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Play media
Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of July (July 31, 2014)
Contents
1 Data and Trends
2 Financials
3 Highlights
3.1 Petition for free access to Wikipedia on mobile phones
3.2 Legal victories in Italy and against paid editing sites
3.3 New Wikipedia app for iOS mobile devices
3.4 Grants impact analysis
4 Engineering
4.1 HHVM
4.2 Mobile Apps
4.3 Mobile Web
4.4 Flow
4.5 VisualEditor
4.6 SUL finalization
4.7 Phabricator migration
4.8 MediaWiki core front-end libraries
4.9 Research and Data
4.10 Services
5 Fundraising
5.1 Major Gifts and Foundations
5.2 Online Fundraising
6 Grantmaking
6.1 Highlights
6.2 Visits and Events
6.3 Annual Plan Grants Program
6.4 Project and Event Grants Program
6.4.1 Grants funded in July 2014
6.4.2 Reports accepted in July 2014
6.5 Individual Engagement Grants Program
6.5.1 Grantee updates
6.5.2 Reports accepted in July 2014
6.6 Travel and Participation Support Program
6.6.1 Requests awarded in July 2014
6.6.2 Reports accepted in July 2014
6.7 Wikimania Scholarships
6.8 Learning and Evaluation
6.8.1 Grants programs
6.8.2 Grants operations and tools
6.8.3 Program Evaluation & Design
6.8.4 Other
6.9 Wikipedia Education Program
6.9.1 Wikimania
6.9.2 Wikipedia Education Collaborative
6.9.3 Arab world programs
6.9.4 Communications
7 Human Resources
7.1 July Staff Changes
7.2 July Statistics
8 Finance and Administration
9 Legal and Community Advocacy
9.1 LCA Report, July 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
10.1 Major announcements
10.2 Major Storylines through July
10.3 Other worthwhile reads
10.4 WMF Blog posts
10.5 Media contact
10.6 Wikipedia Signpost
10.7 Communications Design
Data and Trends
Global unique visitors for June:
432 million (-7.9% compared with May; -9.1% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects, not including mobile devices; comScore will release July data later in July)
Page requests for July:
20.583 billion (+1.8% compared with June; +4.4% 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 June 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
74,549 (-7.0% compared with May / -2.0% 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 June 30, 2014
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of June 30, 2014
(Financial information is only available through June 2014 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date June 30, 2014.
Revenue
51,280,212
Expenses:
Engineering Group
17,380,695
Fundraising Group
3,701,090
Grantmaking Group
1,860,627
Programs Group
1,766,790
Grants
5,695,611
Governance Group
1,254,286
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group
5,114,480
Finance/HR/Admin Group
7,025,451
Total Expenses
43,799,030
Total surplus
(7,481,182)
in US dollars
Revenue for the month of June is $1.31MM versus plan of $1.67MM, approximately $0.36MM or 22% under plan.
Year-to-date revenue is $51.28MM versus plan of $50.07MM, approximately $1.21MM or 2% over plan.
Expenses for the month of June is $6.58MM versus plan of $4.52MM, approximately $2.06MM or 46% over plan, primarily due to higher legal fees, capital expenditures, grants, outside contract services, personnel expenses, and travel & conference expenses offset by lower internet hosting expenses.
Year-to-date expenses is $43.80MM versus plan of $50.07MM, approximately $6.27MM or 13% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, payment processing fees, staff development expenses, overall grants and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal fees, outside contract services, and conference expenses.
Cash and Investments – $49.67MM as of June 30, 2014.
Highlights
Play media
Knowledge For Everyone – a short documentary accompanying the petition
Petition for free access to Wikipedia on mobile phones
On July 28, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a petition for free access to Wikipedia on mobile phones, as it is offered in the Wikipedia Zero program. The petition is accompanied by the short documentary film, titled Knowledge for Everyone, about a group of high school students in South Africa who had written an open letter asking the country’s mobile carriers for such access, so that they could use Wikipedia for their schoolwork.
Legal victories in Italy and against paid editing sites
After more than four years, a Rome court dismissed a case against the Wikimedia Foundation, describing Wikipedia as “a service based on the freedom of the users” and setting positive precedent for other claims in Italy. Also in July, the Foundation successfully obtained orders preventing four websites advertising a service of paid editing of articles on Wikipedia from abusing the “Wikipedia” trademark.
Screenshot of new iOS Wikipedia app
New Wikipedia app for iOS mobile devices
In July, the new native iOS Wikipedia app was released, following the successful launch of the Android app in June. The app has the same features as the Android app, including the ability to edit both anonymously and logged in, saved pages for offline reading, and a history of your recently visited pages.
Grants impact analysis
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Grantmaking department published the first set of analyses for an impact review focusing on $4.4M of fully reported grants from the year 2013/14 in its three grants areas: Individual Engagement Grants, Project & Event Grants and Annual Plan Grants.
“Key observations from this first round of impact analyses” (presentation slide)
Engineering
A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for July 2014 can be found at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/July
Department Highlights
Major news in July include:
a recap of how the Operations team collaborated with the RIPE NCC to measure the delivery of Wikimedia sites to users in Asia and elsewhere;
an analysis of the impact of the San Francisco data center on the speed of Wikimedia sites;
the launch of the new native Wikipedia app for iOS;
a first look at the content translation tool.
HHVM
HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) is aimed to improve the speed of Wikimedia sites. The Beta cluster (the testing environment that best simulates our sites) is now running HHVM. The latest MediaWiki-Vagrant and Labs-vagrant (virtual machine environments that make it easier for developers to apply their code to Wikimedia sites) use HHVM by default.
Presentation slides about the iOS app launch
Mobile Apps
In July, the Mobile Apps team launched the new native iOS Wikipedia app, following the successful launch of the Android app in June. The app has the same features as the Android app, including the ability to edit both anonymously and logged in, saved pages for offline reading, and your recently visited pages. The iOS app also contains an onboarding screen which is displayed the first time the app is launched, asking users to sign up. An update to the Android app was released, containing the Android version of the onboarding screen, as well as a a night mode for reading in dark environments, a font size selector, and a references display that makes browsing references easier. Next month, the team plans to continue improvements to page styling, and begin designing a dialogue that displays the first time a user taps edit to help them make their edit successfully.
Mobile Web
This month, the team continued to focus on wrapping up the collaboration with the Editing team to bring VisualEditor to tablet users on the mobile site. We also began working to design and prototype our first new Wikidata contribution stream, which we will build and test with users on the beta site in the coming month.
Flow
In July, the Flow team built the ability for users to subscribe to individual Flow discussions, instead of following an entire page of conversations. Subscribing to an individual thread is automatic for users who create or reply to the thread, and users can choose to subscribe (or unsubscribe) by clicking a star icon in the conversation’s header box. Users who are subscribed to a thread receive notifications about any replies or activity in that thread. To support the new subscription/notification system, the team created a new namespace, Topic, which is the new “permalink” URL for discussion threads; when a user clicks on a notification, the target link will be the Topic page, with the new messages highlighted with a color. The team is currently building a new read/unread state for Flow notifications, to help users keep track of the active discussion topics that they’re subscribed to.
VisualEditor
In July, the team working on VisualEditor converged the mobile and desktop designs, made it possible to see and edit HTML comments, improved access to re-using citations, and fixed over 120 bugs and tickets. The team also expanded its scope to cover all MediaWiki editing tools as well, as the new Editing Team.
The new design is possible due to the significant progress made in cross-platform support in the interface code. This now provides responsively-sized windows that can work on desktop, tablet and phone with the same code. HTML comments are occasionally used to alert editors to contentious issues without disrupting articles for readers. Making them prominently visible avoids editors accidentally stepping over expected limits. The simple dialog for re-using citations is now available in the toolbar so that it is easier for users to find.
Other improvements include an array of performance fixes targeted at helping mobile users especially. We fixed several minor instances where VisualEditor would corrupt the page. We also installed better monitoring of corruptions if they occur. The mobile version of VisualEditor, currently available for beta testers, moved towards stable release. We fixed some bugs and editing issues, and improving loading performance. Our work to support languages made some significant gains, nearing the completion of a major task to support IME users. The work to support Internet Explorer uncovered some more issues as well as fixes.
SUL finalization
In July, the SUL (single user login) finalisation team worked on developing features to ease the workload that the finalisation will place on the community, and to minimise the impact on those users that are affected. A feature is being developed that allows users to log in with their pre-finalisation credentials, so that everyone who is affected is still able to access their account; this feature is mostly complete from a back-end engineering standpoint but now needs design and product refinement, and will hopefully be completed by late August. A feature to globally rename users in a manner that does not create clashing accounts was completed and deployed. A feature is being developed to allow accounts to be globally merged, so that clashing local-only accounts that were globalised by the finalisation can be consolidated into a single global account; this feature is in the early stages of implementation and no estimate is possible at this time. A feature is being developed to allow local-only account holders to request rename and globalisation before the finalisation, and also feeds these rename requests to the appropriate community processes in a manner that reduces the workload of community; this feature is in the design phase, and will likely be ready for implementation in early August.
Phabricator migration
Phabricator’s “Legalpad” application (a tool to manage trusted users) was set up on a separate server that provides provides Single-User Login authentication with wiki credentials. We implemented the ability to restrict access to tasks in a certain project and worked on initial migration code to import data from Bugzilla reports into Phabricator tasks. We also set up a data backup system for Phabricator, and upgraded the dedicated Phabricator server to Ubuntu Trusty. A more detailed summary email about the status of the Phabricator migration was sent to Wikitech-l.
MediaWiki core front-end libraries
In July, the Request for comment for refactoring MediaWiki’s skin system (which handles the appearance of wiki sites) was re-written and discussed with members of the community and staff. Work on the proposed system is scheduled to begin in August, alongside creating an Agora theme for, and server-side version of, OOjs UI, a toolkit used to compose complex widgets. In addition to the RfC work, a well-attended meeting was held for teams using or considering using OOjs UI, including Editing, Multimedia and Growth. From that meeting, several issues were identified as blockers to increased acceptance of the toolkit. The most prominent blocker is the lack of an Agora theme for OOjs UI at this time. Creating this theme has thus been prioritized and will be completed as soon as possible. The Design team has committed to delivering necessary assets by mid-August. Discussion about changes to OOjs UI also surfaced the desire to be able to create widgets on the server and then bind to them on the client (a feature proposed as part of the skinning RfC). This functionality is thus now planned to be implemented in OOjs UI before the skin refactoring begins.
Presentation slides on mobile readership and contribution trends at the July 31 metrics meeting
Research and Data
This month we completed the documentation for the Active Editor Model, a set of metrics for observing sub-population trends and setting product team goals. We also engaged in further work on the new page views definition. An interim solution for Limited-duration Unique Client Identifiers (LUCIDs) was also developed and passed to the Analytics Engineering team for review.
We analyzed trends in mobile readership and contributions, with a particular focus on the tablet switchover and the release of the native Android app. We found that in the first half of 2014 mobile surpassed desktop in the rate at which new registered users become first-time editors and first-time active editors in many major projects, including the English Wikipedia. An update on mobile trends was presented at the upcoming Monthly Metrics meeting on July 31.
Services
The brand new Services group started design and prototyping work on the storage service (see code) and REST API (see code). The storage service now has early support for bucket creation and multiple bucket types. We decided to configure the storage service as a back-end for the REST API server. This means that all requests will be sent to the REST API, which will then route them to the appropriate storage service without network overhead. This design lets us keep the storage service buckets very general, by adding entry point specific logic in front-end handlers. The interface is still well-defined in terms of HTTP requests, so it remains straightforward to run the storage service as a separate process. We refined the bucket design to allow us to add features very similar to Amazon DynamoDB in a future iteration. There is also an early design for light-weight HTTP transaction support.
Fundraising
Fundraising is off to a strong start in the new fiscal year – raising $4.5 million in July.
We welcomed Victoria Shchepakina as a new Fundraiser Program Associate. She will focus her efforts on the Wikimedia Shop.
We started accepting Bitcoin. See the blog post for the full announcement.
A Petition for Free Access to Wikipedia on Cell phones was published. We will be emailing this petition to our donors in order to increase awareness about Wikipedia Zero.
Major Gifts and Foundations
The MGF team raised over $2.4 million in July, including $1.25 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Fall fundraising events scheduled for September 22 in NYC and November 6 in San Francisco
Online Fundraising
The online fundraising team ran low-level banner tests world-wide, and a full-scale campaign in Japan. Emails were sent to previous donors in the Japan and South Africa. Approximately $2 million USD was raised in July through these campaigns (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.
We are making our mobile banner tests more sophisticated, and ran a very successful one on July 30 which increased donations 3.5 times.
Grantmaking
Highlights
FY 2013-14 first part of grantmaking impact assessment report.
Published the first set of analyses for grantmaking impact review (a full assessment will follow)
4 new members are appointed to the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) by the WMF Board of Trustees: Risker (Anne Clin), Matanya (Matanya Moses), B1mbo (Osmar Valdebenito), and Thuvack (Dumisani Ndubane). Welcome, and congratulations!
The Travel and Participation Support program launched a revamp. Besides making workflows more user-friendly and fun, some experimental changes in this revamp aimed at supporting more participants to accomplish Wikimedia’s mission include: broadening the eligibility of event types and offering Wikimedia merchandise as an outreach-tool for participants
110 Wikimania scholarship recipients are headed to London next month, and we can’t wait to learn about the outcomes of their participation.
A review of Project and Event Grants which were reported on in 2013-14 was completed. 32 different Wikimedia projects were supported (out of 36 grants), resulting in over 340 events, 10K people involved, 190K photos to Commons, and over 8K articles written. See full report.
2014-2015 Round 1 of the FDC process kicks off, with the initial announcement of eligibility status for all 15 organizations that submitted a Letter of Intent (LOI) for the upcoming round.
Several members of the grantmaking team participated in the International Human Rights Funders Group (IHRFG) annual conference in New York City, where we talked about the challenges and opportunities in funding human rights work, and importantly, shared our experiences in participatory grantmaking with the larger field of funders (and wrote the Wikipedia article).
Launched new Learning Quarterly newsletter. Sign up to subscribe
In other news, from grantee projects:
IEGrantee Keilana published a kit to help replicate successful experiments in countering systemic bias in Wikipedia.
As The Wikipedia Library‘s 1-year IEG comes to a close, Ocaasi is measuring outcomes and notes that so far,
the Library is serving 1,940 editors with access to 2,924 free journal accounts worth 1.2 million USD. There is still room to grow as the Library has set its sights to move well beyond English.
The results from Wiki Loves Earth are coming in. With the support of a PEG grant, the Macedonian community submitted over 12,000 photos, with 200 already in use in Wikipedia articles!
Members of Wikimedia Taiwan have translated the Editing Wikipedia brochure into Chinese — filling a huge gap in resources for our global community.
Amical Wikimedia supported as many as 792 articles created through the Catalan Culture challenge in 92 languages.
Visits and Events
Asaf Bartov participated in the Ukrainian 10th Anniversary WikiConference in Kiev, delivering a keynote on identifying and managing conflict of interest in non-profit governance (as distinct from w:WP:COI while editing)
Asaf Bartov visited Wikimedia Serbia in Belgrade, to have a meeting with the board and an open wikimeetup.
Anasuya Sengupta and Garfield Byrd visited Wikimedia Israel in Tel Aviv, to learn more about the chapter’s current work and future plans.
Grantmaking session preparations are underway for Wikimania. Some events in the works include: an IdeaLab mixer and workshop and a panel showcasing grantee projects from across our 4 programs.
Annual Plan Grants Program
Aerial photography supported through WMIL’s WikiAir in 2013
Photo upload supported by WMCH in 2013
Participants in WMRS’ EduWiki Learning Day, featured in their Q1 report
20 reports reviewed; 6 grants completed; 11 reports submitted; 15 organizations evaluated for eligibility; 4 new committee members appointed
The WMF Board of Trustees announces four new appointments to the FDC. Welcome to new members Risker (Anne Clin), Matanya (Matanya Moses), B1mbo (Osmar Valdebenito), and Thuvack (Dumisani Ndubane)! New members were appointed by the board after a selection process including statements from nominees and a public question and answer phase. The terms of the new members will begin 1 August. We thank the departing members for their invaluable contributions to the work of the inaugural FDC: Mike Peel, Arjuna Rao Chavala, Anders Wennersten, and Yuri Perohanych.
Organizations receiving grants in 2013-2014 Round 2 were contacted in order to execute grant agreements and send payments. New grant terms started on 1 July, and the first round of progress reports will be due 30 October.
Initial eligibility for 15 organizations submitting Letters of Intent for 2014-2015 Round 1 was announced on 18 July 2014. Organizations in the YES IF category will have until 15 July 2014 to meet eligibility gaps and move to the YES category. Organizations in the YES category will be eligible to submit proposals for 2014-2015 Round 1, which will be due on 1 October. As of 30 July, 10 organizations are already deemed eligible to participate!
11 Quarter 2 progress reports for 2013-2014 grants were submitted by 30 July. Second installments of grant funds will be sent to 2013-2014 Round 1 grantees.
11 Quarter 1 progress reports for 2013-2014 grants and 2 Quarter 3 progress reports for 2012-2013 Round 2 grants were reviewed by FDC staff. Some highlights from the Q1 progress reports include:
Amical Wikimedia supports as many as 792 articles through the Catalan Culture challenge in 92 languages.
Wikimedia Serbia hosts a successful EduWiki conference.
9 impact reports for 2012-2013 grantees were reviewed by FDC staff and 2012-2013 Round 1 grants have now been completed by 8 organizations (including Wikimédia France and Wikimedia Foundation, that submitted impact reports earlier); 2 organizations will need to return underspent grant funds before grants are complete and 1 organization still needs to submit English translations of audited financial statements before its grant is considered complete. Some highlights from the impact reports include:
Images gained through WMIL’s WikiAir program show an impressive 9.1% use rate for a group of 1,441 photos, and one of the photos was featured on the President’s greeting card for Rosh Hashanah.
WMCH supports the upload of 11,453 pictures, including 437 quality images in 2013.
WMAR shares impressive results from the international Mujeres Iberoamericanas contest, which produced 1,227 improved articles and an outstanding retention rate of contributors.
WMAT shares a learning pattern about community engagement in photo contests.
Project and Event Grants Program
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