Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2009-10/In progress

In progress

Actions we are taking for the future

New data center in Virginia

From a single data center in Tampa, Florida, USA, a few racks of servers offer up content to an audience of more than 45 million people every day. If this data center should be affected by a major disaster, Wikipedia and other projects could go dark for many weeks. Given the importance of these projects to people all over the world, this is an unacceptable risk for us to continue to take. In 2010-11, therefore, we are building up additional hosting infrastructure in a new primary data center, based in the state of Virginia. This facility will provide top tier connectivity, and enhanced stability should disaster strike in the future. For now, we are maintaining our Tampa facility as a backup data center.

Wikipedia on campus

The Public Policy Initiative will be the largest effort ever undertaken to engage students in the creation of free knowledge. Thanks to a $1.2M grant by the Stanton Foundation, the Wikimedia Foundation is developing working relationships with professors of Public Policy at universities across the US. They will assign students the task of improving articles on the English language Wikipedia as part of their course work.

Every year, millions of students write term papers and complete assignments which have no impact beyond their own education. As a living, breathing community, Wikipedia offers an alternative: Students can gain a worldwide audience for their work, and also benefit from real-time feedback from others engaged in their field.

The Wikimedia Foundation is providing professors with lesson plans and is also recruiting Wikipedia Ambassadors, who serve as mentors for the first-time Wikipedians. The first eight universities taking part in the fall of 2010 were Harvard, Indiana University, University of California, Berkeley, George Washington University, James Madison University, Georgetown, Syracuse, and Lehigh. The program will expand to include many more universities in 2011.

Focus on India

To reach one billion people by 2015, we will need to increase both participation in, and readership of, Wikimedia's projects in the Global South. Not surprisingly, many countries in this part of the world have the fastest growing population of Internet users. But Wikipedia exhibits significant knowledge gaps about the culture, history, and geography of these regions. Over the coming year, we are concentrating on establishing the first significant Wikimedia Foundation presence outside the United States in India, where there is tremendous enthusiasm to help us set an example that can be copied by others around the world. Our goal is to catalyze community and outreach programs and to support the burgeoning Wikimedia India chapter, to plant the seeds for years of sustainable growth.

Our targets for 2015

Wikimedia's strategic planning process identified five key targets to measure our success and progress through 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 who make at least 5 edits per month 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

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