Wikimedia Foundation Report, July 2012

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of July (August 2, 2012)

Data and Trends

Erik Möller explaining pageviews

Global unique visitors for June:

469.64 million (-4.62% compared with May; +17.60% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release July data later in August)

Page requests for July:

17.7 billion (-1.9% compared with June; +25.3% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for June 2012 (>= 5 edits/month):

82,220 (-3.2% compared with May / -1.3% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons. Note: We are in the process of moving to a metric that takes into account SUL and Wikimedia Commons.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for June 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

Financials

WMF YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of June 30, 2012

WMF YTD Expenses by Functions as of June 30, 2012

Sue Gardner explaining financial information

(Financial information is only available for June 30, 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2012.

Revenue	$36,112,711
Expenses:
Technology Group	$12,335,628
Community/Fundraiser Group	$3,769,765
Global Development Group	$4,879,005
Governance Group	$998,443
Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group	$6,814,021
Total Expenses	$28,796,862
Total surplus/(loss)	$7,315,849

• Revenue for the month is $549K vs plan of $162K, approximately $387K or 238% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $36.1MM vs plan of $29.5MM, approximately $6.6MM or 22% over plan.
• Expenses for the month is $3.3MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $1.1MM or 49% higher than plan, primarily due to catching up on planned capital expenditures and higher-than-budgeted expenses for professional services and wikimania.
• Year-to-date expenses is $28.8MM vs plan of $28.3MM, approximately $512K or 2% higher than plan, primarily due to higher-than-budgeted payment processing fees (reflecting over-achieved revenue targets), higher-than-budgeted expenses for Wikimania, and an over-spend for Legal to fix issues with our trademark portfolio.
• Cash position is $25.4MM as of June 30, 2012 which is approximately 10.9 months of expenses.
• Please note that the June 30, 2012 numbers presented in this report will be different from those in the audited financial reports due to the way capital expenditures and other items are presented. For example, for this report capital expenditures for servers and other equipment purchases are shown as an expense for the fiscal year, and for our audited financial statements they will be moved to fixed assets on the balance sheet and the audited statement of activities will show depreciation expense.

Highlights

Foundation staff report on their work at Wikimania

Wikimania 2012 group photograph

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

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

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

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

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

Technology

A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for July 2012 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/July

Department Highlights

Major news in July include:

• Engineering presence at Wikimania 2012 in Washington, D.C., and the pre-Wikimania hackathon;
• the launch of Limn, an open source dataviz toolkit developed by the Wikimedia analytics team;
• the deployment of Article Feedback Version 5 (which supports free-text feedback and moderation thereof) to 10% of English Wikipedia articles

Events

Wikimania and Pre-Wikimania hackathon (10–15 July 2012, Washington, D.C., USA)

This year's pre-Wikimania Hackathon was special in that it had a full track for newcomers, going beyond tutorials. The Hackathon was a collaboration with OpenHatch, an open-source teaching non-profit. The new efforts included appropriate first-time tasks to orient newcomers into more advanced Wikipedia editing and tech contribution, a laptop setup guide that steps attendees through the process of configuring development environments, and constant in-person assistance to help people past problems they encountered. While at the event, we saw many people learning more about templates, editing Wikipedia, and using and modifying bots to improve the encyclopedia and media on it. At least 65 people signed in, with surely more in attendance. During the main Wikimania conference, a number of volunteer and staff gave talks and led discussions about technology-related topics.

Operations

Site infrastructure

The team mostly worked behind the scenes in July. Notably, we successfully integrated and tested the upgraded Varnish software (with persistent cache patch) on some of our mobile caching servers. They are working very well and the plan is to roll it widely in the coming weeks.

Object Store/Swift

Migration to Swift is progressing to the final stages now that the performance bottleneck issue identified in June has been resolved. MediaWiki is now operating fully using Swift as the primary object store for thumbnails (the legacy NFS system is relegated to a secondary fail-over backup). The 'originals' (uploaded images and multimedia contents) have been copied over to Swift as well, setting the stage to migrate away from the NFS filer next month.

Features Engineering

VisualEditor

Explaining the visual editor

The VisualEditor (VE) team presented their work at Wikimania and received a good deal of feedback from the community. The team created a rough plan for the next three months' work. The early version of VE on mediawiki.org was updated twice, fixing a number of bugs and noticeably including the addition of support for nested lists.

Article feedback

The team deployed Article Feedback on 10% of the English Encyclopedia. This month, we developed final features for this tool, including the article feedback page, the central feedback page, and the final feedback form (scroll to bottom of page). To guide users of this tool, we also published a new video tour, a walkthrough tutorial and various help pages. We are aiming for a full release to 100% of English Wikipedia by October 2012 — with other wiki projects starting later this year.

Page Curation

The team deployed an updated version of the new Page Curation product (formerly called Page Triage) on the English Wikipedia. It includes two main features: 1) the New Pages Feed, a dynamic list of new pages for review by community patrollers; and 2) the Curation Toolbar, an optional panel on article pages, which enables editors to get page info, mark a page as reviewed, tag it, mark it for deletion, send WikiLove to page creators — or jump to the next page on the list. We plan to pre-release this feature on the English Wikipedia in mid-August — with a full release in September 2012.

Internationalization and Editor Engagement Experiments

Internationalization and localization tools

The team continued to work on the Universal Language Selector and set up a prototype to test it. Development was completed on Translation memory and CLDR plurals support and code review is pending. User experience testing of the Translate extension is in progress to Translate UX enhancements. The WebFonts and Narayam extensions were deployed on Bengali Wikisource and Punjabi Wikipedia. Development started on Project Milkshake.

Editor engagement experiments

The Timestamp Position Modification experiment was completed, and initial analysis shows that adding the timestamp on articles increases clicks on the History tab. Development started to deliver post-edit feedback messages; this experiment includes a proof-of-concept dry run of a new editor bucketing strategy for delivering experimental treatments that was deployed in advance of the full experiment. The team configured a test environment on Labs, to be used for UI and functional requirements validation by the team. The Wikimania conference was an opportunity to interact with editors from the English Wikipedia, and to define a new experiment related to cleanup templates.

Mobile Engineering

Wiki Loves Monuments mobile application

Thomasz Finc explains the Wiki Loves Monuments mobile application

Thomasz Finc explains the potential effect of the Wiki Loves Monuments mobile application

Significant progress made at the Wikimania Hackathon in Washington DC and elsewhere. The development team of Jon, Brion, Yuvi, Max, Arthur improved the robustness of photo uploads, sped up monument discovery, and polished the app extensively. We held a showcase to demo our app to the WLM community and have released a first beta for Android.

Mobile default for sister projects

We added three new projects and one new domain to be mobile default. Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and *.wikimedia.org are now equipped to better server our mobile users. The development team is eager to hear back from our community about what they would like to see from their projects on mobile. Our last project to migrate will be commons.

Platform Engineering

Git conversion

We're in the process of evaluating Gerrit and its alternatives as a code review tool. We upgraded our Gerrit instance to 2.4, which provided many incremental fixes and small features (e.g. the "rebase" button), and migrated the Gerrit database to our Ashburn datacenter, which resulted in a big performance boost.

Lua scripting

We've added a debug console to test code snippets. We believe we're ready to deploy Lua to the WIkimedia cluster, starting with test2 in August, followed by mediawiki.org. We plan to let Lua incubate on mediawiki.org while we test the performance characteristics with key templates, and work out a deployment plan for larger wikis that includes community involvement.

Fundraising

Major Gifts and Foundations

Secured a $100,000 3-year grant from the Charina Endowment Fund.

Revamped the categories in Civi to better capture the data we need.

Completed our annual report to the Sloan Foundation.

Fundraiser

Jonathan Curiel and Victor Grigas setting up video equipment during Wikimania to interview Wikipedians

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

Photographed the Wikimedia servers that the Fundraising team is always talking about in banners.

User:Helpameout photographing the Wikimedia Servers

Worked closely with Finance and Legal for reviewing/approving new payment service providers.

Weekly testing continued: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Breakthrough

Prepared for a fundraising test on Spanish Wikipedia to take place the week of August 21. This will be the first of several tests that will go up prior to the fundraiser kicking off. The goal is to localize the campaign to the best of our ability, test our infrastructure, and identify any kinks in the overall operation.

Hired Matt Walker, fundraising engineer. The fundraising tech team is fully staffed and making much progress on implementing new features for the 2012 fundraiser.

Joseph Seddon started as the Fundraising Translation Coordinator to build up and support our volunteer translators so we can show our fundraising messages and supporting materials (emails, info pages, etc) to our users in their own language.

Global Development

Global Development Highlights

• Anasuya Sengupta joins the Global Development Team as Director of Global Learning and Grantmaking
• Announcement of Wikimedia Foundation's partnership with CIS (Center for Internet and Society) to continue its work in India
• Launch of the Wikimedia Shop
• Communications support for Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC
• Launch of Wikipedia Zero in Kenya
• Launch of the FDC portal for Round 1, 2012-2013

Global Learning and Grantmaking

• Delivered a presentation on the Foundation's grantmaking at Wikimania 2012
• Significant work supporting the FDC process and eligiblity assessments
• Started fiscal year 2012-13. $600K are allocated for Wikimedia Grants this year, a significant increase over last year, especially considering some of last year's grantees will be seeking funding from the (separate) FDC budget this year.

Grants Awarded and Executed

• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_MX/Start-Up
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:The_John_Ernest_Foundation/2012_Wikisym_Conference
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:CMNT/WikipediaMA

Fellowships

• Showcased current fellowship projects in a fellows panel presentation at Wikimania
• Evaluating open project ideas and fellowship applications to fill an expected open fellowship slot in Fall 2012.
• The July edition of the Fellowship News has complete updates on all fellowship projects, and a few highlights are listed below.

Dispute Resolution

• Based on the results of DR findings so far, an easier way for editors to file disputes has also been rolled out to the dispute resolution noticeboard on English Wikipedia. This, along with other changes, will be undergoing a trial in August, and metrics are being collected to see what impact these have.
• Steven Zhang held IRC office hours to discuss ongoing DR work with the community.

Help Pages Redesign

• Peter released finalised results from the help pages survey conducted in June.
• Usability testing on old help pages is nearly complete and new help page designs are underway.

Small Wiki Editor Engagement

• Tanvir ran a survey on Bangla Wikipedia to learn from readers how to best encourage more active editing and participation. About 1100 responses are giving us a clearer picture of their needs. The full survey report will be available soon.
• Planning a first experiment to introduce a new kind of help pages that provide step-by-step guidelines on basic Wikipedia editing questions.

Teahouse

• Began a two week experiment to evaluate automated invitations as a feasible alternative to manual invites, and created a new automated invite template. Preliminary results seem promising: in the week since July 23rd when HostBot began sending out Teahouse invites, the average number of questions per day has doubled and guest profiles are up by 300%.
• Other measures of Teahouse activity were relatively stable in July. 215 guests visited the Q&A page, half of whom were new editors. Guests asked 172 questions. 23 Teahouse hosts participated overall, and 13 participated per week on average. Complete July metrics are available in the Teahouse lounge.
• Planning for a phase 2 sprint to improve hosting processes in August, which will include some redesigns of key Teahouse pages.

Translations

• A campaign to recruit translators for the new meta translation system was a success, with more than 1200 new signups across more than 100 languages, despite being targeted to only the top 20 languages. Updated statistics can be seen on Toolserver.
• In the final weeks of his fellowship, Jon Harald has been helping revamp the translation committee, which is currently looking for new members. He is also finishing up documentation of outcomes from the meta translation project.

Editor Growth and Contribution Program

Logo of the Editor Growth and Contribution Program

Experiments continue on the Arabic Wikipedia Contribution Portal. Analysis of the initial pilot phase of the project is demonstrating early proof of concept - running banners that invite readers to learn how to contribute and providing simple learning tools for this purpose is encouraging a higher proportion of new accounts to edit.

Brazil Catalyst

Activities in events: Campus Party Recife 2012 and Wikimania

• At Wikimania there were two meetings that contributed to sharing ideas: the three catalyst program groups (Arabic, Brazilian and Portuguese, parts of the India Community) met to discuss challenges and opportunities at their countries (Google Translation); a Brazilian-Portuguese community meeting to discuss issues regarding the Brazil Catalyst program (community facilitator role, supporting community-led projects, planning activities based on resources and experience).
• Campus Party Recife, meet-up involving about 12 people discussing Wikipedia possibilities and the Wikimedia movement, workshop that engaged 3 developers to develop new apps for Wikipedia, 2 volunteers working on editing actitivies, panel on women in the IT field.
• Conversations with Casa de Cultura Digital - Santos representatives, the Brazilian Steering Committee of Internet, as well as the Pirate Party, and other communities such as Mozilla.

Community Engagement and activities

1. Community is actively collecting and analyzing data and proposing activities and actions to increase editing in Wikipedia.
2. Brazilian Wikimedia community is still trying to organize WikiBrasil 2012 and wants to develop know-how and experience to host Wikimania in the future: a volunteer traveled with his own resources to check logistics and structure of Wikimania to be able to help in the organization of events by the Brazilian community.

Brazil Education Program

• Concluded the recruitment of new professors for the second semester of the Education Program in Brazil: we received 36 applications from professors in less than one month with an open call and more than 80 application from volunteers to be Ambassadors in about 10 days using a sitenotice.
• Positive impressions: great interest from professors (almost none from our previous circles of acknowledgement) and volunteers, spontaneous online media news on the open call (http://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/vidae,wikipedia-convoca-professores-para-melhorar-verbetes,896314,0.htm ).
• Challenges:
  1. Lack of intensive involvement of the community in the process of selection (many editors did not volunteer to participate and expressed skepticism)
  2. Sustainability and institutionalization of the program
  3. Coordinating more than 10 courses is a huge challenge for 1 - 3 contractors
  4. Methodologies: creating articles in the main domain may create conflicts between new editors and the community, but creating articles outside the main domain may create work for staff and Ambassadors

Office/Staff

1. Worked at the Hub in July
2. Everton's contract renewed
3. Meeting with community in Wikimania made us reconsider the hiring of a community facilitator and we're now working to develop a more specific role around data collection, development of tools and features.

US Cultural Partnerships

• Launched the GLAM-Wiki US Consortium during GLAM Night Out at Wikimania, and facilitated ongoing dialogue with cultural professionals and Wikipedians about the direction this network will take.
• Significant internal outreach for GLAM initiatives and needs during Wikimania, including at the Wikipedia Loves Libraries workshop, the National GLAM Coordinators Panel, the State of GLAM in the US talk, and in the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, in addition to GLAM Night Out.

Mobile and Business Development

• Fully launched three new Wikipedia Zero programs with full free access to entire Wikipedia on mobile including images with Orange in the following territories: Uganda, Niger, and most recently in Kenya. We encourage community members in those countries that are on Orange's networks to try them out and give us their feeback.
• Ongoing testing and fixes allowed us to overcome two major roadblocks including (1) resolving Opera Mini browser compatibility issues with our WP Zero programs, and (2) providing ability to support partners that want to provide free access to both .zero and .m Wikipedia mobile sites.
• Project planning work on Wikipedia via text message (on USSD and SMS): we plan to put this into production for our first pilot by next month.

Wikipedia Education Program

• Cairo Pilot wraps up successfully with conference: Professors, Ambassadors, students, and supporters of the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program gathered in Egypt on July 4–5 to share their experiences and celebrate the incredible accomplishments of the students. Seven classes participated in the pilot last term, with 54 students editing. Those students added the equivalent of 372 printed pages of content to 246 unique Arabic Wikipedia articles, and the Cairo Pilot succeeded in confirming that the proof of concept of students editing Wikipedia works in Egypt. See photos at commons:Category:Cairo_Pilot_-_Celebration_Conference_July_2012 and read more about the conference and pilot on the Wikimedia blog. See also a post on one professor's experience teaching with Wikipedia on the Spanish and Arabic Wikipedias.

• A crowd of more than 80 people interested in Wikipedia's use in education around the world attended a meet-up held during Wikimania last week. Co-hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and the Saylor Foundation, the event allowed people from around the world to share their experiences using Wikipedia in classrooms and what they hope to do in the future. A follow-up meeting delved more into details of how to get programs started and sharing learnings, with promises to provide more cross-country communication about programs on-wiki. Photos from the event are available at commons:Category:Wikimania_2012_Wikipedia_in_Education_Meet-Up.

• Class assignment inspires growth of Kazakh Wikipedia: Rauan Kenzhekhanuly first started editing Wikipedia as a student in Professor Nicco Mele's course at Harvard University on the first term of the U.S. pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program, the Public Policy Initiative. Rauan was so inspired by the assignment that he returned to his native Kazakhstan and started invigorating the community around growing the Kazakh Wikipedia. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recognized his efforts by naming him the Wikipedian of the Year last year during Wikimania, an honor that included a travel stipend for Rauan to attend Wikimania this year. Read more about Rauan's work on a Wikimedia Foundation blog post published this month.

• The Working Group for the United States and Canada – a body of volunteers who will help spin out the programs from the Wikimedia Foundation to a new organization so the programs can be more volunteer-driven – met in person for the first time on July 16–17 in Washington, D.C. Working Group members split into task forces to help develop a strategic plan for the future of the programs, which will be open to community involvement along the way.

• U.S. Ambassador blogs about transnational scholarship: Georgetown University Campus Ambassador Kelsey Brannan wrote a post for the Wikimedia blog about how her work with Professor Adel Iskandar starts a trend toward transnational scholarship at Georgetown. Professor Iskandar's students wrote on topics related to the Arab world, and he hopes to collaborate with professors in the Cairo program to translate these articles to the Arabic Wikipedia as well. Read Kelsey's blog post.

India Programs

The Wikimedia Foundation announced a partnership with the Center for Internet and Society [1] to continue its work in India. For more information about this change, please visit the FAQ, or Barry's post on the Wikimedia Foundation Blog [2].

India Community Support

• Supporting new editors for GLAM Project on Hindi Wikipedia. More on Wikimedia blog.
• Odia and Malayalam workshops in Delhi.
• Creating Typing scheme for Punjabi Wikipedia, Facebook group and page creation and update and community involvement for social media activities.
• First Punjabi Wikipedia workshop at Ludhiana.

Communications

The focus for the Communications team in July was Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC. Prior to the event, we supported the Wikimedia DC organizing team as they prepared for the Wikimania press conference with Jimmy Wales, Sue Gardner, representatives of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and plenary speaker Mary Gardiner. More than 40 media outlets pre-registered or showed up directly at the event at George Washington University's campus, interviewing a number of participants and speakers (see the wonderful BBC editor profile story linked below).

The Communications team also organized a day of media interviews for Jimmy Wales the Tuesday before Wikimania. It included roundtable discussions with the Washington Post editors, columnists and reporters, a similar roundtable and video interview with Politico, and an excellent video piece with PBS Newshour (see below).

James Alexander explaining the Wikimedia Shop

The Wikimedia Shop (http://shop.wikimedia.org) debuted to a positive reception at Wikimania, and to the world via a blog post). James Alexander introduced the shop to Wikimedians in person and gave out all the official Wikimania t-shirts to the more than 1400 participants at the conference. Further, James solicited significant feedback from the volunteer community for further merchandise, including a number of new designs sketched out on the spot. As the online platform for the shop expands, we'll continue to make the shop more accessible and cost-effective for those outside of North America.

The focus for Communications continues to be increased production on the Wikimedia blog, with more participation from our contributor community and more articles in non-English languages.

Major announcements

In July, we announced the new Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and Elected Officers for 2012-2013.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/WMF_Board_Election_July_2012

Major Storylines in July

Increasing editors on Wikipedia (July 12th, 2012)

A central theme at Wikimania 2012 was the need to increase the total active editors across Wikimedia projects. Significant press attention followed several discussions at the event, including Jimmy's opening plenary and Sue's Saturday plenary.

(US News & World Report) http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/12/wikipedia-founder-worries-about-future-of-editorial-community

(Washington Post) http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/wikimania-hits-dc-as-wikipedia-faces-changes/2012/07/14/gJQAqRKxkW_story.html

The need to promote new administrators on English Wikipedia (July 2012)

The press wrote a number of articles based on a presentation by Andrew Lih during Wikimania, which chronicled the decline in the rate of new admins promoted on English Wikipedia over time.

(The Atlantic) http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/#

(Daily Mail) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2174773/Will-Wikipedia-edit-existence-From-50-volunteer-admins-site-month-just-one.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

(BBC) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18886752

Increasing the number or women editors on Wikipedia

The Wikipedia Gender Gap was a prominent theme at Wikimania and in the press surrounding Wikimania. Jimmy mentioned a controversy around the notability of Kate Middleton's wedding dress, which set off a media flurry.

(Slate) http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/13/kate_middleton_s_wedding_gown_and_wikipedia_s_gender_gap_.html

(NYMag) http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2012/07/does-wikipedia-have-a-fashion-problem.html

(Vogue, UK) http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/2012/07/16/catherine-duchess-of-cambridge-wikipedia-page-debate

Other worthwhile reads

Russian Wikipedia blackout over parliamentary bill (CNN, 10 July, 2012)

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/10/tech/web/russia-wikipedia-bill/index.html

Jimmy on PBS Newshour (10 July, 2012)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec12/wikipedia_07-10.html

Wikipedia and Internet Freedoms (Reuters, 13, July, 2012)

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/12/wikipedia-internet-freedoms-idINL2E8ICF6M20120712

English Wikipedia crosses 4 million article threshold (13 July, 2012)

(WMF Blog) http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/13/english-wikipedia-crosses-4-million-article-milestone/

Meet the men and women who edit Wikipedia (BBC, 14 July, 2012)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18833763

Meet the Bots that Edit Wikipedia (BBC, 24 July, 2012)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18892510

Wikipedia Signpost

For lots of detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for July 2012:

• Volume 8, Issue 27, 2 July 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 28, 9 July 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 29, 16 July 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 30, 23 July 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 31, 30 July 2012

WMF Blog posts

Twenty-nine blog posts in total for July 2012. A surge of new posts from the Wikipedia Education Program team, including several important posts in WMF priority regions, such as Arabic-language countries.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/

Selections from July:

• Wikipedia ranks 1st in ACSI Customer Satisfaction Index for 3rd straight year
• Meet the Wikimedia Foundation Analytics Team
• Improving Arabic and Spanish Wikipedia articles for a class in Cairo University

Media Contact

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#July_2012

Human Resources

WMF staff snapshot for July 2012

WMF contractor snapshot for July 2012

HR is pleased to now have a full-time internal recruiter, Sangeeta Prashar, who can build our strength in that area. We will focus on engineering recruiting and improving our candidate experience.

Staff Changes

New Requisitions Filled

• Lynette Logan, Director of Administration (Administration)
• S Page, Software Engineer (Engineering)
• Sangeeta Prashar, Recruiting Manager (Human Resources)
• Anasuya Sengupta, Director of Global Learning and Grantmaking (Global Development)
• Matthew Walker, Software Engineer – Fundraising (Engineering)

New Other Position Hires

• Vanessa Sanchez, Intern (Administration)

Conversions

• Sara Lasner, Development Outreach Manager (Fundraiser)
• Gabriel Wicke, Sr Software Developer (Engineering)
• Peter Youngmeister, Operations Engineer (Engineering)

New Contractors

• Rebecca Neumann (Global Development)
• Kevin Gorman (Global Development)
• Brittany Jones (Fundraiser)
• Srikanth Lakshmanan (Engineering)

Contract Extended

• Giovanni Ciampaglia (Engineering)
• Niklas Laxström (Engineering)
• Sage Ross (Global Development)
• Joseph Seddon (Fundraiser)
• Diederik Van Liere (Engineering)
• Susan Walling (Fundraiser)

Departure

• Jeremy Postlethwaite

Contract Ended

• Pavel Andreev
• Mariel Bird
• Luis Campos
• Karen Chelini
• Jimmy Chiu
• Daniel DeJarnatt
• Rodney Dunican
• Faris El-Gwely
• Brittany Jones
• Ayush Khanna
• Johanna “Petro” Leigh
• Mimi Li
• Jacqui Pastor
• Ricardo Saavedra
• Robert Schnautz
• Sarah Selim
• Essam Sharaf

Department Changes

• Melanie Brown joins Human Resources

New Postings

• Community Facilitator
• Executive Assistant to the Chief of Finance and Administration
• IT Systems Engineer
• Operations Engineer
• Operations Engineer (Systems & Storage)
• Software Engineer
• System Administrator

RFP

• Part Time System Administrator

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled

July Actual: 118

July Total Plan: 137, Month Plan Hire: 25

July Filled: 8 (9 Reqs in Process), July Attrition: 2

FYTD Filled: 8, FYTD Attrition: 2

Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 56

Department Updates

Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

We are pleased to welcome Lynette Logan as our new Director of Administration.

We have been working on several projects this month:

• Optimizing our foreign exchange systems to increase flexibilty and reduce cost
• We did a physical count and site visit at the Virginia data center. Our thanks to Rob Halsell for a sucessful site visit and a well-organized data center.
• We have been working on the eligibility criteria and methods for the FDC process.
• We have received Board approval to proceed with putting part of our cash reserves in a low cost bond portfolio working with an investment manager.

Legal and Community Advocacy

• Launch of Affiliate Guideline RFC
• Legal Review of several key contracts for the annual fundraiser
• Completion of the Payment Processing Chapters' Agreements
• Support and implementation of a new Financial delegation policy for WMF
• Signing of agreement for mobile in India
• Finalization of the internal contract approval process and launch of new database
• Continued privacy review and recommendations
• Released donor data guidelines for fundraising staff
• Wikilegal:
  • Copyright of images in German postage stamps - Jesse
  • Sweat of the brow Will
  • Copyright in Google translations - Will
  • Copyright status of images hosted on US government websites - Peter
  • Linking legal considerations - Peter
• Cease and desist stats:
  • Opened 23 cases
  • Closed 6 cases
  • 19 letters sent
  • Total open cases 81
  • Recovered @wikisource Twitter account after community request
• Metrics
  • Contracts submitted: 36
  • Trademark issues submitted: 14
  • Approved: 3
  • Pending: 8
  • Denied: 3

Visitors and Guests

1. Bence Damokos (Wikimedia Hungary)
2. Steven Zhang (Community Fellow)
3. Pete Forsyth (Wiki Strategies)
4. Stella Yu (StellaResults)
5. Anya Shyrokova (Design for America, fellowship candidate)
6. Grant Joung (Thoughtworks)
7. Rene Resendez (Dell Financial Services)
8. Deborah Bezona (D. Bezona & Company)
9. Valerie Aurora (ADA Initiative, Co-founder)
10. Mary Gardiner (ADA Initiative, Co-founder)
11. Timo Tijhof (User:Krinkle, contractor based in Netherlands)
12. Andrew Garrett (User:Werdna, contractor based in Australia)
13. Jan Gerber (User:JanGerber, contractor based in Germany)
14. Liam Wyatt (User:Wittylama, GLAM)
15. Chiori Takahashi (JATV/LA Arts Productions - Worksight magazine interview)
16. Shotaro Yamashita (Kokuyo - Worksight magazine interview - plus 5 crew members/editors)
17. Daisuke Ando (bridgeworks, LLC, Worksight magazine interview)
18. Mark Oppenheim (m/Oppenheim Associates)
19. Kelly Smith (Travel and Transport)
20. Mike Godwin (Legal Consultant)
21. Laura Lanzerotti (Bridgespan Group)
22. Libbie Lowndles-Dowling (Bridgespan Group)
23. Meera Chary (Bridgespan Group)
24. Monty Widenius (MariaDB, CEO)
25. Andrea (MariaDB)
26. Mina Nagy Takla (ict Qatar)
27. Sami Al-Mubarak (ict Qatar)
28. Andy Duncan (ThoughtWorks)
29. Natalya Berenshteyn (Creative Commons)
30. Andy Blanco (Creative Commons)
31. Tim Vollmer (Creative Commons)
32. Jessica Coates (Creative Commons)
33. Anna Daniel (Creative Commons)
34. Varun Aurora (OpenCurriculum)
35. James Gleick (Author/Journalist)
36. Brendan Corrigan (JP Morgan)
37. Ron Waliczek (JP Morgan)
38. Charu Gorrepati (JP Morgan)
39. Dawn Wojrarowski (JP Morgan)
40. Markus Beckedahl (group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
41. Ulf Buermeyer (group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
42. Dr. Jeanette Hofmann (group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
43. Konstantin von Notz (group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
44. Anne Roth (group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
45. Malte Spitz (group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
46. Christian Stoecker (SPIEGEL ONLINE / group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
47. Matthias Kolb (sueddeutsche.de / group visit of German digital rights experts, organized by Böll Foundation)
48. Arne Jungjohann (Böll Foundation / group visit of German digital rights experts)
49. Alice Iliynskaya (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
50. Savin Alexandz (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
51. Joseph Ng (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
52. Ondres Zaska (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
53. Qinzhi Liu (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
54. Kate Gavva (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
55. Svetlana Koshenkova (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
56. Svetlana Lakovleva (UC Berkeley Summer Session)
57. Tamas Meszoly (Wikimedia Hungary)
58. Itzik Edri (Wikimedia Israel)
59. Chris Johnson (visiting contractor)
60. Michael Peel (Secretary, Wikimedia UK)
61. Pete Forsyth (Wikistrategies)
62. David Peters (Exbrook)
63. Reza Musavi (Cushman & Wakefield)
64. Bob Kraynak (Cushman & Wakefield)
65. Bob McDonald (TOG Solutions)