For versions in other languages, please check the wiki version of this report, or add your own translation there!

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Lua speeds up pages and empowers Wikimedia’s technical contributors

On March 13, Lua was enabled for templates on all Wikimedia wikis. The existing syntax for wikitext templates is complicated and limited: it does not offer loops, for example. With Lua, editors can now use a real programming language, in which they can also contribute to programming projects outside Wikimedia. For Wikimedia wikis, Lua means a big performance gain in widely used templates, such as citations. For example, 300 citations on an English Wikipedia article now render in 3 seconds instead of 18 seconds.

The new image upload button in an article on the mobile version of the English Wikipedia

Mobile uploads launch for apps and the mobile web

On the mobile version of Wikipedia, smartphone users can now easily upload a lead image to Wikipedia articles that lack one. Also in March, the Mobile team released a dedicated app for Wikimedia Commons, allowing media uploads from Android and iOS devices.

First Individual Engagement Grants awarded to innovative community projects

The recipients of the first Individual Engagements Grants were announced on March 29. These grants fund projects by individuals or small teams for a duration of six months. Among the largest of the eight funded grants are “The Wikipedia Library” ($7500), which aims to give editors access to reliable sources, donated by publishers, “The Wikipedia Adventure” ($10,000), an on-wiki game for new editors, and a project to collaboratively define a vision for the future of Wikisource (10,000 Euros).

Wikipedia Zero wins award, reaches new users

Wikipedia Zero, which gives people around the world mobile access to Wikipedia free of data charges, won the 2013 SXSW Interactive “Activism” award, beating four other finalists. Also in March, Wikipedia Zero became available to more than 55 million additional subscribers in Russia, as part of a partnership with Beeline (VimpelCom). This was the biggest launch for the Wikipedia Zero team to date. The same month, a new Wikipedia Zero partnership with Axiata Group was announced, which will expand the program in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh this year.

Four of the Ombudsmen during their visit at the WMF office

Ombudsmen meet, might expand mandate

In March, the Foundation’s LCA team hosted five out of seven members of the Ombudsmen Commission in San Francisco, where these community members from around the world met with each other in person for the first time. They consulted with various WMF departments and provided input regarding privacy topics and the work of administrators. Formed in 2006, the Ombudsmen Commission is currently tasked with investigating complaints of alleged Privacy policy violations on behalf of the Board of Trustees. It has been proposed that the Commission should also be allowed to handle complaints about the global CheckUser policy and Oversight policy. An RfC (request for comment) about this is being prepared.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for February:

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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 February 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Legal victory for Wikivoyage and free knowledge

The Wikimedia Foundation’s legal team announced a settlement in the legal proceedings between the Foundation and Internet Brands, relating to issues stemming from the creation of Wikivoyage, our community’s newest free knowledge project.

Last year, Internet Brands (owners of a for-profit wiki-based travel project) sued two Wikimedians involved in supporting the travel wiki project. The Foundation supported the legal defense of the volunteers and the court ultimately dismissed Internet Brands’ lawsuit.

The Foundation also went on the offensive and filed its own separate lawsuit against Internet Brands seeking a declaration from the court that Internet Brands had no proper basis to block the travel wiki project. That suit was resolved in an out of court settlement on February 14, 2013. In that settlement, Internet Brands released the Foundation and Wikivoyage e.V. (the German non-profit organization who worked hard to make the travel project a success) from all claims related in any manner to the creation and operation of the travel wiki project. In return, the Foundation agreed to dismiss its suit.

Screenshot of the new mobile watchlist

Mobile watchlist available

Facilitating contributions to Wikipedia on mobile devices is an important goal for the Foundation’s mobile team. As one of the first results of these efforts, mobile Wikipedia users are now able to log into their account, and to view and modify their watchlist. On the mobile version, the star symbol for the watchlist is shown to all users, to encourage them to log in or create an account. Experienced contributors can use the watchlist as usual: To track changes to the selected pages and fix problems if necessary. But to make the watchlist more newbie-friendly, the mobile version also offers a full view of all selected pages, which can function as a reading list.

Language Engineering team attends open source conferences in India

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team participated in two conferences in Pune, India: GNUnify 2013, a major open source conference, and the Second Open Source Language Summit, co-organized by the Foundation with Red Hat. The team aims to make Wikipedia a website that can be used by anyone on the planet in their own language. India’s many different languages make it a natural location for the team to see the effect of their work. At the Language Summit, the engineers from the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated with attendees from Red Hat, KDE, Google and other groups. The work areas included the following:

• Input methods (enabling typing in a certain language), bringing the number of supported languages to 140.

• Translation tools, including a demonstration of the new design and features for the translation editor in MediaWiki’s Translate extension

• The “Language Coverage Matrix”, a detailed overview of language support in different projects and platforms (with 285 languages currently supported by Wikimedia, and more than 100 in the Fedora Linux distribution)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for January:

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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 January 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Logo of the IdeaLab

New program offers financial support for projects by individual Wikimedians

The Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grants program launched on January 15. While most WMF grants have so far gone to organizations like chapters, the new program will finance initiatives by individual Wikimedians or small teams to improve Wikimedia projects. The first application period lasts until February 15. During the first two weeks, 31 ideas, drafts, and proposals were submitted. An “IdeaLab” has been set up where draft proposals can be discussed, and applicants can get help to turn their ideas into complete proposals.

Wikimedia Foundation servers

Successful migration to new data center

On January 22, Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia sites were migrated to the Foundation’s new primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia (US). The prior data center in Tampa, Florida had been the main hosting site since 2004; it will remain on standby to take over in case the new data center experiences an outage. The switch worked nearly without any problems. The Operations Team attributes this success to the careful preparation since 2011. This involved reviewing, improving and documenting the configuration of the servers (currently about 885) in a way that has already improved stability in 2012, and will make it possible to set up new data centers much faster.

New partnership grows the reach of Wikipedia Zero to 330 million mobile users

VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world, joined the Wikipedia Zero program in January, raising the number of mobile users who are eligible to access Wikipedia without data fees by 100 million, to 330 million worldwide. Among the countries serves by VimpelCom are Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and other countries of the former USSR.

Wikivoyage logo

Wikivoyage becomes newest Wikimedia project

On January 15, the 12th anniversary of Wikipedia, Wikivoyage was officially launched as the newest project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The free travel guide that anyone can edit is already available in nine languages – Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish – with more being added. There are more than 50,000 articles, which are edited and improved by a core group of approximately 200 volunteer editors.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for December:

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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 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.

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

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Screenshot of the Wiki Loves Monuments app

Wiki Loves Monuments app enables the first mobile contributions to Wikimedia projects

In preparation for September’s “Wiki Loves Monuments“, the worldwide contest to contribute freely licensed photos of cultural heritage sites to Wikimedia Commons, the mobile team released the new Wiki Loves Monuments app for Android. Users can find nearby monuments, or search for them on a list. One can take photos from within the app and directly upload them to Wikimedia Commons. This is the first time that a mobile contribution mechanism is officially supported. Others ways of contributing to Wikimedia projects using mobile devices are being considered, too.

Language support tools released in “Project Milkshake”

The Internationalisation/Localisation (i18n/l10n) team reported progress on its Project Milkshake, an effort to release its existing internationalisation-related JavaScript components as standard jQuery libraries. They include an i18n framework that supports parameter replacements and grammar-, plural-, and gender-dependent translations, a library to support WebFonts (fonts that do not need to be installed on the reader’s computer), and a library to provide text input methods in the browser.

Request for Comment on legal fees assistance program

In a Request for Comment (RfC), the Foundation proposes a program intended to help pay for the legal defense fees of eligible users in specified support roles – such as certain community administrator, arbitrator, email response, or project governance functions – if a lawsuit is brought against them in relation to their activities in these roles.

Pilot project on Arabic Wikipedia increases contributions by new editors

On the Arabic Wikipedia, a new “contribution portal” was created in June, as a pilot project within the Editor Growth and Contribution Program. It offers simple visual tutorials for six basic editing tasks, such as fixing a typo or creating a new article. It has already increased the ratio of new users who start contributing, according to an analysis of the first phase (in English and Arabic).

Contribution portal on the Arabic Wikipedia (phase 0)

Data and Trends

Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting, September 4, 2012

Global unique visitors for July:

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

Wikimania 2012 group photograph

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Foundation staff at Wikimania

From July 12 to July 14, Wikimedians from around the world came together in Washington DC for this year’s annual Wikimania conference, organized by Wikimedia District of Columbia (see also the this month’s movement highlights). Among them were many Wikimedia Foundation staff, fellows and contractors.

The keynote of Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner was titled “Wikimedia Foundation: The Year In Review and The Year Ahead” (slides), and the Schedule included many other presentations by WMF staff, fellows and contractors:

• Fabrice Florin, Howie Fung, Karyn Gladstone, Brandon Harris, Oliver Keyes: Engaging editors on Wikipedia: A roadmap of new features (abstract, slides) / Oliver Keyes: Engaging the Community: What We’ve Tried and Where We’re Going (abstract) – video
• Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw: Life Without Brackets: Visual Editing for Wikitext (abstract,
• Erik Moeller: The purpose-driven social network: Supporting WikiProjects with technology (abstract, slides)
• Brandon Harris: The Athena Project: Wikipedia in 2015 (abstract. slides)
• Steven Walling, Maryana Pinchuk: Welcome to Wikipedia, now please go away: improving how we communicate with new editors (abstract, slides, video)
• Tilman Bayer (with MZMcBride): Stop Spamming’ vs. ‘Nobody Told Me’ – the state and future of movement broadcasting mechanisms (abstract, slides, video)
• Alolita Sharma: The next billion users on Wikipedia with Open Source Webfonts (abstract, video)
• Amir E. Aharoni: The software localization paradox (abstract, slides)
• Noopur Raval: GLAM and Outreach in India (abstract)
• Lori Byrd Phillips: State of GLAM-WIKI in the US (abstract)
• James Forrester & Philippe Beaudette: Wikimedia relations with governments, lobbying and public relations (abstract, video)
• Amir E. Aharoni: Supporting languages, all of them (abstract – submitted by Gerard Meijssen – , slides, video)
• Siebrand Mazeland: A Tale of Language Support (abstract, slides, video)
• Siebrand Mazeland, Santhosh Thottingal, Pau Giner, Niklas Laxström, Amir Aharoni, Arun Ganesh, Alolita Sharma: Ask the Language Support People (abstract, video)
• Fabrice Florin: Giving Readers a Voice: Lessons from Article Feedback v5 (abstract, slides, video)
• Geoff Brigham: Top 10 Legal Issues for the Wikimedia Movement (abstract, slides, video)
• Leslie Carr, Ben Hartshorne, Jeff Green, Ryan Lane, Rob Halsell: Ask the Operators (abstract, video)
• Ben Hartshorne: Swift and the Media Storage System (abstract, slides, video)
• Amir E. Aharoni: The hundred-year old websites – a new look at Wikisource (abstract, slides, video)
• Brion Vibber: Embedded scripting: creating interactive diagrams, maps, and other media resources in MediaWiki (abstract, slides, video)
• Andrew Garrett, with other panelists: Small Process Helpers: The case for Widgets (abstract, video)
• Tomasz Finc, Jon Robson: The Wikipedia Mobile Experience — Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going (abstract – submitted by Patrick Reilly -,slides, video)
• Yuvaraj Pandian: The Wikipedia Smartphone Apps Story (abstract, video)
• Oliver Keyes, with other panelists: Eternal December: How Awful Arguments are Killing the Wiki, and Why not to Make Them (abstract, video)
• Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling: “This is my voice”: the motivations of highly active Wikipedians (abstract, slides, video)
• Ryan Lane: Wikimedia Labs and the state of our open source infrastructure (abstract)
• Amit Kapoor/Kul Takanao Wadhwa: Reaching the Next Billion Users: Wikipedia on mobile (abstract, slides, video) + panel (video)
• Tomasz Finc, Dan Foy: Removing the barriers of access to Wikipedia (abstract, slides, video)
• Niklas Laxström: Translating the wiki way (abstract, slides, video)
• Rob Lanphier: Delivering MediaWiki faster, smoother and better (abstract, video)
• Siko Bouterse, Sarah Stierch, Jonathan Morgan, Jon Harald Søby, Peter Coombe, Tanvir Rahman, Steven Zhang: Wikimedia Community Fellows: what we’re researching, piloting and building to help the movement (abstract, slides: Introduction, Teahouse, dispute resolution, translation project, help pages, Small Wiki Editor Engagement)
• Sumana Harihareswara, Guillaume Paumier, Rob Lanphier: Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering (abstract, video)
• Katie Horn: Fundraising: Under the Hood (abstract, video)
• Sarah Stierch: 10 women in 10 minutes (abstract, slides)
• Santhosh Thottingal: Read and Write in your language (abstract, slides)
• Asaf Bartov: Funds for Free Knowledge: Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking (abstract, slides, video)
• James Alexander: The Bad Assumptions of the Copyright Discussion (abstract)
• Sumana Harihareswara: What Does THAT mean? Engineering Jargon And Procedures Explained (abstract)
• Roan Kattouw and Timo Tijhof: ResourceLoader 2: The Future of Gadgets (abstract, slides)
• Guillaume Paumier: 11 years of Wikipedia, or the Wikimedia history crash course you can edit (abstract, video)
• Lori Byrd Phillips (with Àlex Hinojo and Andy Mabbett): QRpedia and you (abstract)

Beyond these, Wikimedia Foundation staff, fellows and contractors also participated in various other panels.

The fundraising team recorded over 100 on-camera interviews with Wikimedia editors, programmers and volunteers from all over the world. Interviews are inspiring new editor appeals (and a short video about Wikipedia), which we will showcase during the annual fundraiser.

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.

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

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Advisory group discusses future funds dissemination structure

The FDC advisory group meeting in San Francisco

On June 9-10, the advisory group for the formation of the future Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) met at the Foundation’s offices in San Francisco. Community volunteers, Wikimedia Trustees, chapter representatives, Foundation staff and members of the Bridgespan Group discussed how the FDC will guide the decisions about the distribution of money (over 10 million US dollars in 2012-13) among the Foundation, chapters and other groups. Based on the resulting recommendations, the Board of Trustees has since approved the charter and initial operation of the FDC. Wikimedians who wish to serve on the FDC are invited to nominate themselves.

Logo of the Visual Editor project

Second Visual Editor prototype launched

A new prototype of the “visual editor” for Wikimedia projects was launched, the first release that can create and edit pages. It will enable users to contribute without having to learn complicated wikitext syntax.

“Teahouse” pilot concludes with encouraging results

The Teahouse, where new Wikipedia editors can receive support from experienced community members, concluded its three month pilot phase on the English Wikipedia, publishing a report and metrics. 568 volunteers participated in the pilot. In a survey, 70% said that they were satisfied with their Teahouse experience, while only 5% were not satisfied. New editors who are invited to the Teahouse made many more edits afterwards than those who do not receive an invitation. 28 percent of Teahouse participants are women, compared to 9 percent of editors on Wikipedia in general.

Hackers convene in Berlin

A panoramic view of the Berlin Hackathon

Over 100 participants from 30 countries came to Berlin for the Berlin Hackathon, co-organized by Wikimedia Deutschland and the Foundation. They included MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, systems administrators, bot writers and maintainers, Gadget creators, and other Wikimedia technologists. The community also learned more about the Wikidata and RENDER projects.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for May:

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

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

New Wikimedia fellows working on dispute resolution and small language wikis

The Wikimedia Fellows Program added two Community Fellows: Steven Zhang (a Wikipedian since 2008) is analyzing dispute resolution on the English Wikipedia. Tanvir Rahman (active on the Bengali Wikipedia since 2009, and elected as a steward by the global community in 2011) is experimenting with on-wiki strategies for growing the number of editors on small-language wikis, with an initial focus on the Bengali Wikipedia. Another Fellowship project, the Teahouse (where experienced Wikipedians are helping new editors), concluded its 3 month pilot phase on the English Wikipedia and was preparing a full analysis. Initial results indicated that it had a positive impact on new editors. The Teahouse concept is already being adapted to Arabic and Indic language projects.

Upload Wizard usage statistics on Commons for January 2011 to April 2012 (September 2011 spike coincides with Wiki Loves Monuments)

1 million media files uploaded using Upload Wizard

One year after it was announced, the Upload Wizard has been used to upload more than 1 million freely licensed media files to Wikimedia Commons, and has contributed to an acceleration of its community’s growth. Developers are working on a more reliable upload of large files (up to 500MB), on a mobile upload application to support the Wiki Loves Monuments contest in September, and on improving Flickr integration and geolocation support in the Upload Wizard.

Wikipedia Zero landing page for Digi users in Malaysia

Wikipedia Zero launches in Asia

Wikipedia Zero, the Foundation’s initiative to enable free mobile access to Wikipedia, became available in Asia for the first time on May 21: Malaysian mobile operator Digi started offering the lightweight, text-only version of Wikipedia free of data charges to its 10 million customers. The program is already live in Tunisia and Uganda, and will launch in many other countries in the coming months.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for April:

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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 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:

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