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Wikimedia Foundation Report, February 2013

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Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of February (March 7, 2013)
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Global unique visitors for January:

488.5 million (+3.37% compared with December; +1.31% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release February data later in March)

Page requests for February:

21.8 billion (-2.1% compared with January; +20.2% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

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

84,848 (+8.60% compared with December / +2.03% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

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

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

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

(Financial information is only available for January 2013 at the time of this report.)

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

Revenue $33,756,118
Expenses:
Engineering Group $7,393,053
Fundraiser Group $2,223,577
Grantmaking & Programs Group $2,617,926
Governance Group $413,747
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group $1,818,707
Finance/HR/Admin Group $3,249,731
Total Expenses $17,716,741
Total surplus/(loss) $16,039,377
  • Revenue for the month of January is $2.84MM vs plan of $276K, approximately $2.56MM or 927% over plan.
  • Year-to-date revenue is $33.76MM vs plan of $30.19MM, approximately $3.57MM or 12% over plan.
  • Expenses for the month of January is $2.26MM vs plan of $4.13MM, approximately $1.87 or 45% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, timing of FDC grants disbursement, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and outside contract services.
  • Year-to-date expenses is $17.72MM vs plan of $21.90MM, approximately $4.18MM or 19% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, timing of FDC grants disbursement and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.
  • Cash position is $41.47MM as of January 31, 2013.


Highlights

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The Wikimedia Foundation's legal team announced a settlement in the legal proceedings between the Foundation and Internet Brands, relating to issues stemming from the creation of Wikivoyage, our community’s newest free knowledge project.

Last year, Internet Brands (owners of a for-profit wiki-based travel project) sued two Wikimedians involved in supporting the travel wiki project. The Foundation supported the legal defense of the volunteers and the court ultimately dismissed Internet Brands’ lawsuit.

The Foundation also went on the offensive and filed its own separate lawsuit against Internet Brands seeking a declaration from the court that Internet Brands had no proper basis to block the travel wiki project. That suit was resolved in an out of court settlement on February 14, 2013. In that settlement, Internet Brands released the Foundation and Wikivoyage e.V. (the German non-profit organization who worked hard to make the travel project a success) from all claims related in any manner to the creation and operation of the travel wiki project. In return, the Foundation agreed to dismiss its suit.

Screenshot of the new mobile watchlist

Mobile Watchlist available

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Facilitating contributions to Wikipedia on mobile devices is an important goal for the Foundation's mobile team. As one of the first results of these efforts, mobile Wikipedia users are now able to log into their account, and to view and modify their watchlist. On the mobile version, the star symbol for the watchlist is shown to all users, to encourage them to log in or create an account. Experienced contributors can use the watchlist as usual: To track changes to the selected pages and fix problems if necessary. But to make the watchlist more newbie-friendly, the mobile version also offers a full view of all selected pages, which can function as a reading list.

Language Engineering team attends open source conferences in India

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The Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team participated in two conferences in Pune, India: GNUnify 2013, a major open source conference, and the Second Open Source Language Summit, co-organized by the Foundation with Red Hat. The team aims to make Wikipedia a website that can be used by anyone on the planet in their own language. India's many different languages make it a natural location for the team to see the effect of their work. At the Language Summit, the engineers from the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated with attendees from Red Hat, KDE, Google and other groups. The work areas included the following:

  • Input methods (enabling typing in a certain language), bringing the number of supported languages to 140.
  • Translation tools, including a demonstration of the new design and features for the translation editor in MediaWiki's Translate extension
  • The "Language Coverage Matrix", a detailed overview of language support in different projects and platforms (with 285 languages currently supported by Wikimedia, and more than 100 in the Fedora Linux distribution)


Engineering

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

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/February

Major news in February include:

VisualEditor

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VisualEditor is on schedule to become the default editor for Wikimedia users by July 2013. The alpha version of the VisualEditor on the English Wikipedia and mediawiki.org was updated twice, adding support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 9 and above), improving the support for multiple languages, preparing the backend for upcoming features and fixing several issues reported by the community. Software engineer and Commons contributor Ed Sanders joined the team to work on the VisuaEditor data infrastructure.

In the backend, Parsoid is going through intense activity focusing on performance improvements. New contributor volunteer contributor C. Scott Ananian improved its performance by switching the DOM library from JSDom to Domino. He also improved image handling and contributed numerous other patches. The team wrote a blog post explaining the technical challenges.

User notifications in the new "Echo" system

Editor engagement

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Brandon Harris presenting the "Flow" project (slides)

The Notifications project (codenamed Echo) is preparing its beta release to English Wikipedia by the end of March. This new set of features, already enabled at mediawiki.org, was summarized for the Wikimedia community through a blog post. New features are being developed: bundling notifications, dismissing types of notifications and defining user preferences.

Article Feedback v5 (AFT5) is now feature complete, and a new release is being prepared for interested Wikimedia projects. English Wikipedia will use it as an optional feature, while French and German Wikipedia projects are planning to enable it for all articles. The new features include simpler moderation tools, better filters, new feedback link, auto-archive and discuss on talk page. We posted a usability study report about the effectiveness of the new moderation tools.

The Editor Engagement Experiments team continued testing Guided tours as part of the onboarding new Wikipedians experiences currently enabled on English Wikipedia. GuidedTour extension was enabled on Wikimedia Commons and six Wikipedias (including French, German, and Dutch). See also the slides from the monthly Metrics and Activities meeting. The GettingStarted extension is being enhanced to include a wider variety of task types offered to new editors.

Mobile

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Mobile web uploads functionality went out of beta and is now enabled in all Wikimedia projects. All registered users have now the ability to upload and add images to articles lacking them. We also explored two new upload workflows: adding a call to action to articles that appear in the Nearby and Watchlist view, and allowing users to quickly see articles near them that may need an image. Lastly, we began collaborating with the Fundraising team to enable CentralNotice on the mobile web, giving us the ability to deliver targeted banners to mobile users.

The new Commons app beta for Android and iOS got a first wave of users (installation instructions) and feedback, leading to many updates during the month. The Android app is in Google Play. iOS users need to go through a process for testers until the app is stable and available at the Apple App Store.

Fundraising

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"What's a Love Dart?" video for Valentine's Day

Major Gifts and Foundations

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  • Received a $250,000 anonymous gift
  • Received a $50,000 gift from Graham Weston

Annual Fundraiser

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  • The fundraising team began testing in February in various languages and countries that were not included in the year-end 2012 campaign. Nearly $2 million USD was raised from this testing in the month of February. For additional details, please see the Fundraising 2013 page on Meta
  • The fundraising tech team implemented new local payment methods for various countries that were not included in the year-end 2012 campaign.
  • Produced "What's a Love Dart?", a short video interview with Wikipedian Susan Hewitt about the article 'Love Dart', that she helped to write. The video was emailed to 150,000 U.S.-only donors on Valentine's Day. It was designed to educate viewers that they can write Wikipedia articles. The video received many positive responses. One example: "I found the video to be quite engaging, and the people in it utterly delightful. Quite truthfully, I haven't a clue how Wikipedia "works." I've known it was non-profit and largely volunteer... And, I donated because I've felt guilty not donating based on how much I use it as a resource. But, I'm fully ignorant of how articles get into Wiki and the degree of collaboration that it takes to refine them. So, these videos that give me glimpses into the people and the process are fascinating..."


Grantmaking and Programs

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Department Highlights
  • Individual Engagement Grants committee forms and request for round 1 proposals closes. Decisions for the first round will be announced by the end of March.
  • FDC staff confirms eligibility and prepares for 2012-2013 Round 2 proposal deadline on 1 March.
  • Siko Bouterse takes the lead on the Participation Support Program (previously run by Asaf Bartov).

Strategic Goals Metrics

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Metric Value MoM MoM% Chart
Global South Active Editors (5+ edits in main namespace) 15.8k +6 +0.0% Increase [1]

Grantmaking

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Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

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Katy Love presenting about the FDC round 2 (slides)
  • WMF announces eligibility for 2012-2013 Round 2 of funding.
  • FDC staff prepares for 2012-2013 Round 2 proposal deadline on 1 March.
  • Proposal form and hubpage templates are updated for the second round; policy documents and Frequently Asked Questions page are updated to reflect current policy and relevant dates.

WMF Grants approved in February 2013

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WMF Grant Reports accepted in February 2013

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Participation Support requests approved in February 2013

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Individual Engagement Grants

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Siko Bouterse presenting on Individual Engagement Grants (slides)

Fellowships

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Programs

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Brazil

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Institutional Partnerships
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A research on possible partners for the Wikimedia Foundation Brazil Catalyst Program has been carried out since October. This is part of the narrowing focus strategy and implies the Brazil Catalyst program is to shift into the grantmaking model.

Ação Educativa and Coletivo Digital were considered the most likely institutions for the Wikimedia Foundation to set up an institutional partnerhsip and host the development of the Catalyst project in Brazil. Anasuya Sengupta, consultants from Brazil and two community volunteers visited those institutions during her trip to Brazil. The meetings were good and clarifying. The results can be checked here:

Next steps include: developing a medium term strategy with partners and community and Skype meetings to make final decisions and define terms and governance of this partnership.

Hirings and positions
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  • Arriving: Hiring and onboarding of Henrique Andrade and Jonas Xavier
  • Leaving: Everton announced he’ll be leaving WMF for Open Knowledge Foundation soon. We’re working on the transition (he’ll be working part time for WMF until May or June) and on the opening of the job position. More in March.
Analysis
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Data & Experiments
  • Data analysis: Comparison year-over-year from 2009 to 2012. The Portuguese Wikipedia is still seeing a decrease in editors, active editors and edits, but the descrease in 2012 was lower than in 2011. We may be reverting the decrease trend (except for very active editors), little by little, but it’s hard to say yet. One more year is key to analyze it.
Staff & Community work
  • Henrique’s and Jonas’ onboarding: access to data, tools, Toolserver, guidance on the use of them, how tos, introducing to people, sharing plans, targets etc. Both worked on a draft execution detailed plan to be published and discussed by the community.
  • IRC with community: agenda covered Toolserver-Wikimedia Labs transition, methodologies to work on measures in Wikipedia, data portal (ideas, objectives, structure and target), demand for data on editors and edits per regions.
Workshop Surveys
  • Creation of survey forms to be sent to every participant of offline activities developed by us and by the community.
Education
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Partnerships with universities
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  • FGV SP (Getulio Vargas Foundation): group of professors developing a methodology in collaboration aiming at the second semester of 2013. Professors plan to have class assignment activities as well as a group of students who will be working throughout the semester on Wikipedia.
  • UGF - Gama Filho University: partnership with the coordination of translation courses post graduation. Great part of their students are in their e-learning/distance learning program. Professors in the course are expected to assign students with translations of Wikipedia articles in English and Spanish into Portuguese. Oona and Everton have recorded a video interview in the University with Sanchez (the coordinator), to invite students to participate in the program and engage in Wikipedia activities. Activities will start in April.
  • UFBA - Federal University of Bahia: Presentation to professors and to the university publisher: potential involvement in the Education program and potential partnership on Wikibooks, Wikisources and Commons through open educational resources.
Class assignments
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  • Everton contacted professors who will continue the program in their courses: Iara (Faculdades Integradas Rio Branco), Rafael (UFRGS), Yury (UFES), Rubens (UNESP), Maria Paula (UNESP), Sanchez + 4 professors (UGF), Regina (USP), and to be finalized during this semester: Edivaldo (UFRJ), Juliana (UNIRIO), Viktor (UFF), Ricardo (UFPR), Leni (UFES)
Medicin Wikiproject
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  • Bot: Jonathan has finalized the bot to invite new contributors to edit the Medicin Wikiproject and Everton submitted the request for approval by the Portuguese community. Jonas has worked on final developments customizing categories and criteria for trigger.
Community and High School
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  • Making bridges between and engaging in conversation with 2 high school teachers who looked for WMF and community volunteers who are developing a project to be deployed in high schools.
Meet-ups
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  • Digitalia 2013 (Jan/Feb): Digital Culture debate and Wikipedia editing workshop with 20 new editors. Usuário:Eduardofeld led the workshop and has adopted 10 new users. Oona and Everton organized, promoted and led the activities on the mission of Wikimedia projects. Oona was also one of the speakers in the opening session (pictures).
  • Wiki meetup in Bahia: participation of 3 editors from Bahia and one editor from Natal, who adopted 10 new users from the Workshop to mentor them.
  • 2 Wiki meetups in São Paulo: Feb 02 (fully community driven), and Feb 23 (on the occasion of Anasuya’s visit).
Slides from the quarterly review meeting for Wikipedia Zero

Mobile

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  • Launched Wikipedia Zero in a new country -- Botswana -- with Orange.
  • We've started testing with Vimpelcom for an upcoming launch in March.
  • Made Improvement to the partner dashboard which tracks Wikipedia Zero usage
  • Kul Wadhwa & Amit Kapoor traveled to Barcelona, Spain to attend Mobile World Congress to meet with many current and potential partners. The trip also involved attending talks on mobile usage in developing countries and investigating potential pilots for Wikipedia's USSD/SMS (text) service.
  • Kul also wrote a blog post that was jointly posted on our funder's site -- the Knight Foundation -- that explains our mobile strategy and how we will use their grant to accelerate our mobile programs: "Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most"
  • The Wikipedia Zero team held its quarterly review meeting. Minutes are available.

Global Education

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Slides from Sage Ross' presentation about the Education Program MediaWiki extension

Highlights:

  • Fall 2012 data showed students in WMF-run programs contributed 12.1 million bytes to Wikipedia, putting us on track for our goal of 25 million bytes in 2012-13.
  • More than 350 students in the U.S. and Canada program have completed the online student training, at en:WP:STUDENT, so far. That means half of the students who have created user accounts and signed up on course pages thus far have completed an online training about how to edit Wikipedia.
  • So far, 60 courses are using the Education Program Extension on the English Wikipedia.
  • Planning is underway to kick off a pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in Jordan.
U.S. professor shares student experiences
"New Media and Development Communications," Columbia University, Fall 2012

Anne Nelson, a professor from Columbia University participating in the Wikipedia Education Program United States, contributed a post to the Wikimedia Foundation blog last week on her experiences with the program. Many of her students are English as a second language learners, and she asked those students to contribute to Wikipedia in both their native languages and English, leading to a unique multilingual learning experience for both Anne and her students. Read more of her reflections on the project.

Spanish Wikipedia's art coverage grows thanks to professor

Lila Pagola, a professor at the National University of Villa María in Argentina, started teaching with Wikipedia back in 2007. The lack of good information on the Spanish Wikipedia on topics related to art, her specialty, spurred her to work with her students to add articles on Latin American photography to Wikipedia, and she's been hard at work using Wikipedia in her classroom ever since. Read about her project in Argentina.

Swedish program shares learnings

Sophie Österberg, the education program leader in Sweden, contributed a long post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog talking about her experiences so far as she has been having workshops with professors and launching the Wikipedia Education Program in Sweden, Wikipedia i utbildning. Sophie's post explains some of the mistakes she has made, and what she has learned from them. Her post encourages people worldwide to share learnings so we can ensure we are not repeating mistakes in different geographic regions. Read her post.

Egyptian student becomes active Wikipedia editor

Walaa Abdel Manaem, a master's student in Spanish at Cairo University, learned how to edit Wikipedia through the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program -- and shortly after she started translating articles from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia, Walaa was hooked. Less than one year later, Walaa has more than 8,500 edits on the Arabic Wikipedia. She's created 68 articles, and is steadily climbing the list of the 100 most active editors on the Arabic Wikipedia. She's also assisting the education program as a Campus Ambassador at Cairo University. Read more about Walaa's experiences.

Students in Greece add photos to Commons

Mina Theofilatou, an instructor at Argostoli Evening High School in Kefalonia, Greece, wrote a post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog explaining her project to add photographs to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository project. Mina and her students have embarked on two projects: one to catalog edible species on the island of Kefalonia, and one to photograph every village on the island. Learn more about Mina's project by reading the blog post.

Teaching assistant works to improve Arabic Wikipedia

Doaa Seif, a teaching assistant at Ain Shams University's faculty of Al-Alsun, is an active Wikipedia Ambassador in the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt. Doaa was featured on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog in a post explaining her desire to improve the availability of information on the Arabic Wikipedia. The two courses that Doaa is a teaching assistant for both participated in the Egypt program last term, and she's also organized workshops teaching students how to edit. Read the profile on Doaa.

Program leaders invited to workshop in Milan

Wikimedia chapter members and other volunteer leaders who are already running education programs in countries around the world are invited to attend the first Education Program Leaders Workshop, aimed at building a global community to share learnings and help each other overcome challenges. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Wikimedia Chapters Meeting in Milan, Italy, on April 18. If you are a program leader, you're encouraged to check out this page for more information.

Farewell, Annie!

Annie Lin, who's been with the Wikipedia Education Program since its beginning in 2010, left the Wikimedia Foundation on February 22 to pursue other opportunities. The entire Wikipedia Education Program team will miss her tremendously. Annie is sad to leave, and she says she is very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with so many brilliant, inspiring educators and volunteers.

Learning & Evaluation

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  • Facilitated G&P annual planning process and helped formalize goals and success metrics
  • Experimented with servicing analytics requests using a 1 week sprint methodology
  • Built bot to automate various steps in the Individual Engagement Grants program [2]
  • Built bot to automate certain tasks around the Brazil Education Program
  • Built tool for analysis of category graphs [3]
  • Built tool for analysis of cumulative user contributions to a page by converting page history into Git repository [4]
  • Investigated sources of error in our geolocation technology, MaxMind (mw:MaxMind_Evaluation)
  • Participated in Analytics Reboot Workshop led by ThoughtWorks consultant in preparation for WMF Analytics reorganization


Human Resources

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Primary HR activities for the month include:

  • modeling staffing projections in preparation for the WMF annual planning process
  • conducting the second segment of a three-part series in the WMF pilot leadership development program for directors and managers
  • co-hosted an event with the Op-Ed Project in mutual support of the aim to shift the gender gap in media
  • commissioned a study on Wikimedia Foundation salaries with Radford as follow-up to the board-sponsored executive salary study conducted last year
  • Chief Culture and Talent Officer Gayle Karen Young was profiled on the Wikimedia blog ("Gayle Karen Young: Supporting Wikimedia’s dynamic culture")

Staff Changes

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New Requisitions Filled
  • Henrique Andrade, Data Analyst & Experiments (Grantmaking and Programs)
  • Greg Grossmeier, Release Manager (Engineering)
  • Ed Sanders, Software Engineer, Visual Editor (Engineering)
  • Luis Villa, Deputy General Counsel (Legal and Community Advocacy)
  • Amy Vossbrinck, Executive Assistant to the Chief Finance & Administration Officer (Administration)
New Volunteer
  • Anita Whites (Fundraiser)
New Contractors
  • Kraig Parkinson (Engineering)
  • Marc-Andre Pelletier (Engineering)
  • Jonas Xavier (Grantmaking & Programs)
Contracts Extended
  • Michael Beattie (Fundraiser)
  • LaTrisha Holliness (Finance)
  • Rebecca Neumann (Legal and Community Advocacy)
  • Joseph Seddon (Fundraiser)
Departure
  • Annie Lin
Contracts Ended
  • Peter Coombe
  • Susan Walling
New Postings
  • Partner Solutions Engineer
  • Program Evaluation Community Coordinator
  • Program Evaluation Specialist
  • Senior Program Manager - Mobile
  • Software Engineer - Multimedia User Interfaces
  • Software Engineer - Parser

Statistics

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Total Requisitions Filled
February Actual: 135
February Total Plan: 173
February Filled: 5, Month Attrition: 1
YTD Filled: 41, YTD Attrition: 18
1 Position canceled for FY
Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end
38 (10 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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We have begun active work on the Annual Plan, including setting a baseline for annual expenditures.

The first financial review site visit occured with Wikimedia Argentina. Our thanks to Osmar - Executive Director of Wikimedia Argentina for hosting a sucessful site visit. A full report of the site visit will be submitted to the FDC. The financial review portion of the site visit showed that WMAR has good internal controls and is managing it financial matters well.


Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department

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LCA Report, February 2013

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Contract Metrics

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  • Submitted : 28
  • Completed : 20

Trademark Metrics

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  • Submitted : 21
  • Approved : 1
  • Pending : 11
  • Denied : 4
  • Request withdrawn : 3
  • Approval not needed : 2

Domains Obtained

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wikinews.de

Coming & Going

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Other Activities

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Communications Report, February 2013

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February was a relatively quiet month for the Foundation and projects from a media relations perspective. Major media outlets were focused on the news of the successful conclusion of the Internet Brands lawsuit as well as a measured increase in coverage and requests related to Wikipedia Zero.

Major announcements

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No major press announcements in February.

Major Storylines through February

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Richard Fidler interviewing Sue Gardner
‘’WMF’s ED Sue Gardner in Brisbane, Australia’’ (Feb 17, 2013)

During a visit to Brisbane, Australia to speak at the ALIA conference at the State Library of Queensland, Sue Gardner spent time with a number of Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio programs. Conversations covered the Foundation’s work to recruit new editors and diversify our community, including a lengthy discussion with Australian radio personality Richard Fidler.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/wikipedia--dealing-with-success-and-adversity/4518876
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/02/15/3691244.htm
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/pacific/2013-02-13/wikipedia-flush-with-funds-short-on-volunteers/1087966
‘’A Victory for Free Knowledge and Wikivoyage’’ (Feb 15, 2013)

After five months of legal activity, the Foundation announced settlement of litigation with Internet Brands. The announcement was made on the Foundation’s blog and was followed by positive media coverage that repeated the mission and focus of the non-commercial Wikivoyage project.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57569807-93/wikimedia-internet-brands-settle-wikivoyage-lawsuits/
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/16/3995358/wikimedia-internet-brands-lawsuit-settled
http://pandodaily.com/news/wikimedia-foundation-and-internet-brands-reach-settlement/
‘’Mobile Wikipedia and Wikipedia Zero: 3 billion pageviews and free Wikipedia by SMS’’ (Feb 23, 2013)

A trio of blog posts and coverage relating to the Foundation’s mobile work made positive headlines in February. The push past 3 billion page views on our mobile WP site, coupled with coverage of our push for free Wikipedia via SMS attracted significant interest, particularly from tech and mobile industry blogs.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/23/wikipedia-expects-to-offer-sms-based-access-within-months/
http://www.ibtimes.com/wikipedia-reaches-3-billion-monthly-mobile-views-amid-concerns-about-contributor-content-1057556
http://thenextweb.com/media/2013/02/02/driven-by-developing-countries-wikipedia-passes-3bn-monthly-mobile-page-views-aims-for-4bn-by-june/

Other worthwhile reads

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Infographic: An Amazing, Invisible Truth About Wikipedia | Fast Co. Design | Feb 11
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671833/infographic-an-amazing-invisible-truth-about-wikipedia
Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most | Knight Foundation | Feb 22
http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2013/2/22/getting-wikipedia-people-who-need-it-most/
The Biggest Wikipedia Traffic Spikes Since 2010 Prove We’re All Morbid | Gizmodo | Feb 11
http://gizmodo.com/5983295/the-biggest-wikipedia-traffic-spikes-since-2010-prove-were-all-morbid

WMF Blog posts

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https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/

Forty-three blog posts in February, with bilingual posts in Arabic, Spanish, Greek, Ukrainian and Portuguese. Some highlights from the month:

How the Technical Operations team stops problems in their tracks
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/05/how-the-technical-operations-team-stops-problems-in-their-tracks/
Engaging the local community in a school project on Commons
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/21/education-program-greece/
Egyptian student creates 68 new articles on the Arabic Wikipedia in less than a year
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/25/walaa-wikipedia-education-program-egypt/
Wikipedia Teahouse Celebrates its First Birthday
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/27/wikipedia-teahouse-celebrates-its-first-birthday/

Media Contact

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https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#February_2013

Wikipedia Signpost

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

Sue Gardner giving a keynote at the ALIA Online Conference

Office of the Executive Director

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Sue Gardner traveled to Australia in February, giving keynotes at two library conferences in Brisbane: The Sixth New Librarians Symposium (co-sponsored by Wikimedia Australia) and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Online Conference. She also did several interviews with Australian media (see the Communications Report section above), in particular a long discussion with Richard Fidler, and had productive meetings with Australian Wikimedians.


Visitors and Guests

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Visitors and guests to the WMF office in February 2013:

  1. Samantha Gaskin (Helms Briscoe)
  2. Shannon Farley (Spark)
  3. Amanda Brock (Spark)
  4. Alex Wong (AAPIP)
  5. Chris Cavanaugh (CCS Consulting Inc.)
  6. Yvonne Ortmann (Reporter, t3n)
  7. Eugene Eric Kim + guests (Consultant)
  8. Kellie Brownell (TAI)
  9. Erik Qualman (edx.org)
  10. Abhishek Suryawanshi (Wikipedian)
  11. Iara Camardo (Professor, Wikipedia Education Program Brazil)
  12. Rosa Jiménez Cano (Reporter, El Pais)
  13. Debra Wolter (CCS)
  14. M. McCarthy (RDI)
  15. J. Uppal (RDI)
  16. Mike Chavet (Felice)
  17. John Engers (Felice)
  18. Kraig Parkinson (Thoughtworks consultant)
  19. Marc Chenn (Salt Stack)
  20. Thomas Hatch (Salt Stack)
  21. Julie Jarratt (Cathay Pacific)
  22. Maziebelle Riece (Cathay Pacific)
  23. Valerie Aurora (TAI)
  24. Kathy Ramsey (TAI)
  25. Virginia Sutton (J&D)
  26. Doug Hessel (J&D)
  27. Linda Lam (J&D)
  28. Ron Waliczek (JP Morgan)
  29. Mike McKindey (JP Morgan)
  30. Ryan McNeill (JP Morgan)
  31. Paul Cardoso (Sequoia)
  32. John Gaffney (Sequoia)
  33. Melissa Sharp (Sequoia)
  34. Jed Cloern (Sequoia)
  35. Sheldon Renan (Video crew)
  36. Mark Oppenheim (m|Oppenheim)
  37. Stephany Kirkpatrick (LearnVest)
  38. Denny Vrandecic (WMDE)
  39. Daniel Kinzler (WMDE)
  40. Galen Cranz (Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley)
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