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Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of February (March 6, 2014)
Contents
1 Data and Trends
2 Financials
3 Highlights
3.1 Frank Schulenburg named executive director of the new Wiki Education Foundation, which supports Wikipedia courses in the US and Canada
3.2 New Media Viewer: A better way to view images
3.3 Discussion about disclosure requirements for paid editing, and about the new privacy policy
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 funded in February 2014
6.2.2 Reports accepted in February 2014
6.3 Travel & Participation Support
6.3.1 Requests funded in February 2014
6.3.2 Reports accepted in February 2014
6.4 Individual Engagement Grants
6.4.1 Grants started in February 2014
6.4.2 Grants funded in February 2014
6.4.3 Reports accepted in February 2014
6.5 Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation, and Program Evaluation & Design
6.6 Wikipedia Education Program
6.6.1 Global programs
6.6.2 Arab world programs
6.6.3 Communications
7 Human Resources
7.1 February Staff Changes
7.2 February Statistics
8 Finance and Administration
9 Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department
9.1 LCA Report, February 2014
9.1.1 Contract Metrics
9.1.2 Trademark Metrics
9.1.3 Domains Obtained
9.1.4 Coming & Going
9.1.5 Other Activities
9.1.5.1 Legal
9.1.5.2 CA
9.2 Communications Report, February 2014
9.2.1 Major announcements
9.2.2 Major Storylines through February
9.2.3 Other worthwhile reads
9.2.4 WMF Blog posts
9.2.5 Media Contact
9.2.6 Wikipedia Signpost
10 Visitors and Guests
Data and Trends
Total Active Editors for Wiktionary, Wikivoyage (reconstituted) and Wikisource, 2002-2013 (from presentation slides)
Global unique visitors for January:
495 million +1.05% compared with December; +1.41% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release February data later in March)
Page requests for February:
21.001 billion (+1.6% compared with January; -3.5% 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 January 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
81,821 (+8.24% compared with December / -2.92% 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 January 31, 2014
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of January 31, 2014
(Financial information is only available through January 2014 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date January 31, 2014.
Revenue
38,169,215
Expenses:
Engineering Group
9,278,563
Fundraising Group
2,535,021
Grantmaking Group
951,930
Programs Group
1,044,778
Grants
2,378,690
Governance Group
415,129
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group
2,057,675
Finance/HR/Admin Group
4,084,665
Total Expenses
22,746,451
Total surplus
(15,422,764)
in US dollars
Revenue for the month of January is $3.42MM versus plan of $0.01MM, approximately $3.41MM or 58,335% over plan.
Year-to-date revenue is $38.17MM versus plan of $45.04MM, approximately $6.87MM or 15% under plan.
Expenses for the month of January is $3.97MM versus plan of $4.53MM, approximately $559K or 12% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, legal fees, grants and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services and payment processing fees.
Year-to-date expenses is $22.75MM versus plan of $27.39MM, approximately $4.64MM or 17% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, legal fees, payment processing fees, staff development expenses, grants, and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services and recruiting fees.
Cash position is $54.67MM as of January 31, 2014.
Highlights
Logo of the new Wiki Education Foundation
Frank Schulenburg named executive director of the new Wiki Education Foundation, which supports Wikipedia courses in the US and Canada
The Wikipedia Education Program, where university students contribute to Wikipedia as a course assignment, began in 2010 as a pilot project run by the Wikimedia Foundation (the “Public Policy Initiative” which focused on the subject of US public policy). Since then, the program has expanded worldwide. In the United States and Canada alone, more than 6,000 students have contributed to Wikipedia as part of the program, adding the equivalent of 36,600 printed pages to Wikipedia and significantly increasing the amount of high-quality content.
The global Wikipedia Education Program will continue to be supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. But in 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation began a process to hand over cooperations with educators and institutions in the US and Canada to a new non-profit organization, the “Wiki Education Foundation“, created in late 2013. In February, the new organization appointed its first executive director: Frank Schulenburg, a long-time German Wikipedian and Commons contributor who left his position as head of the Wikimedia Foundation’s program department for the new job.
Media Viewer (early sketch explaining how it works)
New Media Viewer: A better way to view images
The Multimedia Team invited community members to test a beta version of Media Viewer, a new tool for viewing images and other multimedia content. Currently, when a reader clicks on a thumbnail in an article, they are taken to a separate page showing the image in medium size, surrounded by a lot of text information which can be confusing. Media Viewer shows images in a larger size, as an overlay on the current page.
At the end of February, when the invitation was made, over 12,000 beta testers had already activated Media Viewer as part of the Beta Features program. The rollout of Media Viewer to the first wikis was scheduled for April.
Discussion about disclosure requirements for paid editing, and about the new privacy policy
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Legal Department is drafting a proposed amendment to the Terms of Use to address further undisclosed paid editing. Contributing to the Wikimedia projects to serve the interests of a paying client while concealing the paid affiliation has led to situations that the community considers problematic. The LCA team published a draft for a community discussion. The discussion received significant response, and continued through March 21, 2014.
The department also announced the conclusion of the community consultations about the new Privacy Policy (after discussions that lasted over 8 months), together with the accompanying Data retention guidelines, and the Access to Nonpublic Information Policy, whose consultation lasted over 5 months. These policies will be reviewed by the Board in April 2014.
Engineering
A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for February 2014 can be found at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/February
Department Highlights
Presentation slides about Media Viewer
Major news in February include:
a call for volunteers to test the upcoming multimedia viewer;
improvements to VisualEditor’s media and template editors;
the launch of the Flow discussion system on two pilot talk pages on the English Wikipedia;
the launch of guided tours to 31 more language versions of Wikipedia, including all of the top 10 projects by number of page views;
improvements to the tools and process used to deploy code to Wikimedia production sites;
the release of the first archive of the entire English Wikipedia with thumbnails, for offline use.
VisualEditor
In February, the VisualEditor team continued their work on improving the stability and performance of this visual tool to edit wiki pages; they also added some new features and simplifications. It is now easier to edit media items: users can set the position, alt text, size and type for most kinds of media item. When adding links, redirects and disambiguation pages are now highlighted to help editors select the right link, and changing the format or style of some text was tweaked to make editing clearer and more obvious. Adding and editing template usages is now a little smoother, auto-focusing on parameters and making them clearer to use. Page settings have expanded to set redirects, page indexing and new section edit link options. The extensive work to make insertion of “citation” references based on templates quick, obvious and simple neared completion. The deployed version of the code was updated four times in the regular releases.
The Parsoid team continued with bug fixes and improved image support in this parsing program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, behind the scenes of VisualEditor.
Part of the team has continued to mentor two Outreach Program for Women (OPW) interns; this program ends mid-March. Others are mentoring a group of students in a Facebook Open Academy project to build a Cassandra storage back-end for the Parsoid round-trip test server.
We have a first version of a Debian package for Parsoid ready. This package is yet to find a home base (repository) from which it can be installed. This will soon make the installation of Parsoid as easy as apt-get install parsoid.
Editor engagement
This month, the new Flow discussion system was launched on the talk pages of two English Wikipedia WikiProjects that volunteered to be a part of the first trial, WikiProject Breakfast and WikiProject Hampshire. We’ve continued to iterate on the front-end design of the discussion system based on user feedback, releasing a new appearance during the trial and starting work on a front-end rewrite for better cross-browser and mobile compatibility (to be released sometime in March). We also spent time making sure Flow integrates better with vital MediaWiki tools and processes (e.g., suppression and checkuser) and improving the handling of permalink URLs.
Slides of the quarterly review of the Growth team
In February, the Growth team first focused on releasing the new Wikipedia onboarding experience on additional projects. The GettingStarted extension was deployed to 30 Wikipedias, including all of the top 10 projects by number of page views. This marks the first time its task suggestions and guided tours were available outside English projects. The GuidedTour extension was also deployed to those projects (as a dependency of GettingStarted), as well as the Czech Wikipedia and se.wikimedia.org. Late in the month, the team also presented its work at its first Quarterly Review of the 2014 calendar year (see slides and minutes).
Demonstration of editing on a tablet
Mobile
The Wikimedia Apps team primarily worked on basic editing functionality (using wikitext) for both logged-in and logged-out users, as well as account creation and login.
The Mobile web projects team has been working on bringing VisualEditor to tablets; the functionality is currently in alpha. Once this feature is available, tablet devices will be redirected to the mobile site. Work has notably focused on “inspectors” (like the dialog used to add and edit a link) and fixing bugs.
During the last month, the Wikipedia Zero engineering team added zero-data charge rating for secure HTTPS connections for select carriers, in cooperation with the Operations team. In collaboration with the Mobile Apps team, we integrated Wikipedia Zero into the forthcoming rebooted versions of the Android and iOS apps. We updated the legacy Firefox OS app with bugfixes from January, and prepared other bugfixes as well. Discussion with the Operations team and Platform Engineering continued on how to best implement the Wikipedia Zero portal. The team also continued the discussion on core ResourceLoader features, in support of a proof of concept HTML5 webapp. We also started work to make contributory features present for Wikipedia Zero users. Last but not least, we performed extensive analytics work on pageviews and page bandwidth consumption.
(The Wikipedia Zero team led by Carolynne Schloeder, formerly situated in the Programs department, became part of the Engineering department in February, see announcement Q&A)
In February, we launched Wikipedia Zero with MTN South Africa (Opera Mini browser only). MTN South Africa responded directly to the kids of Sinenjongo High School with an open letter to the students and the youth of South Africa. They said they agree that Wikipedia could give a boost to their education system, and that offering Wikipedia Zero is a small thing that could change everything (see video on YouTube). We also launched Wikipedia Zero with Safaricom, the largest operator in Kenya. We now have three partners in Kenya, covering 90% of all mobile subscribers. South Africa is our 23rd country to launch, and Safaricom is our 27th operator partner. The Mobile Partnerships team attended Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where we met with existing operator partners, prospective partners and tech companies who want to support the mission. At the conference, our Wikipedia Text pilot with Airtel Kenya and the Praekelt Foundation was nominated as a finalist for the GSMA Global Mobile awards in the education category.
Fundraising
Major Gifts and Foundations
Received a $100,000 gift from an anonymous donor.
All Annual reports sent out to major donors.
Online Fundraising
The online fundraising team ran banner campaigns in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Finland, and Sweden. Roughly $850,000 was raised in February (preliminary numbers as donations are still settling).
The team prepared translations of fundraising messages into multiple languages for upcoming international banner campaigns. If you would like to help with the translation process, please get involved
Pats Pena was promoted to Senior Global Fundraising Operations Manager.
Grantmaking
Department highlights
IEG round 1 2014 open call!
9 requests funded and 3 reports accepted in February 2014.
Open call for round 1 2014 Individual Engagement Grant proposals and committee members is underway! Proposals are due 31 March 2014: Grants:IEG
The APG proposal form has been revised and is now available to 2013-2014 Round 2 entities: Grants:APG/FDC_portal/Proposal_form. This is in preparation for the upcoming proposal submission date on 1 April 2014 for 2013-2014 Round 2.
Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)
Impact report form has been revised and is now available to 2012-2013 Round 1 entities, which may now create an impact report form using the proposal hub page: Impact report form. This is in preparation for the upcoming impact report submission date on 31 March for entities receiving grants in 2012-2013 Round 1 that have completed in December 2013.
The proposal form has been revised and is now available to 2013-2014 Round 2 entities: Proposal_form. This is in preparation for the upcoming proposal submission date on 1 April 2014 for 2013-2014 Round 2.
Staff comments on WMF’s impact report form have been published.
Dates of the FDC deliberations for 2013-2014 Round 2 and the FDC Advisory Group have been confirmed: 21-25 May in Frankfurt (FDC), Germany; 25-26 May in Frankfurt Germany (FDAG). Preparations are now underway.
No grants were funded and no reports were received in February 2014 through the Annual Plan Grants program.
Project and Event Grants
5 PEG requests funded; 2 reports accepted
Grants funded in February 2014
WMFI – 2014 : to support Wikimedia Finland’s 2014 programs, including a focus on developing the Wikimaps project.
WMEE – 2014 : to support Wikimedia Estonia’s 2014 programs, including outreach events, WLM, WLE, WEP, writing competitions, and more.
Programs in Ukraine 2014 : to support Wikimedia Ukraine’s 2014 programs, including WLM, WEP, wikiexpeditions, and more.
Minority Translate : to support the development of a translation tool targeted at small language Wikipedias.
Wikimedians to the Games : to support Wikimedia Ukraine volunteers to attend the Sochi Paralympics games and increase coverage of disabled athletes on Wikipedia.
The Wiki Loves Monuments South Africa 2013 awards gala in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Reports accepted in February 2014
Report of WikiConference Yerevan 2013 was accepted on 18 February 2014.
Report of WLM-ZA-2013 (Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 in South Africa) was accepted on 27 February 2014.
Travel & Participation Support
4 requests funded; 1 report accepted
Planning for redesign to simplify and improve TPS pages is underway, with improvements to be launched as soon as March. Improvements to the reporting process and to backend administrative processes are also being planned.
Requests funded in February 2014
LibreGraphicsMeeting: a request for two Wikimedians to attend the Libre Graphics Meeting to present on WikiArS (one Wikimedian also attended last year’s meeting through the TPS program).
Harsh4101991/FOSSASIA, Rahul21/FOSSASIA, FOSS_Asia_2014: three requests for Wikimedians to present their work at FOSS Asia in Phnom Penh.
Reports accepted in February 2014
FOSDEM – Report
Individual Engagement Grants
Open call for round 1 2014 Individual Engagement Grant proposals and committee members is underway! Proposals are due 31 March 2014: Grants:IEG
In preparation for the open call, the IEG, IdeaLab and Grants:Start pages on Meta-wiki were set up for internationalization this month, thanks to Jon Harald Søby who was engaged as a contractor to work on this project. All pages are now available for volunteer translation in the Translate Extension, expanding the global reach of these programs.
Sprint planning is underway to improve IdeaLab. The sprint will run April through June, and focuses on incorporating new features to make it easier to create, join, and endorse ideas, as well as match project needs to people’s skills.
In cooperation with WMF technical staff, we’ve developed a proposal for a OPW or GSoC student to work on building a system for scoring grant proposals and scholarship applications.
In other individual grantmaking news: In consultation with the Arabic Wikipedia community, planning is underway for a join microgrants pilot between WMF grantmaking and The Wikipedia Library. This pilot will fund books and other reliable sources for Arabic editors, via a new Wikipedia Library hub currently being built on Arabic Wikipedia.
Grants started in February 2014
The Wikidata Toolkit IEG project kicked off this month, with a team assembled at TU Dresden.
Grants funded in February 2014
No new IEGs were funded in February 2014
Reports accepted in February 2014
No new IEG reports were accepted in February 2014
Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation, and Program Evaluation & Design
(The Program Evaluation and Design group, formerly situated in the Programs department, became part of the Grantmaking department in February, see <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.o