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Wikimedia Foundation Report, August 2013

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Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of August (September 5, 2013)
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Global unique visitors for July:

492 million (-1.50% compared with June; +8.92% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release August data later in September)

Page requests for August:

23.91 billion (+12.29% compared with July; +31.47% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access, Wikidata and the Wikipedia portal page)

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

data currently under review
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)

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

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

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

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

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


Revenue $3,246,242
Expenses:
Engineering Group $1,206,978
Fundraiser Group $276,719
Grantmaking & Programs Group $233,032
Grants $151,787
Governance Group $50,035
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group $262,471
Finance/HR/IT/Admin Group $541,604
Total Expenses $2,722,626
Total surplus $523,616
  • Revenue for the month and year to date July is $3.24M versus plan of $1.00M, approximately $2.24M or 223% over plan.
  • Expenses for the month and year to date July is $2.72M versus plan of $3.43M, approximately $706K or 21% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenditures, internet hosting, legal fees, grant expenses, and travel expenses partially offset by higher payment processing fees that resulted from higher fundraising revenue.
  • Cash position is $39.78MM as of July 31, 2013.


Highlights

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Foundation staff report on their work at Wikimania

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From August 7 to August 11, Wikimedians from around the world came together in Hong Kong for this year's annual Wikimania conference, organized by Wikimedia Hong Kong in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Switzerland (see also this month's movement highlights). The keynote of Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner was titled "The Year in Review and the Year Ahead" (slides, video), and the schedule included many other presentations by WMF staff and contractors:

WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner presenting her Wikimania keynote
  • Steven Walling, Siebrand Mazeland, Diederik van Liere, Maryana Pinchuk, Howie Fung, Fabrice Florin, James Forrester (with Denny Vrandečić): "What is a product manager, and why does Wikimedia need them?" (abstract, slides)
  • Philippe Beaudette: "Working together, but separately: a gathering of functionaries" (workshop; abstract)
  • Arthur Richards; Siebrand Mazeland; James Forrester; Diederik van Liere: "Hacking our teams: Flexible ‘agile’ development at the WMF" (panel; abstract, slides)
  • Tilman Bayer: "Editor surveys: Taking the pulse of the community" (abstract, slides)
  • Siebrand Mazeland and others: "Ask the developers" (abstract)
  • Santhosh Thottingal, Niklas Laxström: "MediaWiki i18n getting data-driven and world-reusable" (abstract, slides)
  • Niklas Laxström, Amir Aharoni: "Multilingual Wikimedia Commons - What can we do about it?" (abstract)
  • Sumana Harihareswara, Guillaume Paumier, Quim Gil, Andre Klapper: "Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering" (abstract, notes)
  • Dario Taraborelli (submitted with Ryan Faulkner): "The UserMetrics API: Measuring participation in Wikimedia projects" (abstract, slides)
  • James Forrester, Roan Kattouw, Ed Sanders, Timo Tijhof (with Inez Korczyński): "VisualEditor: The present and future of editing wikis" (abstract, slides, extended slides, video)
  • Siko Bouterse, Heather Walls (with Jake Orlowitz): "Fun user experience is SRS BZNSS, and so can you" (abstract, slides)
  • Katy Love, Anasuya Sengupta (with FDC members): "Nobody knows, but everyone cares: How to submit an awesome application to the Funds Dissemination Committee" (panel and round-table discussion; abstract)
  • Asaf Bartov: "WMF's New Global South Strategy" (abstract, slides)
  • Diederik van Liere, Dario Taraborelli: "Datafying Wikimedia: Data products and services to empower our communities" (abstract)
  • Brandon Harris: "Flow: The future of collaboration" (abstract, slides)
  • Maryana Pinchuk: "Roundtable on Messaging and Discussions" (abstract, slides)
  • Jessie Wild (with Martin Rulsch): "Wikimania scholarships" (discussion; abstract)
  • Geoff Brigham, with the WMF legal team: "Discussing Our Legal Strategy Going Forward: A Talk with the WMF General Counsel" (abstract)
  • Luis Villa, Stephen LaPorte: "Licensing Trends in Open Culture, Open Data, and Open Source" (abstract, slides)
  • Pau Giner: "Improving the user experience of language tools" (abstract, slides)
  • James Forrester: "Improving 'admin tools'" - workshop (abstract)
  • Matthew Roth, Victor Grigas, Tilman Bayer (with Eddie Erhart): "Wikimedia storytelling: how we show the movement to the world" (panel; abstract)
  • Steven Walling and others from the E3 team: "Forget the tutorials, be bold! How one feature has attracted thousands of new editors" (abstract, slides)
  • Fabrice Florin: "Notifications: A new editor engagement tool" (abstract, slides)
  • Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ: "How to enhance your MediaWiki extensions with Echo notifications" (abstract)
  • Marc-André Pelletier: "Presenting the Tool Labs" (abstract)
  • Erik Moeller: "Ghosts of Wikis Yet to Come: Three Stories of Wikimedia's Future" (abstract)
  • Jon Robson, Maryana Pinchuk: "Wikipedia Mobile - The Trojan Horse. Why MediaWiki has a separate mobile site" (abstract)
  • Fabrice Florin: "Engaging users on Wikipedia" (abstract, slides)
  • Matthew Flaschen and the E3 team: "Make your user experience easy to learn: a guided tour" (abstract, slides)
  • Andre Klapper: "Improving MediaWiki quality: How everybody can help with bug report triaging" (abstract, slides)
  • Fabrice Florin: "Article Feedback: New forms of collaboration between readers and editors" (abstract, slides)
  • LiAnna Davis (with Mohammed Ouda and Aya Mahfouz): "Growing the Arabic Wikipedia through the Wikipedia Education Program" (abstract, slides)
  • Howie Fung: "A look into next year: WMF Product Roadmap" (abstract)

Pre-conference:

  • Various WMF Engineering staff took part in the Wikimania DevCamp (hacking days)
  • Rod Dunican, LiAnna Davis, Sophie Österberg, Frank Schulenburg: Various sessions at the Education Program Pre-Conference
  • Siko Bouterse, Heather Walls: "IdeaLab Brainstorm" (workshop; abstract)
  • Fabrice Florin, Rob Lanphier, Erik Moeller, Ryan Kaldari (with Andrew Lih): "Multimedia Roundtable" (abstract, slides)

Beyond these, Wikimedia Foundation staff and contractors also participated in various other panels and workshops, and gave lightning talks.

Students contributions to the Arabic Wikipedia, 2012-13

Wikipedia Education Program in the Arab World completes its third term

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The third term of the Wikipedia Education Program in the Arab World ended with strong results. The program began with a small pilot project at two universities in Egypt in spring 2012. It has now turned into a force on the Arabic Wikipedia, with students participating in the program in three countries, adding content to Wikipedia as part of their university coursework. Last term, students in Egypt, Algeria, and Jordan contributed 12.79 million bytes of content to the Arabic Wikipedia. That's more than double the 5.97 million bytes of the fall 2012 term.

HTTPS by default for logged-in users

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Following concerns over the privacy and security of Wikimedia users due to recent revelations about surveillance on the Internet, on August 28 the Foundation made changes so that now all logged-in users are, by default, accessing Wikimedia sites over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection. Users can turn this off in their preferences. More information can be found on Meta-wiki, in various languages.

Engineering

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

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/August
Department Highlights

Major news in August include:

VisualEditor

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In August, the VisualEditor team continued to work on this visual interface to edit wiki pages without markup, and met with the Wikimedia community at Wikimania in Hong Kong to discuss how to best improve it. The software saw three major updates this month, with other smaller updates to fix urgent issues. The focus of this work was on improving the stability and performance of the system, fixing a number of bugs uncovered by the community, and making some usability improvements.

Work also continued on Parsoid, the software that converts wikitext to annotated HTML behind the scenes of VisualEditor. The team continued to improve the compatibility with existing wiki markup, thanks to the feedback provided by users after VisualEditor was released in July. The infrastructure used for the conversion between formats received a much-needed overhaul, notably to improve performance by changing the storage back-end. Performance statistics are now recorded, which will make it easier to identify performance bottlenecks and catch regressions.

Editor engagement

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In August, the Notifications feature was added to Wikipedia in French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish. It was well received, particularly the ability to notify people by mentioning them in a discussion, and the ability to thank users for an edit. Notifications should be added to all Wikimedia sites in the coming months.

Development continued on the upcoming discussion system ("Flow"). New features were added to the prototype, notably the revision history and a moderation tool.

A few changes were made to the Article Feedback Tool on the English and French Wikipedias, like improvements to the opt-out tool. Feedback notifications have also been added, to let users know when useful feedback is given for a page they monitor. The article feedback tool will be made available to other wiki projects interested in testing it later this year.

This month, the Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) primarily focused on development for its next and final test of the Getting Started task suggestion system, a part of a project aimed at onboarding new Wikipedians. The team also worked on enhancements and bug fixes for the GuidedTour feature, such as adding the ability to customize default tour actions and better integration with VisualEditor.

Mobile

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In August, the Mobile Apps team released a new version of the Commons photo uploader app for iOS and Android. The interface of the iOS version was improved, while the Android version received incremental updates, such as better support for upload campaigns (like Wiki Loves Monuments). The team also started making plans for the next generation of the Wikipedia reader app, which will be more closely integrated with the mobile web site, to ensure that new features are always available through a web view, even where there isn't specific native support.

The team continued to plan the re-architecture of Wikipedia Zero, the program that allows free mobile access to Wikipedia on select carriers. They also analyzed HTTPS requirements in support of a push for greater usage of HTTPS across Wikimedia projects.

Last, the mobile editing feature on the mobile site continued to be improved. Bugs were fixed, and the feature show at the section level of articles was expanded. The first iteration of mobile notifications was also activated on wikis projects where Notifications are enabled.


Fundraising

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Major Gifts and Foundations

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  • ICANN donated $58,000.
  • We concluded our grant with the Stanton Foundation for VisualEditor and sent our final report to them.
  • There was a NYC fundraiser with Jimmy Wales on October 1st.

Online Fundraising

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Victor Grigas interviewing a Wikipedian at Wikimania
  • The fundraising team ran campaigns worldwide throughout August. Banners were displayed to 5% of readers for 1 impression per reader. The team continued to run A/B tests of banner messages, designs, and payment flows. In the month of August, approximately US$1.8 million was raised from 130,000 donors. For more information on testing, please see the 2013 fundraising page on Meta-wiki.
  • The fundraising team completed the handover of the Wikimedia Shop, now managed by contractor Juli Matthews, and is streamlining processes for order, fulfillment, and branding design.
  • Victor Grigas conducted several video interviews with Wikipedians at Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong.

Grantmaking

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Slides from the Global South Strategy presentation at Wikimania
Highlights
FDC Round 2 survey results (PDF)

Annual Plan Grants (FDC)

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  • At Wikimania 2013, Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) members hosted a session with entities considering an annual grant and other interested volunteers to discuss what makes a good proposal for an Annual Plan Grant.
  • Results of the 2012-2013 Round 2 process and cost-benefit surveys are published, and complement the 2012-2013 Review, and process improvements are being made in response to these results. Thank you to everyone who took the time to contribute to the surveys and process improvements.
  • FDC eligibility for 2013-2014 Round 1 continued during the month of August as entities who have submitted an LOI prepared to meet any outstanding or potential eligibility gaps listed on the eligibility status table and eligibility checklist in preparation of the upcoming due date for confirming eligibility on 15 September 2013. To prepare, FDC staff have held several IRC meetings and have reached out to each potentially eligible entity regarding next steps for achieving their positive eligibility steps.
  • The 2013-2014 Round 1 Proposal Form is now available on the FDC portal in preparation for the upcoming proposal submission due date on 1 October 2013.
  • FDC Staff visited several entities now receiving Annual Plan Grants: Wikimedia Österreich, Wikimedia Sverige, and Wikimedia Nederland. Thank you to all chapters, volunteers, staff, and community members who participated in these meetings or supported them.
  • The second quarter progress reports and one impact report were received and reviewed by FDC staff for completeness; a summary of these reports will be published in mid-September.

Project and Event Grants

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Grants funded in August 2013

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Reports accepted in August 2013

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Participation Support

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  • Plans are moving forward with the Learning & Evaluation team to gather feedback on this program and conduct analysis in September. The learnings will be used to make data-driven decisions about programmatic improvements; a redesign of the program based on the findings will begin in October.

Grants funded in August 2013

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Reports accepted in August 2013

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Individual Engagement Grants

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IdeaLab Brainstorm workshop at Wikimania
  • We launched an open call for round 2 proposals and new committee members. 11 volunteers have submitted their candidacy for the committee, and are currently being vetted for membership. Most round 1 members will also be returning to serve. The finalized round 2 committee will be announced in early September, and IEG proposals are due 30 September.
  • 7 IEGrantees attended Wikimania, sharing their experiences in talks like:
  • An IdeaLab Brainstorm session was held at Wikimania, generating lots of conversation and connections between attendees. 7 new ideas have been documented in the IdeaLab so far as a result.
  • Grantee Jeph Paul released the first live demo of his tool for visualizing edits.

Reports accepted in August 2013

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Grantmaking Learning & Evaluation

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Wikimania grantmaking session
Welcome new team member: Jonathan Morgan!
  • Jonathan has had a rich history working with the Wikimedia Foundation on various fronts, starting back in 2011 during the Wikimedia Summer of Research. Since then, he has been actively engaged in the broader Wikimedia research community through his own PhD research on WikiProjects as complex systems, and developing tools to support WikiProject-based collaboration. He participated in the former WMF Fellowships program, helping design and launch the Wikipedia:Teahouse.
  • We are thrilled to have Jonathan working with us on the Grantmaking Learning & Evaluation team, where he will use his research expertise to guide the fostering of an online grantmaking learning community and to evaluate the effectiveness of grantmaking streams.
A successful first grantee Learning Day was hosted after Wikimania in Hong Kong.
  • The Monday following Wikimania in Hong Kong, we hosted around 35 individuals from different grantmaking streams (including Individual Engagement, Annual Plan, Travel & Participation, and Project & Event) and each grantmaking committee, as well as staff from the Grantmaking and Program Evaluation teams at WMF. Conversation highlighted the ideals of the movement work that we should fund. We spent significant time working through an Annual Plan grant proposal case study in which we engaged from the perspectives of different stakeholders in the proposal process: WMF staff, FDC members, leadership of the submitting entity, and the broader Wikimedia community.
  • We left the time together with lots of interesting ideas for how to go forward as a learning community. We are working with our grantmaking partners on ways to encourage an online sharing community and plan similar useful events in the upcoming year.
  • Read the full summary of feedback from event.
Self-evaluation for grantmaking streams
  • Annual Plan Grants: Process feedback posted from FDC process 2012-2013 Round 2. Process changes resulting from the feedback received:
    • Revamping the FDC portal - Planned revamp before 2013-2014 Round 1
    • Clarifying eligibility requirements - requiring Letter of Intent from all entities submitting proposals; ongoing monitoring of the eligibility of applicants and compliance with current grants and agreements throughout the eligibility process
    • Simplifying language - using less jargon and including more definitions on proposal form, working with Program Evaluation & Design team on a glossary of terms
  • Created surveys for internal evaluation of Project & Event grants.
  • In progress: developing first Travel & Participation grants program analysis
  • In progress: developing IEG experience survey
Overview of Learning & Evaluation for WMF grantmaking

Brazil Catalyst Project

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Institutional Partnerships

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Data & Experiments

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  • Timeline: released a tool on Tool labs that connects events to data on the PT-WP (such as editors' growth, articles metrics growth, etc.). This timeline is intended to help the community visualize how certain events (such as changes to the software, changes to the Wikipedia policies/rules, campaigns, changes to features, etc.) may have impacted the overall picture of the community.
  • Geolocated edits data updated to July (showing the provenance of IP edits on PT-WP per country).
  • Published Monthly stats with month-to-month and last-year-month variations of the numbers of active and new editors on PT-WP.
  • Wikipedia Education Program students activity on PT-WP analysed.
  • In progress: Configuration of Portuguese Wikipedia data for automatic update on Tool labs (ptwikis), instead of on Limn, in order to facilitate regular updates and the work in partnership with the community.
  • In progress: Localization of Snuggle for the PT-WP.
  • In progress: Timeline: development of an on-wiki interface for adding events (such as software or policy changes) to the timeline, through the original events' page, facilitating changes to the timeline made by any editor (not requiring technological expertise). The feature is meant to allow automatic change on the timeline by including new events on the Wikipedia page.
  • In progress: Improvement and evaluation of Abuse Filters. This is part of the Antivandalism project and we've been supporting the community in enhancing tools to be used when emergency mode of CAPTCHA is definitely removed.
  • In progress: Bot for WikiProjeto Medicina: The bot to engage newcomers in specific WikiProjects has been approved. The first version of if is meant to be used for the Medicine/Health Wikiproject in a partnership with the Ministry of Health, bringing professionals from the Brazilian health system to edit Wikipedia.

Catalyzing Wikipedia - support community on online acitivites

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Education

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  • Installation and Translation of the education extension (and its documentation) for the education program submitted at Bugzilla
  • Configuration of a mailing list to support the creation of the network of professors, and exchange of experiences
  • Meetings with potential partners:
    • Meeting with Abril Educação: detailing the proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation, finalizing budget and discussing further agreements with other Brazilian organizations.
    • Meeting with the Ministry of Education: presenting the education program to the Brazilian government to discuss future support
    • Meeting with SERPRO (government IT company): presenting the education program and discussing the possibility of including modules of Wikimedia projects tutorials in Digital Inclusion distance learning courses coordinated by SERPRO.
    • Meeting with Bandtec/Colegio Bandeirantes: discussed partnership with a secondary school, through the School's technology project
    • Meeting with Universidade de Passo Fundo: discussed joining the program Wikipédia na Universidade, engaging in class assignments activities
    • Meeting with Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). There is a group of more than 5 professors willing to work with Wikimedia projects. Four of them are already collaborating with class assignments on Physics, Maths, German (translation) and Educational software. They are wiling to develop more activities as a university group with the support of WMF and the Brazil Catalyst program.
    • Meeting with Piraí Digital (a project in the first Brazilian city to deploy public wifi all over the city) coordinators to define and realize a workshop in September with teachers and local coordinators

Meet-ups and events

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  • Oona, Henrique and Celio attended Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong.
  • Rodrigo attended the CONSEGI IT conference in Brasilia, where some meetings with members of government ministries members and of other IT departments took place.

Program Development

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Highlights
  • One month after the first launch in India, Wikipedia Zero reports an increase of 12 million pageviews. The launch, which has been achieved with our partner Aircel in July, has been the biggest launch for the Wikipedia Zero team so far. Overall, Wikipedia Zero has shown a tremendous growth over the last six months, with monthly pageviews increasing from 3 million in February to 35 million in August.
  • In August, the Program Evaluation and Design Team designed and executed its first Evaluation Capacity Survey. Over 70 program leaders from different parts of world reported back on the current state of their evaluation capacity. The results, which will be published in September, will give an overview of how chapters, thematic organizations and unaffiliated volunteers across countries evaluated their programmatic activities in the past and how they're planning to grow their capacity in this area.
  • The third term of the Wikipedia Education Program in the Arab World wrapped up with strong results. What began with a small pilot at two universities in Egypt in spring 2012 has now turned into a force on the Arabic Wikipedia, with students participating in the program in three countries adding content to Wikipedia as part of their university coursework. Last term, students in Egypt, Algeria, and Jordan contributed 12.79 million bytes of content to the Arabic Wikipedia. That's more than double the 5.97 million bytes added by students in the fall 2012 term. Samir I. El-Sharbaty, one of the Wikipedia Ambassadors and former student of the program, achieved Featured Article status for the article George I of Great Britain.
  • Thanks to the Analytics Team's new WikiMetrics tool, we now have data on the performance of students in the Wikipedia Education Program U.S. and Canada from spring 2013. They added 7.4 million bytes of content. That brings the total amount of high-quality content added by the U.S. and Canada program to the English Wikipedia after six terms to 43.4 million bytes – or the equivalent of 17 War and Peaces.

Wikipedia Zero

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Slides from the Wikipedia Zero update at the September 5 metrics meeting
  • The impact of the Wikipedia Zero launch with Aircel in India is the largest to date. It added 12.0 million pageviews to the overall pageviews of Wikipedia Zero, which grew from 19.6 million in July to 34.9 million in August. Pageviews also grew strongly in Saudi Arabia (from 4.6 million to 7.3 million), and Pakistan (from 2.1 to 3.1 million).
  • Overall pageview growth is more than 1000% over the last six months, driven by new operator launches (3 million to over 35 million pageviews per month). We're now in 17 countries through six group level carrier partnerships covering 490M mobile subscribers (290M launched) – and growing.
  • Carolynne Schloeder joined as Director, Mobile Programs. Carolynne has more than 20 years of experience in the mobile and online business. Her hiring is part of an increased investment in Wikipedia Zero and mobile in general. Carolynne will be responsible for coordinating all phases and aspects of product development, the launch process and ongoing management of Wikipedia Zero. She will create a strategy for mobile programs and then lead and execute this strategy through strong collaboration with internal stakeholders and external partners.
  • At Wikimania in Hong Kong, Kul reviewed Wikipedia Zero's growth in Africa and initial findings from primary research conducted in Africa. Dan presented our Wikipedia via Text (USSD/SMS) solution to reach more people in Africa that use feature phones.

Wikipedia Education Program

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Presentation slides about the Education Program from the metrics meeting for August
Global
  • Nearly 30 Wikimedians gathered for a pre-conference at Wikimania focused on developing educational programs. Representing more than 20 countries, the participants discussed challenges, solutions, and plans for educational efforts in their countries. Representatives from Namibia, the U.K., Germany, and the Wikimedia Foundation led sessions on fears, best practices, challenges, working with institutions, reaching out to different target groups, and program evaluation, among other topics.
  • We squashed some bugs and made minor improvements to the Education Program extension.
  • Talks are currently being executed and planned with the 53 educational efforts going on around the world, to gather deeper and more accurate information about their efforts.
  • Steps are being taken towards a global education cooperative by initiating and keeping dialogues with global partners who are undertaking educational programs and who are capable of having this on their agenda.
  • General information of the global situation of education has been collected through meetings with UNESCO and WWF.
  • More specific academic information of the status of academics in Sweden, Europe and the rest of the world has also been collected as to take into account when looking at the education programs around the world.
United States/Canada Program
  • Professors who will be teaching with Wikipedia in the Fall 2013 semester have begun preparing their Wikipedia assignments and creating Course Pages.
  • Ambassadors have been working with professors to consult on their assignment design and help them create Course Pages.
  • We released the numbers for the program over the past 3 years: students have added 43.4 million bytes to English Wikipedia.
  • Students have begun completing the online training for students for the Fall 2013 semester.
  • We continued verifying and analyzing data for our English Wikipedia plagiarism research project.
Arab World Program
  • Tighe and LiAnna traveled to Amman after Wikimania for the Wikipedia Education Program Arab World meeting in Amman, hosted by Isra University. Six volunteers from Egypt (two professors and four students) and Faris participated in the two day meeting and end of term celebration at Isra University. Two Jordanian Wikipedians also joined the group. Photos: Commons:Category:First Celebration Conference, Jordan-August 2013
  • The Arabic version of the Online Training for Professors, Ambassadors and students should be available before the start of the term in late September.
  • New Arabic brochures are being finalized and will be printed in Egypt for the new term. These resources will complement the "Welcome to Wikipedia" brochures that are already available in Arabic.
  • The Education Extension is being translated and should be available for the upcoming term on the Arabic Wikipedia.
  • Tighe and Faris are planning a visit to King Saud University in late October to formalize their participation in the Wikipedia Educaiton Program. A visit is also planned to the King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences to see about potential contributioons with a medical/health focus.
  • Tighe and Faris are planning a week long visit to Jordan following Saudi Arabia to do a workshop for new professors and Wikipedia Ambassadors. They will also meet with professors individually to discuss their plans for the semester. Additional meetings with other professors and organizations will be arranged to discuss future participation and strategy.
  • Tighe and Faris are speaking with two contacts in Algeria to look at options for continuing Wikipedia Education Program efforts in the country.
Communications

Program Evaluation and Design

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Dinner after the Program Evaluation & Design Meetup at Wikimania
  • PE&D participated in a number of events at Wikimania 2013, which was the first time the PE&D team had appeared at Wikimania since the team formed:
    • At the Education Program Pre-Conference (see also above), Frank gave a presentation about the PE&D team and concept, and our missions and how we can support community members and chapters doing the education program.
    • A Program Evaluation & Design Meetup was held in the evening during Wikimania. The team hosted over 20 community members from around the world, including many who were at the Budapest workshop, to provide them updates, deliverables, and to touch base about evaluation. Dinner was sponsored by WMF afterwards, which allowed for continued community building.
    • Learning Day post-conference event. The entire team attended, participating as support for the Grantmaking Learning & Evaluation team who organized the inspiring day of learning. The team also participated in facilitating break out sessions and were able to share their team mission and goals with program leaders from around the world who attended the day.
    • PE&D shared a table with Learning & Evaluation at Wikimania, fielding questions and concerns from community members from around the world and spreading the news of the teams formation and team mission through postcards, social media, networking and session participation.
  • Facebook group launched
    • After an informal community survey, PE&D launched a Facebook group which has over 70 members and an active community being formed around program evaluation. Anyone can join!
  • First Google Hangout Held
    • The team held their first Google Hangout, and participants were guided through a step by step process of how to use WikiMetrics as an evaluation tool. A follow-up Hangout is scheduled for September 6.
  • Program Evaluation Portal progresses to October 1 launch.
    • Sarah, Community Coordinator, has been taking the lead alongside Jonathan Morgan, from Grantmaking Learning & Evaluation, to create a shared portal space which will launch in October on Meta, replacing the current Meta page maintained by the team.
  • Evaluation Capacity Survey closes; results are next
    • PE&D designed and executed a survey, which ran for two weeks, and surveyed over 70 program leaders from the movement regarding their capacity to evaluate – what they have done, what they haven't done, why, and wht they want to do regarding evaluation. Results will be shared publicly in the upcoming weeks, and will allow PE&D to have a better understanding of where the movement is at regarding evaluation, and will also allow the team to see how they can support the movement with tools, resources and communications.
  • PE&D was covered in the Journal on Meta and on the Wikimedia blog this past month:

Human Resources

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HR has continued to work on bringing on new employees and contractors, and supporting the search for the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. It's been a busy month in terms of moving to the 6th floor, planning for the AllHands meeting in September, and participating at Wikimania. We launched a new commuter flex plan and benefits website, and filed our second round of required government filings that describe our demographics to them.

Staff Changes

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New Requisition Filled
  • Carolynne Schloeder, Director of Mobile Programs (Programs)
Conversions
  • Jonathan Morgan, Evaluation Analyst (Grantmaking)
  • Timo Tijhof, Software Engineer – Features (Engineering)
New Legal Intern
  • Manprit Brar
New Contractors
  • Renee Bracey Sherman (continuing as Contractor for Fundraising)
  • Akshata Metha (Human Resources)
  • Sucheta Ghoshal (Engineering)
Contracts Extended
  • Amir Aharoni (Engineering)
  • Michael Guss (Administration)
  • Limayli Huguet (Administration)
  • Faidon Liambotis (Engineering)
  • Kirsten Menger-Anderson (Engineering)
  • Stefan Petrea (Engineering)
  • Michael Ray (Administration)
  • Sam Reed (Engineering)
  • Janet Renteria (Administration)
  • Santhosh Thottingal (Engineering)
Departures
  • Renee Bracey Sherman (continuing as Contractor for Fundraising)
  • Zack Exley
  • Amit Kapoor
  • CT Woo
  • Peter Youngmeister
Contracts Ended
  • Jennifer Bloom
  • Matthew Collins
  • Timothy Sandole
  • Brian Wolff
New Postings
  • Software Engineer - Editor Engagement
  • Software Engineer - Editor Engagement Experimentation
  • Legal Intern (Spring)
  • RFP - VP of Engineering (Search Firm Engagement)
  • User Experience Designer
  • Senior Software Engineer | Multimedia

Statistics

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Total Requisitions Filled
August Actual: 150
August Total Plan: 174
August Filled: 3, Month Attrition: 5,
YTD Filled: 12, YTD Attrition: 7
Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end
43

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 Business Office has begun work with KPMG on our annual audit. The audit report is scheduled to be presented to the Audit Committee at its September 19th meeting.
  • Completed financial review of FDC Q2 reports.
  • Consolidated Engineering on the 3rd floor of the New Montgomery building with a new space layout to accommodate the growth in Engineering.


Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department

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Contract Metrics

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  • Submitted : 14
  • Completed : 19

Trademark Metrics

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  • Submitted : 11
  • Approved : 2
  • Pending : 8
  • Approval not needed: 2

Domains Obtained

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(none)

Coming & Going

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  • We welcomed Manprit Brar (Michigan State Law) as a new intern on the team.
  • Intern Matthew Collins (Columbia) left us - we wish him luck in his last year at CLS!

Other Activities

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The new Wikivoyage logo
Presentation slides about the privacy policy draft rollout

Communications Report, August 2013

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Slides from the metrics meeting presentation about some results from the 2012 editor survey

Wikimania 2013 took place in August - the major communications effort of the year. This year's Wikimania in Hong Kong was a major success from a media and visibility standpoint. The WMF communications team worked closely with the local organizing team to manage dozens of media visits and interviews. The team also showcased their work in four events at Wikimania, at a panel on Wikimedia storytelling, a presentation on designing fun user experiences, a presentation on editor surveys and a workshop about the IdeaLab.

Major announcements

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Wikimedia Foundation announces 2013–14 Board of Trustees and elected officers at Wikimania in Hong Kong (8 August 2013)

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met immediately before the kick-off of Wikimania, carrying out an important selection process and naming new officers.

Wikimania Hong Kong 2013 press conference announcement (5 August 2013)

An invitation to local and international press to take part in the opening ceremonies and press conference of Wikimania 2013.

Major Storylines through August

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Wikimania brings global Wikimedians together in Hong Kong (August 9 to 11)

The annual Wikimania conference brought together nearly a thousand Wikimedians from all over the world to meet, discuss, and build the Wikimedia projects. This year's event garnered major coverage from outlets around the world. Global and regional media based in Hong Kong covered the event, providing mostly positive-tone coverage. This Wikimania also saw some of the first major involvement from China-based media outlets. Coverage ranged from stories about Jimmy Wales' keynote and comments about Edward Snowden/PRISM and issues around censorship in China, to the gender gap on Wikipedia, the history of Wikimedians in Hong Kong, and the wide range of topics presented in sessions.

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1295545/jimmy-wales-calls-wikimedians-fix-broken-journalism
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/08/09/wikipedia-co-founder-urges-vigilant-journalism/
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/498601/20130813/wikipedia-china-censorship-tiananmen-massacre.htm
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/wikimania-2013-whats-next-wikipedia
http://www.hkej.com/template/dailynews/jsp/detail.jsp?dnews_id=3783&cat_id=3&title_id=619748
'Listen to Wikipedia' continues to gain attention (early to late August)

WMF staffer Stephen LaPorte's 'Listen to Wikipedia' (http://blog.hatnote.com/post/56856315107/listen-to-wikipedia) gathered significant attention on blogs and mainstream media in July and August of this year. The tool produces a musical analysis of live activity on Wikipedia. Media and bloggers have enjoyed writing about and promoting the service, frequently suggesting it's a highly meditative way to immerse oneself into our global knowledge project.

http://www.techtree.com/content/news/4382/listen-wikipedia-turns-edits-music.html
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/listen-to-wikipedia-make-music-in-real-time
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/9/4607240/fall-asleep-to-the-sound-of-wikipedia

Other worthwhile reads

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India’s Indigenous Languages Drive Wikipedia’s Growth | TechCrunch | August 6
ROM gathers ‘e-volunteers’ for a Wikipedia edit-a-thon Friday | August 14
Israel’s latest invention: Free hi-res aerial photos for all | August 18

WMF Blog posts

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Blog.wikimedia.org ran 25 posts in August 2013. Six posts were multilingual, including Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Japanese, Kazakh, Russian, Spanish. Some highlights:

Media Contact

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Media contact through August 2013 https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#August_2013

Wikipedia Signpost

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

Visitors and Guests

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Visitors and guests to the WMF office in August 2013:

  1. Matthew Gaba (Google Payments)
  2. Linda Lam (Johnson & Dugan)
  3. Monica Ortega (Johnson & Dugan)
  4. Joe Sutherland (Volunteer: User:foxj)
  5. Jim Cubinar (Sports Club LA/SF)
  6. Ohad Gilberg (KPMG)
  7. Linda Lam (J&D)
  8. Angela Hill (Bay Area News Group)
  9. Peter Meyer (WMPC)
  10. Wendy Wilson (ADP)
  11. Leslie Lipari (BDE)
  12. Chris Cavanaugh (CCS Consulting)
  13. Lipo Ching (Mercury New)
  14. Leila Zia (Stanford University)
  15. Kelly Kolstad (KPMG)
  16. Sizhe Liu (KPMG)
  17. Valerie Aurora (TAI)
  18. Frank Jiang (CCTV1)
  19. Sun Zengtian (Chief Director, CCTV2)
  20. Li Yahui (Director, CCTV2)
  21. Liang Meng (Director, CCTV2)
  22. Yu Chen (Consultant of Interview, CCTV2)
  23. Nancy Rose (KPMG)
  24. Karen Cordero (KPMG)
  25. Robert Brownstone (Fenwick & West)
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