Wikimedia Highlights, August 2013
Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for August 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement
Wikimedia Foundation highlights
Foundation staff report on their work at Wikimania
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:
- 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.
Wikipedia Education Program in the Arab World completes its third term
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
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.
Data and Trends
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):
Financials
 |
 |
(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.
Other movement highlights
Wikimania
In August, around one thousand attendees from more than 80 countries came to Hong Kong for Wikimania 2013. The main event from August 9-11 was preceded by a DevCamp (hacking days), a one-day conference about the Wikipedia Education Program, and various other meetups, as well as the related research conference WikiSym/OpenSym.
The main schedule contained around 120 sessions (see also the Foundation highlights). Jimmy Wales gave his traditional "State of the Wiki" speech (video). In another plenary session, the Board of Trustees answered questions by Wikimedians. At the Board's meeting before Wikimania, Jan-Bart de Vreede was elected as the new chair of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimedians and pilots cooperate to photograph Israel from the air
WikiAir (Hebrew: ויקיאוויר, VikiAvir) is a cooperation between Wikimedia Israel and the Israeli Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), where civil pilots volunteer to take Wikipedians on their routine flights so they can take photos from the air and later on upload them to Wikimedia Commons. At Wikimania, the audience voted it the coolest and most unique Wikimedia chapter project of the year.
