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Wikimedia Foundation Report, November 2012

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of November (December 6, 2012)
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Global unique visitors for October:

488.4 million (+2.84% compared with September; +2.46% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)

Page requests for November:

20.3 billion (+2.7% compared with October; +16.8% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for October 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,964 (-2.73% compared with September / +0.59% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

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

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

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Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of October 31, 2012
 
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of October 31, 2012

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

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date October 31, 2012.

Revenue $5,358,084
Expenses:
Engineering Group $4,258,755
Fundraiser Group $816,319
Global Development Group $1,804,417
Governance Group $278,363
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group $976,506
Finance/HR/Admin Group $1,793,482
Total Expenses $9,927,842
Total surplus/(loss) ($4,569,758)
  • Revenue for the month of October is $1.24MM vs plan of $0.85MM, approximately $396K or 47% over plan.
  • Year-to-date revenue is $5.36MM vs plan of $5.21MM, approximately $151K or 3% over plan.
  • Expenses for the month of October is $2.53MM vs plan of $2.84MM, approximately $305K or 11% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and operating grants.
  • Year-to-date expenses is $9.93MM vs plan of $11.52MM, approximately $1.59MM or 14% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and awards and grants.
  • Cash position is $20.76MM as of October 31, 2012 which is approximately 5.92 months of expenses.

Highlights

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New HTML5 video player

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A new video player was enabled on Wikipedia and its sister sites, promising to bring free educational videos to more people, on more devices, in more languages. The player is the same HTML5 player used in the Kaltura open-source video platform. Its many new features include advanced support for subtitles, support for the royalty-free WebM video format, and server-side transcoding, i.e. the ability to convert from one video format to another, in order to deliver the appropriate video stream to the user depending on their bandwidth and the size of the player.

 
Usability testing of the new translation interface at the Bangalore DevCamp 2012

Developer meetup and language summit in India

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On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India. The Engineering DevCamp focused on language support, development for mobile devices, and user interaction and user experience design (UI/UX). More than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators attended the event. It was preceded by an Open-Source language summit that the Foundation organized together with Red Hat in Pune, India.

Fundraiser launch

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The Foundation's ninth annual online fundraiser officially launched on November 27, 2012 and raised a record breaking $2.3 million in a single day: a 59% increase over our biggest day in 2011. See the Fundraiser Statistics page for a view comparing this year to previous years. Banner design progressed from last year's "Jimmy appeal" ([1]) to variations on a new "Facts banner" ([2], [3], and [4]) which are more oriented towards informing users about the Wikimedia Foundation.

Due to the very successful start, it was decided to show banners only in the following five English-speaking countries through December 31: US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand (in addition to the banners for fundraising chapters). The fundraiser will be re-launched in all remaining countries in the spring of 2013, with improved translations.

 
Proposed new logo for Wikivoyage

Beta launch of Wikivoyage

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Wikivoyage, the project to create a free world travel guide which anyone can edit, launched on Wikimedia Foundation servers on November 10, migrating text content and accounts from the old servers run by the Wikivoyage Association. The community is working on the review and transfer of media files, and the site remains in "beta" until this and other cleanup tasks are completed.

Engineering

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

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

VisualEditor

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In November, the VisualEditor team, who is working on the upcoming rich-text interface aiming to make it easier to edit wiki pages, finished restructuring the code behind the scenes. This "refactoring" was aimed at making the code more modular, and easier to change and extend, even for developers who are not familiar with the entirety of the VisualEditor's code.

They also continued to work on Parsoid, the parsing program that translates plain wikitext into HTML annotated for easy editing, and vice-versa. In preparation for the upcoming deployment on the English Wikipedia, the team concentrated on the preservation of existing content. They continued to tweak the parser and to compare the articles' original wikitext to the one obtained after a "round-trip" (the operation consisting of converting wikitext to annotated HTML, and back to wikitext) on random selections of test articles. Currently, 79.4% of test articles (up from 75% last month) are converted without any differences at all, 18% (stable) show only minor differences, and the remaining 2.6% (down from 7%) have differences that still need fixing.

Editor engagement

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Version 5 of Article feedback, a quality assessment tool also aiming to engage readers and encourage them to contribute, is still being tested on 10% of articles on the English Wikipedia. A few additional features and improvements were developed in November. A few other features were designed, mostly related to moderation and reducing the editor workload; they will be developed next month, once the code reorganization to improve database performance is completed. The team also analyzed new research data to track how moderators use the feedback page, and measure how many readers who post feedback become editors or registered users. Next month, Wikipedians will be invited to evaluate the usefulness of feedback posts and the effectiveness of the new moderation tools. Once these tasks are done, this tool is expected to be expanded to all articles on the English Wikipedia in early 2013.

Page Curation (an interface for experienced contributors to review and improve newly created pages) is now in maintenance mode, following its release on the English Wikipedia in September. Its impact has been tracked with a metrics dashboard, which confirms that it is being used actively, with over 27,000 pages reviewed since launch.

The MicroDesign team (focusing on small design issues) continued to work behind the scenes in November, notably on a tool called "Agora" that aims to make it easier to build and deploy future improvements. Several templates on the English-language Wikipedia have been redesigned to reduce interface clutter, with some changes already implemented.

In November, the Editor engagement experiments team (E3) deployed the third and final A/B test of the new account creation page, including client-side validation (automated checks when the user enters content in a text field). Results from basic data analysis of all three tests were published on Meta, and the project will now move to the productization stage. The post-edit confirmation message was put in maintenance mode after being deployed to a further seven Wikipedias, including French and Portuguese. On the analytics side, E3 transitioned permanently to EventLogging, a tool to help measure the success of future experiments, and collaborated with the mobile team to track activity on Wikipedia's mobile beta. The team also deployed a small design improvement to the personal tools menu in MediaWiki core.

Last, key features of the Notifications project (code-named 'Echo') were designed and developed in November, leading to a first experimental deployment in early 2013. This new notification system is designed to replace and augment existing notification systems on Wikimedia sites, as well as provide significantly more control to both users and developers as to how their notifications are handled, read, and deleted. A first prototype is available for testing.

Mobile

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In November, the Mobile team added the ability to log in to the site. Many experimental features were made available in beta, such as editing articles, reformatted tables, random article support, simpler layout for cleanup templates, and watchlists.

Infrastructure work continued on programs to bring Wikipedia to more devices (Wikipedia Zero, access over SMS or USSD and the J2ME app), notably during the Bangalore DevCamp, where volunteer developers got involved.

The Mobile quality assurance team started to set up automated mobile browser-based tests and mobile browser regression tests.

 
Universal language selector: Input method menu, accessed from the search box

Other news

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  • Two calls were sent in November. One was for interns as part of the Outreach Program for Women, organized by the GNOME Foundation. Applications are now closed. The other call was to recruit volunteers to lead or advise engineers on select activities; applications are still welcome.

Fundraising

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Department highlight
  • The online fundraiser officially launched on November 27, 2012 and raised a record breaking $2.3 million in a single day (see also general "Highlights" section)

Major Gifts and Foundations

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  • Received a $500,000 grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation.
  • Held a event for Bay Area major donors at Local Edition on November 13th.

Annual Fundraiser

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'The Impact of Wikipedia' video series
  • Launched the 2012 annual fundraiser offically on November 27 (see also general "Highlights" section). The year-end fundraising goal is $46 million, while the online fundraiser is expected to raise a total $32.6 million (not including fundraising chapters and Major Gifts and Foundations).
  • Banner design progressed from last year's "Jimmy appeal" [5] to variations on a new "Facts banner" [6], [7], and [8] which are oriented more towards educating users about the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • As a result of extremely well performing banners and more payment options, the fundraiser has been very successful. The team decided to only show banners to the following five English-speaking countries through December 31: US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand in addition to fundraising chapters. This was a response to a very successful start, donor feedback and worldwide testing which indicated we could improve our banner message translations. The team will be working to improve translations to re-launch the fundraiser in all remaining countries in the spring of 2013.
  • We uploaded the video series 'The Impact of Wikipedia'.
  • See the Fundraiser Statistics page for a view comparing this year to previous years. Some interesting statistics:
    • Raised a record breaking $2.3 million in a single day (November 27, 2012): a 59% increase over our biggest day in 2011. On this day we had 145,000 donations averaging about $27 USD per second. During the biggest single hour, we received over ten thousand donations, and averaged about $45 USD per second.
    • The multi-lingual donor services team responded to donor emails and liaised closely with tech, the creative team, and our payment providers to trouble shoot technical and financial errors that hindered users from donating.

Global Development

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Department highlights

Strategic Goals Metrics

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Metric Value MoM MoM% Chart
Free Wikipedia Zero Page Requests 2.6m 675k +35.6%   [9]
Global South Active Editors (5+ edits in main namespace) 14k 206 +1.5%   [10]

Wikipedia Education Program

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New teaching tool brochure released
 

A new brochure, titled "Instructor Basics: How to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool", is now available from the Wikimedia Foundation and on Wikimedia Commons. This brochure covers key Wikipedia policies and structures that educators wanting to do a Wikipedia assignment in their classes need to understand, best practices on article selection and working with the community, and sample grading rubrics. Download the brochure.

Sample syllabus brochure revamped
 

The sample syllabus provided for instructors interested in having their students write Wikipedia articles as part of the course curriculum has been updated based on recommendations from more instructors who have participated in the Wikipedia Education Program. The new version provides a week-by-week breakdown of how you can incorporate a "write a Wikipedia article" assignment into your classes. It includes some key milestones that have proven effective at ensuring that students derive the greatest educational benefits from editing Wikipedia. Download the syllabus brochure.

Egypt

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  • Frank and Annie had a meeting with the Vice President of Ain Shams University and some participating Ain Shams professors, students, and Ambassadors. The Vice President is highly supportive of the program and promised to provide free internet USB sticks and official certificates to all Ain Shams students in the program.
  • The Egypt program is now the fastest growing wing of the Wikipedia Education Program — from 5 classes last term to 18 classes this term (despite a teachers' strike in Alexandria that put all classes in Alexandria on hold!).
  • Wikipedia Education Program Egypt consultant Faris El-Gwely is working with Campus Ambassadors to keep a running updates page on the Arabic Wikipedia with information about their activities. The updates pages includes information on in-class editing sessions, students' reactions to Wikipedia editing, and challenges that they faced, such as lack of reliable internet access. It's a great way to keep up with the current status of the Egypt program. Read the updates page.

U.S. and Canada

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Wikipedia Education Program booth at the National Communication Association conference 2012

The US National Communication Association is joining the Association for Psychological Sciences and the American Sociological Association in calling for academics in their discipline to improve the content on Wikipedia through using it as a teaching tool in their classrooms. The Wikipedia Education Program was featured at the NCA convention in Florida, with a workshop attended by more than 40 instructors and a booth in the exhibit hall. Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager LiAnna Davis and volunteer professors Adel Iskandar of Georgetown University, Lori Britt of James Madison University, and Zach McDowell of the University of Massachusetts Amherst led the workshop. See more information about the NCA Wikipedia Initiative.

  • The Working Group — a group of volunteers leading the spin-out of the U.S. and Canada Education Programs — turned in their first complete proposal draft to Frank. The proposal outlines their "business plan" for the new non-profit organization that will run the U.S. and Canada Education Programs.
  • A student at Davidson College created the article on the psychology of music preference as an assignment for Professor Greta Munger's course on Cognition and the Arts, which is participating in the U.S. Education Program this term. The student's article got accepted into the Did You Know section on Wikipedia's Main Page, where it received more than 2,000 views. Read the article.

Brazil

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Institutional partnerships:

  • Two trips to São Paulo for meetings with 3 potential institutional partner organizations
  • Development of catalyst program planning with initial discussions with the community available here
  • Interviews with candidates for the Data Analyst position and development of task to be given to the finalists
  • Two IRC meetings for general community debates on CAPTCHA, Wikiprojects and data organization

Outreach:

Professor in Brazil leads successful editing workshop

Last month, professor Juliana Bastos Marques of Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, led an editing workshop for students as part of the Extension Week at her university. She and her Campus Ambassador, User:OTAVIO1981, introduced 12 students into how to edit Wikipedia. During the four hour workshop, the students translated five articles from the English Wikipedia into the Portuguese Wikipedia and learned wiki editing and literacy skills that can be used for future. Learn more by reading Juliana's post.

Partners:

  • Translation courses at Gama Filho Faculty (Rio de Janeiro) through an UNESCO Latin America contact
  • Ministry of Health to bring experts and Medical School students to Portuguese Wikipedia
  • Lots of talks with possible partners (still in progress): Google, UNESCO, Fiocruz, Faculty of Medicine at the University of São Paulo, United Nations, Medical School groups, research groups, other colleges and universities, language courses etc.

Presentation and outreach:

  • Lecture and workshop in Vitória (Espírito Santo) to professors (positive feedback received)
  • Connected LiAnna Davis (Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager) with the professors using Wikipedia.

Direction of the program:

Research:

  • On the usage of WikiProjects and previous researches by WMF on the subject
  • On complex adaptive systems

Planning and goals:

  • Started planning alternative actions for the Education Program (WikiProjects and translation without Ambassadors)
  • Draft on the goals of the WikiProject model and working with Jonathan Morgan on how to improve it
  • Following up on talks with University's translation department in order to ensure reasonable goals

Reports and learnings:

  • Started courses evaluation
  • Started program sustainability and scalability analysis
  • Contacted each professor for positive feedback on the program
  • Started giving post semester survey to professors

Fellowships

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  • Program: Discussions about the wind-down and moving some support opportunities into WMF's grant-making activities are ongoing
  • Dispute Resolution: A second survey started this month to follow up on the results of the first DR survey, this time focusing on the motivations and ideas of existing dispute resolution volunteers, in hope of boosting participation and recruitment. Responses are filing in and results will be released in December. An IRC office hours session was also held to solicit feedback and input from the community, and while the universal DR wizard is still being developed, alternative ideas about processes for routing disputes, recognizing volunteers, and holding disputants to decisions are in discussion.
  • Small Wiki Editor Engagement: The help page pilot has been shown to more than double the number of new editors making 5 or more edits to Bangla Wikipedia, from 21 to 50 editors in 47 days before and after September 12th. Pilot report with more details is forthcoming, as is a work-plan for phase 2 of the project.
  • WikiWomen's Collaborative: Phase 2 goals and activities have been set for the project. In this phase we'll be focusing on activites like experimenting with ways to increase the participation of women who are not yet editing, and developing the sustainability of the project in anticipation of the fellowship coming to an end.
 
Logo of the Editor Growth and Contribution Program

Editor growth and Contribution Program

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Wikimania

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  • Working on development of new scholarship committee; providing overall coaching to the new team.

Learning & Evaluation

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Wikipedia Zero Mobile Partner Dashboard
  • Established dashboard for the Mobile Partners to be able to track their progress
  • Developing frameworks for measuring organizational effectivess as well as programmatic effectiveness
  • Supporting the development of standards of support for different affiliate groups via CIS and Brazil. This includes helping develop program and hiring plans, as well as figuring out what sorts of legal and programmatic support we are able to lend.
  • Working with the analytics team on how to develop a more robust update of the Limn reporting software

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

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  • The FDC's recommendations for Round 1 were submitted to the Board on November 15.
  • The recommendations were accepted as-is by the Board on 1 December.
  • 8.43 mn USD will be allocated through Round 1.
  • Overall, 12 entities (including the Foundation) submitted proposals to the FDC for Round 1; 10 were recommended support for their annual plans, with two recommended for bridge funding and re-application in Round 2.
  • The grantmaking team worked on recruiting a Senior Program Officer for the FDC, who will be the main point person for the FDC processes on staff.

Grants

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Grants approved in November 2012

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Participation support requests approved in November 2012

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Program updates

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  • The Flow Funding Pilot program, a grant-funded experiment in empowering individual Wikimedians to make (small) funding recommendations is about to begin. Learn more at the Flow Funding portal.
  • All current and past grants now also viewable in a set of sortable tables to get a good overview, at the new Grants:Table page.

US Cultural Partnerships

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  • Planning for upcoming meetings with Open Knowledge Foundation and Open Cultuur Data, in moving forward with efforts for sustainable Open GLAM US entity.
  • Coordination of upcoming Wikipedian in Residence positions and GLAM partnerships.

Wikipedia Zero

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  • Worked with volunteer developers at the Bangalore DevCamp to start supporting an important variant of the upcoming text messaging support.
  • SMS/USSD combination working and awaiting launch
  • Developing the SMS only version for carriers that cannot support USSD.

Human Resources

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HR completed the annual WMF employee engagement survey between September 26 and October 12, 2012, to understand the views of employees in areas critical to employee commitment. A total of 84 employees participated, representing a 66% response rate, which is considered good. Overall employee engagement is considered "very good" where 71% of employees responded favorably across the survey questions. The highest scores showed a strong commitment to the mission and purpose of Wikimedia, a desire to help one another, and to learn from the job. Lower scores and recommendations indicated a need for improvement in accountability and performance measures, organizational planning, better recruiting, and more efforts in recognizing strong performance.

HR also organized the first pilot staff orientation program for the Foundation, including modules hosted by different WMF staff. We ran it for a couple hours a day, over the course of a week. The modules included: WMF org structure, office orientation, wikis and practical knowledge, communications, finance, community structure, what the transition is like in moving from being a community member to being a WMF employee, and its challenges, orientation about the projects, legal orientation, open source/free culture orientation, a staff edit-a-thon, a phone call with community member and an international contractor (to have a sense of what the remote experience is like), and an article assignment. Many thanks to Lynette Logan, Philippe Beaudette, Matthew Roth, Tony Le, James Alexander, Ryan Kaldari, Michelle Paulson, Tomasz Finc, Arthur Richards, Phoebe Ayres, Oliver Keyes, and Maggie Dennis for their leadership on their respective orientation modules. These modules were all filmed, and are being edited for online distribution.

HR held a benefits meeting to help employees become aware of changes to their benefits. Because of our organizational size, we've had to move from small-group to large-group benefit plans, with few changes in the actual level of coverage available to our staff. We also completed a more informal staff characteristics and preferences survey to collect characteristics of staff and to get to know them better (such as international experience, where they've lived, and what percentage of our staff are Wikipedians), and will be releasing that data next month.

Staff Changes

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New Requisitions Filled
  • Quim Gil, Volunteer Engineering Coordinator (Engineering)
  • Juliusz Gonera, Software Developer – Mobile (Engineering)
  • Raymond Lui, Finance & Administration Assistant (Finance & Admin)
New Contractors
  • Robert Miller (Administration)
  • Nischay Nahata (Engineering)
  • Ian Poirier (Legal)
  • Naoko Sakurai (Community Advocacy)
  • Mike Wang (Engineering)
Contracts Extended
  • Sandra Hust
  • Stefan Petrea
  • Tanvir Rahman
  • Yuko Sakata
Contracts Ended
  • Kristina Baker
  • Kevin Gorman
  • Hisham Mundol
Department Movement
  • Patrick Reilly joins the Engineering Features team
New Posting
  • Legal Intern (Summer)

Statistics

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Total Requisitions Filled
November Actual: 129
November Total Plan: 163
November Filled: 3, Month Attrition: 1
YTD Filled: 30, YTD Attrition: 13
1 position canceled for FY
Remaining open positions to fiscal year end
44 (8 of which are on hold)

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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  • The first phase of the new space design for the WMF office is completed. Engineering now has new desks and space layout with additional improvements in process.
  • We have begun the process of our annual insurance renewals for risk management. Improving coverage for media and privacy liability is one of our key goals in this renewal.
  • With the departure of the Manager of Office IT, we have interim coverage for network and server issues being provided by Tech Ops. We have posted a position opening and are looking at the option of selecting a vendor or contractor to provide network and server support.
  • With the pending departure of our travel manager, we are enaged in a search for a new travel manager and are in the process of implementing a new travel services provider.
  • We welcome a new member of the Finance and Administration team - Raymond Lui.
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Contract Metrics

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  • 14 - submitted
  • 17 - completed

Trademark License Request Metrics

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  • 14 - submitted
  • 1 - approved
  • 7 - pending
  • 2 - denied
  • 1 - request withdrawn
  • 3 - moved to C&D queue

Litigation

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Internet Brands

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  • Summary: The federal district court in Los Angeles issued its written order on volunteer Ryan Holliday’s anti-SLAPP motion and motion to dismiss. A copy of the order is available here. In the order, the court noted that Internet Brands abandoned its federal Lanham Act claim. That claim was based on the factual allegation that the Foundation was operating a new travel wiki called “Wiki Travel Guide,” which Ryan showed to be incorrect. After being required to respond to Ryan’s motion, Internet Brands was forced to admit that the basis of its claim was primarily predicated on an assumption. Noting that this Lanham Act claim was the only claim supporting federal jurisdiction, the court dismissed the remainder of Internet Brands’ case and found Ryan’s anti-[[en:Strategic lawsuit against public participation|SLAPP motion to be moot.
    While we had hoped that the court would reach the merits of Ryan’s anti-SLAPP motion, the dismissal of the entire suit nonetheless represents a victory for Ryan and volunteer James Heilman (who was also named in the suit). We congratulate both of them on this result.
    Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is proceeding forward with its lawsuit against Internet Brands in San Francisco. Internet Brands has filed a demurrer (motion to dismiss), the hearing for which has been postponed to December 14. The court has issued a tentative ruling on that motion, which is available here. In the tentative ruling, the court indicates that it is inclined to rule against Internet Brands. We will send out an update after the hearing.

German Cases

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  • Summary: The Foundation successfully defended against two cases in Germany, where the Foundation was accused of failing to respect the rights of personality of two individuals as a result of content appearing on German Wikipedia. However, one of the cases is now currently under appeal.

Coming & Going

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  • Deputy General Counsel Kelly Kay is leaving the Foundation, effective December 7, 2012.
  • Contract attorney Kristina Baker left the Foundation.
  • Ian Poirier joined as a contract attorney to help with the workload.
  • Currently interviewing for community advocates from around the world to increase our understanding of different projects and find ways to better support them. Also interviewing for spring and summer legal interns, a new legal counsel role, and the deputy general counsel role.

Other Major Activities

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  • WMF received a major DMCA takedown request involving 59 images on Commons of sculptures by an artist named Claes Oldenburg. After exploring all possible options in favor of retaining the images, it was determined that we had to comply with the takedown notice. For more information, please see the statement to the community.
  • Maggie, Michelle, and Philippe all participated in the new employee orientation modules by each conducting their own training sessions on legal and community issues.
  • Domains/Trademark Opposition Wins - We won several domains from third party squatters and successfully opposed one trademark registration by a third party who was attempting to register the Wikipedia puzzle globe logo.
  • We worked with Creative Commons to ensure that the community’s interests are properly represented as they work through drafting of CC v.4 licenses.
  • Standardized grant agreements have been drafted and vetted and should be ready for use next week for the new Grantmaking and Programs Department.
  • Hosted a visit from Risker - got valuable community input on ongoing projects and arranged for brown bag so that attendees could get a unique community perspective.

Communications

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November’s communications work focused largely on production of this year’s Annual Report (to be launched in early December), support to the online fundraising team, and launch of the Wikimedia merchandise volunteer recognition program. No major issues or media stories around the projects broke in November.

Major announcements

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The Wikimedia Foundation launches ninth annual fundraiser to support Wikipedia and free knowledge (27 November 2012) [11]

Major Storylines through November

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Wikimedia kicks off its fundraiser (mid/late November 2012)

This year’s most successful fundraiser ever, launched with a significant jump in giving, resulting in unusually light media coverage. The simple and effective designs (currently lacking photography) haven’t caught the attention of mainstream media as in the past. Further coverage is expected as the campaign nears its goals, and around some proactive media outreach in December.

  • Wikipedia Begins Annual Fundraising Drive [12]
  • A Guide To Tech Charities On Giving Tuesday [13]
PR firm edits on prominent UK biz figures and brands (November 17)

The follow-up to an investigation from The Times about PR firm edits to articles about prominent businesses and clients generated considerable attention in November, predominantly in the UK media. A duo of Times reporters focused on allegedly paid edits and ‘clean up’ to the UK entrepreneur Alisher Usmanov, as well as a long list of prominent businesses and brands. PR industry veterans weighed in to defend industry practices vis a vis Wikipedia’s policies. Most stories directed criticism towards the PR industry rather than our contributors or projects.

  • Multinationals with something to hide? Wiki wipes exposed; Controversies, disasters and embarrassments were deleted or amended.[14]
  • Finsbury edited Alisher Usmanov's Wikipedia page [15]
  • “Public relations professionals should not directly edit Wikipedia” CIPR & PRCA insist, following RLM Finsbury editing Alisher Usmanov's entry [16]
Wikipedia adds HTML5 video support (November 8)

Significant coverage in tech blogs following the launch and implementation of our HTML5 video player. Largely positive posts and stories, although some critical observations that the project has been underway since 2008.

  • After Many Delays, Wikipedia Adds Video Support Today [17]
  • After a 5-year beta period, Wikipedia finally moves into the video era with an HTML5 player [18]
  • Wikipedia adds HTML5 video player, though no influx of vids just yet [19]

Other worthwhile reads

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Macleans.ca | Meet the man with 130,000 Wikipedia edits (November 29) [20]

Slate.com | Top Wikipedia Editors To Get Free Access to JSTOR. Be Jealous. (November 26) [21]

DailyDot | Top Wikipedia editors get free access to JSTOR academic journals (November 21) [22]

PopSci | Meet The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia (November 2) [23]

WMF Blog posts

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Fifty-two blog posts through November, including multilingual posts in Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French and German

A few highlights:

Language engineering news: Bugs fixed in Universal Language Selector, and a new IPA keyboard layout (November 30) [24]
Wikimedia India hosts Wikipedia women’s workshop in Mumbai (November 19) [25]
The FDC process: a milestone in sharing Wikimedia movement funds (November 15) [26]
Introducing Wikipedia’s new HTML5 video player (November 8) [27]
Wikimedia Foundation Profile: Garfield Byrd, Chief of Finance and Administration (November 1) [28]

Wikipedia Signpost

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The Wikipedia Signpost is a weekly community-written newsletter developed in the English Wikipedia, but describing trends and developments across the movement as well.

Media Contact

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https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#November_2012

Visitors and Guests

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Visitors and guests to the WMF office in November 2012:

  1. David Weir (independent consultant)
  2. Edward Griffin (Intivix)
  3. Jared Pickering (Intivix)
  4. Trevor Bolhler (Wikia)
  5. Mark Bünger (Lux Research)
  6. Dr. Usmani (Interactive Group, Pakistan)
  7. Dennis Weckel (Forte)
  8. Josep Nolla (Telenor)
  9. Bjørn Martin Worsøe (Telenor)
  10. Johanna Staaf (Telenor)
  11. Nicolay Nickelsen (Telenor)
  12. Dr. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani (Interactive Group)
  13. David Peters (exbrook)
  14. Anne Clin (Risker - enwiki Arbcom)
  15. Valerie Aurora (TAI)
  16. Naoko Sakurai (volunteer)
  17. Deborah Bezona (SML insurance agency)
  18. Christine Moellenberndt (volunteer)
  19. Herb Miles (SML)
  20. Mandy Lee (SML)
  21. Juan Riboldi (Ascent)
  22. Sowmyan Tirumurti (Director of Wikimedia India)
  23. Kelly Smith (Travel and Transport)
  24. Amanda Brock (Spark)
  25. Shannon Farley (Spark)
  26. Adrianne Wadewitz (Wikipedia Education Program - Community Member)
  27. Cindy Hawlet (AIG)
  28. Christina Drascudgee (AIG)
  29. Brendan Quinka (AIG)
  30. Dylan Hale (Cooley LLP)
  31. Liz Williams (Collab Zone)
  32. Liz Nichols (Brin Wojcicki Foundation)
  33. Rob Fetrestaley (Brin Wojcicki Foundation)
  34. Laura Hale (Wikimedia Australia)
  35. Robert Myers (Wikimedia Australia)
  36. Pete Hodgson (ThoughtWorks)
  37. Khali Young (ThoughtWorks)
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