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 December (January 10, 2013)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for November:

484.5 million (-0.79% compared with October; +2.06% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for December:

20.2 billion (-0.8% compared with November; +23.5% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for November 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,532 (-0.03% compared with October / +0.59% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for November 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of November 30, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of November 30, 2012

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

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date November 30, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of November is $11.26MM vs plan of $10.29MM, approximately $964K or 9% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $16.61MM vs plan of $15.50MM, approximately $1.11MM or 7% over plan.
• Expenses for the month of November is $2.83MM vs plan of $3.12MM, approximately $290K or 9% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses and capital expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, outside contract services, and operating grants.
• Year-to-date expenses is $12.76MM vs plan of $14.64MM, approximately $1.88MM or 13% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, and awards and grants.
• Cash position is $28.06MM as of November 30, 2012.

Highlights

Visual Editor opt-in launch on English Wikipedia

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Major news in December include:

• The launch of an alpha, opt-in version of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, a project more complex than it appears;
• A research study on the use of the Article Feedback feature;
• New metrics for the MediaWiki community;
• The start of the Outreach Program for Women;
• Continued work to improve the workflow and interface for translators.

Note: We’re also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

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WMF 2011-2012 Annual Report

Today we’re excited to launch the Wikimedia Foundation’s latest Annual Report. This year marks the fifth edition of our Annual Report, which focuses on the achievements and core work of the preceding fiscal year (2011-12), and gives us a chance to recognize the amazing contributions of our volunteers and the generous support of our donors. You can read both the PDF and wiki versions. We welcome your comments on the discussion page.

This year’s report is quite different from our previous efforts. Instead of a multi-page book format, this year we created a folding, vertical brochure (when it’s printed). It’s considerably shorter in terms of text and we hope it will help make for a quicker and more impactful read.

We’re currently in the midst of a translation effort that will result in another 12 language editions to be released in the coming weeks. If you have an account on Meta-Wiki and you’re interested in helping with the review of these translations and other community translation efforts, please sign up. We will be posting this new project for translation shortly.

Our thanks to the many folks who contributed to this annual effort. A particular thank you to David Peters (Exbrook) for his work on the report’s design, and to those photographers and illustrators whose work we featured.

We’re looking forward to another amazing year in the Wikimedia movement!

Jay Walsh, Senior Director, Communications

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

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for November 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

New HTML5 video player

A new video player was enabled on Wikipedia and its sister sites, promising to bring free educational videos to more people, on more devices, in more languages. The player is the same HTML5 player used in the Kaltura open-source video platform. Its many new features include advanced support for subtitles, support for the royalty-free WebM video format, and server-side transcoding, i.e. the ability to convert from one video format to another, in order to deliver the appropriate video stream to the user depending on their bandwidth and the size of the player.

Usability testing of the new translation interface at the Bangalore DevCamp 2012

Developer meetup and language summit in India

On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India. The Engineering DevCamp focused on language support, development for mobile devices, and user interaction and user experience design (UI/UX). More than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators attended the event. It was preceded by an Open-Source language summit that the Foundation organized together with Red Hat in Pune, India.

Fundraiser launch

The Foundation’s ninth annual online fundraiser officially launched on November 27, 2012 and raised a record breaking $2.3 million in a single day: a 59% increase over our biggest day in 2011. See the Fundraiser Statistics page for a view comparing this year to previous years. Banner design progressed from last year’s “Jimmy appeal” ([1]) to variations on a new “Facts banner” ([2], [3], and [4]) which are more oriented towards informing users about the Wikimedia Foundation.

Due to the very successful start, it was decided to show banners only in the following five English-speaking countries through December 31: US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand (in addition to the banners for fundraising chapters). The fundraiser will be re-launched in all remaining countries in the spring of 2013, with improved translations.

Proposed new logo for Wikivoyage

Beta launch of Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage, the project to create a free world travel guide which anyone can edit, launched on Wikimedia Foundation servers on November 10, migrating text content and accounts from the old servers run by the Wikivoyage Association. The community is working on the review and transfer of media files, and the site remains in “beta” until this and other cleanup tasks are completed.

Data and Trends

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

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of November (December 6, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for October:

488.4 million (+2.84% compared with September; +2.46% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for November:

20.3 billion (+2.7% compared with October; +16.8% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for October 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,964 (-2.73% compared with September / +0.59% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for October 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of October 31, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of October 31, 2012

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

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date October 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of October is $1.24MM vs plan of $0.85MM, approximately $396K or 47% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $5.36MM vs plan of $5.21MM, approximately $151K or 3% over plan.
• Expenses for the month of October is $2.53MM vs plan of $2.84MM, approximately $305K or 11% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and operating grants.
• Year-to-date expenses is $9.93MM vs plan of $11.52MM, approximately $1.59MM or 14% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and awards and grants.
• Cash position is $20.76MM as of October 31, 2012 which is approximately 5.92 months of expenses.

Highlights

New HTML5 video player

(more…)

Major news in November include:

• the soft-launch of Wikivoyage.org;
• the launch of a new HTML5 video player, with support for WebM video, subtitles and multiple resolution derivatives;
• the first version of the Analytics Hadoop cluster put into service;
• the opening up of the product management process to volunteers.

Note: Like last month, we’re proposing a shorter and simpler version of this report for less technically savvy readers.

(more…)

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

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for October 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

The design changes to the Wikipedia mobile site include new navigation and updated typography.

Mobile Wikipedia redesigned

The mobile gateway to Wikipedia was updated with several features that had earlier been tested on the mobile beta site. The new navigation system aims to make mobile features and settings easier to discover. In the coming months, the mobile team will work on adding possibilities to contribute on mobile devices. In the previous month, the Wiki Loves Monuments app had already introduced a mobile photo upload function, as the first such possibility. For readers, the new design offers fonts that make the content easier to read.

First in-person meeting of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

The nine members of the new volunteer-run Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) met for the first time in October, preparing their recommendations about funding requests by 12 organizations (11 Wikimedia chapters and the Foundation) from a pool of more than $10 million of Wikimedia donations. In this new model, the funding requests have to be submitted in public, enabling a community review period that lasted until October 22.

The staff which supports the FDC scored each request according to a criteria list:

• estimates for the potential impact,
• the organization’s ability to execute the planned activities,
• their expected financial efficiency,
• the quality of the proposed success measures
• the potential benefit for the Wikimedia movement

The Signpost (the English Wikipedia’s weekly community newspaper) has published an overview of these scores and of the requested sums.

The Board of Trustees will announce its decision about the FDC’s recommendations in December.

Wikipedia Zero now available to 230 million people after Saudi Arabia launch; has already grown Wikipedia readership in Africa and Asia

Wikipedia Zero, the program offering mobile Internet users access to Wikipedia without data charges, added Saudi Telecom Company (STC) to the list of partners. With STC’s 25 million subscribers in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait, altogether 230 million mobile users in 31 countries have now access to the program, half a year after its worldwide start. A preliminary evaluation of its effect on readership is promising: Wikipedia pageviews from Orange Niger customers grew by 77% and those from Orange Kenya customers grew by 88% in a four-month period including the launch in these countries. In Malaysia, unique visitors to Wikipedia from local operator Digi jumped by 42% after it joined Wikipedia Zero.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for September:

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

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of October (November 1, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for September:

474.9 million (+4.08% compared with August; +4.47% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for October:

19.8 billion (+3.4% compared with September; +15.8% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for September 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

82,582 (+4.08% compared with August / +2.98% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for September 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of September 30, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of September 30, 2012

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

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date September 30, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of September is $2.36MM vs plan of $2.44MM, approximately $81K or 3% under plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $4.11MM vs plan of $4.36MM, approximately $245K or 6% under plan.
• Expenses for the month of September is $2.20MM vs plan of $2.77MM, approximately $577K or 21% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher expenses for the annual all-hands meeting.
• Year-to-date expenses is $7.40MM vs plan of $8.68MM, approximately $1.3MM or 15% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, legal expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services.
• Cash position is $22.0MM as of September 30, 2012 which is approximately 6.29 months of expenses.

Highlights

(more…)

Major news in October include:

• a redesign of the mobile site emphasizing readability and navigation;
• the launch of a Wikipedia app for Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets;
• the test of a redesigned account creation page.

Note: As of last month, we’re proposing a shorter and simpler version of this report for less technically savvy readers.

(more…)

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

Highlights

The Curation Toolbar, here being used to mark a new article as reviewed and send its author a message

“Page Curation” tools make it easier to review new Wikipedia articles

Every day, thousands of new pages are created on Wikipedia, requiring hundreds of volunteer editors to check them for quality. To make their work easier, the Editor Engagement Team has developed the “Page Curation” feature. It includes two tools:

• The New Pages Feed, an overview of new pages, annotated with information that helps reviewing them
• The Curation Toolbar appears next to a new page, offering autoconfirmed editors easy access to various actions, e.g. to mark the new page as reviewed, tag it for quality problems, or nominate it for deletion.

Page Curation was deployed on the English Wikipedia on September 20, and is planned to become available on other projects as well.

Many new Wikipedia editors experience frustration when they start an article that does not meet community expectations and gets deleted. It is hoped that the Page Curation feature will also lead to better feedback for page creators.

New volunteer-based model for distributing donation money launched

Over the last half year, a new model has been established for distributing the donation money raised via Wikimedia project sites. More than $10 million of it will now be allocated based on the recommendations of the new Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), which consists entirely of volunteers.

Following a public nomination process, the seven voting members of the first FDC have been announced: Arjuna Rao Chavala (India), Dariusz Jemielniak (Poland), Ali Haidar Khan (Bangladesh), Mike Peel (United Kingdom), Yuri Perohanych (Ukraine), Sydney Poore (United States), and Anders Wennersten (Sweden). They are joined by Jan-Bart de Vreede (Netherlands) and Patricio Lorente (Argentina) as non-voting representatives of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Susana Moraes (Portugal) was appointed as ombudsperson for the FDC process.

The FDC is now reviewing funding requests by 12 organizations, which are open for public comment until October 22.

New travel project site, and legal activities

The Wikimedia Foundation has agreed to host a new travel project site at the request of the Wikimedia community. Unfortunately, on August 29, 2012, Internet Brands, the owner of the Wikitravel website, sued two Wikitravel volunteers, alleging various legal claims. In response, one of the volunteers filed an anti-SLAPP motion, arguing that Internet Brands’s lawsuit sought to suppress his right to discuss the new Wikimedia travel project. The Wikimedia Foundation has also filed a suit against Internet Brands, claiming that it has no right to impede the creation of the new travel project.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for August:

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