Talk:Wikimedia Foundation reports

If anyone else wants to add some, this gmane search will be useful. --pfctdayelise 06:38, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

rename

'Foundation reports' is simpler and shorter - it allows inclusion of annual reports. These are the only Foundation reports; and I feel the name should either include both source and audience (ED to the Board) or not specify in detail at all. So I renamed for simplicity.

In fact, maybe this TOC can be merged into a section of Reports, with individual reports renamed Foundation report to the Board, March 2009, &c. -- sj | translate | + 06:18, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Draft structure for the new WMF quarterly reports (feedback welcome)

Hi everyone,

as detailed by Erik earlier, the Foundation is changing its reporting from the monthly cycle that has been in place since 2008 to a quarterly rhythm. A main reason being to better align it with the quarterly planning and goalsetting process that has been extended to the entire organization since Lila took the helm. The first of these new quarterly reports is set to come out on February 15, and while the content is being filled out over the next week, we wanted to provide an opportunity for the entire community to comment on the planned structure.

The main objectives and design principles for this report are:

• Accountability: Help our movement and our supporters understand how we spend our effort, and what we accomplish.
• Learning together: Highlight important internal & external data, trends and lessons.
• Presentable: Anyone, from volunteer to the executive director, should be able to present the work of the WMF using this report.
• Reasonable effort: Pull as much as possible from existing sources, e.g., quarterly review slide decks & minutes.

We have decided that this iteration of the new report will appear in the format of a slide deck suitable for a 90 minute presentation, which means that it will need to focus on the highest priorities in each area, linking to the quarterly review documentation and other material for further detail.

See the mockup below for the intended structure, which includes the following sections:

• Key metrics (expanding the "Data and Trends" section of the previous monthly reports, adding a red/green/yellow indicator to provide context on whether each number is seen as concerning, positive or neutral), and overall insights/takeaways from this quarter

For each priority work area:

• What we said (previously set goals) and what we did (results).
• What we learned (how should the results impact the work going forward? What insights can the Foundation or the movement take away?)

and concluding with:

• What's next (excerpt of the highest priority goals for the next quarter)

The draft structure (with mocked up content - not the actual report yet) can be found below.

Please leave comments below. We will try to take them into account while tweaking the structure further, and of course, this being the first iteration, we are likely to make many further changes for the next quarterly report.

Note: This report is going to cover the second quarter of the Foundation's fiscal year (October-December 2014). The remaining monthly reports under the old model until September have all been published by now, you can find them here.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 06:18, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

DRAFT / MOCKUP - not the actual report yet. This PDF is to demonstrate the currently planned structure of the report (will be overwritten with the finalized version)

Wiki version?

PDFs are good for slide shows, but they tend to be fairly large (the example is >3.5MB), which makes it difficult for those with slow internet connections to download, and also difficult to flick through on a web browser. Please consider making a wiki version available in addition to the PDF version. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 11:01, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm not convinced about the slide/PDF format either. There are many reasons to think that a wiki is well suited for the Wikimedia Foundation reports, but my highlights are: real text (searchable, editable), real links (complementing concise texts), images in Commons (connecting to original files and other pages using them).--Qgil-WMF (talk) 19:39, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Mike and Quim - we should be able to provide the report as an online presentation in Google Drive as well, making it presentable/viewable slide by slide, which should take care of some of that concern until phab:T77145 ("Show PDF Slides in Media Viewer") is resolved. Also, I suspect that a wiki page with all the images in the same resolution might likewise have a quite large size; and I'd like to observe that this PDF is actually searchable and contains real links (e.g. click on "Active editors" in the scorecards slide). But I understand and share the desire for a wiki version, and have been looking into ways to efficiently convert Google Slides decks (the format in which the report is being drafted) into wiki pages. Unfortunately I haven't yet found a way that is as direct as this one for Google Docs, and for now, the focus is on publishing the report as a PDF in time, but I will look into that again afterwards. In case someone wants to weigh in and help make this happen, here is what I found so far:

• The shortest way for extracting images from a Google Slides deck seems to be to export it as PDF and run pdfimages. This still leaves quite a bit of overhead for renaming images and (re)adding metadata before they are available on Commons.
• For tables, the shortest process that I have found so far that produces reasonable results, still with some manual cleanup needed, is this:

• Copy the table from Google Slides to (any document in) Google Sheets
• Export from Google Sheets as ODF (LibreOffice) file
• "Save as" HTML from LibreOffice
• Excerpt the <table>...</table> part from the HTML source
• Optional: Run it through html2wiki to produce wikitext table code instead of HTML table code.

In the case of the table on page 6 of the draft (see right), this produces the following:

Department	Objective / Key Results	Status
Engineering	Mobile App: Improved search & browsing, validated through qualitative testing Mobile Web: Launch A/B test for microcontributions to Wikidata	Done
...	...	...

I.e. the basic table structure is intact, but e.g. the coloring and the links are missing, and would needed to be added manually, adding significant overhead.

Again, if someone knows of better conversion methods, I would really appreciate learning about them.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

I'm no expert in using Google Docs (or a fan of it: I'd question whether that's the best tool for the job here rather than using a wiki to start with, since we already use that so successfully to write accessible, collaborative documents!), but you might be able to get better results by exporting from Google Docs in HTML format in the first place and then converting that to wikitext. You may also want to consider making some design choices to make things easier to copy between the two: e.g. use ticks/question marks/crosses rather than table background colours. There may also be regular expressions you could construct to improve the conversion to wikitext, possibly using templates (e.g. search for the HTML codes of the colours used, and convert that line into one wrapped by an appropriate wiki template that does the rest of the formatting for you) - I'm sure that the WMF has developers who know how to write regex's and could be asked to lend a hand here. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:18, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, but as mentioned, this is actually about Google Slides, not Google Docs, and Google Slides doesn't offer an HTML export feature currently.

I'm not sure how much we would want to compromise on the report's readability (e.g. by avoiding colors) just for the purpose of making the conversion process easier.

MediaWiki actually recognizes HTML color codes just fine (as you can verify in the exported code for the table above, which designates the borders as "#000000", i.e. black). The problem is that the information about the background color gets lost entirely during the export, not that it is in the wrong format.

Thanks for informing me about the existence of regular expressions. If you had clicked the above link regarding Google Docs, you might have found out that I already came up with several regexes myself to make conversion work in that case (and I wrote many more for this conversion problem). I don't yet see an application for regexes to the current problem, but let me know if you find one.

I sincerely appreciate the effort to help, but to be honest, handwaving about e.g. a hypothetical "template that does the rest of the formatting for you" isn't very useful advice.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:59, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

A wiki version is now available here: Wikimedia Foundation Report, October-December 2014 - and I also published a version on Google Slides for easy online presentation.

I spent some more time figuring out a reasonably efficient process for the conversion, and (since I didn't find much useful information anywhere else, and it might be useful for many other decks too) documented it here: User:Tbayer (WMF)/Converting Google Slides to wikitext.

It's much better than the previous method I had outlined above - in particular, it preserves links and the coloring of table cells. But even with these improvements, there is still quite a bit of manual work involved, so we will need to keep being mindful of cost vs. value here.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, the process is indeed painful but the result is much more readable. I still hope for a textual version though. --Nemo 08:23, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Textual version

Slide deck is a no go. A text is needed, that can be read and digested; everything else is just too slow to consume, as well as insufficiently nutritious. Don't say this is just a niche preference: the main Wikimedia project is an encyclopedia, not a kaleidoscope. --Nemo 22:45, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment, Nemo. The slides will contain quite a lot of text actually. As for publishing the same content in a wiki version (as the previous monthly reports were), see my reply to Mike above. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

I didn't see any readable text. --Nemo 23:08, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Concrete usefulness

I can do without the propaganda snippets from each department (which are duplicated from other places anyway), but the monthly report is also a day-to-day work tool in some of its parts. The barebone information needs to continue being available, whatever format is decided.

For instance, staff changes updates are absolutely necessary for anyone regularly interacting with the WMF, given how quickly persons change. And they need to be available swiftly, otherwise new employees will be mere ghosts, impossible to work with, for a long time.

Same for other sections which contain information one can't extract from elsewhere at all, or not in a timely manner: I won't list them all. The new reporting must not result in a decrease of transparency. --Nemo 22:57, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

As mentioned above and in Erik's original announcement, it's fully intentional that information is duplicated from the (voluminous) quarterly review documentation material, and that the report will provide a high-level view without going into details. The Foundation already publishes a lot of detailed information about its work elsewhere, and I really appreciate that you are someone who reads much of it (thanks for all your typo fixes in the quarterly review minutes!), but the audience of this organization-wide quarterly report is a more general one.

As for how and when WMF publishes staff changes, Gayle is in a better position to comment on that, but I'd like to note that at least the new hires and conversions are still announced in the metrics meeting each month (and the list is published on Commons), and it's also possible to consult the "Staff and contractors" list on the Foundation wiki which should be up to date and has a public version history.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:01, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

That's no substitute. And no, the staff page doesn't include every change either. This information can't be reduced. --Nemo 23:09, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

And of course now people are using things like wmf:Special:Log/block instead (or the account creation/disabling on officewiki)... Nemo 21:10, 21 February 2016 (UTC)

As often, you omitted the link to the thing your statement is based on, which would enable people who read your comment to form their own opinion about your summary. That analysis clearly shows that, contrary to the impression you tried to create above last year, not only is it still possible to track staff comings and goings, it's even possible to do so with much better time resolution and timeliness than "monthly + at least several weeks delay" (as it was when this was coupled to the entire monthly report).

What's more, in 2015 the HR team got very good (perhaps after some prodding) with updating the staff list page which I think may also be more complete (e.g. the departure of Marc Pelletier was recorded there but not in the log you linked). It's kind of strange that you insist that the staff section in monthly reports until 2014 are the only thing that is allowed to be considered "the official data source" - it was compiled by the same team that updates that staff list page now.

Finally, in addition, new hires are still announced monthly as part of the metrics meeting (example).

(Note that I no longer working on this; the quarterly report's publication is now being handled by the WMF Communications team, in particular Greg.)

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 17:46, 22 February 2016 (UTC)

Number of registrations

I noticed phabricator:T89276. As you are trying to reduce the volume of the report, I suggest removing this useless metric. If you advocate for its inclusion for the first time in years of wiki statistics, please explain why and how it benefits the mission. --Nemo 23:11, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Cf. Research:Newly registered user and Research:Metrics standardization. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

What's your point? I know what that page says, in fact it confirms what I said above: «There is no historical definition of a newly registered user provided by the Wikimedia Foundation. New account registrations do not form part of data historically collected and exposed via WikiStats». --Nemo 20:18, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Re: the reports have increasingly gotten backlogged

This new process was introduced, inter alia, with the following statement by Erik (linked at the beginning of this section):

the reports have increasingly gotten backlogged, to the point that we're just now [November 6] releasing the August report.

As Tilman stressed elsewhere, the latest report was released 70 days after the reported period; in other words, reports are now more backlogged than they used to be when the quarterly schedule was adopted (67 days of delay). This is certainly not the individuals' fault, so perhaps it's time to admit that the new system hasn't reached any of its stated goals? Nemo 11:42, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Like other of your statements on this page, your conclusion about the "new system" (i.e the one used first in the report for Q2 2014/15) is based on misconceptions. Each of the first four quarterly reports released after the system's introduction met the previously set publication deadline: 46 days, 45 days (OK, 2 minutes late), 30 days, and 19 days after the end of the quarter. (We had intentionally set a more relaxed deadline initially because the process was still new.) What's more, you're omitting the fact that the quarterly reports cover a longer timespan than the monthly reports that Erik's statement had referred to - a publication delay of 67 days was seen as very undesirable in case of the monthly reports, but would be less grave an issue for a quarterly report.

(As noted elsewhere, I am no longer involved in the publication of these reports and can't speak to the current process.)

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 09:43, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

2014-15 Q3

media:Wikimedia_Foundation_Quarterly_Report,_FY_2014-15_Q3_(January-March).pdf

Read uptime

p. 3

Nice to have some uptime statistics at last. However, why only the English Wikipedia? And what about editing uptime? Typically there is at least one event per week disrupting editing and/or viewing at least somewhere for half a hour or so. --Nemo 08:07, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Actually, the uptime stats were already included in the same form in the previous report's scorecard.

They come from monthly reports by Nimsoft Cloud Monitor, which contain uptime numbers for various services corresponding to items on http://status.wikimedia.org/ (e.g. also for the main pages of the Finnish and Ukrainian Wikipedia) - but no overall "uptime of all WMF sites" aggregate metric, which would be difficult to define, I guess. The most viewed page on the most viewed project seems a reasonable choice to me for a single metric to be highlighted. As mentioned in the report, the Ops team has been working on new availability metrics which should be replacing these soon.

"Typically there is at least one event per week ... for half an hour" - citation sorely needed.

Separate editing uptime stats might be interesting, but there too availability metrics would need to be defined first, and while my knowledge in this area is limited, I understand from Ori that it's rarely been the case recently that Wikipedia was in a read-only state (i.e. where editing availability differed from reading availability).

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Ah, too bad, then that number is useless; status.wikimedia.org consistently lies. As for citations, I refer you to Tech News in the period when it was actively maintained. --Nemo 20:12, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Reuse

I see practically all the pages are reused from quarterly reports. Nice that the collated report costs less now, however it would be nice to highlight the original content in some way (e.g. in a TOC). --Nemo 08:07, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Actually, reusing existing material such as the quarterly review decks (instead of requiring teams to write up things twice) was already a primary design principle of the previous report (see slide 2 or the discussion above).

What has changed this time is that we covered all existing objectives - 130 of them - instead of focusing on 10 top objectives as in the last report; which made the report much longer even though individual goals weren't covered in the same level of detail. In the Q2 report, we spent a bit more effort to add some explanatory information, but this time there was still a lot of editing involved.

Good point about highlighting the original quarterly review decks for further detail, I have now linked them throughout the document.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for doing all of this, Tilman. The new report looks wonderful. –SJ talk  15:08, 4 June 2015 (UTC)

Staff

Where is the information on staff arriving and departing? --Nemo 08:07, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

See the discussion above. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

The response there is outdated, for instance it suggests to wait for more comments from Gayle. --Nemo 20:15, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

Seeing that you are continuing to spread the misconception that this information was omitted without replacement (linking to this discussion thread), let me repeat here too what I said above:

The HR team is continuously updating the staff list page on the WMF wiki with information on arriving and departing staff, and in addition, new hires are still announced monthly as part of the metrics meeting (example). Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 09:34, 3 November 2016 (UTC)

There is no misconception. The staff list has always existed, but is often wrong: sometimes people are added or removed only weeks later, so that usually people get to know about staff changed by other means (rumors, permission changes). Additionally, there is no easy way to subscribe to the updates, even less to search the archives (for me it's rather easy to follow the feeds and search history, but for most people it is not).

Let's not be disingenuous: it's clear that editing a template is by no means comparable to the distribution of actual announcements for changes. Nemo 21:02, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Wiki version

See: Wikimedia Foundation Report, January-March 2015

I refined my conversion process (User:Tbayer (WMF)/Converting Google Slides to wikitext) a bit, there is still a non-trivial amount of time involved. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Monthly slides

Related to Talk:Wikimedia_monthly_activities_meetings#End_of_the_run: since commons:Category:Wikimedia Foundation Metrics and Activities Meeting, September 2016, no slides seem to have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, or if they were they can't be found in the expected categories. I don't know how many of those monthly meetings had the "usual" slide deck with agenda, staff announcements and the like, but surely most of them had at least someone using slides, and probably someone's emails or even IRC logs still contain links to such slides, possibly on Google Docs. So it should be possible to download the slides and archive them on Wikimedia Commons to avoid their loss. However, this needs to be done by some WMF employee to avoid copyright concerns. Nemo 21:09, 29 August 2019 (UTC)