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Play media
Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of June (July 3, 2014)
Contents
1 Data and Trends
2 Financials
3 Highlights
3.1 Revamped Wikipedia app for Android, and new optimized view for tablet users
3.2 Media viewer released on all wikis
3.3 First impact assessment of FDC grants (APG)
3.4 Term of Use amended with transparency requirements for paid editing
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 June 2014
6.2.2 Reports accepted in June 2014
6.3 Travel and Participation Support
6.4 Individual Engagement Grants
6.5 Learning & Evaluation
6.5.1 Grants Programs
6.5.2 Program Evaluation
6.5.3 Grants Operations and tools
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 June Staff Changes
7.2 June Statistics
8 Finance and Administration
9 Legal and Community Advocacy
9.1 Contract Metrics
9.2 Trademark Metrics
9.3 Domains Obtained
9.4 Coming & Going
9.5 Other Activities
10 Communications
10.1 Major announcements
10.2 Major Storylines through June 2014
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 May:
469 million (+0.7% compared with April; -10.2% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects, not including mobile devices; comScore will release June data later in July)
Page requests for June:
20.217 billion (-0.2% compared with May; -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 May 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
80,131 (+6.5% compared with April / -1.9% 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 May 31, 2014
Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of May 31, 2014
(Financial information is only available through May 2014 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date May 31, 2014.
Revenue
49,972,461
Expenses:
Engineering Group
15,308,224
Fundraising Group
3,392,468
Grantmaking Group
1,696,721
Programs Group
1,630,409
Grants
4,104,348
Governance Group
909,083
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group
4,066,924
Finance/HR/Admin Group
6,109,383
Total Expenses
37,217,560
Total surplus
(12,754,901)
in US dollars
Revenue for the month of May is $0.78MM versus plan of $1.67MM, approximately $0.89MM or 54% under plan.
Year-to-date revenue is $49.97MM versus plan of $48.40MM, approximately $1.57MM or 3% over plan.
Expenses for the month of May is $3.71MM versus plan of $4.49MM, approximately $0.78MM or 17% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, and FDC grants partially offset by higher legal fees, outside contract services, and travel expenses related to community convening events.
Year-to-date expenses is $37.22MM versus plan of $45.55MM, approximately $8.33MM or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, payment processing fees, staff development expenses, grants and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal fees and outside contract services.
Cash and Investments – $53.13MM as of May 31, 2014.
Highlights
Main Page of the English Wikipedia on the new Android app.
Revamped Wikipedia app for Android, and new optimized view for tablet users
The new Android Wikipedia app was released in June and is now available in the Google Play store. Core features of the app include the ability to save pages for offline reading, a record of your reading history, and the ability to edit either as a logged in user or anonymously. The app is the first mobile platform that allows anonymous editing.
Also, since June 17, users on tablets are now redirected to the new tablet-optimized mobile site; they were previously being sent to the desktop version of all Wikimedia projects. Early data suggests that this change had a positive impact on new user signup and new editor activation numbers.
Media viewer released on all wikis
In June, the multimedia team released Media Viewer v0.2 on all Wikimedia wikis, with over 20 million image views per day on those sites that are tracked. Global feedback was generally positive and helped surface a range of issues, many of which were addressed quickly. Based on this feedback, a number of new features were developed by the team: view images in full resolution, view images in different sizes, show more image information, edit image file pages, as well as easy disable tools for anonymous users and editors.
First impact assessment of FDC grants (APG)
The results of the first impact assessment for Annual Plan Grants (FDC grants) to Wikimedia organiations were published. Based on the reports of the 9 organizations funded in Round 1 of 2012-2013, the report found that organizations had strength in content-related projects, which benefitted from full time staff and consistent partnership:
Content development results: 12K articles improved, 168K images on Commons, and 86K other media on Commons
Participation improvements (new editors; active editors; retained editors) were not recorded by most organizations. But over 9000 people were touched by the programs associated with the activties of the organizations, and Wikidata (a new Wikimedia project developed by Wikimedia Deutschland) saw 3000 new active editors.
Term of Use amended with transparency requirements for paid editing
The Wikimedia Foundation published a new amendment to the Terms of Use to address disclosure of paid editing.
Engineering
A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for June 2014 can be found at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Report/2014/June
Department Highlights
Major news in June include:
the release of the new Wikipedia for Android app, preceded by its beta version;
the decision to move away from Bugzilla in favor of Phabricator;
A new tablet view for Wikimedia sites.
VisualEditor
Presentation slides about VisualEditor from the Editing team‘s quarterly review
Presentation slides from the Parsoid team’s quarterly review
In June, the VisualEditor team continued to improve this visual tool to edit wiki pages. They provided a way to see the context of links and other items when you edit to make this easier, worked on the performance and stability of the editor so that users could more swiftly and reliably make changes to articles, and made some improvements to features focused on increasing their simplicity and understandability. The editor now shows with a highlight where dragging-and-dropping content will put it, and works for any content, not just for images. The citation and reference tools had some minor adjustments to guide the user on how they operate, based on feedback and user testing. A lot of fixes to issues with windows opening and closing, and especially the link editing tool, were made, alongside the save dialog, categories, the language editing tool, table styling, template display and highlights on selected items. The mobile version of VisualEditor, currently available for alpha testers, moved towards release, fixing a number of bugs and improving performance. Work to support languages made some significant gains, and work to support Internet Explorer continued. The new visual interface for writing TemplateData (structured template documentation) was enabled on the Catalan and Hebrew Wikipedias.
Work also continued on Parsoid, the parsing system that works behind the scenes of VisualEditor to convert wikitext to annotated HTML, and vice versa. The team continued with ongoing bug fixes and bi-weekly deployments; they notably worked on improving the parsing support for some table-handling edge cases, handling nowiki tags, and making the parsing faster. They also began work on supporting language converter markup.
The Parsoid team added CSS styling to the HTML code to bring Parsoid’s HTML closer to what is produced by the PHP parser (used in MediaWiki). They continued to tweak the CSS based on rendering differences they found, and started work on generating visual diffs between screenshots of content rendered with the two methods. This initial proof-of-concept will serve as the basis of larger scale automated testing and identification of rendering diffs. Last, the LintTrap project (for the detection of broken wikitext) saw good progress and a demo application was made available.
Presentation slides on Flow from the metrics meeting for June
S Page presenting about Flow
Editor engagement
In June, the Flow team finished an architectural rewrite for the interface, to make it easier to update it in the future. The new feature in the latest release is the ability to sort topics on a Flow board. There are now two options for the order that topics appear on the board: you can see the most recently created threads at the top (the default), or the most recently updated threads. This new sorting option makes it easier to find the active conversations on the board.
We’ve also made a few changes to make Flow discussions easier to read, including a font size now consistent with other pages, dropdown menus now easier to read, and the use of the new button style and the WikiGlyphs webfont.
The Growth team completed analysis of its first round of A/B testing of signup invitations for anonymous editors on English, French, German, and Italian Wikipedias. Based on these results, the team prepared a second version to be A/B tested. Additionally, the team released a major refactor of the GuidedTour extension, as well as design enhancements like animations, a new way of drawing guider elements, updated button styles, and more. The team also launched GuidedTours on three new Wikipedias: Arabic, Norwegian, and Bengali.
Presentation slides about the Android app launch
Dan Garry presenting about the Android app launch
Mobile
The Mobile Apps team released the new Android Wikipedia app and it is now available to be downloaded through the Google Play store on Android devices. Core features of the app include the ability to save pages for offline reading, a record of your browsing history, and the ability to edit either as a logged in user or anonymously. The app is the first mobile platform that allows anonymous editing. The app also supports Wikipedia Zero for participating mobile carriers. Additional work done this month includes the start of implementing night mode for the Android app (by popular demand), creating an onboarding experience which is to be refined and deployed in July, and numerous improvements to the edit workflow.
New appearance of the tablet-optimized mobile site.
Early data indicates that the new view on tablets is well accepted among readers – few are switching back to the old view
The Mobile web team finished work on styling the mobile site to provide a better experience for tablet users. As of June 17, users on tablets are now redirected to the new tablet-optimized mobile; they were previously being sent to the desktop version of all Wikimedia projects. Early data suggests that this change had a positive impact on new user signup and new editor activation numbers. The team also continued work on VisualEditor features (the linking and citation dialogs) in preparation for releasing the option to edit via VisualEditor to tablet users in the next three months.
During the last month, the Wikipedia Zero team activated the new code for Wikipedia Zero, by replacing replaces one monolithic piece of software by multiple smaller tools. The JsonConfig extension, which allows a wiki-driven configuration system with data validation, received significant enhancements to make it more general for other use cases.
Additionally, the team enabled lower-quality thumbnails for a live in-house Wikipedia Zero operator configuration, and finished a basic version of Wikipedia Zero for the Android and iOS Wikipedia apps. The team also supported the Wikipedia apps development by improving the network connection management in Android and iOS, and with the Find in page feature for Android.
Wikipedia Zero was launched with Airtel in Bangladesh; this is the third Zero partner in Bangladesh, and the 34th launched partner overall. The team participated in the Wiki Indaba conference, the first event of its kind to be held in Africa. The event, organized by Wikimedia South Africa, brought together community members from Tunisia, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa. The attendees shared experiences and challenges to work in the region and formulated strategies to support and strengthen the movement’s efforts across the continent. The team also met with local operators in South Africa, and operators and handset manufacturers in India.
Fundraising
Presentation slides
The Fundraising Tech team welcomed Elliott Eggleston as software engineer.
Fiscal Year Updates:
Recognized by GuideStar as the #2 most efficient nonprofit fundraising effort in the US.
Overall we generated $50.5 million in the past fiscal year.
Play media
Video message recorded by legacy donor Jim Pacha
Major Gifts and Foundations
Fiscal Year Updates:
Major Gifts hit their individual group goals.
Major Gifts fundraising events were held in New York City and London.
A significant legacy gift was received from Jim Pacha.
Online Fundraising
Fiscal Year Updates:
Moved to a year-round continuous-campaign model for banner A/B testing.
Launched first experiments with mobile fundraising.
This was our first year where we sent out emails to donors in multiple languages.
For Next Fiscal Year:
Continue to localize to reach more donors worldwide
Expand our mobile fundraising reach
Improve infrastructure and analysis
Fine tune continuous-campaign model
Expand email fundraising
Grantmaking
Department highlights
In 2013-14, we funded over 200 grants to over 66 countries.
2013-14 Funding by location
8 new grants were funded in June 2014, and 22 reports were reviewed.
The first impact analysis for the Annual Plan Grants program (FDC process) has been completed. The first round of funding (Round 1 2012-2013) of ~$4M resulted in lots of new content on Wikimedia projects (12K articles improved; 168K images on Commons; 86K other media on Commons).
The FDC’s recommendations for 2013-2014 Round 2 were approved by the WMF Board of Trustees on 30 June 2014.
Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)
3 new grants were funded and 12 progress reports were reviewed in June 2014.
The FDC’s recommendation for 2013-2014 Round 2 was approved by the WMF Board of Trustees on 30 June 2014. Three grants were approved, to Wikimedia Norge, Wikimédia France and the Centre for Internet and Society. Grant terms begin 1 July 2014.
The WMF Board of Trustees is seeking four new members to join the FDC. Those interested in serving have submitted nominations on Meta, and the WMF Board of Trustees will announce the shortlist of candidates in July.
FDC staff reviewed Q1 and Q3 progress reports that were submitted at the end of April this month: we can already see that organizations have increased their activity in the new year. Highlights include an impressive increase in program activity across all grantees as well as more targeted approaches to programs. Grantees have already achieved a lot. 792 articles in 92 languages created through Amical’s Culture Challenge, 6,589 uploaded files already supported by Wikimedia Österreich in Q1, 592 new articles created through Wikimedia Norge’s Women’s Day editing workshop, Wikimedia Argentina’s exploration with working with high school students on Wikivoyage, and an exciting partnership between Wikimedia Nederland and the Dutch National Parks. Amical Wikimedia and Wikimédia France are established in new office spaces, and we have welcomed a number of new employees to our Wikimedia community. We hope this will enable increased program activity and results in future quarters. Here are some visual highlights from the Q1 and Q3 reports we reviewed:
A beautiful image captured in February using equipment borrowed from Wikimedia CH.
EduWiki Learning Day hosted by Wikimedia Serbia, a new Annual Plan grantee.
Wikimedia Israel celebrates the 13th Birthday of Wikipedia at a Tel Aviv Meetup.
Wikimédia France discovers sports photography is motivating for its volunteers.
Project and Event Grants
Iberoconf 2013
Kolessa Phonograph Cylinders
Volunteer training, Philippine Cultural Heritage Mapping Conference
4 new requests were funded and 10 reports were accepted in June 2014.
The Grant Advisory Committee is going through a revamp of its process – stay tuned for improved resources and pages!
Grants funded in June 2014
Producer Prize for Arabic Wikipedia: To support an annual contest awarding the best contributions to Arabic Wikipedia.
New York GLAM-Wiki Community Fellow: To support an increase in scope for ongoing GLAM-wiki outreach managed by the Metropolitan New York Library Council’s Community Fellow.
Wiki Loves Monuments Pakistan 2014: To support the new Pakistani User Group with organizing Wiki Loves Monuments Pakistan 2014.
Wiki Loves Monuments South Africa 2014: To support Wikimedia South Africa with organizing Wiki Loves Monuments South Africa 2014.
Reports accepted in June 2014
Iberoconf 2013: WM Mexico hosted a successful Iberoconf summit, resulting in increased project coordination and knowledge sharing between the 10 chapters.
Wikimedia Estonia Programs 2013: WM Estonia held over 10 photo and writing competitions in 2013, in addition to successful education, digitization, illustration, and photo expedition projects. Check out the diversity of their programs!
Wikimedia Ukraine Kolessa Recordings Digitization: Listen to over 60 newly-digitized, early 20th-century Kozbar recordings!
Wikimedia Ukraine Programs 2013: Check out over 4,000 photos from 11 expeditions supported by WM Ukraine, including a 32-day trek in the Carpathian Mountains.
Wikimedia Ukraine Wikimedians to the Games: A team of dedicated volunteers increased coverage of Sochi 2014 paralympians and continue to create content in this under-represented field.
Small Language Translation Tool (“Minority Translate”): A new, easy translation tool being piloted in the Voro and Estonian Wikipedias.
Wikimedia Mexico Start-up: The organizational foundations were laid for a successful WM Mexico — evidenced by their Wikimania 2015 bid win!
Wikimedia Philippines Operations 2013: WM Philippines stabilized operations, recruited 36 new members, and broadened their membership base beyond Manila.
Wikimedia Philippines Cultural Heritage Mapping Project Interim Report: 19 volunteers passed an intense training and certification period and will be headed out across the Philippines to document heritage sites. Follow their progress on the Philippines Heritage Map.
Wikimedia Finland Wikimaps Interim Report: Provide your feedback and ideas for the Wikimaps