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Wikimedia Highlights, November 2011

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Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for November 2011, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

WikiConference and Hackathon in Mumbai, India

Participants of the Mumbai Hackathon

From November 19 to November 20, Wikimedia staff and volunteers gathered together in Mumbai for the India Hackathon 2011, focusing on mobile access, language support, and offline distribution. The hackathon was held simultaneously with WikiConference India 2011, an event organized by Wikimedia India. The WikiConference had nearly 700 participants, making it one of the largest Wikimedia events ever, and certainly the largest so far in India. More than 50 sessions provided insights on community building, improving project quality, establishing partnerships, best practices in outreach and opportunities for general experience sharing.

A new tool for helping new editors

Since August, the experimental “Moodbar” function has invited new users on the English Wikipedia to quickly and easily provide feedback on their editing experience by entering a 140 character comment. All these comments are posted as a public feed on the Feedback Dashboard. In November, we added a new functionality that enables experienced editors to easily respond to this feedback without leaving the dashboard. Wikimedia Foundation Community Organizers Steven Walling and Maryana Pinchuk have started a Response Team of experienced editors willing to help out new users in this way.

We're continuing to improve this system and assess its impact; specifically, whether new users read the messages they receive, and whether editing activity increases as a result of active coaching.

Fundraiser

The annual Wikimedia fundraiser launched on November 16th with over $ 1M donated on the first day. $ 10,433,402.89 were donated until the end of the month, in a total of 545,362 donations. The significant increase in contributors across more regions of the world can largely be attributed to the increase in the number of currencies Wikimedia is able to accept this year - more than 80.

In addition to the annual personal appeal from Jimmy Wales, this year's fundraising campaign features new voices, including community members and Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Compared with the previous year, four times as many volunteers are contributing to the translation of banners and appeals, including over 700 logged out users (readers?). The Article Feedback Tool enables anyone to rate the quality of the translations.

Discussion of the image filter in Hannover

Sue Gardner visits European Wikimedia chapters

Award of Wiki Loves Monuments and Heritage Day. November 17th, 2011 in the offices of the Federal Monuments Office Vienna, Hofburg

In November, the Wikimedia Foundation sent a delegation to Europe, in which Executive Director Sue Gardner, her assistant James Owen, General Counsel Geoff Brigham and Community Organizer Maryana Pinchuk visited seven cities in three weeks. The main purpose of the trip was to spend time with chapters, with the goal of listening to chapters' hopes and fears, particularly with regards to fundraising and funds dissemination. A secondary purpose was to spend time with the German community, with the goal of improving mutual understanding particularly with regard to ongoing controversy about the possible implementation of a personal image filter.

The trip also involved a number of other activities, such as meet-ups, talks and media interviews. The delegation visited Paris, Utrecht, London, Vienna, Hannover and Berlin. The trip included meetings and/or meals with five chapter boards, as well as four community meet-ups, and a variety of other small informal gatherings with chapters people and/or editors. The group visited the UK National Archives with members of the UK Board, and helped present awards to the winners of the Wiki Loves Monuments competition in Vienna. Sue Gardner gave three presentations, to the UK Board, the German chapter, and to Imperial College in London, and did six media interviews, in London and Berlin.

The Wikimedia Foundation is grateful to the boards of Wikimédia France, Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Österreich and Wikimedia Deutschland, for their hospitality, openness and candour. Our particular thanks to the following individuals: Christophe Henner, Rémi Mathis, Adrienne Alix, Ziko van Dijk, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Roger Bamkin, Andrew Turvey, Andy Mabbett, Jon Davies, Fiona Apps, Marek69, Kurt Kulac, Manuel Schneider, Barbara Neubauer, Jo Pugh, Pavel Richter, Sebastian Moleski, Julia Kloppenburg and Catrin Schoneville.

Global unique visitors for October:

477 million (+4.9% compared with September; +16.7% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)

Page requests for November:

16.8 billion (-0.1% compared with October; +12.3% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for October 2011 (>= 5 edits/month):

84,426 (+1.4% compared with September / +0.8% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for October 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/

The report card is currently undergoing a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects).

Financials

(Financial information is only available for October 2011 at the time of this report. All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 - October 31, 2011)

Revenue: $ 4,253,486

Expenses:

  • Technology Group: $ 3,021,534
  • Community/Fundraiser Group: $ 1,066,080
  • Global Development Group: $ 1,116,890
  • Governance Group: $ 336,150
  • Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group: $ 1,989,659

Total Expenses: $ 7,530,312

Total surplus/(loss): ($ 3,276,826)

Revenue was ahead of plan due to grants of $ 2.8 million and additional donations ahead of plan of $ 385,254.

Expenses were below plan at $ 7.5 million actual versus $ 9.1 million plan. Expenses were below planned due to lower than planned expenditures in capital expenditures, chapter grants, recruitment cost and other activities due.

Cash of $ 14.9 million, which is six months of cash reserves at current spending levels.

Other movement highlights

  • Wikimania videos available: The organizers of Wikimania 2011, which took place in August in Haifa, Israel, have announced that all video recordings from the conference have been uploaded. They are also linked from the conference schedule. The videos have already been watched more than 16,000 times.
  • Wikimedia France lobbies for freedom of panorama: On November 23, the French parliament debated an amendment to French intellectual property law that would introduce freedom of panorama exceptions similar to those in many other countries. This would, for example, allow Wikimedians to upload photos of French buildings and of sculptures that are permanently on display in public places. The amendment was supported by the French Wikimedia chapter, but failed to achieve the necessary majority.
  • Al Jazeera releases images: After interventions by Wikimedia Foundation fellow Liam Wyatt and Mathias Schindler from Wikimedia Germany, the Qatar-based news channel Al Jazeera English decided to make the photos from its Flickr stream available under the CC-BY-SA 2.0 license. They are being uploaded to Commons. Many of them document the political uprisings of the Arab Spring.
  • First Wikimedia hackathon in the UK: A two-day event in Brighton brought together Wikimedia Foundation developers with other new and experienced coders. See notes for day 1, notes for day 2.