working with the communities where we are deeply engaged, a desire to do more upfront consultation and design work, and due to our relatively thinly spread leadership resource (me). We are also actively reflecting on the Pune Pilot and integrating lessons into how we work across the board, not just in the Global Education Project or in India.

WMF Goal #1: Mobile

Woman taking a mobile picture in Bangalore

We are on track to meet our plan for our mobile target of 2 billion page views for 2011/12 and partnerships with mobile operators representing 500 million subscribers. In December 2011, we had 1.534 billion page views to our mobile sites across all Wikipedias as compared with 802 million in June 2011.^[1] We have made excellent progress across the organization on mobile over the past six months and are in a fundamentally better place than we were. Our mobile partnerships team has built a pipeline of partnerships with mobile operators around the world that start launching in January. Our current partnership list covers key markets in Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Turkey and Russia representing over 700 million subscribers. Not every deal will come to fruition, but we are confident that some major ones will and we’ll begin to attract wider interest in partnerships. In most cases, our partners will be offering Wikipedia access for free to their subscribers and we are working on marketing programs that will expand reach.

The Global Development team works closely with engineering on mobile research, product feature decision making and on technical support for partners. Our engineering team has deployed a much-improved mobile gateway and enhanced its functionality, and is working hard to release an Android app, which closes a hole in our portfolio. They are building out our engineering resources to enable continuous improvement of our mobile position. GD/Eng’s mobile research work (we have done two major studies) has helped inform engineering decisions on the product development pathway. Results from the Mobile Readers Survey 2011 are being analyzed, and will be shared soon. Findings from the mobile research work conducted in India and Brazil can be found at Wikipedia Mobile User Research.

WMF Goal #2: Editor growth

Qatar Convening for Arabic Wikipedia October 2011

Progress on editor growth has been more challenging. We are behind in getting pilot initiatives deployed to really understand the potential for direct impact on editor growth. Our primary effort to date has been the Global Education Program including the Pune Pilot in India. While the program in the US and Canada continues to grow, it has had a small and temporary impact on editor numbers. The program has not been oriented toward creating new Wikipedians, but has added almost 2,000 editors during the Fall 2011 semester, more than thrice the number from Spring 2011 (500+).

The Pune Pilot, which we launched in June, has wrapped up, but was a failure. There were a range of problems involving student plagiarism and the program took on too many students with too few support resources to manage the problems that came up. We also taxed the English Wikipedia community in a way that we had not intended and was regrettable. We learned a lot…and are engaged in a thorough review of the pilot with outside help to ensure we capture the lessons and make better and different mistakes in the future.

We did not have the capacity in place to launch other pilot initiatives in the past six months. We slowed down our plans for Brazil to create space to build a strong relationship with the Brazilian community and conduct some research into the current state of PT:WP. Our India program was at full capacity dealing with the Pune Pilot, supporting the Wikiconference India, and basic program setup requirements. Our India team also took some time to strengthen their links to the community and do a better job of getting early community partnership in program work.

An unplanned for opportunity emerged to accelerate catalyst activities in MENA focused on Arabic Wikipedia. It was not in the annual plan to work in MENA this year, but we took the opportunity presented by the interest of the Qatar Computing Research Institute in supporting Wikipedia. They hosted a small workshop where we met with leading Arabic Wikipedians and laid the groundwork for program work in the beginning of 2012.

Global Development core activity review

see full report

Global Development Priorities for the next six months

see full report

Barry Newstead

Chief Global Development Officer

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 December 2011, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

Wikitext (right) and its representation in the Visual Editor (left)

Visual editor prototype

The team developing a Visual Editor for Wikipedia and our other projects presented a first prototype for testing on December 13. Its development has been one of the Foundation’s top priorities according to the 2011-2012 Annual Plan. Wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing, and it is hoped that the Visual Editor will make editing easier.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/help-test-the-first-visual-editor-developer-prototype/

Fundraiser ends with record-breaking donations

Tamil Wikipedia Editor Dr. Sengai Podhuvan being interviewed by Victor Grigas for a fundraiser testimonial

The 2011 annual fundraiser ended on January 1, 2012 raising a record-breaking USD 20 million from more than one million donors in nearly every country in the world. This year’s campaign highlighted staff and volunteers who help to create Wikipedia. It featured testimonials from volunteer editors in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States ranging in age from 18 to 76.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/02/wikimedia-fundraiser-concludes-with-record-breaking-donations/

WMF annual report 2010-2011

Annual Report published, for the first time with translations

The Wikimedia Foundation’s latest Annual Report was posted in PDF and wiki format in mid-December. This year’s report focusses on the Foundation’s major strategic efforts: supporting growth in India, expanding our mobile reach, improving and simplifying our software, and building our global education program. The report also highlights accomplishments within our community through the last fiscal year, and features a center spread article about the creation of the Arab Spring article on Wikipedia. For the first time, we produced ‘summary’ versions in seven languages.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/17/our-latest-annual-report-how-the-world-tells-its-story/

Collaborative drafting process for Terms of Use update completed

After more than 120 days, the comment period for the proposed user agreement comes to an end with powerful and effective community participation. See the present version of the proposed user agreement and extensive discussion .

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/31/terms-of-use/

Data and Trends

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

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for November:

474 million (-0.4% compared with October; +15.6% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release December data later in January)

Page requests for December:

16.3 billion (-6.2% compared with November; +17.1% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for November 2011 (>= 5 edits/month):

83,444 (-1.2% compared with September / comparison data for November 2010 currently unavailable)

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

Report Card for November 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_11_detailed.html

The report card is currently undergoing a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects).

Financials

(Financial information is only available for November 2011 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – November 30, 2011

Revenue: $14.5 million

Expenses:

• Technology Group: $3,916,000
• Community/Fundraiser Group: $1,732,000
• Global Development Group: $1,454,000
• Governance Group: $406,000
• Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group: $2,419,000

Total Expenses: $9,927,000

Total surplus/(loss): $4,573,000

Revenue was ahead of plan due to grants of $2.8 million and additional donations ahead of plan of $2.1 million.

Expenses were below plan at $9.9 million actual versus $11.6 million plan. Expenses were below planned due to lower than planned expenditures in capital expenditures, chapter grants, recruitment cost and other activities due.

Cash of $22.8 million, which is twelve months of cash reserves at current spending levels and ten months of cash per the annual plan.

Highlights

Visual editor prototype

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Major news in December include:

• The deployment of WebFonts to select Indic wikis;
• The first developer prototype of the Visual editor;
• A new version of Article Feedback being tested on the English Wikipedia;
• Progress on the Swift media storage project.

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

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for November 2011, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

WikiConference and Hackathon in Mumbai, India

Participants of the Mumbai Hackathon

From November 19 to November 20, Wikimedia staff and volunteers gathered together in Mumbai for the India Hackathon 2011, focusing on mobile access, localization, and offline distribution. The hackathon was held simultaneously with WikiConference India 2011, an event organized by Wikimedia India. The WikiConference had nearly 700 participants, making it one of the largest Wikimedia events ever, and certainly the largest so far in India. More than 50 sessions provided insights on community building, improving project quality, establishing partnerships, best practices in outreach and opportunities for general experience sharing.

A new tool for helping new editors

Since August, the experimental “Moodbar” function has invited new users on the English Wikipedia to quickly and easily provide feedback on their editing experience by entering a 140 character comment. All these comments are posted as a public feed on the Feedback Dashboard. In November, we added a new functionality that enables experienced editors to easily respond to this feedback without leaving the dashboard. Wikimedia Foundation Community Organizers Steven Walling and Maryana Pinchuk have started a Response Team of experienced editors willing to help out new users in this way.

We’re continuing to improve this system and assess its impact; specifically, whether new users read the messages they receive, and whether editing activity increases as a result of active coaching.

Fundraiser

The annual Wikimedia fundraiser launched on November 16th with over $ 1M donated on the first day. $ 10,433,402.89 were donated until the end of the month, in a total of 545,362 donations. The significant increase in contributors across more regions of the world can largely be attributed to the increase in the number of currencies Wikimedia is able to accept this year – more than 80.

In addition to the annual personal appeal from Jimmy Wales, this year’s fundraising campaign features new voices, including community members and Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Compared with the previous year, four times as many volunteers are contributing to the translation of banners and appeals, including over 700 logged out users (readers?). The Article Feedback Tool enables anyone to rate the quality of the translations.

Discussion of the image filter in Hanover

Sue Gardner visits European Wikimedia chapters

Award of Wiki Loves Monuments and Heritage Day. November 17th, 2011 in the offices of the Federal Monuments Office Vienna, Hofburg

In November, the Wikimedia Foundation sent a delegation to Europe, in which Executive Director Sue Gardner, her assistant James Owen, General Counsel Geoff Brigham and Community Organizer Maryana Pinchuk visited seven cities in three weeks. The main purpose of the trip was to spend time with chapters, with the goal of listening to chapters’ hopes and fears, particularly with regards to fundraising and funds dissemination. A secondary purpose was to spend time with the German community, with the goal of improving mutual understanding particularly with regard to ongoing controversy about the possible implementation of a personal image filter.

The trip also involved a number of other activities, such as meet-ups, talks and media interviews. The delegation visited Paris, Utrecht, London, Vienna, Hanover and Berlin. The trip included meetings and/or meals with five chapter boards, as well as four community meet-ups, and a variety of other small informal gatherings with chapters people and/or editors. The group visited the UK National Archives with members of the UK Board, and helped present awards to the winners of the Wiki Loves Monuments competition in Vienna. Sue Gardner gave three presentations, to the UK Board, the German chapter, and to Imperial College in London, and did six media interviews, in London and Berlin.

The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful to the boards of Wikimédia France, Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Österreich and Wikimedia Deutschland, for their hospitality, openness and candour. Our particular thanks to the following individuals: Christophe Henner, Rémi Mathis, Adrienne Alix, Ziko van Dijk, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Roger Bamkin, Andrew Turvey, Andy Mabbett, Jon Davies, Fiona Apps, Marek69, Kurt Kulac, Manuel Schneider, Barbara Neubauer, Jo Pugh, Pavel Richter, Sebastian Moleski, Julia Kloppenburg and Catrin Schoneville.

Data and Trends

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

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for October:

477 million (+4.9% compared with September; +16.7% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)

Page requests for November:

16.8 billion (-0.1% compared with October; +12.3% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for October 2011 (>= 5 edits/month):

84,426 (+1.4% compared with September / +0.8% compared with the previous year)

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

Report Card for October 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/

Financials

(Financial information is only available for October 2011 at the time of this report. All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – October 31, 2011)

Revenue: $4,253,486

Expenses:

• Technology Group: $3,021,534
• Community/Fundraiser Group: $1,066,080
• Global Development Group: $1,116,890
• Governance Group: $336,150
• Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group: $1,989,659

Total Expenses: $7,530,312

Total surplus/(loss): ($3,276,826)

Revenue was ahead of plan due to grants of $2.8 million and additional donations ahead of plan of $385,254.

Expenses were below plan at $7.5 million actual versus $9.1 million plan. Expenses were below planned due to lower than planned expenditures in capital expenditures, chapter grants, recruitment cost and other activities due.

Cash of $14.9 million, which is six months of cash reserves at current spending levels.

Highlights

WikiConference and Hackathon in Mumbai, India

(more…)

Major news in November include:

• The completion of the Coding challenge, and two coding events in India and the UK;
• Continued infrastructure work in our data centers to improve performance and reliability, and on the Labs project;
• Progress on the Visual editor and its back-end;
• New versions of the Feedback Dashboard and the Upload Wizard, bringing new and long-awaited features;
• Fundraising engineering going full-swing, in parallel with the annual fundraising campaign;
• The final release of MediaWiki 1.18.0.

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