Wikimedia Foundation/Annual Report/2010-2011/Single

The Way the World Tells its Story

Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2010–2011

The Gypsy Girl mosaic fragment from the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep, Turkey, is an example of the global effort to capture images of important cultural artifacts and make them available to all on Wikipedia. This fragment, made up of many small pieces, also can be seen as symbolic of the collaborative story-telling method used by hundreds of thousands of Wikimedian volunteers to document the "sum of all human knowledge."

Everywhere...

In Rennes, France, ten large installations representing Wikipedia entries for local landmarks were posted around the city in celebration of Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary. These signs were placed so as to spotlight places like the opera house, the Parliament, and a street named after former mayor Jean Janvier (left).

Letter from the Directors

Back in January 2001, few people could have imagined the extraordinary impact of what was then just a tiny project driven by a big idea. But ten years later, we find ourselves at the center of a free knowledge movement built around our flagship project, Wikipedia, which has become the most important collaboratively created repository of knowledge in history.

Today, Wikimedia volunteers around the world work in more than 280 languages to document the stories of their communities and cultures, past and present. During 2011, for example, hundreds of volunteers contributed to the articles on the Arab Spring rebellions, capturing one of the major stories of our time as it unfolded.

The Wikimedia Foundation is part of a broad global network of individuals, organizations, chapters, clubs and communities who together work to create Wikipedia, the most powerful example of volunteer collaboration and open content sharing in the world today. In 2010–11, the bulk of the Foundation’s spending was focused towards putting in place solid technical and organizational infrastructure. In 2011–12, the majority of spending goes towards growing, strengthening and increasing the diversity of the editing community, simplifying our wiki-editing interface, making investments to grow the projects’ readers and editors in key geographic areas such as India, Brazil and the Middle East and North Africa, and improving our presence on mobile devices.

Over the past year, more than 500,000 people donated to the Wikimedia Foundation, giving us more than $23 million USD. Thank you for your incredible generosity, and for your outpouring of support and love for Wikipedia and its sister projects, enabling the work of nearly 100,000 active editors. We owe you a huge debt of gratitude.

The Wikimedia Foundation especially wants to thank the editing community. Your work is essential, and it is what donors are enjoying and supporting: thank you for everything you do. A big thanks as well to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and Advisory Board, and a warm welcome to our new Advisory Board members Veronique Kessler and Jessamyn West.

Sincerely,

Sue Gardner Executive Director

Ting Chen, Chair Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Dispatch from India: Stories from the Future

The rise of India

Wikipedia is the only place that’s allowed for a system where generosities can be coupled and multiplied and leapfrogged upon, where therefore one’s individual generosity, the fruits of it and the results of it are something that are just far beyond the effect of that act alone.

— Achal Prabhala

Bangalore, India

user:aprabhala

Wikimedia advisory board member

Helping Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects flourish in India is one of the Foundation’s highest strategic priorities.

With the help of a strong community in India, the Indian chapter and a team of consultants based out of Delhi, Wikipedia is poised for rapid growth in this large and diverse country.

More Indians speak English than anywhere outside of the United States of America. Several hundred million people speak Hindi, and there may be more than 30 other languages with more than a million native speakers each. Today, there are Wikipedia projects in 20 Indic languages with 20 more in incubation. Indians are important contributors to Wikimedia projects in English and other languages.

The Foundation sees India as the most logical place to support community growth because of the country’s rapidly growing population of Internet users, its tradition of free speech, and the presence of a committed community. Through our work in India we are learning about the challenges of growing free knowledge projects in a developing country.

Wikimedians in India created the “Narayam” MediaWiki extension, an input tool that allows wiki users to type in Indic language scripts. For many, Wikipedia is the first Internet location where they contribute in their mother tongue.

India presents many daunting challenges. Approximately 37 percent of the nation’s population lives in abject poverty, surviving on less than $1.25 per day. Outside of the major cities, electricity is rare, and Internet access is a luxury for most. Only 7 percent of the population have online access, yet that translates into the fourth-largest national Internet audience — 81 million — in the world.

And, while 71 percent of the population is literate, less than half of women can read and write. Only 15 percent have completed a high school education.

The number of Indian contributors to Wikimedia to date, around 2,000, is small relative to India’s size, but they are extremely active and passionate about their work on the projects. They also are especially creative. Among the most impressive breakthroughs by Wikimedians in India is an innovation by local software programmers that allows Indic language scripts to be expressed as text on a keyboard, and therefore to be integrated into Wikipedia.

In 2008, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Foundation executive director Sue Gardner went to India to evaluate how best to stimulate interest and growth in the Foundation’s projects there. Since then, the Foundation has added an Indian, Bishakha Datta, to its board of trustees and Foundation managers have traveled frequently to the country, where they see indications that the multiple language versions of Wikipedia are gaining traction and more Indians are reading and contributing to Wikipedia.

Early in 2011, almost a quarter (about 95) of Wikipedia’s tenth-anniversary celebrations held around the world (over 400) occurred in India. In partnership with the Indian community, the Foundation is just getting started in the work to catalyze Wikimedia’s free knowledge projects in India with the expectation of planting deep roots in the world’s second most populous country.

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  Throughout India, Wikimedians enthusiastically gather to discuss projects, localization, and outreach.
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Class Assignment: Wikipedia

Recruiting on campus today

The Wikipedia Education Program is an ambitious initiative to transform post-secondary education the world over by fostering critical thinking, media literacy and collaborative learning, while improving Wikipedia at the same time.

Due to the enthusiastic endorsement of our early efforts by professors and students at leading universities, this program is gaining traction both in the U.S. and overseas. Professors who participate in our program assign their students to improve Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. Students are assisted by trained “Wikipedia Ambassadors” — a newly developed concept — who help both in the class and virtually, thereby evangelizing and recruiting students and others to join in the effort.

As a Wikipedia volunteer my major project is distributing the offline version of Wikipedia in schools, this is a compressed version of Wikipedia and contains articles that are relevant to the Kenyan curriculum. This project has changed the lives of thousands of school children and is revolutionizing education in Kenya.

— Isaac Kosegi

Kenya

user:Kipsizoo

Georgetown student Patrick Friedel originated Wikipedia's article for the National Democratic Party of Egypt as a course requirement. Months later, as revolution gripped the region, Friedel’s article attracted thousands of readers, sparking a debate that left Friedel a firm believer in Wikipedia’s power for enhancing collaborative learning.

The 17-month pilot project (initially called the Public Policy Initiative, as it focused on that academic discipline) was funded by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, and professors and students at 24 leading U.S. universities participated. In the pilot program, more than 800 students contributed the equivalent of more than 5,800 printed pages of content to Wikipedia. And the contributions were excellent: On average, the quality of articles students worked on improved 64 percent. Research from the pilot program found that students are much more motivated by a Wikipedia assignment than they were by a traditional term paper because it was a useful assignment. Through the Wikipedia Education Program, students have a global audience for their assignment, instead of working on something that will be read only by their professor and never used again. After great successes in the U.S., the program recently expanded into three additional countries: Brazil, Canada, and India.

A key goal is to develop new ways of assessing article quality, including tests of a new tool allowing readers to provide article feedback. Throughout the past academic year, students worked with the blessing of their professors to improve the quality of a wide range of project content, helping us reach by the end of 2010 the milestone 10,000th quality article on Wikipedia.

This development prompted a great deal of press coverage, and appears to represent a turning point in the relationship of the academy and Wikipedia. During the early years, many U.S. educators remained deeply skeptical of the online encyclopedia’s reliability for research and learning purposes. But in recent years, more and more professors have come to the conclusion that their students are going to rely on Wikipedia no matter what, so why not help improve the quality of its entries?

This breakthrough comes as the Foundation extends the lessons of its educational initiatives into a sustained effort to work with academics worldwide to promote collaborative learning models in pursuit of our goal to provide free access to the sum of the world’s knowledge to all.

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  Three of the dozens of universities working with us to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles are (left to right) the University of Michigan, Davidson College, and Georgetown University.
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New Tools for the Knowledge Trade

Making it all possible: technology

All of the Foundation’s technology initiatives can be boiled down to one goal — reducing the barriers to sharing knowledge.

I remember being really frustrated back in the days when I didn’t know Wikipedia. I didn’t have a way to express my love for knowledge, my struggle to be useful in this world, to be meaningful for my fellow humans.

I really don’t know how I could have ended up without knowing this project.

— Andrea Zanni

Modena, Italy

user:aubrey

Staff and volunteer developers at a "hackathon" meeting, improving the MediaWiki software.

Foundation tech staff and volunteers are constantly striving to develop more efficient workflow processes.

But this is challenging. Just consider the scope of our work: The number of articles in the English version of Wikipedia alone passed 3.5 million in 2010, and the number of media files on Wikimedia Commons reached 10 million early in 2011. Also over the past year, we logged our one-billionth edit.

Hosting and supporting this content in over 280 languages requires a massive ongoing effort by our tech staff and community volunteers. That includes improving our MediaWiki software, the platform running Wikimedia’s sites. This past year we added the “ResourceLoader” system to speed up page-loading times; plus the new “UploadWizard,” which makes contributing media files easier; and developed the “Article Feedback Tool,” to engage Wikipedia readers in quality assessment.

Another major focus during the year was improving our collaboration with Wikimedia volunteers. We hired a volunteer development coordinator, and a “bugmeister” tasked with managing the myriad suggestions for software improvements and fixes that come from the community. A huge effort was also made to reduce the code review backlog. Previously, volunteer developers had to wait a long time, sometimes years, before their work was accepted, because so few staff were available to attack the backlog. And for the fifth time, the Foundation took part in the “Google Summer of Code,” where six students worked on improvements and new features for MediaWiki.

A new, much more powerful data center was built out in Virginia over the past year, to keep pace with the rapid growth envisioned in our five-year plan.

Since Wikipedia appeared in 2001, the web has dramatically changed, including the widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and the rise of social networking sites. User expectations are now very different. During our Usability Initiative, many people told us our editing interface was confusing and difficult to use. This may also be related to another serious issue confronting our community — the decline in the number of active editors working on our projects.

We are therefore working on multiple levels to update and improve our editing interface and recruit more volunteers to participate in our projects in the years going forward.

The Revolution Will Be Mobilized

Mobile moves forward

The mobile web is growing faster than the desktop Internet around the world, and most new users from the Global South will come online via cell phones.

Currently users can read Wikipedia on their phones, but a major development effort is under way to ensure they will be able to edit it in on mobile devices as well.

Wikipedia is perhaps one of the few truly global endeavors that really brings together people from all races, religions, nationalities, points of view...Wikipedia will continue working and has established a new way because deep down, deep inside of us, we want to share. Deep inside we are all generous persons and deep inside we want the best for the human race.

— Alfonso Luna

Caracas, Venezuela, Donor

In India alone, there are an estimated 500–600 million mobile users, a population roughly seven times larger than the number of people there who have any sort of Internet access (81 million).

At the current pace, research indicates the mobile web will overtake the desktop web in 2014, i.e., more users will access the Internet globally using a mobile phone rather than a PC by that time. By 2015, it is projected that fully 87 percent of the world’s population will have cell phone subscriptions, which translates to about 6.35 billion people. It’s expected that about a third of them, some 2 billion people, will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones.

But there is a deep disparity between those in the more developed world who have access to high-speed mobile networks (3G or higher), and those in the poorer, rural parts of the planet whose only access to the mobile Internet is over slower-speed networks.

As part of our commitment to help everyone gain free access to knowledge, the Foundation is reworking our mobile platform to enable both an enhanced experience on fast 3G and 4G networks, as well as allow for usage on lower bandwidth networks by simplifying the experience where needed. The redesign of our mobile platform creates a base for new feature development and, because the new platform is integrated into our free and open MediaWiki software, organizations that use MediaWiki now have access to a convenient mobile web capability.

We are starting to explore solutions for short message service (SMS) and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) communications that would provide Wikimedia’s free knowledge to billions more people in an accessible form.

Also, we are striving to develop partnerships with network providers in key regions of the Global South to provide their customers with no or low-cost access to Wikipedia on a range of devices.

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  One huge technical challenge for Wikimedia is that people around the world use thousands of different mobile devices and platforms to access our content, and we need to support all of them.
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  Mobile technology is coming to dominate the landscape, from cellphone towers rising everywhere to the playful facade of an office building in Tokyo.
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A Decade that Changed the World

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  Community members of all ages came together in 120 countries to celebrate, complete with elaborate Wikipedia-themed birthday cakes.

Jimmy Wales greeted celebrants at more than 450 events in 120 countries by video upon the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia.

“I remember the first day Wikipedia existed. And I thought about what was to come and of course I really didn’t know what was to come. (O)ver the years I had many opportunities to (meet) with Wikipedians in India, in China, in South America, really all around the world. (And) it turns out that we tend to be very much the same even though we come from very different cultures. We share the same values, the same ideals, the things we are working for, a free encyclopedia for every person of the planet written really by thoughtful people, (who) try to be neutral, try to be honest. It’s still as exciting for me today as it was in the very early days. We’ve still got a lot of work left to do. So, thank you again and happy birthday to Wikipedia!”

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  The gathering at the Stockholm City Library was one of many held at major cultural institutions across Europe and around the world.

Timeline

• 2001 - Wikipedia is launched on January 15.
• 2002 - First release of the MediaWiki software, on which Wikipedia and its sister projects are still running today.
• 2003 - Jimmy Wales hands over operation of Wikipedia to the newly founded Wikimedia Foundation.
• 2004 - Wikimedia Commons is founded as a central repository of free media.
• 2005 - The first Wikimania (the annual global conference of Wikimedians) takes place in Frankfurt, Germany.
• 2006 - There are Wikimedia chapters — local organizations supporting the mission — in seven countries.
• 2007 - An independent study finds the German Wikipedia to be more accurate, complete and up-to-date than the longstanding German print encyclopedia Brockhaus.
• 2008 - The ten millionth Wikipedia article is published, a biography of 16th-century painter Nicholas Hilliard in the Hungarian Wikipedia.
• 2009 - Wikimedians vote to adopt the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license (CC BY SA) as the primary license for Wikipedia and its projects, allowing much wider reuse of the content.
• 2010 - The Wikimedia projects reach 1,000,000,000 (one billion) edits.
• 2011 - Wikipedia celebrates 10 years of sharing the sum of all knowledge.

Contributors the world over adapted and contributed to the “Wikipedia 10” design style to fit their cultures and geographies.

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"Our revolution is like Wikipedia"

Telling the story of the Arab Spring

the revolution will be charted and edited

Facts about the article at time of printing.
Number of references

• 400+

Total number of revisions

• 4,849

Users who contributed

• 1,248

Top article editor

• User:Kudzu1

Views of article in September 2011:

• 186,023

Watchers for accuracy

• 220

There have been few developments in modern times as dramatic as the series of popular uprisings known as the “Arab Spring” that erupted at the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. As such, they provide one of the best case studies for understanding how people around the world today rely on Wikipedia to share the story of current events even as they are unfolding around them.

Starting in Tunisia and Egypt, and spreading all across North Africa and the Middle East during 2011, over 1200 volunteers uploaded text and images from the demonstrations directly to Wikipedia, turning to the world’s largest free knowledge resource to share the dramas they were witnessing with the rest of the world.

Many of the contributors had first-hand experience of the events themselves. In fact, Wael Ghonim, the Google employee in Egypt widely quoted by media sources as an influential leader in the uprising there, stated “Our revolution is like Wikipedia...Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don’t know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened.”

In response to specific requests from Wikipedians, and recognizing Wikipedia’s central role in documenting the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera donated video footage of the historic events on Cairo’s streets.

In 2010, the year before the Arab Spring, the Foundation decided to make the Middle East/North Africa region a priority. During 2011 we began collaborating with our Arabic Wikipedia community and potential partners to evaluate opportunities. Our work seeks to expand our community of dedicated contributors who want to build a truly great Arabic Wikipedia for the more than 300 million people in the Arabic speaking world.

With thousands of edits and hundreds of references, the repository of articles and photos about the Arab Spring already stands as a living example of how people around the world increasingly see Wikipedia as a vital channel for telling the most important stories of our time.

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  Wikipedians provided the world at large with spectacular real-time documentation of the Arab Spring developments, overcoming government attempts to suppress such knowledge.
• Dramatic footage of the events in Cairo donated by the Al Jazeera network helped bolster Wikipedia’s multimedia coverage of the Arab Spring.
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  Referring to Wikipedia’s coverage, one researcher noted that while, in earlier times, “history was written by the winners, now it is written in real time, by anyone.”

Case Stories

“Encyclopedia of Life: A Wikipedia Sampler,” is a print version capturing our ongoing collaboration with leading scientists to document life on earth.

Proof-of-concept for Expert Reviews: Encyclopedia of Life Curates Wikipedia Articles

There are more than 1.9 million animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. In May 2007, some of the world’s leading scientists announced the development of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) to document them all. Inspired by biologist E.O. Wilson and supported by more than $25 million in funding, the project aggregates and makes accessible information about species, ranging from 19th century journals to modern online databases, including Wikipedia content. EOL’s curators vet these Wikipedia articles for factual accuracy, and are encouraged to improve Wikipedia directly if errors or omissions are found. Over a hundred Wikipedia articles that were marked as “trusted” in this way have been collected into a hardcover book called “Encyclopedia of Life: A Wikipedia Sampler.”

The landmark 10,000,000th file uploaded to Wikimedia Commons was user Leinad’s photograph of a waterfowl observation platform near Lipno Lake in Poland’s Wdzydze Landscape Park. Taken during 2nd Wikiexpedition

10,000,000th File Uploaded to Commons

Wikimedia Commons, the sight and sound of Wikipedia, logged its ten millionth file in April. With more than five million new files added in less than two years, the Foundation’s repository of educational media is growing faster than ever, in part thanks to volunteers building enthusiastic relationships with cultural institutions around the world. The breadth and variety of the imagery is invaluable.

Wikipedia Editors Survey

Every word on Wikipedia is the result of work by a volunteer editor somewhere in the world. Early in 2011, we conducted an Editor Survey as the first iteration of what will continue as a biannual endeavor in an attempt to better understand the people who make Wikipedia what it is, and how their potential as a whole can be more fully realized. As the Foundation continues to expand its reach globally, an advanced knowledge of the existing community will increase efficiency as we grow across diverse cultures, as well as help us to retain core editors who keep improving the quality of Wikipedia going forward.

QRpedia

Wikipedia partnered with the Derby Museum and Art Gallery in England this year to launch QRpedia, an initiative that brings QR codes to museum walls, linking visitors with exhibit-specific articles on Wikipedia. Volunteers participated in the first-ever Wikipedia Multilingual Challenge to translate relevant articles into as many languages as possible. Museum visitors can point their mobile device to a QR code for an object, and Wikipedia’s QR tool, conceived with Roger Bamkin, chair of Wikimedia UK, then uses the language settings of the device to ensure the proper article is displayed. Unveiled in April, QRpedia is already in use at four other museums internationally. At a time when cultural funding is hugely constrained, the creation of a multilingual visitor experience that any museum is welcome to adopt at virtually no cost is an achievement to celebrate.

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  QR codes are used to direct Derby Museum visitors to relevant Wikipedia articles.
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UploadWizard: A New Way to Share Pictures, Sounds and Video

As an outcome of the “Multimedia Usability Project,” a one-year effort funded by the Ford Foundation to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites, the “UploadWizard” became the default upload tool on Wikimedia Commons. It replaced the earlier complicated upload form by a simple step-by-step process. The software improvement was flanked by the creation of an illustrated licensing tutorial, where a cartoon character explains copyright issues in an accessible way, to help novice users determine if their material can be uploaded and freely shared with the world. To date, the community has translated the tutorial into at least 35 different languages.

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  “Puzzly” provides a simple visualization that educates users about which kinds of content are suitable for uploading to Wikimedia Commons.

WikiLove is a cookie, or a cappuccino, or a skewer of meat — whatever image warmly sends the message of “job well done” from one volunteer to another.

WikiLove Rollout

A survey among Wikipedia editors revealed that 70 percent are motivated by receiving barnstars or other virtual rewards from the community for their work. In June, the Foundation unveiled the “WikiLove” feature. Designed to provide contributors with an easier way to bestow personalized virtual gifts upon one another in recognition of a job well done, user pages now play host to kittens, beer steins, and other images crafted by grateful editors. No matter the size of the contribution, editing Wikipedia should not be viewed by anyone as a thankless hobby. And now that there’s an easier way to share the love, we aim to continue perfecting methods of ensuring all users know they’re appreciated.

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Eight researchers spent the summer digging up illuminating insights into the nature of Wikipedia’s collaborative online environment.

Summer of Research

Beginning in June and spanning three intense months, this year’s first-ever Summer of Research welcomed eight academics from around the world to Wikimedia’s San Francisco offices. Intended to spark an interdisciplinary examination of both Wikipedia communities and the online influences that either help or hinder collaboration, the researchers were selected primarily based upon previous commitments to studying Wikipedia topics. Of the eight, six were pursuing PhDs in fields ranging from computer science to social interaction on collaborative online environments. Timely, ambitious discussion and walls of intricately linked sticky notes began attempting answers to questions revolving around editor retention, editing policy, and community size.

Wikimedians as Officially Accredited Photographers

The world’s increasing recognition of Wikimedians as its storytellers becomes visible in the numerous events where they are officially accredited as photographers or reporters. When the wedding of Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, and Daniel Westling drew half a million visitors to Stockholm last year, two Wikimedians were among the media representatives that were granted special access to cover the event. With help from the Swedish and German Wikimedia chapters, they had obtained official accreditation from the Swedish foreign ministry, showing the Swedish government’s awareness of the importance of free information. Apart from the royal family, the event presented opportunities for portraying the guests of honor, who numbered more than a thousand.

Among the many other events where Wikimedians have been granted official accreditation are an international football match between Portugal and Argentina, the Prix de Lausanne ballet competition, and the 2011 G8 summit.

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  As Wikipedia’s reputation grows internationally, the movement’s accredited photographers are gaining front-line access to a broad variety of significant events, from the Swedish royal wedding to a Lady Gaga performance.
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Cultural Partnerships Take Off

More and more galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are partnering with Wikimedia to increase the reach of their collections. Many are uploading images and other media to Wikimedia Commons, thereby making them available for the whole world to use and enabling them to be employed as illustrations for Wikipedia articles. They are also providing Wikimedians with special access to their collections and to the expertise of their curators.

Many GLAMs are opening their doors to “Wikipedians in Residence.” Pioneered at the British Museum in 2010, this collaboration model has Wikimedia volunteers working in-house at a cultural institution, improving content in collaboration with staff and the Wikimedia community, organizing “backstage pass” or “editathon” events for Wikipedians, and generally laying the foundation for a lasting partnership. Among the GLAMs with Wikipedians in Residence are The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the Château de Versailles, the Museu Picasso, the Archives of American Art, the U.S. National Archives, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Derby Art Gallery and Museum.

Among the image collections of cultural icons are over 1,000 photos of the Château de Versailles.

Gdańsk welcomes Wikimania

Wikimedians converge in the birthplace of Solidarność

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  Nobel Peace Prize Winner and former President of Poland, Lech Wałęsa, a frequent Wikipedia user, sent his greetings to this year's Wikimania gathering.

Wikimania provides an annual venue for community leaders, tech enthusiasts, and free-knowledge supporters to celebrate and deepen their collaborative spirit.

The sixth annual Wikimania, the global conference of Wikimedians, took place in the Baltic Philharmonic in Gdańsk. Poland succeeded Argentina and Egypt, the hosting countries in the previous two years. During three days, Wikimedians got together to celebrate the free knowledge movement, to meet their collaborators in their year-round online work on Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to share insights informing the continuing evolution of the projects. Foundation travel scholarships enabled Wikimedians from 39 countries to participate.

On the conference T-shirts, the motto “Free Knowledge in the City of Freedom” tied Wikimedia values to the history of Gdańsk, where the Solidarność movement had defied communist rulers in the 1980s — led by Lech Wałęsa, who sent his greetings to Wikimania attendees, noting that he was a frequent user of Wikipedia.

The Polish Baltic F. Chopin Philharmonic in Gdańsk was founded in 1945 as the Gdańsk Symphony Orchestra. Its building on the Ołowianka island hosted Wikimania 2010.

Governance and Chapters

Board of Trustees

Ting Chen, Chair

Jimmy Wales, Founder

Jan-Bart de Vreede, Vice-chair

Phoebe Ayers, Executive Secretary

Stu West, Treasurer

Bishakha Datta

Matt Halprin

Samuel Klein

Arne Klempert

Kat Walsh

Advisory Board

Angela Beesley

Ward Cunningham

Florence Devouard

Melissa Hagemann

Mimi Ito

Mitch Kapor

Veronique Kessler

Neeru Khosla

Teemu Leinonen

Nhlanhla Mabaso

Rebecca MacKinnon

Wayne Mackintosh

Benjamin Mako Hill

Roger McNamee

Domas Mituzas

Trevor Neilson

Craig Newmark

Achal Prabhala

Clay Shirky

Michael Snow

Jing Wang

Jessamyn West

Ethan Zuckerman

Executive Director

Sue Gardner

Wikimedia chapters

During 2010–11, Wikimedia’s network of volunteer-driven international chapters grew from 30 to 35. Wikimedia’s chapters, which are independent from the Wikimedia Foundation, are made up of local members and directors, and in some cases employees. They focus on region-specific work. Typically, that work includes building awareness of Wikimedia projects, handling media inquiries, staging public outreach events, and forming partnerships with local educational and cultural organizations.

Chapters as of November 2011

AR Wikimedia Argentina

AT Wikimedia Österreich (Austria)

AU Wikimedia Australia

BD Wikimedia Bangladesh

CA Wikimedia Canada

CH Wikimedia CH (Switzerland)

CL Wikimedia Chile

CZ Wikimedia Česká republika (Czech Republic)

DE Wikimedia Deutschland (Germany)

DK Wikimedia Danmark (Denmark)

EE Wikimedia Eesti (Estonia)

ES Wikimedia España (Spain)

FI Wikimedia Suomi (Finland)

FR Wikimédia France

GB Wikimedia UK (United Kingdom)

HK 香港維基媒體協會 (Hong Kong)

HU Wikimédia Magyarország (Hungary)

ID Wikimedia Indonesia

IL ويكيمديا إسرائيل, ויקימדיה-ישראל (Israel)

IN Wikimedia India

IT Wikimedia Italia (Italy)

MK Викимедија Македонија (Macedonia)

MO Wikimedia Macau

MX Wikimedia México

NL Wikimedia Nederland (Netherlands)

NO Wikimedia Norge (Norway)

PH Wikimedia Philippines

PL Wikimedia Polska (Poland)

PT Wikimedia Portugal

RS Викимедија Србије (Serbia)

RU Викимедиа РУ (Russia)

SE Wikimedia Sverige (Sweden)

TW 中華民國維基媒體協會 (Taiwan)

UA Вікімедіа Україна (Ukraine)

US DC Wikimedia District of Columbia

US NYC Wikimedia New York City

VE Wikimedia Venezuela

ZA Wikimedia South Africa

Financials

The Wikimedia Foundation continues to enjoy a stable base of revenue, stemming largely from its annual community giving campaign. In 2010–11, we doubled the number of small donors to over 500,000 individuals from all over the world. Now in the second year of our five-year strategic plan, we are hiring new staff members, increasing the capacity of our server network to deliver Wikipedia and our other projects to the world, and intensifying our efforts to expand the reach of our projects in the Global South through on-the-ground initiatives.

Where the money goes

Maintaining our site and improving our software Operations and engineering, purchasing servers, maintaining and improving our data center, internet hosting, and software development and product engineering.	$8,869,675	44%
Expanding our global reach Improving access to Wikipedia on mobile devices in the Global South, public and education outreach, support and grants for our global chapters.	$2,388,698	12%
Direct support to our volunteer community Researching community activity trends, increasing editor retention and recruitment, improving new technologies to help project editors.	$1,889,084	9%
Fundraising Planning and development of our annual giving campaign, global payment collection fees (including Paypal and other fees).	$2,142,217	11%
Board of Trustees and special projects Travel and professional development for our governing Board, as well as special research projects and initiatives to support the Wikimedia community.	$1,172,654	6%
Administration Benefits and related administration costs for Foundation staff, capital expenses, leases, training, travel, and other costs.	$3,636,236	18%
Total cash expenditures, including all capital purchases.	$20,098,564

2010-11 Financial Performance

The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2010–11 fiscal year took place from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011. Throughout this report all financial data is reported in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted.

Statement of Activities
in thousands of dollars

Description		Amount
Support and revenues
	Contributions	23,020
	Restricted contributions	666
	In-kind service revenue	350
	Investment income, net	37
	Other income, net	712
Total — revenue		24,785
Expenses
	Salaries and wages	7,312
	Awards and grants	471
	Internet hosting	1,800
	In-kind service expenses	350
	Operating expenses	5,761
	Travel	1,159
	Depreciation and amortization	1,001
	other expenses, including special events	36
Total — expenses		17,890
Increase in net assets		6,895

Balance Sheet
in thousands of dollars

Assets			Liabilities & Net Assets
	Cash and cash equivalents	12,026	Liabilities
	Contributions receivable	1,000		Accounts payable and accrued expenses	1,431
	Accounts receivable	695		Deferred revenue	375
	Investments	5,849		Other liabilities	168
	Prepaid expenses and other current assets	1,215		Total liabilities	1,974
	Total current assets	20,785	Net Assets
	Property, plant, and equipment	3,402		Unrestricted net assets	20,772
	Nonconcurrent portion of contributions receivable	1,979		Temporarily restricted net assets	3,420
				Total net assets	24,192
Total assets		26,166	Total liabilities and net assets		26,166

Google	31,350 employees	1.05 billion unique visitors
Microsoft	92,000 employees	900 million unique visitors
Facebook	3,000 employees	752 million unique visitors
Yahoo	13,600 employees	686 million unique visitors
Wikimedia:	80 employees	423 million unique visitors

Who supports us

	2009-10	2010-11
Number of individual donors	261,339	573,568

219% Increase in total number of funding sources

$40.10 Average donation for 2010-11

The Wikimedia Foundation is a four-star rated charity according to Charity Navigator, America's premier independent charity evaluator.

Contributors

The Wikimedia Foundation benefits from its unique global community of volunteer editors and financial contributors. We thrive due to the vital support we receive from this community, which in 2010–11 made over 155 million edits and over 500,000 financial contributions. Going forward, we intend to continue to serve this worldwide community with every resource at our command.

$1 million +

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Stanton Foundation

Anonymous

$100.000 – $999.999

The Brin Wojcicki Foundation

David and Jamie Cummings

The Ford Foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Omidyar Network

The James and Angela Thompson Foundation

$25,000 – $99,999

The Craigslist Charitable Fund

John N. Caulkins

The Google Matching Gifts Program

The Kaphan Foundation

The Shor Family Foundation

Two Sigma Investments, LLC

Yardi Systems, Inc.

Anonymous (4)

$5,000 – $24,999

Andras Konya, Jr.

Annette J. Campbell-White

The Apple Pickers Foundation

The Arlene & Arnold Goldstein Family Foundation

Armen Avanessians

The Boris and Inara Teterev Foundation

Brian Kim

Casey DeGroot

Christopher Ruddy

Craig Hatkoff

Djordje Jankovic

Elon Musk

Galip Tomac

Goldman, Sachs, and Company Matching Gifts Program

Ilja Pljusnin

J. Willis Jarvis

Jeff Hartline

Jeffrey Dauber

Jeffrey Weber

Jeremy Coller

John Baldridge

John Doerr

John Little

Kaz Foundation for Social Advancement

Kevin O'Shea

Kevin Shepherd

The King and Linda Won Family Fund

Laurent Drion

Leon David Michaud

Liam Connell

The Madan Family Gift Fund

The Marc Haas Foundation

Marco Teubner

Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic

Mattias Söderhielm

Mehrdad Golabgir

The Microsoft Matching Gifts Program

Milonja Bjelic

Neil Riordan

The Nora Roberts Foundation

Paul Spraos

Peter Macaulay

Purnendu Ojha

Ron Unz

Ruslan Panasovskyi

The Ruth and David Levine Charitable Fund

Sarah Wesley

Sean Lennon

Shabbir Moosabhoy

Shvat Shaked

The Sigrid Rausing Trust

The Skowronski Family Foundation

Srinivasan Krishnan

Stephen B. Ippolito

Susan Petersmeyer

Tripling Elephants

Anonymous (4)

$1,000 – $4,999

Aaia Nugent

Aase Lindahl

Abdul Bin laden

Abdulla Al-Thani

Abdulmajeed Alshatti

The Academy Place Foundation

Adam Fila

The Adam J. Weissman Foundation

Adobe Matching Gifts Program

Ajay Goel

Akash Jain

Alan Dunn

Alan Gorenberg

Alan Weiner

Albert James Hudspeth

Albert Shahugian

Alex Blavatnik

Alex Hsu

Alex Poon

Alexander Polsky

Alexander Rousmaniere

Alfred Zimmermann

Alisa Oleary

Alistair Woodman

Allan Stephan

The Amont Foundation, Inc.

Andrew Hillstrom

Andrew Kraft

Angela K. Hodge

Anna Scott

Anna Wodynski

Anup Mantri

Arthur Hunter

Aspera, Inc.

Ayco Charitable Foundation

B. S. Ramamurtie

Beauchamp Place Communications Inc.

The Behemoth

The Bell Family Foundation

The Belmonte Foundation

The Ben Williams Fund

Bernard Halim

Bernhard Friess

Betty Gerlack

BiblioLabs, LLC

Bill McCune

Boris Kontsevoi

Brad Wilson

Bradford Sherburne

Brandon Kopetzky

Brian Burnim

Brian McInnis

Brian Potter

Brian White

The Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation Matching Gifts Program

The Brooks Family Foundation

Burada Iulian

Burt Cutler

The Caithness Foundation

Carla Flournoy

Caroline Hu

Catherine L. Leung

Cedar Street Advisors

Charles Gibbs

Charles Smith-Dewey

The Chevron Humankind Matching Gifts Program

Christine A. Molinaro

Christine Herget

Christopher Jannuzzi

Christopher J. Lingle

Christopher Turner

Chuck Silvers

Claude Blackburn

The Coleman Foundation

The CYLA Charitable Fund

Cynthia Boyd

Dalibor Antonic

Dave McComb

David Agraz

David Brauer

David Bunton

David Bydeley

David Cline

David Dacus

David Fischer

David Harris

David Hitz

David Humm

David K. Donald

The David L. and Marilyn S. Wenner Fund

David Peltz

David S. Starr

Derrick Strickland

The Dillon Fund

Dimitrios Staikos

Dirk Pranke

Djordje Jankovic

Dmitry Sagalovskiy

Domas Mituzas

Don Garrett

Don Husby

Don Melton

Donald Jaycox

Doron Daveed Ben-Avi

Doug Jaffe

The Douglas B. Marshall, Jr. Family Foundation

Douglas Durst

Douglas Ferguson

Drew Perkins

The Drexler Estate Fund

Dustin Frazier

Dylan Parker

Earl Hemphill

Eben Moglen

Edna Sugihara

The Elbrun and Peter Kimmelman Family Foundation, Inc.

Elecia White

Elisabeth Bylund

Greg and Liz Lutz

Emil Biendara

Emmanuel Balseca

Eric Lee

Eric Stokes

Eric Yao

Erich Hoop

Ethel W. Moore

Florin Miron

Francisco Sampaio

Francois Delori

Frank Brunckhorst

Frank Rothacker

Franz Heinsen

Franziska Bodmer Mancia

Fred Hipp

Frost Bank

Gabe Newell

Gavin Moodie

The Geisel Family Foundation

George T. Anagnost

Gerald Jay Sussman

Graeme Birchall

The Graham Weston Gift Fund

The Grainger Matching Gifts Program

Graphics Press, LLC

Green Bicycle Fund

Greg Grass

Greg Hendershott

Gregory Richards

H.M. Koo

Heather Bendler

The Highland Vineyard Foundation

Hiromasa Nagase

Holger Madsen

The Houser Foundation

Howard Ahmanson

The HP Company Foundation Matching Gifts Program

The Huber Gift Fund

Hugh Glenister

Iain McClatchie

Iqbal Shamsul

Irene and Richard Van Slyke

J. Michael Miller

Jacob Albrecht

Jacqueline Shelburne

James Cogbill, Jr.

James Mason

James McClave

James O'Shaughnessy

James Ward

Janet DeNicola

Jaroslav Verchkovski

Jawaad Mahmood

Jay Flatland

The Jeff and Linda Hendricks Family Foundation

Jeffrey Feddersen

Jeffrey Krug

Jeffrey Lamkin

Jelly Vision Inc.

Jennifer King

Jennifer Lazuka

Jesse Ausubel

The Jewish Community Endowment Fund

Don and Jill Knuth

Jim Hobart

Jimmy Janacek

Joan Sherman

Jochen Titus

John Dove

John E. Peters

John Eckstein

John Hughes

John McKnight

John Nelson

John O'Connor

John Powell

John Rowley

John Stanford, Jr.

Jonathan Tobert

Jordan Hare

Jose Trejo

Josef Frick

Joseph Brandt

Joseph Sokal

Joshua Eckhardt

Joshua Guberman

Jude Montassir

Juergen Wagentrotz

Jules Bernstein and Linda Lipsett

Julie Johnson

Julien Basch

Kanghao Lu

Karen Lawrence

Karine Joly

Katharine Brigham

Katherine Erickson

Keah Yong Heng

Keith Tyson

Kenneth Eddings

Kevin Arpe

Kevin C. Hammond

Kevin Cheng

Ki Yan Karen Lo

Kim Henry

Kim Spitznagel

Kim Stowers

Kimberley Harding

Kimberly Mayfield

The Koppelman Family Foundation

Kristine M. Lung

Kuang-Hsiang Lin

Kurt Ackermann

L. David Mirkin, M.D.

Lars Markhus

Lars Petter Mathiassen

Las Vegas Hotels

Laurel Touby

Laurence Boyd

Laurie Pitman

Lawrence D. Cavanagh, Jr.

Lee Elder

Lee Hong Gerald Yu

Lenore C. Cooney

Leonard Ferrera

Linda L. Slakey

Linda Lee

Linda Weitz

Lisa Tung

Lone Pine Capital, LLC

Lowell Wood

The Louie-Marsh Family Fund

Luís Norberto Pascoal

Luke A. Knowles

M. Hepel

Maho Kokuryo

Manisha her

Marc Forand

Marc Heinz

Marc Labelle

Marcello Cattaneo Adorno

Margaret Raymond

Marilyn Lucht

Marilyn Simons

Marius Bakken

Mark Feldberg

Mark Heising and Elizabeth Simons

Mark Leonard

Mark Melton

Mark Waber

Masazumi Miyagawa

Mathew Donovan

Matthias Dietrich

Mehmet Betil

Melissa A. Chilton

Michael and Debbie Koss

Michael Hodnett

Michael J. Fine

Michael Marcus

Michael Matera

Michael Pryor

Michael Swart

Michael Terry

Michael Totten

Mikhail Degtiarev

Mikhail Seregine

The Million Children Foundation

Minjen Mao

Mohammed Al Nahyan

Mohan Pandit

The Moorhead Family Fund

Murtada Elkhalifa

Nadir Godrej

Nancy Cornelius

National Philanthropic Trust

The Neal and Elizabeth Weber Fund

Nicholas Fink

Nicholas Riesland

Nicole Ingeborg Lieger

Nora Klein

The Nord Family Foundation

Oisin Crawley

Oliver Wright

Omer Ayfer

The Oracle Corporation Matching Gifts Program

ORX

Patrick Condon

Paul Haahr

Paul Harvey

Paul von Kuster

Paul Wilmes

Pavel Kostenko

Pawel Ciszewski

Peter A. Wiringa

Peter Francati

Peter J. Enyeart

Peter Swiecicki

Peter Ungar

Petr Jirous

The Philip and Julia Meshberg Family Foundation

Philip Mateescu

Philip Perlman

The PMJJ Harmon Foundation

The Pond Family Foundation Trust

Pooja P. Rutberg

Pradeep Sindhu

R. G. Geisler

Raghavan Srinivasan

Rahul Bhadani

Ramamoorthi Bhaskar

Rasheed Aleid

Rau Abari

Ravi Kalidindi

The Raymond Family Foundation

Rebecca Reynolds

Reuben E. Last

Richard Kandarian

Richard Saada

Richard Yonash

Rob Napier

Robert Ashcroft

Robert Capps

Robert Kaplan

Robert M. Chin

Robert Prestezog

Robert Ruderman

Robert Thomas

Robert W. Roper

Rohan Murty

Rory O'Connor

Rosanne Cerello

Roy H. Jablonka

The Royce Family Foundation

Rutherford Gong

Ryusuke Koyama

Sadao Milberg

Samuel Klein, Jr.

The San Diego Foundation

Sara Smollett

Sarah Alfadl

Sathien Tejapaibul

The Sawa Family Charitable Fund

Scott Coulter

Scott Jensen

Scott Johns

Scott Johnston

Scott R. Knight

Seattle Foundation

Shamsa N.

Shon Harris

Sid Harth

Sienna Deano

The Skinner Fund

The Snyder White Oaks Foundation of Delaware

Sohei Machida

Spencer V. Pricenash

Stefan Edlis

Stefan Schwab

Stefan Winkler

Stephen C. Hecht

Stephen Gray

Steve Kass

Steven B. Schlossstein

Steven VanRoekel

Stuart Cheshire

Sudhir Sadalge

Susan Borden

Susan Woodward

Swiftrank Pte Ltd

Tahir Gozel

Takashi Kousaka

Takeshi Mano

Talal AlFaisal

Taner Halicioglu

Tetsuya Isozaki

Thai Tan Nguyen

Thomas Salander

Tilman Reinhardt

Timothy Mott

Timothy Robinson

Tomaso Renoldi Bracco

Torunn Birkeland

Tradebot Ventures, Inc.

Tuula Simell

The Vadasz Family Fund

Vadim Asadov

Victoria Walsh

Vijay Santhanam

Villazzo, LLC

Vinay Jain

Vincent Paquet

Warren Snaider

Whitney Robinson

The Wikimedia Foundation Staff

WIG Company

Wilford Reynolds

William B. Edwards

William Foster

William K. Rohwedder

William Lynch

William Wenheim

The Windmill Foundation

Xie Wu

The Yahoo! Matching Gifts Program

Yaso ITO

Yasuhiro Murakami

Yu-Chen Chen

Yudson Gondobintoro

Zoline Foundation

瑞霙 洪

Anonymous (5)

Gifts in-kind

Cisco

comScore

Electronic Frontier Foundation

EvoSwitch

Exbrook Design

Kennisnet Amsterdam

Leaseweb

No Starch Press

Perkins Coie

Tele2

TeliaSonera International Carrier

WatchMouse

Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich, & Rosati

Wikimedia chapters

Wikimedia Australia

Wikimedia Austria

Wikimedia Deutschland

Wikimedia France

Wikimedia Hungary

Wikimedia Netherlands

Wikimedia Sweden

Wikimedia Switzerland

Wikimedia United Kingdom

Projects

The Wikimedia Foundation operates 11 free knowledge projects managed and built by a community of over 100,000 active volunteers.

Wikipedia® Free encyclopedia

The free encyclopedia containing more than 20.6 million articles in more than 280 languages. The most comprehensive and widely used reference work humans have ever compiled. 100,000 active volunteers contribute new content every month.

Wikimedia Commons™ Shared media repository

A repository of almost 13 million freely usable images, sound and video files, serving both Wikimedia’s projects and countless other educational and informational needs.

MediaWiki® Open-source wiki software

The leading open-source wiki software on the Internet which acts as the backbone for all of the Wikimedia Foundation’s wikis and thousands of other wiki communities.

Wikispecies™ Dictionary of species

Wikibooks™ Free textbooks and manuals

Wikinews® Free content news source

Wikiquote™ Collection of free quotations

Wiktionary® Dictionary and thesaurus

Meta-wiki™ Project coordination

Wikiversity™ Free learning tools

Wikisource® Free source documents

Index

Figures as of October 2011 unless otherwise stated

• Unique visitors to Wikimedia Foundation sites, September 2011: 454 million
• Language editions of Wikipedia: 282
• Average number of new articles created daily, July 2010 through June 2011: 8,371
• Number of articles across all Wikipedia language editions: 20.6 million
• Number of edits to Wikipedia, July 2010 through June 2011: 139.3 million
• Average monthly page views, July 2010 through June 2011: 13.6 billion

Acknowledgements

All images from the Wikimedia Commons are under a CC BY SA or public domain license unless otherwise stated. The content contained within the annual report is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v.3.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CC-BY-SA) or any later version. The trademarks and logos of the Wikimedia Foundation and any other organization are not included under the terms of this Creative Commons license. Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimania, Wikipedia, Commons, MediaWiki, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, and Meta-wiki are pending trademark registration or are registered trademarks of Wikimedia Foundation.

For more information, please see our Trademark Policy page, http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy. For other questions about our licensing terms or trademark policy, please email legalwikimedia.org.

Design by EXBROOK, San Francisco

Story consultant: David Weir

Photo retouching: Daniel Furon

Visit http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report
for a summary report of the 2010-11 Annual Report in French, Japanese, Spanish, German, Arabic, and Portugese.

Strategic Priorities

Stabilize infrastructure

Increase participation

Improve quality

Increase reach

Encourage innovation

Wikimedia Foundation targets for 2015

• Increase the total number of people served to 1 billion
• Increase the number of Wikipedia articles we offer to 50 million
• Ensure information is high quality by increasing the percentage of material reviewed to be of high or very high quality by 25 percent
• Encourage readers to become contributors by increasing the number of total editors per month who made >5 edits to 200,000
• Support healthy diversity in the editing community by doubling the percentage of female editors to 25 percent and increase the percentage of Global South editors to 37 percent

Wikimedia Foundation

149 New Montgomery Street

San Francisco, CA 94105 USA

+1 415-839-6885

wikimediafoundation.org

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Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

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