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Wikimedia Foundation Report, April 2013

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of April (May 2, 2013)
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Global unique visitors for March:

517 million (+7.17% compared with February; +5.76% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release April data later in May)

Page requests for April:

20.8 billion (-3.4% compared with March; +20.1% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for March 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

82,105 (+5.67% compared with February / +2.15% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for March 2013:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

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Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of March 31, 2013
 
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of March 31, 2013

(Financial information is only available through March 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date March 31, 2013.

Revenue $41,573,672
Expenses:
Engineering Group $10,569,516
Fundraising Group $2,915,969
Grantmaking & Programs Group $4,565,386
Governance Group $555,937
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group $2,263,477
Finance/HR/Admin Group $4,187,115
Total Expenses $25,057,400
Total surplus $16,516,272
  • Revenue for the month of March is $5.92MM versus plan of $5.28MM, approximately $647K or 12% over plan.
  • Year-to-date revenue is $41.57MM versus plan of $35.74MM, approximately $5.83MM or 16% over plan.
  • Expenses for the month of March is $3.09MM versus plan of $4.04MM, approximately $943K or 23% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, and grant expenses offset by higher bank fees.
  • Year-to-date expenses is $25.06MM versus plan of $29.97MM, approximately $4.92MM or 16% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants executed, WMF project grants, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.
  • Cash position is $41.02MM as of March 31, 2013.

Highlights

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Screenshot: This user has received four new notifications

New notifications system launches on the English Wikipedia

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On April 30, the Foundation's Editor Engagement Team activated the Notifications system (also known as Echo) on the English Wikipedia. It inform editors about new activity on the wiki that affects them, for example when they receive a message on their user page, or when one of their edits is reverted, or when another user thanks them for an edit. The Notifications system is still being tested and modified based on community feedback. Later, it will be made available on other language versions of Wikipedia, and on other Wikimedia projects.

 
Family tree of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, generated from Wikidata by the "GeneaWiki" tool

Wikidata's content can now be used on all Wikipedias

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Wikidata has now begun to serve all language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used any Wikipedia article, e.g. in infoboxes. Wikidata's machine-readable knowledge database already contains over 11 million items. They can also be queried, evaluated and edited with the help of a growing collection of tools.

Wikimedia Commons app announced for iOS and Android

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The Wikimedia Commons mobile app was officially announced in April, allowing quick and easy image uploads directly from mobile devices. It is available for both iOS and Android devices. Mobile users who don't have the app installed can still upload images from the mobile web version of all Wikimedia projects.

Funds Disseminations Committee (FDC) publishes its recommendations about $1.2 million

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Launched in 2012, the Funds Dissemination Committee is a group of Wikimedia volunteers tasked with helping to decide about the use of movement funds. On April 28, after a period of evaluation by supporting staff and public review by the community, it published its recommendations to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees about the second round of funding requests, by four organizations: Wikimedia Czech Republic (requested: $14,084.50, recommended: $0), Wikimedia Hong Kong (requested: $211,660.26, recommended: $0), Wikimedia Norway (requested: $235,715, recommended: $140,000), and Wikimedia France (requested: $747,259, recommended: $525,000).

New conflict of interest guidelines

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With an immediate effective date, the Board of Trustees approved Wikimedia guidelines on the disclosure of potential and actual conflicts of interest in requesting and allocating movement resources (such as financial grants). Input provided by the community during a six-week consultation period greatly improved the original version.

Engineering

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A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for April 2013 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/April
Department Highlights
 
Presentation slides about the new translation user interface (speaker notes)

Major news in April include:

VisualEditor

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In April, the VisualEditor team continued to work on major new features that will be added in the coming months. The goal is for VisualEditor to become the default editor for all Wikipedia users in July 2013, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the legacy wikitext editor. The team has focused on four substantial areas of work: adding support for references, templates, categories and media items, all of which are currently disabled for editing in VisualEditor. Editing around images is now designed and partially implemented in our experimental code, and editing around categories is almost complete and nearly ready for activation.

The early ("alpha") version of VisualEditor currently enabled on a few select sites was updated three times in April, adding speed and interface improvements, fixing bugs and making deeper changes behind the scenes to better support the new features. We also were able to enable the alpha version of VisualEditor on fourteen more Wikipedias as an opt-in. This has encouraged feedback from the community on what works and is broken, and identifying language- and locale-specific issues that are now being fixed.

As for the Parsoid (the program that serves as translator between wikitext code and annotated HTML, behind the scenes of VisualEditor), the team successfully activated the cumulative work done over the last four months. This includes support for non-English wikis, a rewritten system to reduce artifacts when editing with VisualEditor, support for basic template parameter editing, and a long list of other fixes and improvements.

Several other features for the July target are on track. Specifications to support more features were written and are currently being implemented. This includes images and thumbnails, whose options for embedding in wiki pages will soon be ready. The team also continued to evaluate the performance of Parsoid. Caching was developed to minimize the server load, and new servers were ordered.

Editor engagement

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In April, the Editor engagement team (E2) activated the Notifications feature on the English Wikipedia and mediawiki.org. This first version aims to inform users about new activity that affects them on Wikipedia, such as talk page messages, page reviews, mentions, edit reverts and thanks. The team developed a new feature that lets users mark all notifications as read, and updated the fly-out and archive page. The development of metrics dashboards also started.

The final version of Article Feedback v5 (a quality assessment feature) was activated on the English, French and German Wikipedias. A number of bugs were fixed, the feedback page was simplified, and other features such as feedback links and auto-archival were finalized. Development for this feature is now wrapping up.

 
Brandon Harris demonstrating Flow

Design continues for the first version of Flow, a feed-like interface to enable users to better interact with their projects. An interactive prototype is being built to help describe multiple functions.

The Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) focused on its redesign of the account creation and log-in interface. The first phase of the launch invited editors and readers on all Wikimedia projects to test the new forms on an opt-in basis, to identify bugs and localization issues across wikis. The new interface is expected to replace the legacy version in May.

For the Onboarding new Wikipedians project, the E3 team completed quantitative analysis of the latest version of the GettingStarted landing page, and began prototyping a new version and a navigation system, which will be used for usability testing prior to further development. The launch is expected in early May as well.

Mobile

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An official Wikimedia Commons app for smartphones was released for both iOS and Android devices in April. The team also added support for categories.

Work on Wikipedia Zero mostly happened behind the scenes this month, with changes made to the configuration system to better support carrier preferences.

The team also experimented with a log-in/sign-up call to action for logged-out users from the in-article upload feature on the mobile site. This resulted in a spike in new contributors, but the quality of their uploads was lower than anticipated, and the quantity of inappropriate uploads was a burden on the Commons community. The call to action was therefore disabled, and uploading reserved to existing users, leading to a vast improvement in the quality of the uploads: 3/4th of the files are retained on Commons, as compared to less than 1/4 when brand-new users were uploading. To create a more focused uploading workflow, and let mobile uploaders discover more articles to illustrate, a Nearby view was added to the beta site, showing users a list of articles near them and highlighting the ones that need images. This feature is expected to be activated on the full mobile web site next month.

Fundraising

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Major Gifts and Foundations

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  • Switched our caging service from Merkle to Arizona Lockbox. They will now process the collection, depositing, and processing of our checks.
  • Completed a quarterly report to the FDC.
  • Attended the Hewlett Foundation Grantees Conference for OER.

Annual Fundraiser

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  • Drafted and translated a survey to evaluate Wikipedia readers' perceptions of fundraising banners.
  • Analyzed donation data from the international fundraiser in March.
  • Analyzed success rate for donations over the past year.
  • Changed international processing acquirer via Global Collect (adding 60+ currencies in the future).
  • Prepared sample reports from our AB testing system to post publicly.
  • In early April, we launched samarium (our new public data provider) in conjunction with Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame).
  • Supported the mobile team to document work with Wikipedia Zero negotiations (see also below); examples:
 
Photo for Wikipedia Zero campaign: A fruit vendor in Nairobi, Kenya displays the phone she uses
 
Photo for Wikipedia Zero campaign: A cellphone repair and sales kiosk in Johannesburg, South Africa

Grantmaking and Programs

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Department Highlights
  • New Program Evaluation and Design team established: In April, the new Program Evaluation and Design team has been established. Sarah Stierch joined the team as Program Evaluation Community Coordinator and Jaime Anstee joined the team as Program Evaluation Specialist.
  • The seven members of the FDC met face-to-face to deliberate on four proposals. Following extensive review prior to the meetings and intense face-to-face discussion, they made their Round 2 recommendations to the Board of Trustees. On Sunday, April 28, they announced their recommendations to the community on the FDC portal and on mailing lists. The Board of Trustees will make a final decision about these recommendations by June 1, 2013.

Strategic Goals Metrics

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Metric Value MoM MoM% Chart
Global South Active Editors (5+ edits in main namespace) 15.9k +392 +2.5%   [1]


Grantmaking

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Presentation slides from the metrics meeting
 
Katy Love presenting about the FDC recommendations

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

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  • The FDC members and FDC staff joined the Wikimedia conference in Milan prior to their face-to-face deliberations. They co-led three conference sessions related to the FDC. One session focused on the differences between the WMF grants programs, another shared the basics about the FDC's process and ways of working, and the last was a chance to share and solicit feedback from Round 1 learning. Minutes from these meetings are available. These sessions provided constructive feedback for the FDC to consider as they review the application process, portal, and all the associated forms, and they continue to welcome additional feedback from applicants and the community.
  • Elections for two members of the FDC and the ombudsperson will be held in May and June. Applications are accepted on Meta from 24 April to 17 May.

WMF Grant requests approved in April 2013

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Participation Support requests approved in April 2013

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Individual Engagement Grants

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Presentation slides from the metrics meeting

Editor Growth and Contribution Program

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Logo of the Editor Growth and Contribution Program

An experimental project on Geo-targeted Editors Participation has concluded, and its outcomes and learning have been shared in a summary report. The experiment ultimately did not result in increased contribution to articles by new editors. However, we do believe there are learnings from this experiment that could be useful for future experiments to build on.

Brazil

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Institutional Partnerships
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Travel of Ação Educativa representative to the Education Meeting at the Wikimedia Conference in order to allow learnings about the movement and the program, as well as to introduce Ação Educativa’s vision on Education to the Wikimedia movement.

Started discussing specific ideas and principles of a partnership with Ação Educativa to become a project to be presented to WMF.

Data & Experiments
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  • Ongoing researches:
  • Research in the planning phase:
    • Opinion survey led by a volunteer with the catalyst program team support. The research aims at identifying the main problems the community currently see on the Portuguese Wikipedia:
Education
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"Wikipédia na Universidade: os 5 pilares da Wikipédia" ( a video explaining Wikipedia's "Five Pillars")
Partnerships with universities
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Events
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  • Participation of Everton in the Education Program meeting at the Wikimedia Conference, in Milan
Medicin Wikiproject
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  • Suggest bot released (only waiting final approval to run regularly)


Programs

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Program Evaluation and Design

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  • In April, the new Program Evaluation and Design team has been established. Sarah Stierch, long-term Wikipedian and free culture advocate, joined the team as Program Evaluation Community Coordinator. In this role, she will act as the community liaison for people who have questions about program evaluation. Sarah will facilitate discussions online and also ensure that community members have appropriate communication channels at hand to share learnings, updates and progress reports with each other. Jaime Anstee, former employee of the Center for Program Evaluation at the University of Nevada, joined the team as Program Evaluation Specialist. Jaime earned her Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Social Psychology and has extensive training and experience in program evaluation design and analysis. Jaime's background and professional areas of expertise include: program evaluation, decision-making, research design and analysis, intergroup dynamics, and cultural psychology. As Program Evaluation Specialist, she will empower program leaders across countries to successfully self-evaluate their programmatic activities. She will also collect, analyze, interpret, and summarize self-evaluation results, synthesizes the outcome and create written reports that will be published on Meta. Both Sarah and Jaime will report directly to Frank Schulenburg, Sr. Director of Programs.
  • Frank Schulenburg attended the Wikimedia Conference in Milan, Italy. As part of a 45-minutes workshop, he facilitated a discussion with chapters' members about the basics of program evaluation and design. The session provided answers to questions like "What is program evaluation?", "What are the benefits of evaluating programs?", and "How can evaluation drive the impact of programs?". Frank also outlined the two-year goals of the new Program Evaluation and Design team and announced the upcoming workshop for program leaders, to be held in late June 2013. Besides staging the workshop, Frank also engaged with a number of chapter's representatives in one-on-one conversations about programs and program evaluation.
  • Also in April, Frank Schulenburg worked with the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program team on a self-evaluation of the team's Egypt Education Program. With support from the Foundation's Analytics team, LiAnna Davis and Rod Dunican created the first iteration of a self-evaluation report and successfully tested the new UserMetrics API. The self-evaluation report will be developed further over the course of the next months and is intended to be published on Meta as a first, tentative sample report that will help program leaders across countries understand how to write their own self-evaluation reports. As a result of this process, the Foundation's Analytics team could increase the stability of the UserMetrics API and gathered feedback on how the tool can be improved further.
  • In late April, the Program Evaluation and Design team embarked on planning the first program evaluation workshop for people who are running programs within the Wikimedia movement. The workshop will be held in late June in Budapest, Hungary. Wikimédia Magyarország, the Hungarian Wikimedia Chapter, kindly agreed to help with organizing this event. More information about the workshop will be made publicly available in early May.

Mobile

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  • In April, the Wikipedia Zero team met up with mobile operators in Africa to discuss launching two different projects. Our proposal to conduct a pilot of our Wikipedia-via-text service was discussed and we reached a verbal agreement to launch pilots with two mobile operators within the next few months.
  • During this trip, we also were able to reach agreements with several mobile operators to move ahead with additional Wikipedia Zero deployments in Africa.
  • Our new engineer, Yuri Astrakhan, met with our South African technical partner to help contribute to the SMS/USSD pilot program. He worked with their engineers to learn the system and set up the necessary features to collect the analytics data for the upcoming pilots.
  • Our new engineers have been busy fixing our backlog of bugs, partner launches, and preparing the code base with an improved architecture. This architectural change acts as the foundation of a web portal, which will allow the Zero program to scale in a far more automated way than is currently possible.
 
Wikipedia Zero campaign in Johannesburg
 
Kul Wadhwa demonstrating Wikipedia Zero
 
Meeting about Wikipedia Zero in Johannesburg
 
Meeting about Wikipedia Zero in Nairobi

Global Education

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Wikipedia Education Program meetings in Milan
 
Education Program Leaders Workshop group photo
  • Facilitated two days of educational program meetings in Milan, meeting with program leads for 25 Wikipedia Education program from around the world.
  • Met with several participants in the Arab Wikipedia Education program (see Arab World information below), meeting with our respresentative from Egypt and professors from Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
  • Discussed the transitional activities for the Brazil education program, discussing the overall program and how we can support a smooth transition.
  • Program leaders shared about their program and in the process we discovered new programs that we did not know were in operation.
  • Participants exchanged ideas on how to better share experiences and materials across countries so that they could learn from each others' successes and challenges.
  • Notes from the meeting.
US/Canada
  • Supported student editors during their main assignment edits of the semester. Facilitated communication with relevant Wikipedia editors/Ambassadors.
  • Began recruiting and on-boarding professors who had indicated working with the Education Program during the Fall 2013 semester.
  • Implemented a redesign of the support materials and information for program participants. Working to create a central location for all volunteers, professors, and students to find the necessary information.
  • Worked with a group of volunteers to apply for a grant as well as thematic organization affiliation for the proposed non-profit that aims to take over program activity for the Fall 2013 term.
  • Ambassadors and other volunteers began discussion of how to scale the volunteer support to more professors in an online space.
 
Slides from the metrics meeting presentation about the Education Program in the Arab World
Arab World
  • Saudi Arabia: We agreed to work with two professors of translation at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. They will start in mid-May.
  • Jordan: Faris traveled to Jordan to officially kick off program and train Ambassadors. Volunteer leaders in Jordan are working to create a Wikipedia summer camp that includes students and Ambassadors in Jordan (at Isra University and high schools). The main goal of this camp is to add additional content and photos through a competition among editors. Isra University will coordinate with King Saud University (Saudi Arabia) soon to make a joint camp between the countries.
  • Egypt: Classes started at four universities (Ain Shams, Cairo, Damanhour, and Kafr El-Sheikh), and students seem to be doing well, especially in the Faculty of the Arts at Ain Shams University.
  • Algeria: Students started to edit articles in the Arabic Wikipedia, and they are looking at ways of expanding the program in the future.
Communications

Learning and Evaluation

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L&E's main focuses throughout April were around gathering and incorporating feedback, preparing evaluation materials to guide decision-making for FDC, and gathering community input into initial stages of L&E design.

  • IEG (Individual Engagement Grants) Performance Management: developed and distributed IEG survey to all applicants and recipients in order to gather useful feedback in the evolving model.
  • FDC Performance Management: analyzed the results of the process survey from Round 1 of the FDC applications and shared the results publicly at the Wikimedia Conference in Milan, Italy. These survey results were shared coupled with a session gathering additional input and feedback into the overall FDC process from entities present at the conference. Also, deployment of a survey to gather feedback from Round 2 of the deilberations.
Partner
  • Strategy development and sharing: Hosted an IRC office hour with some community members getting initial input into the thinking behind the L&E unit. Also, created and delivered a first overview session with the FDC at the Milan Round 2 Deliberations, explaining how L&E should and would be incorporated into the overall grantmaking process.
  • "Toolkit" development: one of the main goals of the L&E team is to provide non-monetary tools to our movement partners to better understand and improve the work they are doing. We are creating the first useful prototypes of these help materials, including:
    • How to develop and use surveys (next step: set-up templates on specific tools to provide to our grant recipients)
    • User Metrics API: tool to track the activity of cohorts of individuals. Evan Rosen took ownership of this over from Ryan Faulkner, who left WMF. We are spending time understanding the code base behind the tool, as well as planning out how it could evolve to be the most helpful and stable for broader use across the movement entities
    • Visualization of geo-data: we are working with Analytics on bringing graph creation options back into Limn - the WMF visualization software. Yay! Paired with the geo-location databases we have developed, this is the first time our movement partners in specific countries can see directly the editorship of their countries over time. Next steps are to prototype and expand the datasources available.
    • Initial conversations around the direction of the L&E "portal" and also the future of the IdeaLab.
    • Program and Organizational Mapping: worked with Rosie Lewis to develop a database collecting all the money we have spent across the movement and the programs they are executing. See Overview presentation for more details

Human Resources

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HR activity for the month was relatively routine. HR has augmented its staff training options by providing courses on communications/presentation skills and (upcoming) negotiation.

Staff Changes

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New Requisitions Filled
  • Jaime Anstee, Program Evaluation Specialist (Grantmaking & Programs)
  • Erik Bernhardson, Software Engineer (Engineering)
  • Brandon Black, Dev Ops Engineers/Site Reliability (Engineering)
  • Jan Eissfeldt, Community Advocate (Legal & Community Advocacy)
  • Monte Hurd, Software Developer Apps (Engineering)
  • Robert Miller, Facilities & Equipment Coordinator (Administration)
  • Sarah Stierch, Program Evaluation Community Coordinator (Grantmaking & Programs)
  • Julie Trias, IT Administrator (Administration)
Communications Interns
  • Candace Metoyer
  • Sarah Mitroff
  • Donna Peterson
New Contractors
  • Limayli Huguet (Administration)
  • Yukari Mitsuhashi (Fundraising)
  • Michael Ray (Administration)
  • Janet Renteria (Administration)
  • Adrian Rounce (Engineering)
Contracts Extended
  • Nischay Nahata (Engineering)
  • Timo Tijhof (Engineering)
Departures
  • Munaf Assaf
  • Christine Bocknek
  • Ryan Faulkner
  • Joslyn Lewis
Contracts Ended
  • Stephanie Coates
  • Cristiana Coimbra
  • LaTrisha Hollines
  • Ava Miller
  • Shankar Narayan
  • Heather O'Malley
  • Alice Roberts
  • Joseph Silverman
  • Elena Strelnikova
  • Megumi Yukie
New Postings
  • Software Engineer – Fundraising
  • Director of Technical Operations
  • UX Designer
  • Legal Intern (Fall)
  • Part-Time HR Administrative Assistant

Statistics

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Total Requisitions Filled
April Actual: 138
April Total Plan: 174
April Filled: 8, Month Attrition: 4,
YTD Filled: 51, YTD Attrition: 25
2 Positions canceled for FY (decreased from 6 canceled previous month)
Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end
34 (reflects 2 canceled positions for FY)

Department Updates

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Real-time feed for HR updates

http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

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Support to the FDC in providing financial analysis of FDC applications in Round 2 with both written reports and during the FDC meeting in Milan.
Prepared Version 2 of the WMF Annual Plan for FY 13-14.
Received transfers from the payment processing chapters Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia France.

Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department

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LCA Report, April 2013

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Contract Metrics

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  • Submitted : 22
  • Completed : 16

Trademark Metrics

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  • Submitted : 15
  • Approved : 1
  • Pending : 13
  • Denied : 1

Domains Acquired

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  • aboutwikipedia.com
  • aboutwikipedia.org
  • wikimedia.co.nz
  • wikimediaa.org
  • wikimediac.com
  • wikipedia-foundation.com
  • wikipediacontent.com
  • wikipediacontent.org
  • toollabs.org
  • wikimediamail.org
  • wikimediamail.com
  • wikispecies.org
  • wikimediastories.com
  • wikimediastories.net
  • wikimediastories.org
  • border-wikipedia.de
  • wikipedia.is
  • wikipedia.us

Coming & Going

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  • Community Advocacy welcomed aboard its first Community Advocate (international) in the person of Jan Eissfeldt, who will be focused on German- and Spanish-language projects. They hope to hire one more person soon.
 
Presentation slides about the new guidelines on potential conflicts of interest

Other Activities

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Communications Report, April 2013

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April was a high-activity month for Communications, particularly with the media focus on the French DCRI’s detainment of a Wikipedian and the substantial interest in the Wikipedia discussion about the American women novelists category. The team also dedicated efforts to finishing key steps in the WP Editor Survey report and refined plans to expand the functionality of the Wikimedia Blog.

Major announcements

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"The Wikidata revolution is here: enabling structured data on Wikipedia’’

(25 April 2013) A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.

Major Storylines through March

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‘’American women novelists on Wikipedia makes headlines’’ (late April, 2013)

An op-ed in the New York Times from late April highlighted category optimization efforts on the Wikipedia category page ‘American novelists’ - efforts that the writer (and later a wide range of mainstream media) insists amount to sexism and segregation. Media coverage has been mostly negative, with some neutral to positive stories highlighting the Wikipedia discussion about the changes and encouraging women to get involved.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/deannazandt/2013/04/26/yes-wikipedia-is-sexist-thats-why-it-needs-you/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/wikipedias-sexism-toward-female-novelists.html
http://jezebel.com/wikipedia-is-quietly-moving-women-off-their-american-no-481069352
‘’DCRI threatens French Wikipedian over military site article’’ (6 April, 2013)

The major press story for the Wikimedia movement through April focused on the DCRI’s (France’s secret service) efforts to remove a French Wikipedia article, fr:Station hertzienne militaire de Pierre-sur-Haute, from the site by detaining a French Wikipedia admin. The admin, who had never been involved with the article, faced legal repercussions if he failed to comply with an order to delete the article. International media coverage was critical of DCRI’s efforts and largely supportive of Wikipedia’s non-censorship stance.

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/affaire-dcri-wikipedia-interview-exclusive-de-christophe-henner-vice-president-de-wikimedia-france-39789081.htm
http://www.laquadrature.net/node/6533
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/07/french-secret-service-wikipedia-page?CMP=twt_gu
‘’Russian gov’t threatens WP block over articles’’

In early April Russian Wikipedians discovered that the Russian government had placed Wikipedia, as well as dozens of other websites accessible in Russia, on a blacklist due to publication of content deemed illegal in the country (primarily drug and suicide related articles). Media coverage was largely positive, focusing on the censorship threat to Wikipedia and the other projects.

(blog post from Wikimedia Russia) http://www.wikimedia.ru/blog/2013/04/08/15blacklisted/
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2013/04/10/russian-censors-partially-acquiesce-to-wikipedia/
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130409/180529815.html
http://rbth.ru/news/2013/04/05/russian_media_regulator_confirms_wikipedia_blacklisted_24706.html

Other worthwhile reads

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WMF Blog posts

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Twenty five blog posts in April, with bilingual posts in Arabic, Catalan, French, German, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Swedish. Some highlights from the month:

Media Contact

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https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#April_2013

Wikipedia Signpost

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For lots of detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for April 2013:


Visitors and Guests

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Visitors and guests to the WMF office in April 2013:

  1. Eli Goldberg (Microsoft)
  2. Nina O'Neil (Microsoft)
  3. Robert Rodriguez-Lawson (Microsoft)
  4. Danese Cooper (OSHWA)
  5. Alicia Gibb (OSHWA)
  6. Nathan Seidle (OSHWA)
  7. Windell Oskay (OSHWA)
  8. Ted Pefferman (HP)
  9. Rob Poole (HP)
  10. Blaine Cook (author of OAuth)
  11. Brian Wolff (volunteer)
  12. Randall Benson (consultant)
  13. Kim Dodson (consultant)
  14. Jake Orlowitz (Wikipedian, tech talk speaker)
  15. Nebojsa Ciric (Google)
  16. Jungshik Shin (Google)
  17. Norbert Lindenberg (Mozilla)
  18. Stevie Benton (Wikimedia UK)
  19. Kanika Thapar (Oxford)
  20. Mohit Menta (Oxford)
  21. Deb Wolter (Red Bamboo Consulting)
  22. Kathey Ramsey (TAI)
  23. Kellee Browe (TAI)
  24. Shane Snow (Contently)
  25. John Hazard (Contently)
  26. Katherine Bavage (WMUK)
  27. Sarah Pearson (Creative Commons)
  28. Peter Krautzberger (MathJax)
  29. Albert Szulman (Be-Bound)
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