Wikimedia Highlights, September 2011
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Combined highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for September 2011
Public Policy Initiative and Global Education Program
[edit]
In September, the Public Policy Initiative wrapped up after 17 months. Collaboratively, the team created a final report for the Stanton Foundation (awaiting financial summary) and documented achievements, best practices and lessons learned. Other team activities included: Overall project documentation for Chapters Report; last PPI Regional Ambassador trainings throughout the United States; wrapping up the project research components and presenting results on-wiki, in papers and at the end of the month in a final presentation to the rest of the staff at one of the Wikimedia Foundation's brown bag meetings. Additionally, we transitioned specific project activities to the new Global Education Team. With the end of the Public Policy Initiative, the contracts of three team members, Sage Ross, Amy Roth and Mishelle Gonzales, ended by convention. We thank them for their hard work and their commitment to our mission. Sage's, Amy's and Mishelle's involvement in the Public Policy Initiative was key in linking Wikipedia peer production with higher education. We wish them all the very best for their future.
Also in September, the new Global Education Program team worked on preparing the first "Global Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting" (October 25). This new monthly meeting is targeted at everybody (educators, students, Wikimedia chapters, individual volunteers) who is interested in outreach activities at educational institutions. The meeting aims at ensuring that best practices and lessons learned get shared across different countries. More information:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Education_Program_Metrics_and_Activities_Meeting
Ayush Khanna, who joined the Global Education Program team as a half-time contractor at the end of the month, will be in charge of providing quantitative data on our programmatic activities at universities around the globe.
The Global Education Program team also worked on preparing the start of a Wikipedia university initiative in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Supported by Sara Yap, Catalyst Project Associate for the Global Development team, the team embarked on developing a strategy for kicking-off a MENA Education Program in spring 2012.
Technology
[edit]- The deployment of protocol-relative URLs, paving the way for native HTTPS;
- Major progress by our new Internationalization & localization team;
- The deployment of our new mobile front-end, now the default mobile experience;
- The start of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to Wikimedia sites;
- The completion of the Google Summer of Code project;
- Ongoing preparation for the upcoming coding events in the USA, the UK, India and online;
- A revamped, and now maintained, mw:roadmap for Wikimedia engineering efforts.
Community
[edit]Jon Harald Søby transitioned into a Fellow position, focused on community translations [1] and long-time research fellows Steven Walling and Maryana Pinchuk transitioned into full time Community Organizer positions to focus 100% on turning around editor decline.
1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/27/announcing-community-fellow-jon-harald-soby/
Global Development
[edit]- Launch of a research project on Portuguese Wikipedia
- Preliminary work for launching projects in the MENA region is underway.
Data and Trends
[edit]- Global unique visitors for August:
- 422 million (+7.9% compared with July; +13.7% compared with the previous year)
- (comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release September data later in October)
- Page requests for September:
- 15.8 billion (+5,1% compared with August; +9.0% compared with the previous year)
- Report Card for August 2011: The report card is currently undergoing a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard.
Financials
[edit](Financial information is only available for August 2011 at the time of this report.)
- Financial information as of August 31, 2011
Revenue: $1,415,075
Expenses:
- Technology Group: $1,474,075
- Community/Fundraiser Group: $493,102
- Global Development Group: $552,953
- Governance Group: $183,732
- Finance/Legal/HR/Admin. Group: $921,318
Total Expenses: $3,625,273
Total surplus/(loss): ($2,210,198)
Revenue was ahead of plan at $1.4M due to an increase in donations.
Expenses were below plan at $3.6M actual vs. $4.5M plan. Expenses were below plan due to lower than plan expenditures in Capital Expenditures, Chapter Grants and other activities due to being only two months into the fiscal year.
Cash of $15.5M, which is six months of cash reserves at current spending levels.