You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.
Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of January (February 6, 2014)
Contents
1 Data and Trends
2 Financials
3 Highlights
3.1 New community-centered trademark policy
3.2 After one year, Individual Engagement Grants demonstrate potential for impact
3.3 Multimedia vision for 2016, and request for comment on MP4 video
3.4 New search engine
4 Engineering
4.1 VisualEditor
4.2 Editor engagement
4.3 Mobile
5 Fundraising
5.1 Major Gifts and Foundations
5.2 Online Fundraising
6 Grantmaking
6.1 Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)
6.2 Project and Event Grants
6.2.1 Grants awarded in January 2014
6.2.2 Reports accepted in January 2014
6.3 Travel & Participation Support
6.3.1 Requests awarded in January 2014
6.3.2 Reports accepted in January 2014
6.4 Individual Engagement Grants
6.4.1 Reports accepted in January 2014
6.5 Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation
7 Programs
7.1 Wikipedia Zero
7.2 Wikipedia Education Program
7.3 Program Evaluation and Design
8 Human Resources
8.1 Staff Changes
8.2 Statistics
8.3 Department Updates
9 Finance and Administration
10 Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department
10.1 LCA Report, January 2014
10.1.1 Contract Metrics
10.1.2 Trademark Metrics
10.1.3 Domains Obtained
10.1.4 Coming & Going
10.1.5 Other Activities
10.2 Communications Report, January 2014
10.2.1 Major announcements
10.2.2 Major Storylines through December
10.2.3 Other worthwhile reads
10.2.4 WMF Blog posts
10.2.5 Media Contact
10.2.6 Wikipedia Signpost
11 Visitors and Guests
Data and Trends
2013 traffic trends (presentation slides)
Global unique visitors for December:
490 million (-7.98% compared with November; +3.73% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release January data later in February)
Page requests for January:
20.678 billion (+13.2% compared with December; -7.0% 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 December 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
75,441 (+0.99% compared with November / -2.72% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)
Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects):
http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/
(Definitions)
Financials
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of December 31, 2013
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of December 31, 2013
(Financial information is only available through December 2013 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date December 31, 2013.
Revenue
34,750,758
Expenses:
Engineering Group
7,818,380
Fundraising Group
2,267,144
Grantmaking Group
838,068
Programs Group
866,479
Grants
1,289,803
Governance Group
377,413
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group
1,752,003
Finance/HR/Admin Group
3,566,318
Total Expenses
18,775,608
Total surplus
(15,975,150)
in US dollars
Revenue for the month of December is $20.14MM versus plan of $19.61MM, approximately $535K or 3% over plan.
Year-to-date revenue is $34.75MM versus plan of $36.32MM, approximately $1.57MM or 4% under plan.
Expenses for the month of December is $3.65MM versus plan of $4.43MM, approximately $778K or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, payment processing fees, and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services.
Year-to-date expenses is $18.78MM versus plan of $22.86MM, approximately $4.08MM or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, legal fees, payment processing fees, staff development expenses, and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services and recruiting fees.
Cash position is $55.34MM as of December 31, 2013.
Highlights
New community-centered trademark policy
After a seven-month long community consultation, the Foundation’s legal team concluded work on the new trademark policy. The community discussion, which had more words than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, resulted in a policy that is unconventional in how it provides liberal use of the Wikimedia marks, while maintaining legal protection. The final policy was approved by the Board of Trustees on February 1, effective immediately.
After one year, Individual Engagement Grants demonstrate potential for impact
Projects from the first round of IEGs
One year after Individual Engagement Grants program was launched in January 2013, the Foundation’s Learning & Evaluation team completed an impact assessment of the projects funded in the first round. One of the projects, The Wikipedia Library, generated $279,000 worth in donations from commercial research database providers, enabling Wikipedia editors to use high quality sources for free. At a grant cost of only $7,500, this represents a 37x return on investment. Another project, on generating publicity in China for Wikipedia, gained 10,000 followers for a new Wikipedia account on social networking site Weibo (25% of whom are women). Applications for the first round of 2014 start in March.
Multimedia vision for 2016, and request for comment on MP4 video
Video explaining the multimedia vision for 2016 ((slides)
The Foundation’s recently formed Multimedia team presented a multimedia vision for 2016. It is a scenario describing possible new tools for collaborating on multimedia on Commons, Wikipedia and other projects. The team invited community feedback on these ideas.
Separately, the multimedia team started a request for comment (RfC) on whether to support video files in the MP4 format on Wikimedia sites, in addition to the existing software support for the free formats Ogg Theora and WebM. Currently, only about 0.2% of the around 20 million files on Commons are videos, and it is assumed that MP4 support would make uploading and viewing videos much easier for many users, especially on some mobile devices that cannot play videos in the existing free formats. However, MP4 is a proprietary format covered by patents. Most users in the RfC preferred not to support MP4, maintaining the current practice of only using free formats.
New search engine
A new search infrastructure is being rolled out out to all Wikimedia wikis. It is based on the existing open-source software “Elasticsearch”, instead of the “Lucene-search” software that was written especially for MediaWiki. “Lucene-search” has worked well on Wikimedia sites for around 8 years, but developed some technical problems in 2013. The new search system for MediaWiki is called “CirrusSearch“. Its search results will reflect page updates much quicker than the old system. The text of templates in an article will now be found too, and some new search options were added. CirrusSearch is first becoming available as an optional Beta feature (see the timeline).
Engineering
A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for January 2014 can be found at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/January
Department Highlights
Major news in January include:
the transition of our search engines on Wikimedia sites to ElasticSearch (see also general “Highlights” section);
an invitation to comment on the 2-year vision of the multimedia engineering team;
a request for comments on whether the MP4 video format should be supported on Wikimedia sites.
Presentation slides on VisualEditor
VisualEditor
In January, the VisualEditor team continued their work on improving the stability and performance of this visual editing interface to edit pages on Wikipedia and its sister sites; they also added some new features. You can now edit page settings like whether to display a table of contents or whether to show section edit labels. You can also specify the size of a media file manually, see a list of keyboard shortcuts, and create and edit media galleries using a very basic stand-in editor whilst the final form is being designed. Work also continued on a dialog for quickly adding “citation” references based on templates, more media and page settings, setting content language and right-to-left indicators, and equation editing.
The Parsoid team (developing the program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, behind the scenes of VisualEditor) did a lot of bug fixing around images, links, references and various other areas. We also mentored students, participated in discussions relating to the architecture of MediaWiki, and started to work on “packaging” Parsoid to make it easier to install.
Maryana Pinchuk presenting about Flow (slides)
Editor engagement
This month, the Core Features team worked on integrating MediaWiki tools for dealing with spam and vandalism (AbuseFilter and Spam Blacklist) into Flow, a new wiki discussion system. We also launched an updated visual design and user interface for Flow, based on the first round of experienced user feedback last month, as well as ongoing user testing with new users. Lastly, we created a script to disable Flow and convert its content, so that we can begin testing Flow on two WikiProjects that volunteered on the English Wikipedia while being able to revert to wikitext if needed.
The Growth team improved the GettingStarted extension, in part to support local configuration for different Wikipedias. The latest version of GettingStarted and GuidedTour will be released in English and 23 other languages in early February. The team also completed several iterations of design and data analysis in support of upcoming work on Wikipedia article creation. We presented new designs for the Draft namespace, and completed a series of remote usability tests. We also finalized and published extensive quantitative analysis of trends in article creation across the largest Wikipedias.
Presentation slides from the quarterly review of the Mobile Web & App team
Mobile
During the last month, the Wikipedia Zero team worked on supporting secure HTTPS connections for partners in the Zero program, which allows mobile subscribers to access Wikipedia content at no data cost. We also continued to work on a proof-of-concept HTML5 web app for Firefox OS, fixed bugs in the legacy Firefox OS Wikipedia app, and prepared alpha functionality for the integration of Wikipedia Zero with the rebooted Android Wikipedia app. The team also met with the business development team to plan for partners and Wikipedia Zero-related work at large, and conducted tech facilitation to enable partner launches and align approaches with current and future partners.
The Mobile web projects team has been directing much of their attention over the last month at delivering a tablet-friendly mobile experience. We’ve added support for tables of contents, made some design improvements, and have worked towards making VisualEditor work on tablets (in alpha for now). We have also released our overlay UI improvements as well as an improved inline diff view for MobileFrontend into stable. Finally, we have also been working to expand our coverage of browser tests to facilitate quality assurance and help prevent the introduction of bugs and regressions.
Fundraising
Department highlights
Anne Gomez joined as the new Product Manager for the Online Fundraising team.
As of 12/31/13, the fundraising team has raised a total of $36,689,093.29 this Fiscal Year. Some of these funds may be accounted for in January’s totals.
Major Gifts and Foundations
Finalized December Numbers: 2.8 million
Sending out Annual reports to Benefactors
Online Fundraising
The online fundraising team prepared international banner campaigns to run in February. Messages were translated into multiple languages in preparation for the international campaigns. If you would like to help with the translation process, please get involved.
For the latest updates and a brief recap from the December English campaign, please see the updates page on Meta
Grantmaking
Department highlights
Welcome, Alex Wang, new Project and Event Grants Program Officer.
Wikimania Scholarships applications opened in January and are still being accepted until February 17. Thanks to the Wikimedia Scholarship committee for getting these up and running. These scholarships will support community members to come to London this upcoming August.
The new Grants homepage consolidates resources under one umbrella, as well as a better articulation of the grantmaking work in which our community engages.
IEG Round 1 Impact report is posted. Highlights include a 37x return on investment for The Wikipedia Library, and some potential areas for further study. See overall blog post.
Overall for grantmaking, 6 requests were funded, 1 grant was renewed, and 16 reports were accepted or reviewed in January 2014.
An improved FDC proposal form for 2013-2014 Round 2 was launched in January 2014 and is available to organizations that submitted Letters of intent for that round.
Happy 10th anniversary to the Odia Wikipedia! We are excited to support the growth of the Odia language online through our grant to the CIS India Access To Knowledge program, and proud of our active community in India.
Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)
The FDC Advisory Group is planning its review of the FDC process, scheduled for May 2014 in Germany. The FDC Advisory Group is tasked with providing a recommendation to the WMF Executive Director about improvements to the FDC process, based on assessments and learning.
The proposal form has been improved between rounds and was launched for 2013-2014 Round 2 applicants in January, in preparation for the 2013-2014 Round 2 proposal deadline on 1 April 2014. To create a proposal form, organizations that have already submitted Letters of Intent for this round should go to the “proposal form hub page” that was created when their Letters of intent were submitted, and use the proposal creation tool to create a proposal form. Please contact FDCSupportwikimedia.org with any questions.
Annual Plan Grantees receiving grants in 2012-2013 Round 2 submitted progress reports for Q2 (1 October – 31 December 2013) on 30 January 2014. Read Wikimedia Norge’s Q2 progress report or Wikimédia France’s Q2 progress report. We thank WMNO and WMFR for submitting these reports on time and sharing their learning with the larger movement.
Eligibility for 2013-2014 Round 2 is underway: all organizations that submitted Letters of Intent for the 2013-2014 Round 2 Annual Plan Grants cycle have until 15 March 2014 to fill any eligibility gaps. Please reach out to FDCsupportwikimedia.org with questions about eligibility, or the eligibility gaps and potential eligibility gaps outlined in this table.
First installments for grants awarded in 2013-2014 Round 1 are being sent, and three grantees have confirmed receipt of the first installments of grant funds in January 2014.
Site visits from FDC staff and FDC members to WMDE, WMHU, and WMIN are planned for February.
Project and Event Grants
4 requests were funded and 11 reports were accepted in January 2014.
We hired Alex Wang as the new Program Officer for Project and Event Grants. You can read more about her here.
Grants awarded in January 2014
Wikimedia DC projects 2014
Wikimedia NYC: WikiConference USA 2014
Rahmanuddin – Telugu Wikimedians: Telugu Wikipedia ten years celebrations
Olaf Kosinsky: Wikipedians in European Parliament
Reports accepted in January 2014
Wikimedia South Africa: Joburgpedia 2013
Wikimedia Czech Republic: Mediagrant (final report)
Wikimedia DC: Bootstrapping grant
Wikimedia Serbia: Annual plan 2012-2013 (Report/Q4)
Amical: GLAM outreach (II)
Wiki Loves Monuments 2013, Macedonia Organizing Team
Wikimedia Philippines: Philippine WikiCon 2013
User:Keilana: Loyola Women in Science and Math Workshop
Alexandre Hannud_Abdo – Grupo de Trabalho em Ciência Aberta: Encontro de Acadêmicos pelo Conhecimento Livre
Wikimedia NYC: Internship Program 3
Wikimedia Czech Republic: Presentation & Outreach (report 2013-2)
Travel & Participation Support
2 new requests were funded and 2 reports were accepted in January 2014.
We’re working with WMF’s Communications Design Manager to recruit a design contractor to help with the TPS redesign
A pilot is being planned to experiment with microgrants to contributors on Arabic Wikipedia. This pilot aims to test some assumptions and grantmaking systems at WMF for making small grants to individuals in the Global South, which may feed into TPS or other grants programs.
Requests awarded in January 2014
<a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:TPS/Noopur2