Grants:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Foundation/Progress report form/Q2

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Purpose of the report[edit]

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Global metrics overview - all programs[edit]

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Overall[edit]

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved
2. # of new editors
3. # of individuals involved
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects


Telling your program stories - all programs[edit]

Please tell the story of each of your programs included in your proposal. This is your chance to tell your story by using any additional metrics (beyond global metrics) that are relevant to your context, beyond the global metrics above. You should be reporting against the targets you set at the beginning of the year throughout the year. We have provided a template here below for you to report against your targets, but you are welcome to include this information in another way. Also, if you decided not to do a program that was included in your proposal or added a program not in the proposal, please explain this change. More resources for storytelling are at the end of this form. Here are some ways to tell your story.

  • We encourage you to share your successes and failures and what you are learning. Please also share why are these successes, failures, or learnings are important in your context. Reference learning patterns or other documentation.
  • Make clear connections between your offline activities and online results, as applicable. For example, explain how your education program activities is leading to quality content on Wikipedia.
  • We encourage you to tell your story in different ways by using videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g.), compelling quotes, and by linking directly to work you produce. You may highlight outcomes, learning, or metrics this way.
  • We encourage you to continue using dashboards, progress bars, and scorecards that you have used to illustrate your progress in the past, and to report consistently over time.
  • You are welcome to use the table below to report on any metrics or measures relevant to your program. These may or may not include the global metrics you put in the overview section above. You can also share your progress in another way if you do not find a table like this useful.
Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) End of year (projected or actual) Comments
Example Example Example Example Example

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)[edit]

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
A B C D E F G H I J K

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)[edit]

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
A B C D E F G H I J J2 K
TOTAL B C D E F G H I J J2 N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance[edit]

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?[edit]

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Signature[edit]

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources[edit]

Resources to plan for measurement[edit]

Resources for storytelling[edit]


Basic entity information[edit]

Table 1

Entity information Legal name of entity Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Entity's fiscal year (mm/dd–mm/dd) 07/01/12-06/30/13
12 month timeframe of funds awarded (mm/dd/yy-mm/dd/yy) 07/01/12-06/30/13
Contact information (primary) Primary contact name Sue Gardner
Primary contact position in entity Executive Director
Primary contact username User: Sue Gardner
Primary contact email sgardner@wikimedia.org
Contact information (secondary) Secondary contact name Lisa Seitz Gruwell
Secondary contact position in entity Deputy Chief Revenue Officer
Secondary contact username User: Lgruwell
Secondary contact email lgruwell@wikimedia.org


Overview of this quarter[edit]

The purpose of this section is to provide a brief overview of this report. Please use no more than 1-2 paragraphs to address the questions outlined below. You will have an opportunity to address these questions in detail elsewhere in this report.

CHANGES: Please describe how you changed your plans and budget based on the FDC allocation approved by the Board in December 2012, and your rationale for these changes. You can then use the changed plans and budget as the basis on which to report back on the first quarter.

Because of the FDC’s approval of our budget request, the Wikimedia Foundation moved ahead with full implementation of our annual plan. This plan, for the first time in the Wikimedia Foundation’s 10-year history, designated spending into “core” and “non-core” areas, with the latter category funded by the FDC. Non-core spending is devoted to time-based initiatives, like Editor Engagement Experiments, that extend our ability to better serve Wikimedia’s mission, while “core” spending is on initiatives like bandwidth costs and accounting that maintain our sites and organizational infrastructure for the long term. Please note that the Wikimedia Foundation operates on a fiscal year (July 1–June 30), versus a calendar year, so the past quarter was Quarter 4 of our fiscal year. Also note that, in the second quarter of our fiscal year, the Wikimedia Foundation implemented a “Narrowing Focus” realignment, which involved converting the catalyst projects into grants, so that other organizations funded by the Wikimedia Foundation -- not WMF itself -- are directly leading or commissioning activity on-the-ground. The realignment also meant that we ended our fellowships program, which had been a part of our “non-core” programs.

HIGHLIGHTS: What were 1–2 important highlights of the past quarter? (These may include successes, challenges, lessons learned.)

In the past quarter, the Wikimedia Foundation continued to oversee steady growth in the number of Wikipedia articles, an increase in the number of editors across Wikimedia projects, and an expansion of initiatives that drove global readership. We also made important advances in reader engagement, software development, mobile partnerships, and more -- areas that continued the progress made in the first three quarters of our fiscal year. Our funding application to the FDC emphasized four “non-core” areas of the Wikimedia Foundation’s ongoing work. The non-core initiatives in our application -- editor engagement experiments; the Global Education Program; the catalyst projects (editor-recruitment activities in India, Brazil, and the Middle East and North Africa); and WMF fellowships and grant-making -- are intended to extend our mission of giving readers everywhere free, unimpeded access to educational content. From the past quarter, here are two important highlights in these non-core initiatives: 1) The Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) conducted two major iterations on the series of “onboarding” experiments, as well as several new MediaWiki extensions. The most recent A/B test during the quarter was our most successful yet at acquiring additional first-time registered editors, and when not testing, the new "Getting Started" page with associated guided tours was delivered to all newly-registered users on English Wikipedia. New extensions launched included the Campaigns extension that’s helping us learn where new users come from before registering on Wikimedia projects, and aids in assessing the effectiveness of campaigns to drive more signups. We also launched a new CoreEvents extension that provides essential analytics about new user activity across Wikimedia projects, such as page save events and preference updates. 2) The Foundation’s Wikipedia Education Program, which has students edit and write Wikipedia articles as a formal classroom assignment, continued to thrive. In the past quarter, about 1,700 students in 128 classes took part in the program, and now more than 60 schools and universities, in seven countries, are enrolled in the program. The foundation also supported educational efforts led by chapters and volunteers in 40 additional countries. We’ve had particular success in Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country. In May, we published a blog post that detailed the spring semester of our Education Program classes in Egypt, where students at Ain Shams University and Cairo University added 2.4 million Arabic characters to Arabic Wikipedia in January 2013, 1.5 million in February, and 243,000 in March -- a total of almost 4 million characters, and the equivalent of more than 1,000 pages of content.

WIKI-FOCUS: What Wikimedia projects was your entity focused on (e.g., Wiki Commons, French Wiktionary) this quarter?

Our core work is to serve as a global steward for Wikipedia and its sister sites. One of our primary focuses is to increase the number of Wikimedians -- the volunteers who write and edit the articles that appear on Wikipedia, and who contribute to Wikimedia Commons and our other web projects. The continued growth of Wikipedia and our sister projects depends on the stable pool of Wikimedians. And all initiatives funded by the Funds Dissemination Committee are ultimately designed to boost the number of volunteer contributors to the Wikimedia movement, or the number of articles, or the amount and diversity of content.

GROWTH: How did your entity grow over the past quarter vs. the previous quarter (e.g., Number of active editors reached/involved/added, number of articles created, number of events held, number of partipants reached through workshops)?

Because of our central role in the Wikimedia movement, the Wikimedia Foundation is uniquely positioned to grow the number of active editors and articles, and to reach users through workshops, events, and other means, like Internet Relay Chats (IRC). In the past quarter, for example, the Wikimedia Foundation held 20 IRC chats that covered every aspect of foundation doings, from the roll-out of Wikidata to the introduction of the Universal Language Selector. Overall, the Wikimedia Foundation made more key progress in the quarter on our VisualEditor, the editing system that gives contributors a much easier way to code articles. The past quarter also saw Wikipedia Zero introduced to three more countries -- Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka -- which is giving more than 50 million mobile readers access to Wikipedia without data charges. Overall, contributors added more than 1 million new articles to Wikipedia in the quarter, pushing Wikipedia over the 27-million-article threshold. In terms of the four non-core areas funded by the FDC, we made the following progress: Editor Engagement Experiments: The Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) conducted two major iterations on the series of “onboarding” experiments, as well as several new MediaWiki extensions. As part of our “Getting Started” project, the E3 team conducted a test of 12,000 newly registered editors, which gave them a new landing page with three basic options to improve Wikipedia. The Getting Started page inspired 4,047 readers -- a significantly high percentage -- to do one of the three suggested contributions. Global Education Program: The foundation’s Wikipedia Education Program, which has students edit and write Wikipedia articles as a formal classroom assignment, continued to thrive. In the past quarter, about 1,700 students in 128 classes took part in the program, and now more than 60 schools and universities, in seven countries, are enrolled in the program run by the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation also supported educational efforts led by chapters and volunteers in 40 additional countries. Editor recruitment in Brazil, India and MENA: Throughout the quarter, the number of active editors (five or more edits) among Arab states held steady, at a little more than 1,000. At the same time, the number of Arabic articles increased 2–3 percent -- the highest, steadiest pattern of increase among the top 25 Wikipedias by article count. For Portuguese, the number of active contributors eclipsed 1,600 in May (to 1,633, from 1,531 in March) -- the biggest increase since January, when there were 1,707 active editors in Portuguese. In April, when we announced that the foundation’s web sites had reached more than 500 million monthly unique visitors, we also noted that in Brazil, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent. In the quarter, the foundation completed a Portuguese translation of on online tutorial designed to help first-time student editors. India, meanwhile, saw minor increases -- and some decreases -- in editor ranks. Active editors in Hindi, for example, went from 44 in March to 47 in May; from 62 to 63 in Bengali; from 123 to 96 in Malayalam; and from 29 to 27 in Marathi. Still, readership in India is up. And page-view traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased there from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent, we announced in April. Wikimedia Grants Program and Individual Engagement Grants program (which replaced our Fellowship program): In the past quarter, the Individual Engagement Grants program oversaw the eight grant projects that it approved in March 2013. Between April and June 2013, the Wikimedia Grants program reviewed eight new ideas and application drafts, and funded seven projects, while also overseeing the previously funded grant projects that continued in the quarter. One funded project completed in the quarter: Grupo de Trabalho em Ciência Aberta (Open Science Working Group), June 7–8, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was the first gathering of a national Brazilian working group on free knowledge and science, and the seminar and workshop -- about collaborative production and use of free knowledge, licenses, wikis and other tools -- reached more than 50 scientists.

Financial summary[edit]

The FDC requires information about how your entity received and spent money over the past year. The FDC distributes general funds, so your entity is not required to use funds exactly as outlined in the proposal. While line-item expenses will not be examined, the FDC and movement wants to understand why the entity spent money in the way it did. If variance in budgeted vs. actual is greater than 20%, please provide explanation in more detail. This helps the FDC understand the rationale behind any significant changes. Note that any changes from the Grant proposal, among other things, must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

Revenues for this quarter[edit]

Provide exchange rate used:

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
Donation revenue USD $10,237,500 (Q4 fiscal year) $3,879,608 $26,592,263 $10,522,537 $9,563,496 $50,557,904 $10,237,500 (Q4); $45,500,000 (Q1-Q4) $50,557,904 Lower than plan primarily due to timing of donations received (refer to Q2 & Q3, which were higher than Plan).
Other income USD $91,937 (Q4 fiscal year) $233,916 $210,878 $134,470 ($96,373) $482,891 $91,937 (Q4); $569,750 (Q1-Q4) $482,891 Lower than Plan due to unbudgeted unrealized loss on investments, which does not have any cash impact, and also lower activity on the Merchandise Store.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this quarter[edit]

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
All Wikimedia Foundation expenses USD $12,096,621 (Q4) $7,395,987 $8,065,583 $9,595,830 $12,159,007 $37,216,407 $12,096,621 (Q4); $42,069,750 (Q1-Q4) $37,216,407 Higher than plan due to higher CapEx spending, higher outside contract services, higher travel expenses, and unanticipated property tax on data center equipment, offset by lower salary and benefits from unfilled positions that resulted from a competitive market for engineering staff and staff turnover, lower internet hosting resulting from better negotiated pricing than expected, and lower FDC grant expenses.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Progress toward this year's goals/objectives[edit]

This section addresses the impact of the programs / initiatives* and objectives your entity has implemented over the past quarter and the progress your entity is making toward meeting this year's goals. We understand that some metrics may not be applicable in this quarterly report, so please add metrics here if they are applicable.

*In the last round, the FDC used the term 'initiative', but this round, we are using the term 'program.'

Program 1[edit]

Editor Engagement Experiments
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.

This project’s objective is to attract and retain new Wikipedia editors through short-term experiments that give these editors inspiring new ways to engage with the encyclopedia. These tests, which typically last 1-2 weeks, are designed to increase recruitment and retention of new editors.

Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?

In the quarter, the E3 team conducted two major iterations on the series of “onboarding” experiments, as well as several new MediaWiki extensions. The most recent A/B test during the quarter was our most successful yet at acquiring additional first-time registered editors, and when not testing, the new "Getting Started" page with associated guided tours was delivered to all newly-registered users on English Wikipedia. New extensions launched included the Campaigns extension that’s helping us learn where new users come from before registering on Wikimedia projects, and aids in assessing the effectiveness of campaigns to drive more signups. We also launched a new CoreEvents extension that provides essential analytics about new user activity across Wikimedia projects, such as page save events and preference updates.

In April, after a series of E3 tests, the Foundation introduced new account creation and login pages as the defaults for all projects and languages. On English Wikipedia alone -- which accounts for 50 percent of Wikipedia’s pageviews -- more than 3,000 people sign up for an account on an average day. These interfaces, especially account creation, are an essential entry point for new editors on the projects, and providing an easy, pleasant experience is key to smoothing the way toward future contributions. We introduced the new forms in conjunction with other interface changes that are also designed to better inspire new editors.

In June, the E3 team refactored and refined the guided tours extension, including adding usability enhancements like new interface animations, support for community tours, and bug fixing. Guided tours, which we launched in February, point readers to the different steps and tools that are required to complete an editing task. In May, as part of our “Getting Started” project, the E3 team conducted a test of 12,000 newly registered editors, which gave them a new landing page with three basic options to improve Wikipedia: Fix spelling and grammar (“the easiest way to get started!” as we put it in the test); clarify articles by simplifying or rewording sentences; add links that connect a Wikipedia article to other articles. The Getting Started page inspired 4,047 readers -- a significantly high percentage -- to do one of the three suggested contributions. In the past quarter, thousands of people took a guided tour. The E3 team comprises six WMF staff members.

Activities conducted.

In the quarter, the E3 team conducted two significant “onboarding” experiments, which reached all new English Wikipedians for most of the quarter. We also did a series of other tests that supported other Wikimedia projects, such as the VisualEditor.

What worked and what did not?

Among the projects that worked: In May on the English Wikipedia, the E3 team launched and tested a major revamp of the “Getting Started” interface for onboarding new Wikipedians. The test of 12,000 users included a redesigned landing page; a refactor of the backend to increase speed and stability; a new navigation toolbar on articles that new users were given as their first editing task; and a guided tour to help them complete their first edit. The test, which gave readers three suggested ways to better Wikipedia, prompted 32 percent of those readers (4,047 people) to click on one of the three choices. The number tripled the 10–12% click-through rate of previous tests. The experiment also showed a small but statistically significant increase in the rate of first-time edits (+1.7%) by new English Wikipedians invited to participate in Getting Started. Almost one-fourth of all participants (24.9 percent) made an edit within 24 hours of registering for an account (compared to 23.2 percent in the control group). At the other end of the spectrum, a previous version of the onboarding test -- started in March but continued through the end of April -- had mixed results. That experiment offered new users a similar trio of editing options, but many readers indicated that they were confused by the array of choices. And the test did not lead to our goal of a statistically significant increase in active editors reaching their fifth edit, and may have had negative effects on first-time editors.

Any additional details:


Program 2[edit]

Wikipedia Education Program
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.

In the Wikipedia Education Program, students edit and write Wikipedia articles as a formal classroom assignment over the course of a term. Through written guides and online trainings, the Wikimedia Foundation preps the class instructors and Wikipedia Ambassador volunteers who help the students with editing questions during the term. This project’s objective is to generate significant high-quality content from students each term. A small fraction of these students will continue to edit after the semester ends, but recruiting them to become long-term Wikipedians is not the program’s focus. Instead, we seek to recruit the professors to be long-term users of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. Each professor who’s recruited and retained brings 20–30 students to Wikipedia up to two times each year. The Wikipedia Education Program began in 2010 in the United States, and its expansion beyond North America -- to Egypt, Brazil and other countries where the primary language is not English -- coincides with our push to boost the number of articles and editors in non-English Wikipedias. We are also establishing the program to be more self-sufficient, guided more by volunteer professors and other people with deep backgrounds in education and with Wikipedia.

Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?

In the past quarter, we continued to sustain the program's reach and ambition -- about 1,700 students in 128 classes took part in the Wikipedia Education Program. More than 60 schools and universities, in seven countries, are now enrolled in the program, and educational efforts led by chapters and volunteers in 40 additional countries are supported by the Foundation. We’ve had particular success in Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country. In May, we published a blog post that detailed the spring semester of our Education Program classes in Egypt, where students at Ain Shams University and Cairo University added 2.4 million Arabic characters to Arabic Wikipedia in January 2013, 1.5 million in February, and 243,000 in March -- a total of almost 4 million characters, and the equivalent of more than 1,000 pages of content. A good example of a new article: The one on Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, which was greatly expanded by two students in Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez's Spanish class at Cairo University. The program increased from 100 classes in fall 2012 to 128 classes in spring 2013. We are continuing to get Education Program data from the past quarter, and we are working with the foundation’s technology team to further develop the education extension on MediaWiki and to develop evaluation tools to ensure that we efficiently evaluate appropriate class data. The extension has been actively used for courses since January, and it allows professors to more easily monitor student editors' activity. The system logs in student editors when they enroll in the course page, and when they add their articles, or sign up as reviewers. So if another editor is trying to figure out the context for what a student is doing, he or she can find the log entry and see what class they are in. The extension makes student contributions much more transparent, and much easier to manage -- and it coincides with a greater influx of universities from Arab countries. In the past quarter, two Egyptian universities, Damanhour University and Kafr El-Sheikh University, joined the program, as did Saint Khadija High School for Girls in Cairo. Universities in Algeria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia also joined the program in the past quarter -- meaning more than 45 classes were editing Arabic Wikipedia as part of their coursework. In the spring semester in the United States, 1,182 students participated in 64 classes at 46 colleges and universities. In Canada, 70 students participated in 7 classes at 6 colleges and universities. An increasing number of students are utilizing the online tutorials that we built to introduce students to Wikipedia editing and to guide them throughout the semester. In the past quarter, more than 75 users completed the English-language training. We are expanding the training to Portuguese, with more languages on the way. In the past quarter, the global program utilized two WMF staff members, three WMF consultants, and a WMF contractor.

Activities conducted.

Beyond the programmatic activities outlined above, activities from the past quarter included: In April, the Wikimedia Foundation organized an Education Program leaders workshop in Milan, Italy -- held in conjunction with Wikimedia’s chapters conference there -- that brought together 40 people from 25 countries, and galvanized participants who run classes involving hundreds of students; in May, Oona Castro, the foundation’s Catalyst Project consultant in Brazil, spoke at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she encouraged professors to join the Education Program; and in June, Faris El-Gwely, the foundation’s Cairo-based Education Program consultant for the Arab world, traveled to visit Dr. Yahia Fares University of Médéa in Algeria to expand the program there beyond one class. During the quarter, we continued to translate into other languages the online tutorials that introduce students to Wikipedia. We have made significant progress on the development of a new brochure on how to use Wikimedia Commons for new contributors. And we are continuing to refine the MediaWiki extension that is making it much easier for professors to monitor student progress.

What worked and what did not?

It is a challenge to determine what worked and what didn’t programmatically without having access to data. Unfortunately, after a promising start, the UserMetrics API tool being developed by the analytics team stopped functioning, so we have been blind to data about the contributions of our students since March. We are encouraged by promising developments in the analytics team, and we are hopeful that we can get access to data about what our students did on Wikipedia once the tool starts working again. We look forward to being able to identify what worked and what didn’t once we have access to data.

Any additional details: In the past quarter, we made progress on transitioning the Brazil program -- which is now co-coordinated by a consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation -- into a program that’s run from Brazil by an independent nonprofit that we fund. We chose two independent contractors to replace our departing Education Program Consultant in Brazil.


Program 3[edit]

Catalyst Projects
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.

Since 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Catalyst projects focused on three geographic areas: India, Brazil and Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Each of these developing regions is a priority for growth as we expand Wikipedia’s reach to readers in the Global South. After we submitted our Funds Dissemination Committee request in September 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation changed the approach of our Catalyst projects, as part of our “Narrowing Focus” realignment. As a result, we’re moving to a model where we give grants to organizations already on the ground in India, Brazil and MENA (and other countries), and these organizations manage the work themselves with the active encouragement and funding of the Wikimedia Foundation. The objective of this outreach is to recruit new editors in India, Brazil, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?

Brazil: Through the encouragement of the Wikimedia Foundation, and through their own volition, 13 of the largest education institutions in Brazil -- including University of São Paulo (USP); Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO); Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ); and Sao Paulo State University (UNESP) -- have adopted academic activities related to Wikipedia. An example of the collaboration: From May 22–24, Rafael Pezzi and Fabio Azevedo -- professors at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) -- organized a three-day conference for students that centered around two Wikipedia workshops and one Wikipedia seminar. Ms. Castro gave a featured speech at the seminar. Mr. Pezzi and Mr. Azevedo have been among the Brazilian academics who brought Wikipedia into the classroom since 2012, and their increased involvement in the program has led to an increase in participating students. Both professors make student-editing of Wikipedia a voluntary activity. While in 2012 only 10 percent of their students participated in the activities, 85 percent now participate. Through our partnership with Gama Filho University in Rio de Janeiro, a series of 11 Wikipedia tutorial videos were made in Portuguese and uploaded in the quarter to different sites -- including Wikimedia Commons and YouTube. The videos explain every aspect of Wikipedia and editing. (Here is the Gama Filho video in Portuguese that explains Wikipedia’s five pillars, including the fact that Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.) In the quarter, the foundation completed a Portuguese translation of on online tutorial designed to help first-time student editors. In April, when we announced that the foundation’s web sites had reached more than 500 million monthly unique visitors, we also noted that in Brazil, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent. In initial statistics from the quarter, the number of Portuguese articles had increased 1 percent from March 2013, while edit counts had decreased. In May 2013, Portuguese Wikipedia had 771,000 articles, making Portuguese Wikipedia the 12th-largest Wikipedia in terms of article count. Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa: During the most active months of the Education Program (as in spring 2013), contributions from the Education Program make up 3–4 percent of total new article content added to Arabic Wikipedia, and the students are around 10 percent of the active and very active editors on the Arabic Wikipedia. With 230,000 articles, Arabic Wikipedia is now the 24th-largest Wikipedia by article count. In the past quarter, the number of Arabic articles increased 2–3 percent -- the highest, steadiest pattern of increase among the top 25 Wikipedias by article count. Throughout the quarter, the number of active editors (five or more edits) among Arab states held steady, at a little more than 1,000. In the quarter, Dr. Yahia Fares de Médéa University in Algeria joined the Education Program, and students there contributed 1.6 million characters of content -- the equivalent of 1,300 pages -- to Arabic Wikipedia. India: As with Brazil and the Middle East and North Africa, readership in India is up. And page-view traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased there from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent, we announced in April. Overall, for all three geographic areas, five Wikimedia consultants and two Wikimedia staff members oversee the project's work.

Activities conducted.

Brazil: Throughout the quarter, we continued to give support to professors in the Wikipedia Education Program, and our team of consultants continued to participate in workshops in the country. In May, as noted above (in “Progress Against These Objectives”), Oona Castro, the foundation’s Catalyst Project consultant in Brazil, spoke at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she encouraged more professors to join the Education Program. Also in May, we released a new Portuguese version of an online hub for research data. The hub centralizes various sources of open-licensed data published by the Wikimedia Foundation or about Wikimedia projects. The information is intended to help community members, developers and researchers learn about available data sources and find the data they need for their work. Throughout the quarter, engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation worked on projects that will provide better data analysis of Portuguese Wikimedia. For example, we worked on the second phase of our CAPTCHA project, where we’re documenting vandalism reversals on Portuguese Wikipedia in an effort to keep Portuguese Wikipedia articles freer of vandalism. Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa: The foundation oversaw the expansion of the Education Program at universities in four Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia. In the past quarter, two Egyptian universities, Damanhour University and Kafr El-Sheikh University, joined the program, as did Saint Khadija High School for Girls in Cairo. Universities in Algeria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia also joined the program in the past quarter -- meaning more than 45 classes were editing Arabic Wikipedia as part of their coursework. Faris El-Gwely, our Education Program Consultant for the Arab world, based in Cairo, helps oversee the program, and throughout the quarter met with professors and instructors to maximize the participation of Arab colleges and universities. India: To bolster India’s ranks of Wikimedia editors and the number of Wikipedia articles in Indic languages, the Wikimedia Foundation continues to work with the Centre for Internet and Society in New Delhi. Through a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Centre is implementing Wikipedia outreach in India. While in the previous quarter (January-March 2013), the Centre held five workshops in India that reached more than 150 people, it held no specific workshops this quarter that were specifically geared to colleges and universities. Instead, the Centre held Wikipedia workshops at other key public venues -- like the Centre for Good Governance in Hyderabad, the National Informatics Centre in New Delhi, and a bloggers meeting in Bangalore -- that taught hundreds of people how to edit Wikipedia. (Please note: Through our Wikimedia Grants Program, the Wikimedia Foundation funded Wikimedia India to give workshops at universities in India; see “What Worked and What Didn’t” in the “Grants and Fellowships” portion of this progress report.)

What worked and what did not?

Brazil: We continued to search for an institutional partner in Brazil to run our programs there, and during the quarter, we held productive meetings with Ação Educativa, an educational nonprofit that’s based in Sao Paulo. Ação Educativa formed in 1994, and it’s developed a strong reputation for promoting educational rights, social justice, participatory democracy and sustainable development. Our partnership with them is expected to begin in August 2013. During the quarter, we also interviewed candidates for the position of Education Program coordinator in Brazil. By putting focus on this partnership and position search and involving our Brazil consultants, we put less emphasis on expanding classes in the quarter, but this was a temporary situation. Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa: We continued to see strong growth in classes that are in the Education Program, resulting in hundreds of new articles that are adding depth and substance to articles on Arabic Wikipedia. One glitch in the quarter: In Egypt, university students stopped editing for 20 days to concentrate on their final exams -- an understandable stoppage. Also, as noted in the Education Program update under “Progress toward this year's goals/objectives,” we have not gotten recent data on Arabic student contributions to Arabic Wikipedia, because the MediaWiki extension has been inoperational. India: Overall, the number of articles on Indic-language Wikipedias continues to grow, as with Hindi Wikipedia, which is now over 100,000 articles. In June, the Wikimedia Foundation introduced a new MediaWiki extension that makes it easy to read and edit Wikipedia in the reader’s language of choice. Called the Universal Language Selector, it lets readers quickly switch the interface language, so that the instructional headings at the top and left-hand side of a Wikipedia article can be read in Hindi, Bengali, or more than 150 other languages. If a reader’s computer lacks proper fonts to read or write a language, then the Universal Language Selector provides the necessary fonts. The selector, which works on Wikipedia and our sister sites, replaces two other extensions that had been in place. The Universal Language Selector reflects the foundation’s commitment to boost all Wikipedia languages, including Indic languages. We would like Indic-language Wikipedias to grow at a faster rate -- Hindi is expanding by only about 1,000 articles a month, and Bengali by about 350 articles a month. So we are still in a transition period for expanding Indic-language articles.

Any additional details:


Program 4[edit]

Grants & Fellowships
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.

When the Wikimedia Foundation applied for funding from the Funds Dissemination Committee in September of 2012, one of our four key non-core initiatives was “Grants & Fellowships” -- an initiative that combined our Wikimedia Grants program and our Wikimedia Fellowships program. In January 2013, the foundation ended the fellowship program, replacing it with a program of Individual Engagement Grants that -- like the fellowships -- funds select people to work on short-term projects that help editor growth, editor satisfaction and retention, and the growth of Wikipedia’s articles and media. The Wikimedia Grants Program, meanwhile, continues in its previous form, where we give grants to groups (and occasionally to individuals) outside the foundation that are doing mission-aligned programs and activities focused on innovation. The objective for both programs is to encourage independent groups and individuals to pilot, experiment, research, or build something that forwards the movement in mission-critical areas.

Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?

After transitioning to a full-fledged program in January 2013, the Individual Engagement Grants program this past quarter oversaw the eight grant projects that it approved in March 2013. Between April and June 2013, the Wikimedia Grants program reviewed eight new ideas and application drafts, and funded seven projects, while also overseeing the previously funded grant projects that continued in the quarter. Two Wikimedia staff members run the programs.

Activities conducted.

In the quarter, the Individual Engagement Grants program reconfigured the web portal for grantees, which makes it easier for them to report on their projects; prepared for a July re-launch of the IdeaLab, which is the space designed to cultivate ideas for proposals; and deployed two participant surveys that led to key suggestions on how to submit better applications and give those applications more inclusive feedback. Also, program head Siko Bouterse attended Open Help Conference in Cincinnati to present and discuss such Wikimedia projects as IdeaLab and the Teahouse. In the quarter, the Wikimedia Grants program reviewed eight new ideas and application drafts, and funded the following seven projects: 1. Wikimedia Denmark, $4,000; to fund two salaried positions as Wikipedians-in-residence, which extends Wikimedia Denmark’s similar involvement in the GLAM projects from 2012; 2. Aislinn Dewey, $6,500, to fund a project that is purchasing and distributing 500 WikiReaders (portable offline devices that run on 2 AAA batteries and have a text-only version of Wikipedia) to three sites -- a small rural town outside of Mexico City; Capetown, South Africa; and Uttar Pradesh, India; 3. Wikimedia South Africa, $6,423.56, to fund a project to increase Wikipedia coverage of historic buildings around Johannesburg, with QR codes installed to create Africa’s first Metropedia; 4. Wikimedia Mexico, $19,711, to fund “Iberoconf 2013,” the third Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit, which is a meeting of delegates from the chapters and chapters-to-be affiliated to Wikimedia Iberocoop; 5. Wikimedia Ukraine, $1,995.50, to fund a Wiki Loves Earth photo contest in Ukraine, that will focus on Ukraine’s Natural Heritage sites, landscapes and ornamental gardens to illustrate articles on Wikipedia and other Wikiprojects (Wikivoyage, Wikinews, Wikiquote, etc.); 6. Wikimedia Ukraine, $973.49, to fund a free vocal music concert in Kyiv -- part of the "World classic in Ukrainian" project aimed to popularize free Ukrainian translations of vocal music as well as free-licensed music; 7. Grupo de Trabalho em Ciência Aberta (Open Science Working Group), $4,660, to fund the first gathering of a national Brazilian working group on free knowledge and science, with a seminar and workshop for scientists about collaborative production and use of free knowledge, licenses, wikis and other tools.

What worked and what did not?

Both programs are inspiring projects that, with as little as $350, are benefiting the wider Wikimedia movement. In the past quarter, for example, the Wikimedia Grants Program published a report that analyzed our January-March 2013 funding of Wikimedia India. With $4,981 in funding, Wikimedia India organized and supported 24 workshops and other events in India, including: a Wikipedia workshop at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, in Mumbai; a workshop at Somaiya College in Mumbai; a workshop at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani - Goa; Wikipedia Day 2013, in Mumbai; a similar day in Kolkata; and a Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Bangalore. As noted in the report, the sustained pace of outreach events greatly helped community building. Also, the symbiotic alliances that Wikimedia India has built with other open source and open content organisations has led to resource pooling -- which in turn has resulted in significant reduction in organising outreach events in the months that followed the grant period. It has also opened up possibilities for a variety of collaboration activities like the Tamil open source OCR project, in which Wikimedia India is collaborating with the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge project -- a project that the Wikimedia Foundation is also working closely with. While not all projects funded by the Wikimedia Grants Program achieved all desired goals, organizers of each completed project details, on-wiki, their successes and failures -- and successes far outweighed failures. The eight current grantees in the Individual Engagement Program will also, in the months ahead, detail their projects’ successes and failures -- giving everyone in the Wikimedia movement a chance to see what went well and what did not.


Any additional details:


Lessons learned[edit]

Lessons from this quarter[edit]

A key objective of the funding is to enable the movement as a whole to understand how to achieve shared goals better and faster. An important way of doing this is to identify lessons learned from entities who receive funds, and to share these lessons across the movement. The purpose of this section is to elicit some of these insights, which will be shared throughout the movement. Please answer the following questions in 1–2 paragraphs each.

What were your major accomplishments in the past quarter, and how did you help to achieve movement goals?

In our core programs, the Wikimedia Foundation continued to innovate in key areas, as with our VisualEditor and with Wikipedia Zero. In the quarter, the VisualEditor was employed in “alpha” mode -- the last step before its full-fledged introduction across all Wikipedia web sites. Instead of the “wiki markup” coding that has been the default format since Wikipedia’s founding, contributors can now use formatting that’s as easy to use as email formatting. In May, meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation partnered with Vimpelcom’s Mobilink affiliate to begin Wikipedia Zero in Pakistan -- the 15th country to get Wikipedia Zero, and the second-largest launch to date, with 32 million mobile users gaining access to a project that lets them read Wikipedia on their phones without paying data charges. In our non-core programs, innovation also continues to be our focus. In the past quarter, our Editor Engagement Experiments team conducted two major iterations on the series of “onboarding” experiments, which were designed to streamline our sign-on pages and inspire greater percentages of people to edit Wikipedia and engage with the encyclopedia. One test of 12,000 newly registered editors, which gave them a new landing page with three basic options to improve Wikipedia, prompted 4,047 readers -- a relatively large percentage -- to do one of the three suggested contributions. With the Wikipedia Education Program, we continued to sustain the program's reach and ambition -- about 1,700 students in 128 classes took part in the Wikipedia Education Program. More than 60 schools and universities, in seven countries, are now enrolled in the program run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and educational efforts led by chapters and volunteers in 40 additional countries are supported by the Foundation. We’ve had particular success in Egypt, the Arab world’s largest country. In May, we published a blog post that detailed the spring semester of our Education Program classes in Egypt, where students at Ain Shams University and Cairo University added 2.4 million Arabic characters to Arabic Wikipedia in January 2013, 1.5 million in February, and 243,000 in March -- a total of almost 4 million characters, and the equivalent of more than 1,000 pages of content. The student additions paralleled an increase in the number of Arabic Wikipedia articles and editors -- an increase that the foundation has prioritized. In Brazil, meanwhile, the Education Program inspired some of the country’s largest education institutions -- including University of São Paulo (USP); Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO); Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ); and Sao Paulo State University (UNESP) -- to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in the classroom, which led to important articles on Portuguese Wikipedia. Among the additional workshops where the foundation has a presence: The May 22-24 conference at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where Brazil catalyst consultant Oona Castro gave a keynote speech on the importance of Wikipedia. The Individual Engagement Grants program managed eight projects in the past quarter, and our Wikimedia Grants program funded seven projects that are spurring (or have already spurred) new engagement with Wikipedia in South Africa, India, Italy, Mexico, Denmark, Ukraine and other countries. All of these achievements create momentum that is intended to garner new editors and new contributors to Wikipedia and our sister sites.

What were your major setbacks in the past quarter (e.g., programs that were not successful)?

We had no major setbacks in the quarter -- just disruptions and some program ineffectiveness. While the Wikipedia Education Program, for example, continued to make important inroads in Arab countries, our program analytics were delayed because the UserMetrics API tool, which is being developed by the foundation’s analytics team and is designed to measure student contributions, stopped functioning.

What factors (organizational, environmental) enabled your success?

The Wikimedia Foundation has a key team of staff members -- from engineering to development -- who are among the top professionals in their field, and a Board of Trustees that is also acknowledged for its high acumen in decision-making and professional standard-bearing. As importantly, the Wikimedia web sites -- led by Wikipedia -- are built up by contributors from around the world. Eighty-thousand active editors -- those who make five or more edits a month -- contribute to Wikimedia’s success. They are the lifeblood of our projects, and many of the Wikimedia Foundation’s most important innovations, like the VisualEditor, are geared to increasing their ranks and inspiring new editors to add to Wikipedia’s knowledge base in every language that Wikipedia is in. Finally, there is our websites’ readership -- the people who are also inextricably linked to our success. This unique combination of community involvement -- at the readership level, the article-contribution level, and the funding level -- is what continues to drive the success of Wikipedia and our sister sites.

What unanticipated challenges did you encounter and how did this affect what you were able to accomplish?

As noted above, under “What were your major setbacks in the past quarter,” the foundation experienced a delay on the metrics tool that documents student Education Program contributions in Arab countries. While this delays our analytics of the program’s precise effectiveness, we intimate from other indices -- like article counts and interviews with students and professors -- that the program is having a positive impact in the classroom and on Arabic Wikipedia.

What changes might you make in executing your initiatives into the next quarter?

In the next quarter we will continue to expand our initiatives -- with more testing of new approaches, and more streamlining of projects that are already working well. The Editor Engagement Experiments team will conduct more studies and iterations to determine what combinations of landing pages, tutorials and other measures spur greater contributions and greater engagement of readers. The VisualEditor -- with help from the Editor Engagement Experiments team -- is set to expand dramatically in the next quarter, when it will be usable not just on English Wikipedia but on other language Wikipedias, and not just to logged-in users but to logged-out users. The VisualEditor is the most dramatic change to Wikipedia’s editing system since the encyclopedia began in 2001. Overall in the next quarter, the projects funded by the FDC are expected to bring more contributors to Wikipedia and our sisters sites.

Additional information[edit]

Provide any other relevant information that may be helpful or relevant for the FDC (e.g., links to any media coverage, blog posts, more detailed reports, more detailed financial information). All our financial reports, including our latest financial statements, are available here. Our blog, which has daily posts and is read by thousands of people, including journalists, can be seen here. The home page of our foundation summarizes the latest headlines of our blog, and has links to our more important documents, including our annual report. Every quarter, the media writes and reports hundreds of articles about the Wikimedia Foundation and our projects. In the Wikimedia Foundation’s monthly reports, as in this one for June 2013, we summarize the most prominent media coverage. Our main analytics web pages list such key statistics as pageviews, number of active editors, and number of unique visitors, and other analytics pages detail such statistics as active editors in Global North and South and mobile traffic generated by our Wikipedia Zero partnerships.

Compliance[edit]

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?[edit]

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No". Yes

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No". Yes

Signature[edit]

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

JonathanCinSF (talk) 19:37, 30 July 2013 (UTC)


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