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Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of May (June 5, 2014)
Contents
1 Data and Trends
2 Financials
3 Highlights
3.1 12 new individual engagement grants
3.2 Inviting anonymous editors to join the Wikipedia community
3.3 Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) recommendations announced
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 May 2014
6.3 Travel & Participation Support
6.3.1 Requests awarded in May 2014
6.3.2 Reports accepted in May 2014
6.4 Individual Engagement Grants
6.5 Learning and Evaluation (including Program Evaluation)
6.5.1 Grants Programs
6.5.2 Grants Operations and tools
6.5.3 Org effectiveness
6.5.4 Other
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 May Staff Changes
7.2 May Statistics
8 Finance and Administration
9 Legal & Community Advocacy Department
9.1 LCA Report, May 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
10 Communications Report, May 2014
10.1 Major announcements
10.2 Major Storylines through May
10.3 Other worthwhile reads
10.4 WMF Blog posts
10.5 Media Contact
10.6 Wikipedia Signpost
10.7 Communications Design
11 Visitors and Guests
Data and Trends
Global unique visitors for April:
465 million (-6.00% compared with March; -9.92% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release May data later in June)
Page requests for May:
20.654 billion (-0.2% compared with April; -1.6% 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 April 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
75,364 (-2.25% compared with March / -7.25% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.
Note: These numbers were recently adjusted to correct a bug involving IPV6 addresses.)
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 April 30, 2014
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of April 30, 2014
(Financial information is only available through April 2014 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date April 30, 2014.
Revenue
49,194,784
Expenses:
Engineering Group
13,800,658
Fundraising Group
3,209,299
Grantmaking Group
1,472,907
Programs Group
1,493,168
Grants
4,066,472
Governance Group
725,565
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group
3,256,914
Finance/HR/Admin Group
5,484,592
Total Expenses
33,509,575
Total surplus
(15,685,209)
in US dollars
Revenue for the month of April is $8.24MM versus plan of $1.71MM, approximately $6.53MM or 383% over plan.
Year-to-date revenue is $49.19MM versus plan of $46.76MM, approximately $2.43MM or 5% over plan.
Expenses for the month of April is $3.19MM versus plan of $4.69MM, approximately $1.50MM or 32% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants, and payment processing fees partially offset by higher legal fees, outside contract services, and travel expenses related to community convening events.
Year-to-date expenses is $33.51MM versus plan of $41.06MM, approximately $7.55MM or 18% 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.
Cash and Investments – $55.6MM as of April 30, 2014.
Demo video for “ZoomProof”, a tool that will facilitate proofreading work on the Armenian Wikisource – one of the 12 new IEG projects
Highlights
12 new individual engagement grants
The Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) support projects from individuals or small teams to organize, build, create, research or facilitate something that enhances the work of Wikimedia’s volunteers. The 12 winning grants from the first round of 2014 were announced on May 30.
Test of a message inviting anonymous editors to create an account, displayed after they have made an edit (presentation slide)
Inviting anonymous editors to join the Wikipedia community
On the English, German, French, and Italian Wikipedias, the Foundation’s Growth team conducted two experiments to test user interface changes for encouraging anonymous editors to create an account and join the community of registered users. In the first test, a recommendation to create an account was shown when the user clicks “edit”, and in the second test, the invitation was displayed after the user saved an edit. Preliminary data strongly suggested a positive effect on new registrations.
Overview over the FDC proposals from round 2 (presentation slides)
Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) recommendations announced
In May, the nine-member Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) met for its face-to-face deliberations and published its recommendations to the WMF Board of Trustees on proposals from four organizations (three chapters and the Foundation) on how to spend Wikimedia donation money. The Board will make its decision on these recommendations by 1 July. The Advisory Group to the FDC also met in Frankfurt for their final meeting, to provide the Executive Director of the WMF with a recommendation on whether or not the FDC process (begun in 2012) should continue, and if so, what modifications should be made. They unanimously agreed to recommend to continue the process.
Engineering
A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for May 2014 can be found at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/May
Department Highlights
Major news in May include:
changes to the mobile site to better show the editors behind the curtain;
the announcement of CyrusOne in Dallas as the location of the new Wikimedia data center;
the Zürich hackathon and Lila Tretikov’s perspective on it;
experiments by the Growth team to encourage more contributors to register;
the one-year anniversary of the launch of Tech News;
the launch of Wikipedia Zero in Nepal in partnership with NCELL;
the launch of a second request for proposals for the release management of MediaWiki for third-party users.
VisualEditor
In May, the VisualEditor team worked on the performance stability of the editor, rolled out a major new feature to help users better edit articles, and made some improvements to other features to increase their ease of use and understandability, fixing 75 bugs and tickets. The new citation editor is now available to all VisualEditor users on the English, Polish, and Czech Wikipedias, with instructions on how to enable it on other wikis. The citation and template dialogs were simplified to avoid technical language and some outcomes that were unexpected for users. As part of this, the citation icons were replaced with a new, clearer set, and the template hinting system now lets wikis mark template parameters as “suggested”, as a step below the existing “required” state. The formula editor is now available to all VisualEditor users, and a new Beta Feature giving a tool that lets you set the language of content was made available for testing and feedback. Following a new set of user testing, the toolbar was tweaked, moving the list and indent buttons to a drop-down to make them less prominent, and removing the gallery button which is rarely used and confused users. The mobile version of VisualEditor, currently available for alpha testers, was expanded to also have the new citation editor available, and had some significant performance improvements made, especially for long or complex pages. Work continued on making VisualEditor more performant and reliable, and key tasks like keyboard accessibility have progressed. The deployed version of the code was updated five times in the regular release cycle.
Progress was also made on Parsoid, the parsing program that works behind the scenes of VisualEditor. The team continued with ongoing bug fixes and bi-weekly deployments. Besides the user-facing bug fixes, we also improved our tracing support (to aid debugging), and did some performance improvements. We also finished implementing support for HTML/visual editing of transclusion parameters. This is not yet enabled in production while we finish up any additional performance tweaks on it. As part of the Google Summer of Code program, one student is working on a wikilint project to detect broken/bad wikitext in wiki pages.
Editor engagement
In May, the Flow team prepared the new front-end redesign of this new discussion system. We completed work on sorting topics on a board by most recent activity, and changed hidden post handling so that everyone can see hidden posts. Back-end improvements include optimizations on how we handle unique identifiers and generate standard URLs. We also accepted Special:Flow (a community-created improvement that makes it easier to create redirects to Flow boards) and made fixes for topic submission and replies for users without JavaScript.
Growth team presentation slides from the monthly Metrics meeting
The Growth team launched its A/B test of two methods for asking anonymous editors to sign up on the English, German, French, and Italian Wikipedias. Full analysis of the test results is expected in June, though preliminary data strongly suggests a positive impact on new registrations. Last but not least, Growth released two smaller enhancements to our data collection regarding article creation, including adding page identifiers to MediaWiki’s deletion logs and tracking page restorations across all wikis.
Mobile
This month, the Mobile Apps team worked on a series of navigation improvements to the iOS and Android alpha apps, focusing on the interface for searching, saving and sharing pages, and navigating to the table of contents. We also worked on restyling the global navigation menu and article content—typography, color, and spacing—to create a standardized experience across the mobile web and apps. In preparation for the launch of the Android app in June, we tackled a number of user-reported crashing bugs to ensure a more stable and reliable experience for our users.
The Mobile web team continued to build out the basic features of VisualEditor for tablet users, providing the ability to add references via VisualEditor. We hope to finish refining the add and modify references workflow in preparation for graduating VE for tablets to the stable mobile site sometime in July. On the reader features side, we’ve made a number of tablet-related styling improvements (typography, spacing, and Table of Contents) to the stable mobile site. This should greatly improve the reading experience for tablet users who are already accessing the mobile version of our projects, and it is one of the last pieces of work we planned to get done before we begin redirecting all tablet users to the mobile site mid-June.
The Wikipedia Zero team worked on restructuring ZeroRatedMobileAccess into several extensions, and added support for graceful image quality reduction, and worked on a proposal to use GIF images for Zero banners instead of ESI. We also added necessary library support to the reboots of the Wikipedia apps, performed limited app code review, added support for Nokia (now MS Mobile) proxies, and started work with the Design team on the final polish for the Wikipedia Zero experience in the forthcoming apps.
In May we launched Wikipedia Zero with Ncell in Nepal, Sky Mobile (Beeline) in Kyrgyzstan and Airtel in Nigeria. We also added Opera Mini zero-rating in Umniah in Jordan. We served roughly 67 million free page views in May across 30 partners in 28 countries. We met with community members from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan, as well as prospective partners in Brazil, and kicked off the carrier portal design with Noble studios.
Fundraising
Major Gifts and Foundations
The Major Gifts team welcomed Sylvia Ventura to the team as a Development Consultant on a 3 month contract. Sylvia will be helping plan our fall fundraising events and further developing our relationships with international donors.
We are working on an event at St. James Palace in London to support Wikimania the last week of June.
Online Fundraising
The online fundraising team ran low-level banner tests world-wide. Emails were sent to previous donors in the Czech Republic and Norway. Approximately $700,000 USD was raised in May (preliminary numbers as donations are still settling).
The team held focus groups with donors in the US, primarly focused on optimizing mobile and email fundraising.
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.
The fundraising tech team successfully deployed a new credit card processor allowing us to process payments more efficiently internationally, fully customize forms, and have credit card processing redundancy.
Grantmaking
Department highlights
Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)
In May, the nine-member FDC met for its face-to-face deliberations and published its recommendations to the WMF Board of Trustees on 2013-2014 Round 2 proposals. The Board will make its decision on these recommendations by 1 July. A more detailed calendar on the process, including upcoming milestones and deadlines, is available on Meta.
In addition, the Advisory Group to the FDC also met in Frankfurt for their final meeting. Their goal was to provide the Executive Director of the WMF with a recommendation on whether or not the FDC process should continue, and if so, what modifications should be made. Their unanimously agreed to recommend to continue the process; more detailed recommendations are forthcoming.
The FDC is currently accepting four new members. To that end, self-nominations are accepted through June 15. Four new members will be appointed by the Board of Trustees, and will be announced in July. If you should have questions about the process, contact FDCsupportwikimedia.org.
Project and Event Grants
3 new requests were funded in May 2014.
Grants funded in May 2014
The logo for Wikipedia Summer of Monuments.
Indigenous Knowledge for Wikipedia: To support a workshop and the development of case studies examining the use of oral citations for improving Wikipedia articles.
Summer of Monuments 2014: To support Wikimedia US-DC in organizing a photo campaign targeted at select Southern US states to improve coverage of nationally-recognized monuments on Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Estonia office rental: To support Wikimedia Estonia with their rental office space.
Travel & Participation Support
3 new requests were funded and 2 reports were accepted in May 2014.
Requests awarded in May 2014
Three requests involving participation in the 2014 Open Source Bridge Conference to fund:
Niharika’s talk on a compact interlanguage selector tool that supports the many languages on Wikipedia.
Rjain’s hack session on Extension Development with Mediawiki.
Netha’s presentations at both the Ada Camp and Open Source Bridge conferences. At Ada Camp, Netha will hold discussions surrounding the topic of increasing participation in women with plans on tying in ideas to her proposed diversity workshop at Wikimania 2014. At the OSB, her talk is on “The joy of volunteering with open technology and culture”.
Reports accepted in May 2014
LibreGraphics Meeting report
Libreplanet 2014 report
Individual Engagement Grants
Presentation slides about new Individual Engagement Grants
12 new Individual Engagement grants were selected and announced in May! These grants, which range from $600 to $22,600, will support 16 grantees from 10 countries with countless volunteer participants from around the world. Grantees will build tools and partnerships, conduct research, and engage in online community organizing. Some new investment areas in this round include funding mobile app development, Wikipedia research, and projects aimed at improving Wikivoyage and Wiktionary. The round 1 2014 projects are:
Making Telugu Content Accessible, led by Santhosh, funded at 104,000 Rupees.
Medicine Translation Community Organizing, led by CFCF, funded at $10,000.
Open Access Reader, led by Edward Saperia, funded at $6550.
Optimizing Wikimedia Category Systems, led by Paul J. Weiss, funded at $9750.
Promoting Wikivoyage, led by Tammy Bennert, funded at $600.
Pronunciation Recording, led by Rillke with participation from Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV and Infovarius, funded at €1450.
Reimagining Wikipedia Mentorship, led by I JethroBT, Soni and Gabrielm199, funded at $22,600.
Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia, led by Vojtěch Veselý with participation from Vojtěch Dostál, Václav Šulc, and Jan Sokol, funded at 160,000 CZK.
Tools for Armenian Wikisource and beyond, led by Xelgen with participation from HrantKhachatrian and Mahnerak, funded at $7600.
The Wikiquiz, led by Addis Wang, Mys 721x, and Ericmetro, funded at $1070.
WikiTrack, led by Hari Prasad Nadig, funded at $2500.
Women and Wikipedia, led by Amanda Menking, funded at $8075.
Program Head Siko Bouterse attended the Wikipedia Education Program Hackathon in Jordan to meet with Arabic Wikipedians. While there, we launched the Arabic Wikipedia Library, participated in a group generating a list of online Arabic research materials for use in editing articles, and presented about grantmaking to a group of educators and Wikipedians.
Siko also facilitated an IdeaLab workshop at Wikiconference USA, where about 15 participants collaborated to develop a handful of ideas into action plans.
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