Wikimedia Highlights, October 2012
Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for October 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement
Wikimedia Foundation Highlights
Mobile Wikipedia redesigned
The mobile gateway to Wikipedia was updated with several features that had earlier been tested on the mobile beta site. The new navigation system aims to make mobile features and settings easier to discover. In the coming months, the mobile team will work on adding possibilities to contribute on mobile devices. In the previous month, the Wiki Loves Monuments app had already introduced a mobile photo upload function, as the first such possibility. For readers, the new design offers fonts that make the content easier to read.
First in-person meeting of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
The nine members of the new volunteer-run Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) met for the first time in October, preparing their recommendations about funding requests by 12 organizations (11 Wikimedia chapters and the Foundation) from a pool of more than $10 million of Wikimedia donations. In this new model, the funding requests have to be submitted in public, enabling a community review period that lasted until October 22.
The staff which supports the FDC scored each request according to a criteria list:
- estimates for the potential impact,
- the organization's ability to execute the planned activities,
- their expected financial efficiency,
- the quality of the proposed success measures
- the potential benefit for the Wikimedia movement
The Signpost (the English Wikipedia's weekly community newspaper) has published an overview of these scores and of the requested sums.
The Board of Trustees will announce its decision about the FDC's recommendations in December.
Wikipedia Zero now available to 230 million people after Saudi Arabia launch; has already grown Wikipedia readership in Africa and Asia
Wikipedia Zero, the program offering mobile Internet users access to Wikipedia without data charges, added Saudi Telecom Company (STC) to the list of partners. With STC's 25 million subscribers in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait, altogether 230 million mobile users in 31 countries have now access to the program, half a year after its worldwide start.
A preliminary evaluation of its effect on readership is promising: Wikipedia pageviews from Orange Niger customers grew by 77% and those from Orange Kenya customers grew by 88% in a four-month period including the launch in these countries. In Malaysia, unique visitors to Wikipedia from local operator Digi jumped by 42% after it joined Wikipedia Zero.
Data and Trends
Global unique visitors for September:
- 474.9 million (+4.08% compared with August; +4.47% compared with the previous year)
- (comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release October data later in November)
Page requests for October:
- 19.8 billion (+3.4% compared with September; +15.8% compared with the previous year)
- (Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)
Active Registered Editors for September 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
- 82,582 (+4.08% compared with August / +2.98% compared with the previous year)
- (Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)
Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for September 2012:
Financials
 |
 |
(Financial information is only available for September 2012 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date September 30, 2012.
| Revenue | $4,113,523 |
|---|---|
| Expenses: | |
| Technology Group | $3,274,990 |
| Community/Fundraiser Group | $588,771 |
| Global Development Group | $1,353,447 |
| Governance Group | $200,668 |
| Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group | $581,916 |
| Finance/HR/Admin Group | $1,396,195 |
| Total Expenses | $7,395,987 |
| Total surplus/(loss) | ($3,282,464) |
- Revenue for the month of September is $2.36MM vs plan of $2.44MM, approximately $81K or 3% under plan.
- Year-to-date revenue is $4.11MM vs plan of $4.36MM, approximately $245K or 6% under plan.
- Expenses for the month of September is $2.20MM vs plan of $2.77MM, approximately $577K or 21% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher expenses for the annual all-hands meeting.
- Year-to-date expenses is $7.40MM vs plan of $8.68MM, approximately $1.3MM or 15% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, legal expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services.
- Cash position is $22.0MM as of September 30, 2012 which is approximately 6.29 months of expenses.
Other movement highlights
Audio and video from open access scientific publications imported to Commons
The Open Access Media Importer Bot was approved on Wikimedia Commons at the end of October. It searches publication databases (such as PubMed Central) for audio and video files that accompany scholarly papers as supplementary material, and uploads them to Wikimedia Commons if they are available under suitable free licenses. It has already imported more than 9000 files.
200 GLAM professionals at German conference
An international conference titled "Shaping Access! – More responsibility for cultural heritage" took place in Berlin on October 23 and 24, co-organized by the German Wikimedia chapter with five other organizations. More than 200 representatives of cultural institutions (GLAMs) discussed ways of making cultural heritage more accessible, among them Wikipedia and Wiki Loves Monuments.
Ada Lovelace Day
In mid-October, the fourth annual Ada Lovelace Day was celebrated to honor the contributions of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, remembering computer pioneer Ada Lovelace (1815–1852). Wikimedians participated with several events, including editathons at the British Royal Society and at Harvard University that focused on improving Wikipedia coverage of women in science, and a party hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
 Current system: interwiki links between all languages |
|
 Wikidata, phase 1: links of all languages to one central point |
Wikidata.org goes online
Wikidata reached a milestone on October 30 when its wiki at wikidata.org went live, as the first new Wikimedia Foundation project since 2006. Wikidata will be a central repository of structured data for Wikimedia projects. The software is being developed by the German chapter. The project consists of three phases. In the first phase, which has now begun, the interlanguage links that are connecting articles about the same topic in different language projects are being collected on Wikidata. The Hungarian Wikipedia will be the first project to make use of these centrally stored interwiki links.