Wikimedia Highlights, January 2013
Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for January 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement
Wikimedia Foundation highlights
New program offers financial support for projects by individual Wikimedians
The Foundation's Individual Engagement Grants program launched on January 15. While most WMF grants have so far gone to organizations like chapters, the new program will finance initiatives by individual Wikimedians or small teams to improve Wikimedia projects. The first application period lasts until February 15. During the first two weeks, 31 ideas, drafts, and proposals were submitted. An "IdeaLab" has been set up where draft proposals can be discussed, and applicants can get help to turn their ideas into complete proposals.
Successful migration to new data center
On January 22, Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia sites were migrated to the Foundation's new primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia (US). The prior data center in Tampa, Florida had been the main hosting site since 2004; it will remain on standby to take over in case the new data center experiences an outage. The switch worked nearly without any problems. The Operations Team attributes this success to the careful preparation since 2011. This involved reviewing, improving and documenting the configuration of the servers (currently about 885) in a way that has already improved stability in 2012, and will make it possible to set up new data centers much faster.
New partnership grows the reach of Wikipedia Zero to 330 million mobile users
VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world, joined the Wikipedia Zero program in January, raising the number of mobile users who are eligible to access Wikipedia without data fees by 100 million, to 330 million worldwide. Among the countries served by VimpelCom are Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and other countries of the former USSR.
Wikivoyage becomes newest Wikimedia project
On January 15, the 12th anniversary of Wikipedia, Wikivoyage was officially launched as the newest project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The free travel guide that anyone can edit is already available in nine languages - Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish - with more being added. There are more than 50,000 articles, which are edited and improved by a core group of approximately 200 volunteer editors.
Data and Trends
Global unique visitors for December:
- 472.6 million (-2.46% compared with November; +3.39% compared with the previous year)
- (comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release January data later in February)
Page requests for January:
- 22.2 billion (+10.3% compared with December; +23.4% compared with the previous year)
- (Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)
Active Registered Editors for December 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
- 78,536 (-1.04% compared with November / +0.09% compared with the previous year)
- (Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)
Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for December 2012:
Financials
 |
 |
(Financial information is only available for December 2012 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date December 31, 2012.
| Revenue | $30,916,665 |
|---|---|
| Expenses: | |
| Engineering Group | $6,289,609 |
| Fundraising Group | $2,039,275 |
| Grantmaking & Programs Group | $2,390,621 |
| Governance Group | $364,699 |
| Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group | $1,557,154 |
| Finance/HR/Admin Group | $2,820,212 |
| Total Expenses | $15,461,570 |
| Total surplus/(loss) | $15,455,095 |
- Revenue for the month of December is $14.30MM vs plan of $14.41MM, approximately $109K or 1% under plan.
- Year-to-date revenue is $30.92MM vs plan of $29.91MM, approximately $1.01MM or 3% over plan.
- Expenses for the month of December is $2.70MM vs plan of $3.14MM, approximately $433K or 14% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, and outside contract services.
- Year-to-date expenses is $15.46MM vs plan of $17.78MM, approximately $2.31MM or 13% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, and capital expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, and awards and grants.
- Cash position is $41.17MM as of December 31, 2012.
Other movement highlights
Asteroid named after Wikipedia
A committee of astronomers has decided to give a recently discovered asteroid the name 274301 Wikipedia. The name had been proposed by Andriy Makukha, a board member of Wikimedia Ukraine. Wikipedia orbits the sun every 3.68 years, and its diameter is estimated to be about 1–2 kilometers (around 1 mile).
EU-funded RENDER project releases editor support tools
RENDER (REflecting kNowledge DivERsity) is a three-year research project begun in 2010 and funded by the European Union. Wikimedia Germany is one of the project partners. At the end of January, RENDER released two tools to support the work of Wikipedia editors: The Task List Generator (TLG) lists articles in a given category that are marked with a cleanup template or have other flaws, such as lacking images. The Article Statistics and Quality Monitor (ASQM) "offers a brief overview about the quality and the current status of any Wikipedia article". It integrates data such as the number of references in the article, its pageviews, and a comparison of its wikilinks with other language versions of the article, possibly indicating information that is missing from one language version of Wikipedia but is present in another.
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Wiki Loves Monuments exhibition in Polish railway station
The winning pictures from the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 photo contest were presented in a three-week exhibition at Warsaw Central, Poland's largest railway station. The exhibition was organized by Wikimedia Poland, in cooperation with an initiative of Polish State Railways that presents open cultural events at selected train stations in Poland.
Review of management and conflict of interest issues at Wikimedia UK
In January, work wrapped up on a report by Compass Partnership, a group of UK-based consultants in non-profit management, about the management structure of the UK Wikimedia chapter and its handling of conflict of interest issues. The report was commissioned jointly by the Foundation and Wikimedia UK in October 2012 following community discussions about potential conflicts of interest arising from a series of outreach projects, including Gibraltarpedia and Monmouthpedia. The report makes various recommendations on how to improve policies and procedures.