Wikimedia Highlights, August 2014
Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for August 2014, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement
Wikimedia Foundation highlights
[edit]Lightweight version of VisualEditor becomes available for tablets
[edit]In August, a mobile-friendly opt-in version of VisualEditor was launched for users of the mobile site on tablets. Tablet users can now choose to switch from the default editing experience (wikitext editor) to a lightweight version of VisualEditor, which offers some common formatting tools (for bold and italic text, and for adding/editing links and references).
First transparency report on requests for user information and demands for alteration or deletion of content
[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation announced the launch of its first ever transparency report, which included two years of data about third-party requests for user information and for the alteration or deletion of Wikimedia content, as well as information on how WMF responded to such requests.
Global metrics for grants
[edit]The Grantmaking team introduced Global metrics, a small required set of metrics to be used in grant reporting form (e.g. the "Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia project" as part of a grant project). They are meant to help achieving a a shared understanding of how successful programs are in expanding participation and improving content on Wikimedia projects. The team also launched a new Evaluation portal and a new Project & Event Grants (PEG) portal.
Foundation staff report on their work at Wikimania
[edit]From August 6 to August 10, around 2000 Wikimedians from around the world came together in London on the occasion of this year's annual Wikimania conference (see also this month's movement highlights). The keynote of Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Lila Tretikov was titled "Facing the Now" (slides), and the schedule included many other presentations by WMF staff and contractors (frequently captured on video):
- "Machine aided article translation - The content translation project WMF" Santhosh Thottingal with the WMF Language Engineering team
- "Growing the Awesome in your Programs" (workshop) Jaime Anstee, Edward Galvez and Maria Cruz
- "Crazy Contentious Copyright Challenges Constraining Community Creativity" Michelle Paulson and Stephen LaPorte
- "The State of Wikimedia Scholarship 2013-2014" Tilman Bayer (co-presenter, with Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw)
- "Human-centered design for free knowledge" Yana Welinder, Jonathan Morgan and Jessie Wild
- "Learning Literacy with Wikipedia" C. Scott Ananian
- "Multimedia Overview" Fabrice Florin
- "The State (and Fate) of Video in Wikimedia" Fabrice Florin (with Andrew Lih)
- "Freedom in motion: the state of open video and audio at Wikimedia" Brion Vibber
- "Legal Demands: The Good, The Bad, & The Just Plain Wrong" Stephen LaPorte and Michelle Paulson
- "Beyond talk pages: Supporting collaboration with Flow" Nick Wilson (Quiddity), May Galloway and Erik Bernhardson
- "Measuring community health: Vital signs for Wikimedia projects" Dario Taraborelli, Aaron Halfaker and Dan Andreescu
- "Wikipedia Education Collaborative Panel" panel including Floor Koudijs
- "CirrusSearch: How we've replaced a great search engine with an awesome search engine" Chad Horohoe, Nik Everett and Dan Garry
- "Best practices for the evaluation of GLAM-Wiki cooperations" Jaime Anstee (workshop, with Beat Estermann and Maarten Brinkerink)
- "The URAA, Copyright Terms, and the Wikimedia Projects" Yana Welinder and Ryan Kaldari
- "Interface Vision" Jared Zimmerman
- "The Athena Project: Where are We?" Brandon Harris (Jorm)
- "Roundtable: Admin tools development" Dan Garry and Rob Lanphier
- "An update and LIVE A/B Test from the Fundraising Team" Megan Hernandez, Peter Coombe, Victor Grigas and Jessica Robell
- "Join the technical community - an introduction for absolute beginners" Erik Moeller
- "Showcase ALL the (cool) things!" Marc A. Pelletier
- "Wikipedia Goes Viral: Experiments in Social Media" Siko Bouterse (with Addis Wang, Jake Orlowitz, Netha Hussain and Ivan Martinez; panel)
- "Creative Ways to Alienate Women Online: A How-to Guide for Wikipedians" Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling
- "Parsoid: Dealing with Wikitext so you don't have to™" Subramanya Sastry, Gabriel Wicke, C. Scott Ananian, Marc Ordinas i Llopis and Arlo Breault
- "Finding and fixing software bugs for Wikipedia" Chris McMahon
- "Ask the Developers" Siebrand Mazeland and others (panel/hot seat)
- "Virtual Community Roundtable" Aaron Halfaker, Marc A. Pelletier, Brandon Harris and Jonathan Morgan (with Raph Koster, Yaneer Bar-Yam and David White)
- "The WMF's Free Software Advocacy Group and how you can help" Greg Grossmeier
- "Open Source Hygiene: Getting the Details Right", Luis Villa and Stephen LaPorte
- "Creative Commons 4.0 : Everything You Wanted to Know, and Probably More" Luis Villa (with Kat Walsh from Creative Commons)
- "WMF Grants Showcase: Funding Diversity" Siko Bouterse, with participation of the Grantmaking team
- "Replaying edits & visualising edit history" Jonathan Morgan (presenting for Jeph Paul Alapat)
- "Testing internationalized applications for Wikimedia content" Kartik Mistry and Runa Bhattacharjee
- "IdeaLab Workshop: Making Ideas into Action" Siko Bouterse, with Jonathan Morgan and Heather Walls
- "Access to Knowledge and Wikipedia Zero" Yana Welinder (with BJ Ard)
- "Liquid Lobbying - How could Wikimedia change EU copyright?" panel including Luis Villa
- "Wikistats: New Patterns" Erik Zachte
- "Hi, my name is 192.195.83.38: unmasking anonymous editors on Wikipedia" Steven Walling and Aaron Halfaker
- "The missing Wikipedia ads: Designing targeted contribution campaigns" Dario Taraborelli
- "VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily" James Forrester and Trevor Parscal
- "It's Alive! The Joy of Real-Time Collaboration" Erik Moeller
- "Real-time Collaborative Editing with TogetherJS" C. Scott Ananian
- "Thank you for your email: A day in the Wikimedia Mail Room" Keegan Peterzell
- "Meet the press: Introducing WMF’s new Communications team, the new blog and new chances for community collaboration on media" Tilman Bayer, Katherine Maher, Heather Walls, Victor Grigas
- "Trust and Sharing" Luis Villa
- "State of the Wiki" Brandon Harris
- "Wikipedia in Education: by the numbers" Tighe Flanagan (with Prakash Neupane, Shani Evenstein, Toni Sant and Jami Mathewson)
- "How we've grown mobile into something that everyone does" Tomasz Finc
- "User interface: Consistency, consistency, consistency!" Mun May Tee-Galloway
- "Big in Japan: Combating Systemic Bias Through Mobile Editing" Oliver Keyes
- "A data and developer hub for Wikimedia" Moiz Syed, Jared Zimmerman, Stephen LaPorte and Dario Taraborelli
- "The Wikimedia open source project and you" Quim Gil
- "WikiCredit - Calculating & presenting value contributed to Wikipedia" Aaron Halfaker
- "VisualEditor — engineering against the odds" Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal
- "Multimedia Roundtable" Fabrice Florin
- "takedowns, inappropriate images and more: How the LCA team uses technology to scale" James Alexander
- "Diversity Workshop: Gender Gap Strategy into Action" Siko Bouterse, Anasuya Sengupta and Gayle Karen Young (with Netha Hussain and Emily Temple-Wood)
- "JavaScript and long-term relationships" Trevor Parscal
- "Expanding the encyclopedia: trends in article creation on Wikipedia" Steven Walling, Aaron Halfaker and Matthew Flaschen (with Jodi Schneider, Bluma Gelley and Subham Soni)
- "Growing a Culture of Kindness" Fabrice Florin
- "Design Communication Roundtable" Brandon Harris (Jorm) and the Wikimedia Foundation Design Team
- "'Tech News': Fighting technical information overload for Wikimedians" Guillaume Paumier
Data and Trends
[edit]Global unique visitors for July:
- 413 million (-4.38% compared with June; -16.1% compared with the previous year)
- (comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects, not including mobile devices; comScore will release August data later in September)
Page requests for August:
- 21.138 billion (+2.7% compared with July; +15.3% compared with the previous year)
- (Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation content projects including mobile access, but excluding Wikidata and the Wikipedia main portal page.)
Active Registered Editors for July 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
- 76,543 (+2.67% compared with June / +1.07% compared with the previous year)
- (Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)
Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects):
Financials
[edit](Financial information is only available through July 2014 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date July 31, 2014.
Revenue | 2,977,739 |
---|---|
Expenses: | |
Engineering Group | 1,668,690 |
Fundraising Group | 244,409 |
Grantmaking Group | 183,722 |
Grants | 23,152 |
Governance Group | 63,301 |
Communications Group | 91,933 |
Legal/Community Advocacy Group | 162,117 |
Finance/HR/Admin Group | 547,811 |
Total Expenses | 2,985,135 |
Total deficit | (−7,396) |
in US dollars |
- Revenue for the month-to-date and year-to-date of July is $2.98MM versus plan of $2.01MM, approximately $0.97MM or 49% over plan.
- Expenses for the month-to-date and year-to-date of July is $2.99MM versus plan of $3.87MM, approximately $0.88MM or 23% under plan, primarily due to lower legal fees, capital expenditures, grants, outside contract services, personnel expenses, and travel & conference expenses.
- Cash and Investments - $48.27MM as of July 31, 2014.
Other highlights from the Wikimedia movement
[edit]Wikimania
[edit]Wikimania 2014, the tenth and so far largest annual global conference of Wikimedians, drew around 2000 Wikimedians from around the world to the Barbican Centre in London, accompanied by satellite events such as the pre-conference hackathon. (See also the schedule and the coverage in the English Wikipedia's "Signpost" newsletter.)
Video documentary on GLAM activities in the UK
[edit]A 20-minute documentary titled "The GLAM-Wiki Revolution" interviewed Wikimedians-in-Residence in various cultural institutions (GLAMs) in the UK, giving an overview of the GLAM project in the country.