Grants:APG/Proposals/2016-2017 round 1/Wikimedia Deutschland e.V./Progress report form
Overview[edit]
With Abraham Taherivand first transitioning into the interim Executive Director role in late 2016 and then quickly being appointed Executive Director by the WMDE Board in early 2017, a smooth leadership transition was ensured. As a result, the organization was able to remain focused on its program work and was supported by WMDE’s new Executive Director to continue and further develop its programs as outlined in the Annual Plan 2017.
Since then, Wikimedia Deutschland has been thriving under the leadership of the new Executive Director. With support from the Board and enthusiastic participation from staff, much thought and effort was put into improving WMDE’s planning process and culture. We implemented changes aimed at increasing our ability to constantly learn from our work, the work of our communities and the environments we operate in. The planning process now has several new steps for review, analysis, and discussion. We added an environmental and stakeholder analysis, from which opportunities and threats are derived and goals are developed and prioritized. While the planning process still serves to plan resources and activities for the upcoming year, the planning horizon has been widened to multiple years. At multiple points, we created opportunities for face-to-face discussion with WMDE Board and communities.
Our quarterly reporting, originally a set of forms submitted to the WMDE Board, is now used as an ongoing, year round opportunity for a lively joint review of goals and objectives, and collegial input. In the process, people identify areas of collaboration and mutually aligned activities. All this has created a work climate in which people feel heard, advised and responsible, while able to learn and iterate their work. In general, cooperation between WMDE Board, Executive Director and staff has moved towards a more collaborative work modus, with many feedback points, joint initiatives, yet with a clear division of labor.
In the first six months, the organization made major strides in many areas, including:
- We finally filled key positions, including three departmental heads: Software Development; Education, Science and Culture; and Fundraising.
- With new leadership in the Finance and Central Services Team we began streamlining and updating mission-critical internal systems and processes supporting personnel and accounting.
- The board passed a resolution outlining concrete steps aimed at assuring the long-term financial stability of the organization.
- Program teams and the WMDE Partnerships and Development Team collaboratively grew and strengthened key partnerships supporting WMDE’s goals, and securing external funding.
- The WMDE International and Event Teams completed the three-year engagement to run the Wikimedia Conference with a successful event driving the movement strategy process and involving a larger diversity of movement leaders than ever before. The final report covering all three years is currently being put together, with learnings that will inform the design of future conferences, which WMDE intends to continue to host.
- The International Team made key human resources available to the WMF to provide leadership and coordination for the movement strategy process. WMDE had been a long time advocate for conducting a strategy process and for developing a framework for the future of our movement. As a major partner, supporter and beneficiary of the broader Wikimedia movement, we have always been eager to help shape such comprehensive processes. In early 2017, we gladly accepted the Wikimedia Foundation’s invitation to step up and take a leading role in the design and implementation of the current movement strategy process. We made available human resources from our international relations team to liaise between the process and the movement's affiliates, committees and other organized groups. By stepping up to the plate, we take on greater responsibility for the whole movement and particularly contribute to making the strategy process a success.
- WMDE Board, staff (Cycle 1, Cycle 2), membership and communities (Cycle 1, Cycle 2, Cycle 3) also participated in the movement strategy process and provided input on the five themes. WMDE will continue to participate and support the process.
- We expanded our membership development activities to include new inclusive, fun and participatory formats and activities at the June membership assembly (the most highly attended to date) and regional mailings on policy issues. These activities are designed to increase member engagement.
Metrics Overview – All Programs[edit]
[edit]
| Shared Metrics | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Program | Number of participants | Number of newly registered users | Content pages created or improved | ||||
| Annual target (estimated) | Progress until 06/2017 | Annual target (estimated) | Progress until 06/2017 | Annual target (estimated) | Progress until 06/2017 | ||
| Program 1: New Volunteers | 70 | – (1) | 750 | 319 | does not apply | – | |
| Program 2: Volunteer Support | 5,000 | 2,815 | 1,300 | 823 | 150,000 | 596,378 (2) | |
| Program 3: Software Development | 430 | 599 | 8,400 | 4,114 (3) | 5.0M | 2.69M (4) | |
| Program 4: Advocacy | 3,400 | 420 (5) | does not apply | – | does not apply | – | |
| Program 5: Institutions and their Content | 700 | 181 | 20 | – | 7,800 | 1,057 (6) | |
| Other (e.g. Wikimedia Conference, WMDE members’ assemblies) | 400 | 430 | 25 | – | does not apply | – | |
| Total all programs | 9,000 | 4,445 | 10,495 | 5,256 | ~5.16M | ~3.29M | |
Table notes:
1) Program 1 focuses mainly on online campaigning. The landing pages of the campaigns in Q1/Q2 received more than 47k page impressions to date.
2) Based on analysis via Glamorous and Petscan tools and project documentations from supported volunteer projects.
3) Increase in Wikidata contributors (January - May 2017)
4) Increase in Wikidata items (January - June 2017)
5) Additionally, > 32k correct license attributions in German and English were generated via the Attribution Generator tool so far. More than 11k people provided complete answers in our new Digital-O-Mat tool.
6) Most major events in Program 5 (e.g. GLAM on Tour stations, Coding da Vinci hackathon) are scheduled for Q3/Q4.
Grantee-defined Metrics[edit]
Our set of grantee-defined measures was selected from the objectives and their indicators in the 2017 WMDE Annual Plan (see also the respective objectives & targets below). For each of our five main programs we selected one of the indicators as our grantee-defined measure. These measures are central for monitoring the progress of each respective program. Nevertheless, the additional objectives and targets shown in the program sections below present a more complete picture of our work.
| Grantee-defined Metrics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Measure | Target | Progress | Explanation |
| Monthly increase of de:wp editors with 10+ edits | In at least four months in 2017 the increase reaches or surpasses the respective 2016 figures. | Target may not be reached.
From January –May 2017 the monthly ‘new editors’ figures were lower than the respective 2016 figures. The overall declining trend was not slowed down or stopped. |
Note: As of writing of this report, ‘new editors’ data for June 2017 was not yet available on Wikistats. |
| Number of data uses from Wikidata in Wikimedia projects (--> ‘entity usage’) | Baseline 12/2016:
Targets are set on a quarterly basis. |
Entity usage by 06/2016:
(+16.5%, target was ~320 Mio.) |
In Q1 and Q2, the growth in this measure has exceeded the estimated quarterly targets. |
| Number of uses of new media items (resulting from 2017 GLAM cooperations) in the Wikimedia projects | 5,000 | 616 new files / 368 uses | This measure applies to dedicated GLAM cooperations. The majority of these events (e.g. GLAM on Tour stations, Coding da Vinci hackathon) are scheduled for Q3/Q4.
We are not counting the new media items and file uses that result from volunteer projects supported by WMDE in 2017 (for these, see shared metrics table above) |
| Usefulness of WMDE volunteer support services | No target | Usefulness rating for WMDE volunteer support services:
9.49 (mean value; scale 0-10) |
n=119
Scale: ‘0 - not useful at all’ to ‘10 - very useful’ Survey question: ‘How useful for your project was the support you received?’ Data collected via a continuous feedback survey system for capturing volunteer feedback (‘support barometer’ / Förderbarometer) which was newly developed and launched in February 2017. First results for the period of March-May 2017 were analyzed and published in June. Participation: n=140 feedbacks in total (response rate: 38%) |
| Policy processes influenced by WMDE (qualitative) | No target | Important policy processes influenced:
| |
Telling Your Program Stories – All Programs[edit]
Program 1: New Volunteers – Attract and Retain New Volunteers for Wikimedia Projects[edit]
Continuously sinking numbers of editors in the German-language Wikipedia are threatening the vitality and the diversity of the community and the quality of its content. Wikimedia Deutschland takes this threat very seriously, and will continue to test ways of attracting new volunteers, and to study which kinds of support are effective in retaining them on the path to becoming active editors.
The program team continued to work according to the concept outlined in the annual plan, while adding a fifth banner campaign to the four planned ones: the first one, in January, piggybacked on the thank-you banner of the annual donation drive; the second one took place in mid-April, the third one is planned for July, number four in the fall, and the final campaign will again be connected to the thank-you banners of the annual fundraiser. The approach is to use the short periods in between to review and analyze results and learn from them. The team created a portal (in German), which outlines and records all steps and results of our activities, enables feedback from the community, and helps to coordinate activities with the community. The team will present several workshops reporting on our activities at the Learning Days of Wikimania, a poster session, and a session as part of the main program, and will soon publish learning patterns on volunteer recruitment.
Early on, the team discovered that integrating videos into Wikimedia Commons is difficult for a number of browsers, and that standard tracking of click-through-rates and -paths that happens on other platforms does not work through Commons. Wikimedia mailing lists have frequently seen the request to address this issue, beyond WMDE's current use case. After checking the complexity of the task, the team came to the conclusion that the programming of a tool to enable tracking video views in Commons is doable, and engaged a contractor to program the Wikimedia Video Tracking Tool (Commons video-clicks) for all movement communities to benefit. The tool is close to completion.
The first campaign promoted the onboarding videos and tutorials we had prepared to boost motivation and to explain how editing Wikipedia works. The banner received 20,000 clicks on the ‘join us’ button and the linked page on participation was visited 3,200 times. These are almost five times the number of visits that the thank-you banner received in the previous year. People clicked 375 times on the button to create an account, after having visited the video page. A qualitative study consisting of user interviews found that the videos had a positive impact on viewers. The videos were distributed by community members through integration in over 40 Wikipedia pages. Part of the videos were made available with English subtitles, too, and actively promoted towards the broader Wikimedia movement.
Other learnings from the qualitative study:
- Many people still think that Wikipedia somehow runs itself. They are not aware that they could participate and not aware of sinking contributor numbers.
- Support is not searched for generally, but is needed where and when people are editing at any given time. Therefore, help pages and offers need to be widely distributed across the platform.
- Newbies are not necessarily interested in becoming part of a community.
- A casual tone in the videos tends to turn off older users, on the other hand, a matter-of-factly approach is less attractive for younger people. Therefore, we should have offers utilizing both styles.
Learnings were incorporated into the planning for the second campaign, which took place as planned in April. This campaign had the matter-of-fact style, as opposed to the casual style of the first one. For the first time, Guided Tours were offered to a selected group of users. Also for the first time, we were able to actually track how many people register as a result of viewing a banner, and how many edits they provide subsequently, for example after participating in the guided tours. As a result of the 2nd campaign, 319 individuals registered new accounts. Concurrently, the team and community members provided well received newbie courses and a members’ workshop at the WMDE General Member Assembly in May. We also improved in-house tracking of results. Results and learnings from campaign #2 include:
- We missed the target of achieving 600 new accounts. However, an additional 300 individuals, who already had accounts, logged in through the landing page. This was unexpected, and may point to opportunities around reviving ‘dormant’ accounts.
- We randomly displayed guided tours (which had been a long standing wish of the community, unrelated to campaign activities) for users. These seem to have no impact on subsequent editing behavior.
- We were unable to adjust the reach and banner rate because we did not have real time tracking yet. Live monitoring is a function we would like to have available for the next two campaigns to improve their efficiency and impact.
- A comparison of the first two campaigns does not give us reliable knowledge yet about which style (casual/matter-of fact) is more successful.
- 5 out of 319 new users did 10 edits or more. This information can serve as a baseline on what to expect as the outcome of such a campaign and we are able to assess upcoming campaigns.
- A campaign resulting in several hundred new accounts was unable to stop the trend of sinking editor numbers.
-
Members of the project team after presenting their learnings at the WMDE General Assembly in May -
Project team staff working with WMDE members during the workshop on new editors -
WMDE members discussing ideas around new editors at the workshop -
WMDE members at the Wikipedia introduction workshop at the WMDE General Assembly
In summary, the team gathered many learnings around planning and running banner campaigns for recruiting new contributors, as well as around creating promotional onboarding offerings. However, the actual inflow of new contributors has not improved yet - on the contrary, the decrease is even larger than in respective periods of previous years.
In response, in order to be able to test a larger variety of formats and stylistic approaches, we added the fifth campaign and will continue to learn, report back to and coordinate with the community. We aim to find out if an increase in the overall number of active editors is something that can be achieved, and over what period of time.
Are Online Campaigns Really a Way to Increase Active Editors? |
 The first two banner campaigns generated substantial interaction and new accounts registered. However, the number of new editors contributing to the German language Wikipedia keeps declining. With 319 registrations as a result of the second campaign, one would expect at least a slight visible effect on the number of April/May new editors. But there is none. In fact, the decline of new editors appears to be even steeper than in recent years. This brings up a set of new questions. After all, we did get hundreds of people to create a new account. And we know for a fact that there are hundreds of new accounts created in the German language Wikipedia every month, regardless of our campaigns. So, have we been motivating people that would have created an account anyway? Are we cannibalizing the group of usual suspects? Or did we in fact reach an entirely new group, and the new editor numbers would have plummeted even more drastically without the banners? This is just one group of new questions that result from our practical work. The banner campaigns are to us literal “learning-by-doing”. They enable us to try diverse approaches and make sense of actual observations, some puzzling and some that we can adapt to right away (such as developing a new tool to track video views on Wikimedia Commons). Another group of questions is not so new, and relates to the aspect of on-boarding, or rather, keeping new editors engaged up to their 10th edit and beyond. What happens after registration, and while people try their first edits? Do our videos and on-boarding activities move the needle? What are the actual barriers that people face? Which of them are social and what are the technical barriers? This latter is one of the questions we discussed as part of planning our approaches for 2018. We expect many more new questions as well as insights during the course of this year and beyond. The team is looking forward to sharing approaches and practical efforts with others in the Wikimedia movement who are worried about declining editor numbers in the mature Wikipedias. We are preparing a workshop on the topic at Wikimania 2017 which could be a starting point not only for conversations about gaining new editors, but for collective action. |
Goal 1: Increase the number of volunteers active in Wikipedia through an online campaign which motivates the highest possible number of Wikipedia readers to engage as active editors.
| Measure | Target | Progress | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| In the course of 2017, the monthly increase of de:wp editors with ten+ edits (and thus passing the ‘new editor threshold’) reaches or surpasses the monthly increase of the respective 2016 months. | In at least four months in 2017 the increase reaches or surpasses the respective 2016 figures. | Target may not be reached. Between January - May 2017 the monthly ‘new editors’ figures were lower than the respective 2016 figures. The overall declining trend was not slowed down or stopped. |
From the 319 new registrations resulting from the 2nd campaign only five contributors reached the 10th edit threshold (as of May 29th). However, further monitoring is needed as the reaching the 10th edit threshold may take longer than the reporting period. Note: As of writing of this report, ‘new editors’ data for June 2017 was not yet available on Wikistats. |
Program 2: Volunteer Support – Support Volunteers in Wikimedia Projects[edit]
During the first half of 2017, as always, our volunteers and their projects took advantage of a large number and great variety of support provided by WMDE. Unlike the numbers of active editors, the numbers of active Wikimedians applying for support, and the number of resulting projects is continuously on the rise. This included activities such as
- The WikiCon (German-speaking volunteer conference) kick-off and subsequent planning;
- A successful Wiki Loves Earth 2017 with 1061 participants and a record number of 24162 image uploads — for the first time in cooperation with the German Commission for UNESCO, which is also going to support the upcoming Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 competition;
- A workshop on election data with 40 participants representing Wikipedia, Wikidata, OKLabs, OpenStreetMap and other volunteers in Ulm;
- Several GLAM-on-Tour stations including a special around music and musical instruments, Wiki Loves Music. Overall, interest in these formats, both by volunteers and hosting institutions, is increasing;
- A new local hub in Berlin, named WikiBär, and further regular activities by a second Berlin-based group, WikiWedding, founded in 2016. The latter group is based in the Berlin working class district of Wedding, and meets in a local neighborhood center;
- Awarding 28 volunteers with full or partial scholarships to attend Wikimania 2017 in Montreal.
-
Planning workshop with templates of the 2017 WikiCon organizing team -
A frog in disguise – Top 16 picture at the German Wiki Loves Earth photo contest 2017 -
Sketch notes of results from the election data workshop in Ulm -
Some participants of Wiki Loves Music, a GLAM on Tour station in Hamburg -
Opening ceremony at the new local hub in Berlin
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We conducted a community workshop (these are the annual workshops we do with community members to review and improve our support processes and guidelines) which also focused on movement strategy this year. We began actively promoting our support programs in the sister projects to reach out to additional active volunteers and make them aware of the support programs.
In terms of the objective around projects that support non-German speaking volunteers, we logged a total of seven projects or project developments in the first two quarters, including:
- Wikipedia for Peace 2017 Berlin — a community project to increase and improve the Wikipedia content on social movements, justice and peace, organized by Wikimedia Deutschland and Service Civil International. The project is organized as a workcamp, where people from different backgrounds come together for about two weeks to write and edit content about topics related to peace on Wikipedia. The event in Berlin in July brings together 15 participants from many different countries.
- We are currently developing a new model for an international exchange project with the Federal Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa).
The AdminCon of the German-language Wikipedia took place in Salzburg, Austria, this February. The well-organized meeting was attended by 51 admins and experienced editors who worked hard to resolve all the topics on the agenda. The meeting was another illustration of how face-to-face interaction can quickly resolve issues, distribute tasks and plan for further action: For example a lightning talk on the lack of jurors for writing competitions quickly led to several new candidates for the jury. Wikimedia Deutschland supported this meeting with covering travel and accommodation.
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We continued our dialogue with like-minded civil society organizations and associations around the topic of civic engagement in the digital realm in Germany. In January, together with our partners, staff testified to a subcommittee of the German parliament about the forms of digital engagement and the projects Wikimedia supports. Very little is currently known about forms of engagement, and digital volunteers, such as Wikipedians, receive very little public recognition. A workshop in June with over 20 participants — key activists, digital volunteers, advocates and scholars — helped to identify areas of research, advocacy and joint action for the next few years. Next step will be the publication of a white paper together with our allies.
The WMDE volunteer support team engaged with volunteer supporters from other chapters at Wikimedia Conference in March. There was a session on community events, as well as a meeting of the Volunteer Support Network, at which communication avenues and further joint activities for the 2nd half of the year were agreed upon. We would like to see this network, which started with the German-speaking chapters, continue to grow further beyond central Europe and include other interested affiliates in order to reflect the diversity of the movement. WMDE’s team is looking forward to continued exchange and peer learning among volunteer supporting staff, leading to an increasing professionalisation and improvement of this work.
As a new feedback tool, we developed and implemented the support barometer (‘Förderbarometer’), a continuous feedback survey system. This tool measures the level of volunteer satisfaction with WMDE’s support programs, by asking all volunteers who have received support a series of questions around the usefulness of supports, and allowing them to rate on a scale of 0-10. They are also able to leave suggestions on improvements. The results for March-May, submitted by 38% of the people who were asked to complete the survey, are encouraging for our support team: the average rating for usefulness is 9.49, and the average satisfaction rate is 9.42, with 10 being the highest number. In the cases of more comprehensive project support with a higher level of consultation by the support team, the ratings are even more positive (usefulness: 9.61; satisfaction: 9.57). The feedback provided pointed to a number of steps and offerings in the support process that were not obvious or well communicated enough, as well as few suggestions around changes. The team is working to incorporate the suggestions and has already updated its help pages.
Finally, we updated and developed new materials for potential Wikipedians, in particular the popular ‘cheat sheets’ that provide quick overviews on four topics: authoring new articles, editing existing articles, editing from mobile devices and communicating in Wikipedia. Likewise, the introductory brochures about Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons have been revised and updated, the latter is now also available in English, while the translation of the former is in the works.
-
Community workshop at the office of Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin -
Wikipedia-for-Peace group at the Brandenburg Gates in Berlin -
Participants at the AdminCon in Salzburg, Austria -
Workshop on the 99 dimensions of community events at the Wikimedia Conference 2017
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The Wikipedia Hotline ‘0800-Wikipedia’: An Experiment |
Wikipedia and its community in Germany offer a diversity of support mechanisms for new and experienced community members. This includes numerous help pages, resources, and now also the videos and tutorials produced by our team working on Program 1. Since 2004, the Volunteer Response Team has been assisting community members and the Wikimedia movement with technical and legal questions in writing. WMDE has been supporting this team for many years.
 At WMDE we discussed the merits of this idea and decided to support it as an experiment to diversify the help options. We then had to clarify a few logistical matters, such as how to set up a toll-free 800-line, and how to forward calls from the 800-line to the phone of the volunteer providing the service. In January of 2017, the service was started, available via the ‘contact’ link in the sidebar of each Wikipedia page, with a volunteer staffing the line each Thursday night. Since then, each session received between 2-5 calls, some of which took up to 45 minutes. Topics that come up in the calls include issues well known to the Wikipedia Support Team, such as:
Preliminary learnings:
The volunteers are committed to continuing the experiment through this year, and share learnings with WMDE and the movement. |
Goal 1: Continue volunteer support services and facilitate access to support, including for volunteers active in Wikipedia’s sister projects.
| Objective | Target | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Through increased awareness and accessibility of our support services, the number of individuals active in projects who apply for support rises (baseline: total at Q3 2016 compared to Q3 2017). | No target
In 2017 we will increase the number of volunteers who know about and get access to WMDE support and project funding. |
On track Number of individuals applying for support: 263 (Total until Q2 2017; + 6% vs. Baseline) Baseline: Total until Q2 2016: 247 |
Unique count
‘Individuals applying for support’ includes organizers of volunteer group activities as well as volunteers applying for individual grants (e.g. technical support, literature stipends etc.). | ||
| WMDE supports at least three projects benefitting major non-German speaking user populations (e.g. refugees). | At least three supported volunteer projects | On track 5 supported / 2 planned volunteer projects to date |
Current/ past projects:
Planned/ in development:
|
Goal 2: Further develop volunteer support services to improve the program’s contribution to the viability and quality of Wikimedia projects.
| Objective | Target | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 % of volunteer support applications receive a final response within three weeks of submitting a complete proposal. | 100 % final response within three weeks | On track Q1-Q2: 99% final response within three weeks Baseline Q1-Q4 2016: 99% final response within three weeks |
Project support for Wiki Loves Earth 2017 took more time due to the complex nature of the project.
This target is aimed at quick and unbureaucratic processing of support applications submitted by volunteers. We track this on a quarterly basis to ensure our application processes stay efficient. | ||
| To continuously improve support services, WMDE surveys all applicants and project leaders, assessing the usefulness of services and gathering suggestions for improvement. Results will be published quarterly and will inform the further development of support services that is done jointly with the community. | No target/ ‘usefulness measure’ was newly set up in early 2017 | On track Usefulness rating for WMDE volunteer support services: 9.49 (mean value; scale 0-10) |
n=119
Scale: ‘0 - not useful at all’ to ‘10 - very useful’ Survey question: ‘How useful do you rate the support you received for your project?’ Data collected via a newly developed continuous survey system (‘support barometer’ / Förderbarometer) to systematically capture feedback of volunteers receiving support by WMDE. The support barometer was developed and launched in February 2017. First results for the period of March-May 2017 were analyzed and published in June. Participation: n=140 feedbacks in total (response rate: 38%) | ||
| In order to effectively shape our project collaboration with volunteers, WMDE continues the development of guidelines for support services together with the supported community members. | Agreed guidelines and other resources are published until Q3 2017. | On track Q2: Community workshop conducted regarding documentation/ evaluation of collaborative volunteer projects |
Guidelines to be drafted and reviewed with our communities in Q3. |
Program 3: Software Development – Expand Wikidata and Further Develop MediaWiki[edit]
| Wikidata Metrics | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Editors | ||||
| Metric | 12/2016
(31.12.2016) |
06/2017
(30.06.2017) |
Change |
Comment |
| editors (1+/ 30 days) | 16,729 | 17,510 | +5% |  still growing, clearly positive
|
| active editors (5+/ 30 days) | 7,240 | 7,610 | +5% | still growing, clearly positive
|
| very active editors (100+/ 30 days) | 1,250 | 1,380 | +10% | still growing, clearly positive
|
| new active editors (passing 10th edit threshold) | 735
(average per month, 01-12/2016) |
823
(average per month, 01-05/2017) |
+12% | stable |
| Content | ||||
| Metric | 12/2016
(31.12.2016) |
06/2017
(30.06.2017) |
Change |
Comment |
| pages | 26.04M | 28.98M | +11% | steadily growing, clearly positive
|
| items | 24.67M | 27.36M | +11% | steadily growing, clearly positive
|
| items with referenced statements | 15.52M
(~63% of total items, data by December 26) |
17.5M
(~65% of total items, data by June 26) |
+13% | steadily growing, share increasing, clearly positive
|
| edits (total) | 422.80M | 510.30M | +21% | steadily growing, clearly positive
|
| statements (total) | 127.50M | 161.3M | +27% | steadily growing, clearly positive
|
| statements referenced to Wikipedia | 30.97M
(~24% of total, data by December 26) |
34.33M
(~22% of total, data by June 26) |
+11% | still growing, share is decreasing, positive |
| statements referenced to other sources | 34.41M
(~27% of total, data by December 26) |
51.07M
(~32% of total, data by June 26) |
+48% | massively growing and share is increasing too
|
| Use | ||||
| Metric | 12/2015 (31.12.2016) |
06/2017
(30.06.2017) |
Change | Comment |
| # of entity usages from Wikidata in Wikimedia projects | 282.30M | 329.1M | +16% | steadily growing, clearly positive
|
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In 2017, the WMDE Software Development Department continues to work on processes and activities already established in 2016 such as increasing the use of Wikidata in movement projects, routine collaboration with the WMF Tech teams and addressing community software development priorities through the Technical Wishes Project. The goals for 2017 were (1) continuing to assure the technical and social sustainability of Wikidata (software and community) as the central, structured knowledge data base for the Wikimedia movement and beyond, (2) continuing to increase the reach of Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects, and (3) continuing the development of MediaWiki jointly with the Wikimedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation.
These are huge tasks that require multi-year engagement, funding, and partnerships with important movement actors and external partners. WMDE and WMF secured substantial external funding for Wikidata, aimed at supporting the development of Wikidata as a backbone for the Wikimedia sister projects Wikimedia Commons and Wiktionary. This meant that in 2016, work on Wiktionary began and was intensified for Wikimedia Commons, a project which had already gotten preliminary support since 2013. It kept WMDE Software Development busy throughout the first half of 2017. The department’s participation at the Wikimedia Developer Summit in January enabled the team to make important technical decisions together with volunteers and the WMF regarding MediaWiki developments, technical wishlist projects and the future of the Wikidata query service. Working with partners and in close collaboration with the Wikimedia movement continues to shape all our software projects.
In terms of assuring the technical and social sustainability of Wikidata, we have good news: to date, Wikidata has reached almost 30,000,000 items, 500,000,000 edits and the number of contributors is still growing. These numbers together with the other positively developing KPIs show Wikidata is alive and doing very well. Still, such growth also brings risks regarding data quality: A high number of items alone does not mean that all items have the proper information or even information listed at all in their statements. Growing the project while ensuring that data quality remains stable or improves is one of the big challenges for Wikidata and has been a major focus of our work for the sustainability of the project.
Constantly maintaining the software, improving it and incrementally developing new features and tools are important components of the technical groundwork to ensure such sustainability. This entails research, experiments with the user interface, collaboration with the community and maintenance of existing features. In the past months for example, the team improved the keyboard navigability of the user interface. All this work resulted in important learnings at the technical level. In order for as many people as possible to use our projects and products, the WMDE Software Development Team needs to ensure that functions are compatible with different software versions and visible on mobile devices and screen readers for visually impaired people.
At the technical level, one of the highlights in 2017 so far has been the overhaul of constraint checks. These are checks that enable us to find data that does not conform to Wikidata standards and enable a more efficient way to fight vandalism. Constraint checks had been created by the community as a tool for quality assurance early on, and the Wikidata Development Team was able to provide support for this function in order to make it easier to use, increase its visibility and further improve it. This is a big step for quality assurance in Wikidata.
Sometimes Cats are Mayors, but Usually They Are Not |
 In general, Wikidata was set up with few rules and restrictions. The world is too complex for us to decide in advance which kind of information can or cannot be entered in Wikidata. This early guiding principle of Wikidata has remained valid until today and the Wikidata Development Team has worked very carefully to follow it. Instead of deciding on specific rules for data quality themselves, our team members created tools that enable users to make decisions independently. Users are encouraged, enabled and even responsible to implement expectations for data quality themselves. The team, together with researchers, in 2016 focused on better understanding what data quality means for the Wikidata community and on establishing dashboards for quality measurement (e.g. data about statements, references or items. The first half of 2017 saw the roll out of specific features that help the community increase data quality. The most exciting new feature deployed are constraint checks that affect the information included in the statements of a particular item. For example, Berlin (item) is a city (statement) and located in the country of Germany (statement). It concerns information such as the property of an item, which describes the data value of a statement and can be thought of as a category of data. These properties, when paired with values, form a statement.  With constraint checks, this information is now flagged when it contains possibly erroneous information that goes against shared understandings of how the world works, for example the understanding that, for the same person, a date of birth should come before a date of death (unless they are a time traveler). From the property constraints portal: “Property constraints are rules on properties that specify how properties should be used. The Wikidata model itself is very flexible: nothing stops you from adding universe (Q1) as head of government (P6). However, a constraint on the property can tell you that a head of government (P6) is usually a human. Constraints are hints, not firm restrictions, and are meant as a help or guidance to the editor. They can have exceptions: for example, the town of Talkeetna (Q668224) elected the cat Stubbs (Q7627362) as mayor.” (Source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Property_constraints_portal) These constraints are decided upon by the Wikidata users. A number of constraints have already been put into place such as:
A full list of currently available constraints can be found on the property constraints portal, a place that serves as a discussion platform for the establishment of new constraints or the amendment of existing ones by the community. Prior to these constraint checks, constraint reports were available on Wikidata, but hard to find and use. With constraint checks, information on constraint violations for items is directly available in the item statement, first now as a gadget that needs to be enabled, later available as a standard feature for everyone. The constraint checks will alert a user to possible constraint violations such as this one for the item ‘Berlin’ or for the item ‘Douglas Adams’.
It is then up to the user to decide whether or not to change the information available in the statement. The constraint checks will never change information automatically, as this would violate Wikidata’s principles. In general, this feature presents a big step for quality assurance in Wikidata because it makes it easier for users to find inconsistencies in the data and correct them, if necessary. |
Wikimedia Loves Documentation
To assure the technical sustainability of Wikidata, or any long-term software project, documentation is crucial. Without proper technical documentation of software development processes, it is really hard for new developers working on old pieces of software to understand some of the underlying principles used for writing this particular piece of software. Without help pages about Wikidata and how to edit and reuse it, it is hard for newcomers to understand how the project works, make edits and feel included in the community. Really everyone, editors as well as developers, needs documentation. Currently, some documentation exists about MediaWiki and Wikidata, however, it needs to be improved and updated, and the content in many cases needs to be reorganized to be accessible.
WMDE staff decided to work on this issue in collaboration with the volunteers (Wikidata editors, volunteer developers) who are the first users of documentation. The team will support the community members in improving the documentation, both technical (about specific features of the software) and for beginners (how to edit Wikidata, how to use its main tools). WMDE staff organized a documentation sprint during the Wikimedia hackathon in Vienna in May 2017. During this event, anyone who wanted to improve documentation was welcome and WMDE staff provided some suggestions of tasks to do, organized small workshops on specific topics (how to illustrate documentation, how to make content translatable), and accompanied the participants on their projects. After the events, volunteers continued the efforts started during the documentations sprint.
Making Documentation a First-class Citizen |
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Wikidata Loves Data Partnerships
Working with partners is an integral part of ensuring the sustainability of Wikidata. Specifically data partnerships are key. Several new institutions have been expressing interest, while we are continuing to build on ongoing partnerships such as the UNESCO collaboration with John Cummings as Wikimedian in Residence and the support of Wikimedia UK. Such data partnerships are generally either about donating new datasets to Wikidata or using the existing data in a new way. At the Wikimedia Conference, WMDE staff and John Cummings presented the workflow and documentation around the UNESCO data donation such as the data import guide and the data import hub. All of these materials aim to make it easier for people to collaborate on importing datasets, pool their knowledge and start discussions around new data partnerships. These materials were created in 2016 based on the conclusion that more and more institutions are interested in donating data to Wikidata, but that we have to make sure that these donations are desired, the data will be maintained, and that it is of high quality. Working together with other organizations such as Wikimedia CH or Open Knowledge is key for this, as we cannot know everything about every region or knowledge domain.
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Poster for the Wikidata import hub -
John Cummings and Jens Ohlig presenting their learning from the UNESCO data donation at the Wikimedia Conference 2017 -
Audience at the presentation about the workflow and documentation around the UNESCO data donation at the Wikimedia Conference 2017
In general, the process of engaging in data partnerships can only be successful if the community is involved from beginning to end - possibly even to the point where WMDE involvement is reduced to a minimum - which is an approach WMDE staff will further be looking at in 2018. Recently, the International Olympic Committee and Swiss Railroad have registered their interest in engaging with Wikidata for a new data donations. Organizations such as schema.org and Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, on the other hand, want to use the existing data for old and new projects. WMDE staff and Wikidata community members are working with these organizations and institutions to prepare potential new data partnerships. One new data partnership that is just hot off the press is with beaTunes, an application for the Mac that lets you build playlists for your music collection. It uses Wikidata in various ways to enrich the application (see this blog post.) In order to explain how Wikidata works to interested institutions, companies, organizations and individuals who are interested in adding data to Wikidata, a new video was created and an international blog post published.
Wikidata loves Wiktionary
To have an impact on our second program goal - to increase the reach of Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects - the Wikidata Development Team has been focusing many efforts on supporting Wiktionary in the first half of 2017. So far, Wiktionary has been the main repository for all data related to words and language. But the way Wiktionary is set up makes it hard to re-use, and the information is not machine readable.
This leads to a lot of use-cases for Wiktionary’s data not being realized and prevents Wiktionary from reaching its full potential. In response, the Wikidata team started working on the integration of lexicographical data into Wikidata. So far, only two entity types exist in Wikidata: item for concepts like people, buildings, movies etc. and properties that are used to describe those concepts. These entity types provide the basic structure for Wikidata to model the world with. The first step towards supporting lexicographical data and Wiktionary in Wikidata is a new entity type called lexeme. It will enable Wikidata to store information that is currently available in Wiktionary and make it machine-readable.
For this project, the objective is to assure the ability to store lexicographical data in a structured manner and the storage of first lexicographical data in Wikidata by the end of 2017. In order to achieve this, WMDE staff conducted user research with Wiktionary editors, rolled out automated sitelinks for the main namespace of Wiktionary, and wrote down the technical data model for the new entity type lexeme. The publication of the data model was an important milestone for the first half of 2017. The data model of WikibaseLexeme describes the structure of the data that is handled as "Lexemes" in Wikibase, such as words and phrases. It is the conceptual foundation on which a prototype can be build.
To show some possibilities of this data model and to illustrate where the project is heading, the team has provided a few data modelling examples. But this is just the starting point: there are many other possible examples and the community will be free to organize the data as it sees fit. The properties and items used to model these examples are up to the editors to decide on.
The team is currently working to create a lexeme prototype and a demoable lexeme page in time for Wikimania, so that community members have a first opportunity to try it out and give feedback. In order to meet this deadline, staff had to embrace a change of plans for this prototype: instead of providing a demo version that already stores data properly, the demo version will first be a user interface which does not yet store actual data. WMDE staff simply did not have enough time to program a more complex demo version, but in the end this decision turned out to be quite beneficial: such a prototype focusing on the user interface will allow developers to make faster changes based on the feedback gathered at Wikimania.
What You Can Do when Wiktionary Data Is Integrated into Wikidata |
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Storing lexicographical data in a machine-readable form in Wikidata will make a number of interesting use cases possible. Here are some of them: Workload sharing and easing for Wiktionary With a central data store all Wiktionary language editions will be able to work on the same data and make use of the data that has been contributed by an editor of another language edition. In addition, it will be possible to build new tools that make contributing to Wiktionary easier and open it up to new contributors. Existing tools and projects that could make use of it include Wiktionary or the Wikidata game. Dictionary applications The lexicographical data can be used to build dictionaries that can then be used to look up word definitions in one language or also translations of words into another language. It can also be used to build special-purpose dictionaries like a rhyme dictionary or dictionaries for special topics like art. The data can also be used to build thesauri and synonym dictionaries. Existing tools and projects that could make use of it include the online dictionary Leo (dict.leo.org) or Beolingus (dict.tu-chemnitz.de). Language learning tools Machine-readable lexicographical data is a necessary building block for language learning tools. They can for example be used to create word lists for lessons on a specific topic or illustrate a topic with related pictures. Existing tools and projects that could make use of it include Duolingo and Parley. Linguistic research Researchers can use the structured data to learn more about how our languages evolve over time, social classes and more. Then we can answer questions like “Did this class of words change its meaning over time in the same direction?”. Existing research that could make use of it includes analyzing lexical distances between Europe's languages (originally mapping). Text analysis Machine-readable lexicographical data is one important building block for analyzing the content of texts. You can then do sentiment analysis, part of speech tagging and named entity recognition for example. Automated translation In order to build automated translation tools one needs to have a lot of understanding of the source and target language. Machine-readable lexicographical data is one important building block of that. It is especially important for small languages who don’t have a lot or any digital tools supporting them currently. Existing tools that could make use of it include Appertium. Automated text generation In order to generate high-quality texts automatically one needs to understand how words are used in specific contexts. Machine-readable lexicographical data is necessary if you don not want to rely on templates that just get filled. An existing tool that could make use of it is Reasonator. To summarize, there are a lot of opportunities ahead of us for Wiktionary, when we embrace support through structured data for the project. We can significantly increase its reach and impact while at the same time supporting the work of our editors much more than before. |
A change of plan happened with regards to Arbitrary Access for Wiktionary, a feature that was unexpectedly requested by the English Wiktionary community. Arbitrary Access is a technical feature that would enable the English Wiktionary to get access to the full Wikidata database and integrate information from the database into Wiktionary via lists, tables, templates and more. This interest goes to show that the English Wiktionary community is very supportive of our ongoing efforts to further integrate Wikidata and Wiktionary. This high level of interest in Wikidata for Wiktionary comes a bit as a surprise. In response to this very positive development, WMDE staff changed priorities to accommodate this request. This new feature will allow the Wiktionary community to experiment with integrating more of the existing non-lexicographical data.
Wikidata loves Wikimedia sister projects
In addition to the ongoing work on Wiktionary, the Wikidata Development Team worked on removing barriers to ensure that the usage of data from Wikidata continues to increase in Wikipedia. Main accomplishments included the publication of a new click-dummy to allow editing of Wikidata’s data directly from Wikipedia, expanded roll-out of indexing ArticlePlaceholder pages on Welsh Wikipedia in order to make these pages discoverable by search engines, improving usage tracking of Wikidata on sister projects and experimenting with ways to make writing and editing queries to Wikidata easier.
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Screenshot of the first prototype of Wikidata infobox editing -
Dropdown with auto suggest when adding values to a statement in the Wikidata infobox -
Descriptive video of the client editing prototype functionality for integrating into and editing Wikidata from infoboxes in the visual editor
The Technical Wishes Project Loves Community Surveys
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For the third goal in this program, WMDE set out to continue development of MediaWiki jointly with the Wikimedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation, so that volunteers are able to utilize the software effectively. The team conducted the next round of the German-speaking Community Technical Wishlist, now for the third time. From the end of May until early July, 450 German-speaking participants collected, discussed and prioritized technical wishes. More than twice the number of people participated and the page views for our project page tripled (38,855 impressions/views) compared to the last wishlist. A total of 188 valid wishes were submitted. This includes technical wishes in categories such as reading, search, and editing, but also maintenance, sister projects and social.
For the first time, there was a special slot reserved for volunteer software developers who could submit their own software projects. The top-voted project will then get developer support from WMDE. This new category was added in order to provide more support to already existing tools in the Wikimedia projects, and help volunteer developers to bring these tools to the next level. It recognizes the many volunteer developers in the movement who are building tools that are very useful for people’s work in the Wikimedia projects, and shows that the Technical Wishes team values this work greatly.
The team provided a variety of support mechanisms during the submission of wishes. An accompanying workshop series, called Tech on Tour 2017, was organized in five different cities parallel to the start of the survey, in order to further strengthen collaboration with the community and provide real-life support for participating in the survey. Two WMDE staff members were on-site for these workshops, with a third software developer as a tech joker in the online hangout. A total of 44 Wikipedia users participated and WMDE staff helped attendees to formulate and sharpen descriptions of wishes to be submitted. For the first time, one Tech on Tour station also took place outside Germany, in Vienna, organized in cooperation with WMAT.
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Tech on Tour in Cologne: post-its with wishes discussed at the workshop -
Tech on Tour in Dresden: participants discuss ideas for new wishes -
Tech on Tour in Berlin: Presentation on how to collaboratively work on wishes -
Tech on Tour Berlin: WMDE staff and community member collaboratively working on a new wish -
Tech on Tour in Munich: Collection of new wishes from the workshop
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One of the most important goals for the Technical Wishes Project team is to make the entire project more accessible and diverse. This starts with the diversity among the group of participants and the accessibility of the survey: the more diverse the group of participants, the more diverse is the range of wishes submitted. New features and tools are created that are usable on a wider variety of platforms and language versions. As a result, the technical wishes prioritized and implemented satisfy a wider spectrum of needs in the community, make a more diverse group of people happy with their user experience, and retain them as long-term users in our projects.
Making the German-speaking Community Technical Wishlist Survey More Accessible |
 The team had set the goal to make the technical wishlist more inclusive and encourage more people, including non-techy people, to participate in this year’s technical wishes survey. This clearly worked: the participation rate more than doubled as many new community members participated in the submission, discussion and prioritization of wishes. How did that happen? For the first time on the German-speaking Community Wishlist survey, a banner ran on the German language Wikipedia which was displayed to all logged-in users and was not limited to a particular user group (displayed to 30-50% of all logged-in users). The banner called on these users to participate in the survey. Since the banner was not only shown to established users, as was done in the international technical wishes survey, our survey drew a wider spectrum of participants. Many of these new participants were less experienced Wikipedia users, as could be concluded from the increased number of questions, comments and wishes submitted. Many new participants possessed little knowledge about the structure of Wikipedia and did not always fully understand who holds what responsibility for the different technical tasks and roles.
 
Due to the large number of technical wishes submitted, WMDE staff decided to conclude the banner run earlier than planned, after only two days. A significant numbers of wishes had been submitted at that point and in an effort to keep the list of wishes manageable and readable for all involved, the banner run was stopped. Still, a much larger and more diverse group of people than ever before had been reached and had contributed to the wishlist survey. This positive development is also reflected in the voting, which concluded the survey. The number one wish on the German language Wikipedia received a total of 85 votes - only about 10 votes less than the number one wish on the International Wishlist Survey back in 2016 and more than double the number of votes for the number one wish on the German Community Wishlist in 2015. It goes to show that there is a broad base of community support in Wikipedia for the new survey. Taken together with all the other positive developments, the new round of the German Community Technical Wishlist survey presented a great success for the Technical Wishes project team. The team will spend the next months analyzing the submitted wishes and drawing conclusions as to whether the intended impact - having a wider variety of technical wishes submitted - was achieved as a result of this survey. |
In addition to technical wishes survey, the Technical Wishes Project team also continued to work on implementing and further developing wishes from past surveys. The following projects significantly progressed over the first half of 2017:
Update on Technical Wishes | |
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Newly implemented wishes
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When implementing these technical wishes and rolling out new software, the WMDE team constantly deals with issues of diversity and accessibility. One particular challenge is developing software for a variety of different languages: while the majority of worldwide languages read from left to right, a number of languages read the opposite way (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi). For these right-to-left languages, particular changes have to be made to the software in order for new features to function properly. Starting back in 2016, WMDE staff had developed a very productive collaboration with members of the Arabic and Hebrew communities in order to test some functionality of the wishes as a beta function for their language versions. This was requested by the communities themselves and the WMDE staff consider this an important step to enable a worldwide availability of the wishlist products. The team has integrated such consultation into their testing routines. In order to find solutions to other accessibility challenges, an accessibility task force was set up together with staff members and volunteer developers at the Wikimedia hackathon in Vienna. Through such collaborative task forces we hope to address accessibility issues for the various features and increase the diversity of platforms on which these features run smoothly, reaching a larger group of users.
Outlook: What’s next
Looking forward to the second half of 2017, the WMDE Software Development Teams will continue to work towards the goals and objectives outlined above. For the Technical Wishes Project Team, this means analyzing the 2017 technical wishes survey results, conducting additional feedback rounds for the top wishes and continuing work on projects such as “Advanced Search”, “Show changes when moving text chunks”, “Correctly moving files from Wikipedia to Commons”, RevisionSlider and TwoColConflict, with possible availability as beta feature or deployment in the fall.
While much programming work lies ahead for the Wikidata Team, a special highlight will be the organization of the first Wikidata Conference in October of 2017. The planning for the conference is already in full swing, with the recruiting of volunteers for the program and scholarship committees successfully concluded and registration as well as scholarship application open. Volunteers are currently building the program of the conference. So far, the response to the event has been nothing but positive. Organizing the task planning, budget and visa process was quite a challenge for such a new conference, but after much planning and a few changes to the agenda, the organizing process is running smoothly now. The team is looking forward to an inspiring, productive and fun conference.
Note: The Wikimedia Foundation now directly supports the core maintenance of Wikidata through direct payments based on a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between WMF and WMDE. The MOU requires that WMDE submit an annual plan with goals, objectives and budget in the first quarter of each for the WMF fiscal year starting July 1st. The MOU also states that in addition to quarterly check-ins submitted to WMF Engineering, the APG reports will serve as the reporting mechanism for Wikidata. As a result, the goals (1) and (2) plus their objectives are structured along the lines of the goals and objectives updated in the Wikidata business case. In the tables, we have placed the related older APG Proposal objectives alongside the related WMF objectives.
Goal 1: Continue to assure the technical and social sustainability of Wikidata (software and community) as the central, structured knowledge data base for the Wikimedia movement and beyond.
| Objective APG | Objective WMF | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation/Outlook |
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| The quality and quantity of data in Wikidata as well the health of the community continue to develop positively based on the key performance indicators for content, usage, community and quality. For figures on Wikidata KPIs please refer to the Wikidata Metrics table above. |
Improve the usability of Wikidata |
Status: on track |
Next quarter:
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| Improve the documentation around Wikidata |
Status: on track |
Next quarter:
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| Keep the community involved, happy and connected |
Status: on track |
Next quarter:
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| Jointly with the Wikidata Community, WMDE supports a minimum of one institution to contribute to and to use Wikidata, publishes related success stories and motivates additional institutions beyond 2017 to contribute to Wikidata. | Document data partnerships |
Status: on track |
Next quarter:
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Goal 2: Continue to increase the reach of Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects.
| Objective APG | Objective WMF | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation/Outlook |
|---|---|---|---|
| The usage of data from Wikidata by sister projects continues to increase, according to the key performance indicators for usage and community. For figures on ‘entity usage’ please refer to the Wikidata Metrics table above |
Allow editing of Wikidata’s data directly from Wikipedia |
Status: slightly behind |
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| Make ArticlePlaceholder pages discoverable by search engines in order to help small Wikipedias grow their reach |
Status: on track |
Next quarter:
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| Make using Wikidata data on the other Wikimedia wikis easier |
Status: slightly behind |
Next quarter:
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| Automated creation/update of list articles based on queries to Wikidata |
Status: slightly behind |
Next quarter:
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| WMDE, jointly with the Commons community, develops a plan for the migration of unstructured Commons data. Note: Due to a grant of the Sloan Foundation awarded to the WMF for bringing structured data to Commons with the help of Wikidata, WMDE goals and objectives were changed. Tasks are now shared between WMF and WMDE. |
Provide structured data support for multimedia files to Wikimedia Commons. |
Status: slightly behind |
Next quarter:
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| By the end of 2017, the ability to store lexicographical data in a structured manner in Wikidata is assured and first lexicographical data is stored in Wikidata. | Support for storing lexicographical data in order to support Wiktionary |
Status: on track |
Next quarter:
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Goal 3: Continue development of MediaWiki jointly with the Wikimedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation, so that volunteers are able to utilize the software effectively. This work includes the focus on community technical needs, sustained quality assurance and strengthened connections with Wikimedia communities internationally.
| Objective | Target | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation/Outlook | ||
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| The WMDE Software Development Department continuously implements solutions to user requests based on the ‘technical wishlist’, utilizing periodic feedback iterations. | At least 200 editors engage in voting on/ discussing the upcoming 2017 wish list.
Minimum eight feedback iterations around new features with at least 80 participants in total (online & offline) |
On track
450 editors engaged in voting on/discussing the 2017 wish list. Feedback iterations 2017: 5 online, 5 offline (2016: 10 total) Technical Wishes implemented 2017: 2 (2016:5) |
In Q3, the most popular of the more than 180 valid wishes submitted in the wishlist survey will be screened and tested for ease of implementation.
Implemented wishes in Q1-Q2 2017:
Furthermore, the RevisionSlider became a default feature for all users on all wikis, with only <450 feature disables by users (in relation to the >70k active users for which this feature is available). | ||
| By the end of 2017, WMDE tests, evaluates and publishes a variety of support formats for volunteer developers. | At least 2 support formats are tested, evaluated and published until end of 2017. | On track
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Q3: Establishing an IRC Office Hour for volunteer developers and a Wikimania Hackathon workshop for Mediawiki newcomers |
Program 4: Advocacy – Strengthen Legal and Political Conditions for Free Knowledge[edit]
During the first quarter of the year, EU copyright reform continued to be at the core of our political work. The Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU (FKAGEU) in Brussels, supported through WMDE, recorded several successes while participating in the drafting process of the EU parliament copyright reform. These successes have yet to be confirmed by the European Council to become law. Other areas of activity included the reform of exceptions and limitations in German copyright law, education and open data at the German federal and state level, first tests at involving our membership in supporting our political work in Brussels, as well as intensified work with our partners around German membership in the Open Government Partnership.
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WMDE Policy Advisor Dimitar Dimitrov presenting on the EU copyright reform at Wikimedia Conference in March, 2017 -
WMDE members at the member's assembly working on policy issues
The “Wahl-O-Mat” for digital issues (Digital-O-Mat) was primarily initiated and supported by WMDE. This tool first went live and was tested for the state elections in Nordrhein-Westfalen in May. It allows a voter to select their own opinion on eight crucial issues related to digital policy such as Open Data, Museums, Education, Government Data, Public Access to Broadband, and more. Then the tool allows to compare one’s own opinion profile with those of all major political parties (those with realistic chances to win seats in the next regional or federal parliament) in order to identify which of the parties running is closest to one’s own opinion. The tool was curated together with a group of partners including inter alia Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Digitale Gesellschaft, Free Software Foundation Europe and Chaos Computer Club and will be scaled up to be used for the federal elections this fall, with launch for this federal edition planned for mid August.In cooperation with iRights international, and supported by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), WMDE published the Digital Policy Reader just in time for the re:publica conference in Berlin, one of the world's largest conferences on digital culture and the Internet. The reader provides an introduction to the policy field, and includes articles on basic topics such as net neutrality, cybersecurity, big data, the internet of things and many more. The reader was distributed in a printed version directly to 200 selected opinion leaders and requested by a number of people after our presentation at the re:publica conference. An electronic version is available on the WMDE website. We are currently looking for an Open Access publisher to print a second edition to be then also available via regular book shops.
The Open Education Alliance (Bündnis Freie Bildung) continued its advocacy work in the first six months, with WMDE providing substantial backbone support, which enabled us to increase the alliance’s visibility and output.
To prepare for the upcoming federal elections in Germany, WMDE and the Open Education Alliance are working together on a number of approaches, including the Digital-O-Mat mentioned above or the preparation of policy recommendations for the political parties in charge post-election. We will again develop election touchstones around free knowledge. These are not lists of demands, but sets of questions along with the answers provided by the parties. They are published to help voters better understand party positions, estimate how the party, if elected, will govern in relation to the issue, and to then make informed decisions accordingly.
We have started to distribute mailings via email to the WMDE membership in order to mobilize our members to actively participate in our political work around EU copyright reform. The idea is to recruit people to join what some call the ‘Content Liberation Front’, in another wording: To become a ‘liquid lobbyist’, meaning volunteer supporters to assist staff in specific advocacy activities such as contacting members of parliament, collecting ideas or disseminating information and calls for input. In return, we offer interesting insights into the work in Brussels and Berlin, personal collaboration with our political team and the opportunity to jointly shape the future of free knowledge. By the end of the second quarter, this approach has shown some promise, with a group of 25-30 active members who have already begun their activities.
| Bursting the Brussels Bubble:
by Dimitar Dimitrov |
 The Wikimedia community unites and revolves around gathering and editing free knowledge and then making it available to the entire world. We know that it is the legislative framework that defines which parts of human knowledge we are allowed to share, and which we are not. We have learned over the years that legislative change can either endanger or support our mission to bring free content to the world to benefit education, science, culture and democracy.   The European Union has a complex and multilayered legislative process and it is important to speak to as many of its member states as early as possible in the process. This is why, next to talking to the European Commission and the European Parliament, both conveniently located in Brussels, we have also taken up the endeavour of contacting national ministries. As taking a stance while legislation is still being drafted in Brussels requires a lot of insider knowledge, our Brussels team had drafted a guide that explains which issues are crucial to us and why. This has then been localised by 20 national chapters or user groups and submitted in their name to their national governments. In some of the countries these letters started a conversation between volunteer Wikimedians and their government representatives about what copyright should look like. This is a geographical coverage in the EU that matches or tops the one of campaigns run by organizations like Greenpeace, the WWF or Amnesty International with a fraction of the invested resources. It couldn’t have happened without the local groups of volunteers, who can contribute local context and credibility to such conversations. Likewise, it would be impossible, especially for smaller volunteer organizations by themselves to follow-up on such specific processes and gather the necessary knowledge in order to know when to get in touch and what to speak about. To further facilitate the process, we coordinated with Creative Commons within the Communia Association to keep track of deadlines and gather national government contacts across Europe. EU Member States have now reached the next phase: They have begun to discuss compromises to the EU copyright reform in an attempt to find a common position. We will make use of this opportunity to follow-up with a new round of letters and personal meetings across Europe. Further information: Progress report for the FKAGEU |
Learnings from our policy work
The experience of the first half of 2017 continues to confirm that policy work takes a lot of time and perseverance, and that, due to the inherent opportunistic nature of activities, this field defies some of the standard planning and evaluation practices. This can be demonstrated by the target we set around the number of policy positions: Windows of opportunity for encouraging third parties to issue policy positions may or may not occur - and this is outside our sphere of influence. However, fewer third party policy positions at the end of the year do not automatically reflect on a failure to achieve our overall policy goals, as we have taken advantage of numerous other opportunities that had not been foreseen when we wrote objectives in the fall of 2016.
Building capacity and visibility is crucial. A meta page is being developed as the central platform for information and networking around public policy work in Germany. At WMDE headquarters in Berlin, we have deepened cross-departmental coordination with the colleagues from Volunteer Support and from Education/Science/Culture teams. Our Public Policy Team has slowly been growing, through the addition of work study positions and more staff in Berlin. In Brussels, with the help of a grant from Open Society Foundations, we are adding a Policy Advisor position to help steer through the hot phase of the copyright reform. Having additional staff has been hugely impactful, as we have been able to increase the frequency of communications and other political outputs, and shorten our reaction time when opportunities arise. There is still plenty of room to grow here, as it would be desirable to be monitoring net policy events more thoroughly, and to be more active and visible in a number of sub-arenas (for example, in policy periodicals, and at conferences) without compromising the quality of communications. This learning - essentially, that planning policy work means assuring readiness for the unplannable - is currently incorporated into WMDE’s planning for 2018 and beyond.
Working in cooperation and collaboration with partners and allies serves WMDE well to create connections, take advantage of synergies and to ultimately have a higher impact on the policy issues that matter. A steady presence at conferences and in publications helps to show that WMDE is engaged, has consistent policy positions, and is available as an active partner.
WMDE has increasingly served as the backbone for the Open Education Alliance (Bündnis Freie Bildung) since the summer 2016. This has helped to sustain the work and increase the outputs and the visibility of this group. However, at the same time the Open Education Alliance is still highly dependent on the commitments of individuals, rather than institutions, and when these individuals become otherwise occupied or change jobs, the continuity of partner input is compromised. Nevertheless, operating with partners around issuing political statements and election tools is more powerful than operating on our own, even if it takes more work. WMDE is committed to continuing the active support of the BFB through 2017 and then re-evaluate this activity.
Goal 1: The political climate affecting the Wikimedia movement becomes increasingly benevolent, and thus helps to promote movement goals around free knowledge.
| Objective | Target | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WMDE influences a minimum of ten relevant political decision-makers who previously did not have positive positions regarding free knowledge. | 10 relevant political decision-makers have been influenced by end of Q4 | Behind target Statements of interest/ intent by new relevant decision makers Q1-Q2: 2 |
With WMDE’s involvement, the federal state of Berlin has started to make Open Data the default in its public administration.
ESA, the European Space Agency, finally issued a general guideline for publishing all own images under CC-BY-SA license. This great achievement is based on long-standing lobbying and consulting by WMDE, starting back in 2012. It is unlikely to reach the full target by the end of the year. | ||
| WMDE’s political network includes a high level, responsible decision-maker from each interest group that we have identified as relevant. | By the end of 2017, our network covers each identified interest group | On track
Coverage of identified interest groups: 22 of 34 |
‘High level, responsible decision-maker’ covers staff at the level of executive, director, manager and upwards with decision-making power (qualified contacts, who know Wikimedia and its political positions)
Our mapping of relevant interest groups is still ongoing and we will add additional stakeholder groups until the end of the year. We are confident to reach a full coverage of all relevant interest groups by the end of 2017. | ||
| WMDE reviews the premises of its political positions covering the policy areas of education, science and culture, and expands on the respective arguments through publication of at least two statements or studies. | At least two statements or studies published until end of Q4. | On track
Statements/ position papers/ studies published: 5 |
Review of our policy positions is nearly complete.
Together with other Wikimedia chapters:
|
Goal 2: The legal and policy conditions for free knowledge have been improved.
| Objective | Target | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WMDE successfully influences the development of essential policies and laws related to the re-use of content without permission (“Open by default”) which, as a result, will benefit collaboration in the Wikimedia movement. | Successfully influenced cases (qualitative). | On track Important cases in Q1-Q2: >5, for details please see explanation |
Publishing of a comprehensive statement on a draft of the ‘Copyright and Knowledge Society law’ (UrhWissG) - and directly discussing it with the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection.
Contributing to 20 requests for change for the EU copyright reform, of which more than 15 were actually submitted by different members of the European Parliament. Supporting the campaign against mandatory upload filters for platforms with user-generated content (e.g. stopthecensorshipmachine.net) Field testing the new Digital-O-Mat tool in the run-up to the state elections in Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW), leading to >22,000 page views, >11,500 complete answers and intensive exchange with the political parties about digital issues. Joining the ‘declaration for freedom of opinion’ in order to oppose the first draft of the new ‘Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz’ (aka ‘Facebook law’) and discussing community-based mechanisms of fighting hate crimes with a state secretary and two members of parliament. | ||
| WMDE begins to work with at least five key institutions on the reform and development of their policies, regulations and procedures so that they favor free knowledge. | Work with at least five institutions has started. | On track
By Q2, work with 3 key institutions has started |
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz): Started planning a first content liberation project which could potentially set the future standard for this important cultural heritage institution, which used to be rather reluctant towards free knowledge practices.
Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises: Contributing to a administrative regulation on Open Data in Berlin’s public administration. German public-service television broadcaster ZDF: Consulting with members of the ZDF television board and representatives of the federal states about opening the ZDF’s archives for free knowledge projects. |
Program 5: Institutions and Their Content – Together with Communities, Liberate Content Through Cooperation with Institutions [edit]
The cultural hackathon Coding Da Vinci takes place again this year, this time in the fall, with two separate events in Hamburg and in Berlin. The team of partners has gained additional institutional partners, such as the German Committee for Heritage Protection (Deutsches Nationalkommittee für Denkmalschutz). WMDE this year has taken over the implementation of the Berlin event, while a local group in Hamburg organizes and conducts their event with consultation from the team of partners. We are also adding a new component this year, based on learnings from previous years: A ‘Prepare your Data’ two-part workshop for institutional partners, assuring that data sets are in a condition that allows for frictionless processing, including uploading to Commons. This activity is supported by a small grant from the state’s media literacy program.
Members of the WMDE Education, Science and Culture Team worked on the concepts for the information, consultation and training packages. Starting with information, we developed and improved upon a set of brochures and handouts to offer to specific kinds of institutions. The number of institutions, which were informed, consulted or received trainings through WMDE, rose to about 40. In preparing packages for institutions of education, we are focusing on topics of strategic importance to WMDE, such as Wikimedia projects, free licenses and free content. We want to make sure that we create viable connections between institutions and Wikimedia volunteers and projects. This focus allows us to coordinate WMDE’s offerings with the OER related resources being created by partners as part of the federally funded Central OER Office.
The first round of the Open Science Fellows Program was successfully concluded in March. It provided us and our partners with many learnings and much potential for impact. For the next round (2017/18) the program expanded in terms of partnerships and funding, resulting in up to 20 fellow positions, four new scientific partners, new mentors, a new funder, and a three year commitment from our co-founding partner Stifterverband. The call for proposals for round 2 was issued in June.
Open Science Fellows Program – Why and How WMDE Dabbles in Open Science |
We think that through Open Science, more people can benefit from the insights of scientific research. If research in all its phases is practiced openly, scientists can share data with each other and science is thus improved. If a variety of societal players have access to Open Science, research will become more socially relevant. And ultimately, the Wikimedia projects will benefit by incorporating more knowledge, and be utilized as tools to disseminate scientific knowledge. Wikidata, for example, is increasingly valued by scientists from all disciplines as a tool to openly organize and connect data sets used for research. So, a few years ago, we asked ourselves: If we want society to have more access to and participation in science and research, what is the best way for our organization to contribute to opening science? After talking to many people from many different institutions and disciplines, we found that scientists at the early stage of their career are the most eager, interested and at times already comfortable with using methods and tools of Open Science. However, they encounter institutional barriers as well as concerns and discouragement from established colleagues. Based on these findings, our team started developing a theory of change: what if we supported young scientists in learning about and using Open Science tools and methods, could they then in turn serve as change makers with their seasoned colleagues and institutions? We decided to find out. We identified a partner: the Stifterverband, the German Association of Science Funders, and jointly developed a fellowship program model, that includes financial support through a small stipend, joint learning, and one-on-one mentoring throughout the fellowship period. We identified five mentors, people with their own strong experience in practising Open Science. And we set up a logic model and designed an evaluation plan to rigorously test our assumptions. For the pilot year (2016/17) we selected 10 fellows from nearly 80 applications and followed them through a year of doing their work, in their discipline, with their individual Open Science approach. The fellows documented their experience in blog posts and reports, met regularly with their mentors, came together for exchange and joint learning. At the concluding event in March of 2017, each presented their project, and how they used Open Science to make it better. .png) At the end of their fellowship, participants reported that:
We learned that the mentoring component was the most important and useful for fellows, and also that there is a need for increasing the offerings of joint workshops as that would deepen and broaden learnings for the fellows. Many of the fellows communicated about their experience in a variety of situations in and outside of their institutions. This was encouraging sign that they assumed their role as ambassadors of Open Science. Some of them reported that they had been able to excite others in their institutions through showing them the possibilities of open science. All fellows were excited about becoming part of an alumni network, which we hope might be the beginning of an open science community that will grow with new fellows, mentors and allies each year. They also published the ‘Berlin Call to Action’, a statement with concrete recommendations for institutions around realizing the potential of open science. The Call to Action was distributed to various political and institutional decision-makers such as the members of the German Rectors' Conference, the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs and the Science Policy Speakers of the parliamentary groups on federal and state level. The promising evaluation results of the pilot allowed us to solidify the partnership with the Stifterverband, to gain new partners and to carefully scale up the model for 2017/18. This year, the call for applications went out for 20 slots, with five additional mentors, and extra support through the Volkswagen Foundation, one of the major funders of young scientists and their projects in Germany. We are excited to grow the Open Science community, and deepen our learnings, especially around what works in the mdi-term to change institutions, their policies and practices from the bottom up. We are pleased to share more about this program at Wikimania 2017: “Bringing Science and Wikimedia together through people: Wikipedia Ambassadors, Open Science Fellows, Wikimedians in residence – what’s next?” |
Goal 1: In order to provide access to content, work with communities to enter into cooperations and sustainable partnerships with cultural and memory institutions.
| Objective | Target | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Through cooperation with GLAM institutions and with volunteers, data sets are made available for Wikimedia projects, and new media files are re-used a minimum 5,000 times in the Wikimedia projects by the end of 2017. | By the end of 2017:
Media items are used a minimum 5,000 times in Wikimedia projects. |
On track
Use of new media items from GLAM-cooperations: 368 times (616 new files) |
This measure applies to dedicated GLAM cooperations. The majority of these events (e.g. GLAM on Tour stations, Coding da Vinci hackathon) are scheduled for Q3/Q4.
Here we are not counting the new media items and file uses that result from volunteer projects supported by WMDE in 2017 (for this, pls. check the shared metrics table at the top). | ||
| Experiences from these cooperations are shared in published success stories, in order to encourage additional institutions to contribute content for Wikimedia projects. | At least 3 success stories are published until end of Q4. | In progress |
Success stories are planned for Q3/Q4. |
Goal 2: Improve our existing resources around information and consultation for cultural and memory institutions, and develop, based on needs, similar resources for the educational and science fields, so they are enabled to generate and make available open content.
| Objective | Target | Progress (until Q2/2017) | Explanation | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| At least six cultural and memory institutions take advantage of our consultation, information and educational services. | 6 cultural and memory institutions are consulted by the end of 2017. | On track 3 cultural and memory institutions are consulted by end of Q2. |
15 representatives of different museums of the umbrella organization ‘Landschaftverband Rheinland (LVR)’ took part in a © © Change Your Mind workshop at the LandesMuseum Bonn.
7 GLAM institutions took part in the © © Change Your Mind workshop in Hamburg. 19 GLAM institutions took part in the information meeting for the Coding da Vinci 2017 hackathon. | ||
| Jointly with volunteers, WMDE develops and tests the implementation of one new resource each for the fields of science and educational institutions. | 2 new resources are tested by the end of 2017. | Slightly behind |
Initially it was planned to utilize two OER camps in Q2 to gather input from the science and educational communities and to start resource development. This was not fully possible, due to staff illnesses and low participation rates. Nevertheless, there still is time to develop and test the new formats in Q3/Q4. | ||
| 80% of scientific institutions that host fellows as part of the pilot phase Open Science Fellows Program implement further steps towards Open Science (seminars, research projects, publications, and working groups) within six months. | Within six month after end of the program:
80% of the scientific institutions implement further steps |
On track
In 4 of 10 (40%) of the scientific institutions which were hosting our fellows, further activities towards Open Science were implemented. |
We made the very positive observation that in the aftermath of the program our fellows also reached out to scientific institutions other than their own:
3 further initiatives (seminars, guest lectures) took place at additional scientific institutions. |
Learning and Sharing with the Wikimedia Movement[edit]
Wikimedia Conference: Share, Learn, Collaborate! |
_with_WMCON_logo.jpg){kind=logo} In 2017, Wikimedia Deutschland once again organized and hosted the Wikimedia Conference (WMCON), the annual meeting of all Wikimedia organizations and groups as well as the movement’s decision making bodies. The WMCON serves as the central time and space to discuss the future of the Wikimedia movement – in terms of collaboration, structures and organizational development. And the conference is the opportunity for movement organizations to share experiences and to learn from each other. WMCON is key to Wikimedia Deutschland’s efforts to support the movement. The design of the event aims to increase the impact of the movement through international collaboration – not just at the conference, but before and after as well. Since WMDE started organizing this conference with a long-term perspective in 2015, we have shaped the event to be a productive, fun and outcome-oriented forum for the movement. We have published a report about the recent Wikimedia Conference, a more detailed report about our learnings and experiences from organizing this conference three years in a row will be published this fall, but we are eager to share two highlights in advance: In 2017, the number of attendees was increased: Invitations were sent to 150 additional Wikimedians. This served to increase representation and the diversity of voices in the Wikimedia Movement Strategy Process, which was covered in a dedicated track on the program. More participants from Emerging Communities were able to represent their regions and their specific perspectives.  This was also a game changer for the atmosphere of the conference: Since the majority of chapters and user groups represent regions of the so-called “Global North”, participation had previously been unbalanced. Inviting more people from regions and groups that have been less present or visible at previous events led to participants feeling that they are part of something even bigger, more global and more diverse than ever before. We should consider the positive effects of this expansion – which have been reported by several participants in the survey and in many in-person conversations – when designing future movement events. Our key take-away is that adding more voices leads to stronger cohesion within the Wikimedia movement. Looking back over the last years, we acknowledge another learning: Fostering international collaboration among Wikimedia affiliates remains a challenge. Despite having a dedicated Program and Engagement Coordinator who is doing much supportive follow-up work, trying to connect people between conferences, it is very difficult to engage WMCON participants – experienced and inexperienced – to follow up on topics and initiatives.  Many volunteers naturally concentrate their time and efforts on project-based, local activities. It is difficult for them to find time and motivation to work on “meta” topics they take home from WMCON. Staff of Wikimedia affiliates on the other hand might have a stronger motivation for working with their international colleagues, and many wish they could spend more time on issues that affect the movement. However, they too rarely have time and budgets to commit “on top” of their daily work. This is a structural weakness of our movement, which compromises its members’ ability to fully act as movement: International collaboration is not budgeted in the affiliates’ annual plans, with APGs focussing on affiliates’ local or regional work. The structure of the funding program, and the preferences of the Funds Dissemination Committee tend to support the introvert, local aspect of organizations, rather than their role as a equal players in the global movement. To date there has not been a funding mechanism that supports cross-affiliate collaboration – other than the WMCON. But as the only supporting mechanism, a once a year event will not be fully effective as a driver for collaboration. Our teams at WMDE are looking forward to continuously supporting and shaping the conference in coming years, and contributing to a connected, equitable and effective movement in this manner. After the movement strategy has taken shape, structure, infrastructure and resource decisions that support the further development of collaboration among affiliates will hopefully follow. We are sure that WMCON and other movement events will play a crucial part in assuring our collective impact in the years to come. Further information and links
|
Financial Information[edit]
Revenues received during this six-month period[edit]
Table 1: WMDE Revenues
Please note: Exchange rate used throughout the APG 16-17 process is 1€ = 1.115$
| WMDE Revenue 2017 | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue source | EUR | USD | |||||||||
| Budgeted | Actual Q1 | Actual Q2 | Actual total | Budgeted | Actual Q1 | Actual Q2 | Actual total | % budget received | Explanation to variances from budget and large budget items | ||
| Donations | 2,500,000 | 143,174 | 2,366,880 | 2,510,054 | 2,787,500 | 159,639 | 2,639,071 | 2,798,710 | 100% | ||
| APG | 279,198 | 81,433 | 58,166 | 139,599 | 311,306 | 90,798 | 64,855 | 155,653 | 50% | ||
| WMF Wikidata MoU | 1,200,000 | 600,000 | 667,169 | 1,267,169 | 1,338,000 | 669,000 | 743,893 | 1,412,893 | 106% | WMDE received additional WMF funding for an increase in staff resources as amendment to the MoU. | |
| Membership fees | 2,166,163 | 1,358,009 | 688,571 | 2,046,580 | 2,415,272 | 1,514,180 | 767,757 | 2,281,937 | 94% | ||
| Fundraising management overhead | 30,417 | 18,774 | 0 | 18,774 | 33,915 | 20,933 | 0 | 20,933 | 62% | ||
| Google grant for Wikidata | 437,500 | 437,500 | 0 | 437,500 | 487,813 | 487,813 | 0 | 487,813 | 100% | ||
| Other revenues | 41,000 | 2,680 | 36,336 | 39,016 | 45,715 | 2,988 | 40,515 | 43,503 | 95% | ||
| PEG | 145,365 | 151,066 | 0 | 151,066 | 162,082 | 168,439 | 0 | 168,439 | 104% | Due to enlargement of the WMCON, grant size was increased with some payments still due for the second half of 2017. | |
| Total revenue | 6,799,643 | 2,792,636 | 3,817,122 | 6,609,758 | 7,581,603 | 3,113,789 | 4,256,091 | 7,369,880 | 97% | ||
Spending during this six-month period[edit]
Table 2: WMDE Expenses, Budgeted vs. Actual, by Quarter
Please note: Exchange rate used throughout the APG 16-17 process is 1€ = 1.115$
| WMDE Expenses 2017 | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Program/Department | EUR | USD | |||||||||||
| Budgeted | Actual Q1 | Actual Q2 | Actual total | Budgeted | Actual Q1 | Actual Q2 | Actual total | % budget spent | Explanation to variances from budget and large budget items | ||||
| Program expenses | 3,646,025 | 586,621 | 641,083 | 1,227,704 | 4,065,317 | 654,082 | 714,808 | 1,368,890 | 34% | ||||
| Program 1: New Volunteers | 312,872 | 30,268 | 31,022 | 61,290 | 348,852 | 33,749 | 34,590 | 68,338 | 20% | ||||
| 1.1: Increase the number of volunteers active in Wikipedia through an online campaign which motivates the highest possible number of Wikipedia readers to engage as active editors. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 84,905 | 2,893 | 9,661 | 12,554 | 94,669 | 3,226 | 10,772 | 13,998 | 15% | Higher expenses are expected in Q3/Q4 | ||
| Personnel expenses | 227,967 | 27,375 | 21,361 | 48,736 | 254,183 | 30,523 | 23,818 | 54,341 | 21% | Activities required fewer resources than planned. Higher expenses are expected in Q3/Q4. | |||
| Program 2: Volunteer Support | 855,293 | 134,433 | 168,507 | 302,940 | 953,652 | 149,893 | 187,885 | 337,778 | 35% | ||||
| 2.1: Continue volunteer support services and facilitate access to support, including for volunteers active in Wikipedia’s sister projects. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 552,349 | 43,213 | 89,661 | 132,874 | 615,869 | 48,182 | 99,972 | 148,155 | 24% | This budget item reflects the volunteer grant fund. Large volunteer projects such as the WikiCon are planned for the second half of 2017. | ||
| Personnel expenses | 288,204 | 89,498 | 67,912 | 157,410 | 321,348 | 99,790 | 75,722 | 175,512 | 55% | ||||
| 2.2: Further develop volunteer support services to improve the program’s contribution to the viability and quality of Wikimedia projects. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 1,349 | 0 | 7,056 | 7,056 | 1,504 | 0 | 7,867 | 7,867 | 523% | Higher than budgeted travel and accommodation expenses for additional participants at the community workshop on movement strategy. | ||
| Personnel expenses | 13,391 | 1,722 | 3,878 | 5,600 | 14,931 | 1,920 | 4,324 | 6,244 | 42% | ||||
| Program 3: Software Development | 1,690,460 | 305,302 | 281,790 | 587,092 | 1,884,862 | 340,412 | 314,196 | 654,608 | 35% | Underspending due to unfilled positions | |||
| 3.1: Continue to assure the technical and social sustainability of Wikidata (software and community) as the central, structured knowledge data base for the Wikimedia movement and beyond. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 125,635 | 20,244 | 20,780 | 41,024 | 140,083 | 22,572 | 23,170 | 45,742 | 33% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 463,014 | 83,037 | 71,901 | 154,938 | 516,260 | 92,587 | 80,170 | 172,756 | 33% | ||||
| 3.2: Continue to increase the reach of Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 90,635 | 15,773 | 16,614 | 32,387 | 101,058 | 17,587 | 18,525 | 36,112 | 36% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 480,831 | 92,193 | 68,948 | 161,141 | 536,126 | 102,795 | 76,877 | 179,672 | 34% | ||||
| 3.3: Continue development of MediaWiki jointly with the Wikimedia Communities and the Wikimedia Foundation, so that volunteers are able to utilize the software effectively. This work includes the focus on community technical needs, sustained quality assurance and strengthened connections with Wikimedia communities internationally. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 44,135 | 2,519 | 10,949 | 13,468 | 49,211 | 2,809 | 12,208 | 15,017 | 31% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 486,210 | 91,536 | 92,598 | 184,134 | 542,124 | 102,063 | 103,247 | 205,309 | 38% | ||||
| Program 4: Advocacy | 445,923 | 65,387 | 98,693 | 164,080 | 497,204 | 72,907 | 110,043 | 182,949 | 37% | ||||
| 4.1: The political environment affecting the Wikimedia Movement becomes increasingly benevolent, and thus helps to promote movement goals around free knowledge. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 93,379 | 3,451 | 27,574 | 31,025 | 104,118 | 3,848 | 30,745 | 34,593 | 33% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 182,476 | 40,237 | 41,034 | 81,271 | 203,461 | 44,864 | 45,753 | 90,617 | 45% | ||||
| 4.2: The legal and policy conditions for free knowledge have been improved. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 55,439 | 5,661 | 16,248 | 21,909 | 61,814 | 6,312 | 18,117 | 24,429 | 40% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 114,629 | 16,038 | 13,837 | 29,875 | 127,811 | 17,882 | 15,428 | 33,311 | 26% | ||||
| Program 5: Institutions and their Content | 341,477 | 51,231 | 61,071 | 112,302 | 380,747 | 57,123 | 68,094 | 125,217 | 33% | ||||
| 5.1: In order to provide access to content, work with communities to enter into cooperations and sustainable partnerships with cultural and memory institutions. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 27,582 | 110 | 7,968 | 8,078 | 30,754 | 123 | 8,884 | 9,007 | 29% | Higher expenses expected for Q3/Q4 due to major projects scheduled for the second half of the year | ||
| Personnel expenses | 68,548 | 6,105 | 7,631 | 13,736 | 76,431 | 6,807 | 8,509 | 15,316 | 20% | Higher expenses expected for Q3/Q4 due to major projects and hiring of additional staff scheduled for the second half of the year. | |||
| 5.2: Improve our existing resources around information and consultation for cultural and memory institutions, and develop, based on needs, similar resources for the educational and science fields, so they are enabled to generate and make available open content. | Nonpersonnel expenses | 76,061 | 5,787 | 5,133 | 10,920 | 84,808 | 6,453 | 5,723 | 12,176 | 14% | Majority of expenses for new materials and resources shifted to Q3/Q4. | ||
| Personnel expenses | 169,286 | 39,229 | 40,339 | 79,568 | 188,754 | 43,740 | 44,978 | 88,718 | 47% | ||||
| Program support expenses | 875,416 | 249,111 | 237,980 | 487,091 | 976,089 | 277,759 | 265,348 | 543,106 | 56% | ||||
| Education, Science and Culture | Nonpersonnel expenses | 8,000 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8,920 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% | Resources were shifted to direct program expenses. | ||
| Personnel expenses | 15,480 | 218 | 261 | 479 | 17,260 | 243 | 291 | 534 | 3% | ||||
| Volunteer Support | Nonpersonnel expenses | 33,500 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 37,353 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% | Resources were shifted to direct program expenses. | ||
| Personnel expenses | 21,267 | 0 | 516 | 516 | 23,713 | 0 | 575 | 575 | 2% | ||||
| Communication | Nonpersonnel expenses | 182,500 | 7,259 | 50,727 | 57,986 | 203,488 | 8,094 | 56,561 | 64,654 | 32% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 157,448 | 22,407 | 26,890 | 49,297 | 175,555 | 24,984 | 29,982 | 54,966 | 31% | ||||
| Event Management | Nonpersonnel expenses | 16,761 | 3,377 | 7,925 | 11,302 | 18,689 | 3,765 | 8,836 | 12,602 | 67% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 127,315 | 21,948 | 18,418 | 40,366 | 141,956 | 24,472 | 20,536 | 45,008 | 32% | ||||
| International | Nonpersonnel expenses | 117,367 | 142,916 | 64,871 | 207,787 | 130,864 | 159,351 | 72,331 | 231,683 | 177% | Includes the majority of expenses for the WMCON. Size and budget of WMCON was increased significantly. | ||
| Personnel expenses | 47,911 | 12,310 | 33,635 | 45,945 | 53,421 | 13,726 | 37,503 | 51,229 | 96% | ||||
| Partnerships and Development | Nonpersonnel expenses | 9,873 | 680 | 2,075 | 2,755 | 11,008 | 758 | 2,314 | 3,072 | 28% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 137,994 | 37,996 | 32,662 | 70,658 | 153,863 | 42,366 | 36,418 | 78,784 | 51% | ||||
| Indirect expenses | 2,144,878 | 485,959 | 486,271 | 972,230 | 2,391,539 | 541,844 | 542,192 | 1,084,036 | 45% | ||||
| Office of the ED, Board of Directors | Nonpersonnel expenses | 150,100 | 20,591 | 29,225 | 49,816 | 167,362 | 22,959 | 32,586 | 55,545 | 33% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 272,973 | 60,569 | 61,276 | 121,845 | 304,365 | 67,534 | 68,323 | 135,857 | 45% | ||||
| Finance | Nonpersonnel expenses | 29,339 | 7,451 | 7,897 | 15,348 | 32,713 | 8,308 | 8,805 | 17,113 | 52% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 179,086 | 43,231 | 44,440 | 87,671 | 199,681 | 48,203 | 49,551 | 97,753 | 49% | ||||
| IT | Nonpersonnel expenses | 182,613 | 24,903 | 33,762 | 58,665 | 203,613 | 27,767 | 37,645 | 65,411 | 32% | |||
| Personnel expenses | 115,902 | 24,740 | 23,478 | 48,218 | 129,231 | 27,585 | 26,178 | 53,763 | 42% | ||||
| Operations | Nonpersonnel expenses | 811,954 | 180,659 | 148,924 | 329,583 | 905,329 | 201,435 | 166,050 | 367,485 | 41% | This includes expenses for office, office rent, HR, fundraising, membership communications, event support. | ||
| Personnel expenses | 402,911 | 123,815 | 137,269 | 261,084 | 449,246 | 138,054 | 153,055 | 291,109 | 65% | ||||
| Total program and associated expenses | 6,666,319 | 1,321,691 | 1,365,334 | 2,687,025 | 7,432,945 | 1,473,685 | 1,522,347 | 2,996,033 | 40% | ||||
| Risk liquidity | 133,326 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 148,658 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% | ||||
| Total annual expenses (incl. risk liquidity) | 6,799,645 | 1,321,691 | 1,365,334 | 2,687,025 | 7,581,603 | 1,473,685 | 1,522,347 | 2,996,033 | 40% | ||||
Compliance[edit]
Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?
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.
- Abraham Taherivand (WMDE) 13:35, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
- Annual plan grant reports
- Annual plan grant progress report forms 2016-2017 Round 1
- Annual plan grants or proposals by Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. for 2016-2017 Round 1
- Annual plan grant progress report forms
- Annual plan grant progress report forms by Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
- Annual plan grants and proposals for 2016-2017 Round 1