June 2011 Wikimedia Foundation Report
Erik Moeller <
erik@...>
2011-07-15 20:58:21 GMT
Please find below the WMF report for June. As always, the editable and
formatted version can be found on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_June_2011
All best,
Erik
* 1 Data and Trends
* 2 Financials
* 3 Highlights
o 3.1 2011-12 Annual Plan Approved
o 3.2 WikiLove deployed on English Wikipedia
* 4 Technology
o 4.1 Personnel
o 4.2 Operations
o 4.3 Features
o 4.4 Mobile
o 4.5 Special projects
o 4.6 Platform
* 5 Research and Strategy
* 6 Community
o 6.1 Summer of Research
o 6.2 Data Competitions
o 6.3 Fundraiser
o 6.4 Major Gifts and Foundations
o 6.5 Public Policy Initiative
o 6.6 Supporting and helping readers
o 6.7 OTRS Analysis
o 6.8 New Account Creation Project
o 6.9 Cultural Partnerships
o 6.10 WikiHistories Project
* 7 Global Development
o 7.1 Highlights
+ 7.1.1 Grants Awarded and Executed
+ 7.1.2 Chapter Relations
+ 7.1.3 Non-chapter News
o 7.2 Brazil Catalyst
o 7.3 India Programs
+ 7.3.1 Global Education Program in India
+ 7.3.2 India Office
o 7.4 Mobile Strategy and Business Development
o 7.5 Editor Survey
o 7.6 Communications
+ 7.6.1 Major stories and coverage
+ 7.6.2 Blogging
+ 7.6.3 Media contact
+ 7.6.4 Wikipedia Signpost
* 8 Human Resources
o 8.1 Staff Changes
o 8.2 Statistics
o 8.3 Department Updates
* 9 Finance and Administration
* 10 Legal
* 11 Visitors and Guests
==Data and Trends==
Global unique visitors for May:
411 million (+7.9% compared to April / +5.7% compared to previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will
release June data later in July)
Page requests for May:
15.1 billion (+3.1% compared to April / -1% compared to previous year)
Report Card for May 2011: The report card is currently undergoing a
redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard. The current prototype
can be seen at: http://project2.wikimedia.org/reportCard/reportcard.html
==Financials==
(Financial information is only available for May 2011 at the time of
this report.)
Operating revenue for May: USD 0.6MM vs plan of USD 1.7MM
Operating revenue year-to-date May: USD 22.5MM vs plan of USD 20.2MM
Monthly revenue is under primarily due to a foundations grant that was
budgeted for May 2011 but will be deferred to the next fiscal year for
operating purposes. Year-to-date revenue continues to exceed plan.
Operating expenses for May: USD 1.4MM vs plan of USD 1.7MM
Operating expenses year-to-date May:USD 16.6MM vs plan of USD 18.7MM
Expenses for the month are under primarily due to the timing of capex
and personnel-related expenses, partially offset by overspending in
internet hosting, travel, and conferences. Expenses year-to-date are
under also due to the timing of capex and personnel-related expenses, as
well as volunteer development. This underspending is partially offset by
overspending in awards and scholarships, bank and legal fees, and
outside contract services.
Cash and investments as of May 2011 totaled USD 18.7MM (approximately
8.2 months of expenses based on the 2011-12 plan).
==Highlights==
2011-12 Annual Plan Approved
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved the 2011-12 Annual
Plan in its June 28 resolution:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Approval_of_the_2011-2012_Annual_Plan
The 2011-12 Plan calls for $28.3 million of spending and $29.5 million
of revenues with the reserve at $20.7 million at the end of 2011-12.
The 2011-12 plan calls for us to develop and begin deployment of a
Visual Editor to make it easier for new people to edit the projects; to
redevelop the mobile platform (including offering new ways to
participate via phone, and launching partnerships to enable people to
use Wikipedia for free from their phones); to invest further in editor
recruitment in India and to begin investment in Brazil, to launch
experiments and initiatives aimed at improving editor retention; to
launch a Global Education Project designed to recruit editors on
campuses in key geographies; to launch the Wikimedia Labs, and to put
some cash into internationalization supporting non-Western languages.
By doing this, the Wikimedia Foundation intends to halt the decline in
active editors and begin to push the number of editors back up. We will
also more than double mobile pageviews. If we achieve both those
top-priority goals, we will consider 2011-12 a success.
To get this done, we plan to grow the staff 50% from 78 to 117, and
spending will increase 53% to $28.3 million. To pay for that and for the
rest of the plan, we will increase revenues 24% to $29.5 million,
thereby also putting a small amount of additional cash into our
operating reserve.
The plan and Q and A were posted in early July to the Wikimedia
Foundation website:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:2011-12_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE_.pdf
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2011-2012_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Answers
WikiLove deployed on English Wikipedia
<Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WikiLove_tabs.jpg
The new "WikiLove" tab >
On June 30, we enabled the WikiLove extension on the English Wikipedia.
WikiLove adds an additional tab to user discussion pages which makes it
quick and easy to send notes of appreciation to other users. WikiLove
received large international media coverage, much of it inaccurate but
well-intentioned. We're analyzing who is using it, what its impact is on
social interactions in Wikipedia, and how it can be improved.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/24/wikilove-an-experiment-in-appreciation/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiLove/Stories
==Technology==
A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for June 2011 can
be found at:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2011/June
Major news this month include:
* the network setup in our new datacenter, that opened the way to
new server setup and backups;
* progress on features to encourage and facilitate participation,
like the Visual Editor groundwork, and the WikiLove button;
* productive community testing on our now mobile front-end and the
Kiwix download manager;
* the release of MediaWiki 1.17.0;
* the first commits by our Summer of Code students;
* major progress on our code review backlog.
Personnel
* The engineering department continued its growth, and new positions
were opened in June. See the summary e-mail:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-June/054097.html
* Erik Möller announced a reorganization of the engineering
management team, composed of "Directors" and "Lead Architects":
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-June/054040.html
Pperations
* Virginia datacenter — In June, network setup in eqiad, our
facility at Equinix in Ashburn, Virginia, was finished. Two
independent transport connections between our two data centers in
Tampa and Ashburn were installed, and local IP transit (Internet
connectivity) is now available in Ashburn as well. We started
replicating our thumb server from ms5 (tampa) to ms1004 (eqiad).
All our 48 database servers are now up and running, and database
replication was about to start. Several services should come
online from eqiad in July.
* HTTPS & IPv6 — Wikimedia sites will be switching to
protocol-relative URLs in July, as part of the work to properly
support HTTPS.
Features
* Visual editor — Work continued on the front-end of the visual
editor, and specifications for accessing the editing surface via
the API. We also worked on a demo to integrate MediaWiki and Etherpad.
* Article Feedback <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback>
— Additional features were added in June, like a dashboard
tracking articles receiving low ratings. The community provided
feedback and bug reports, and the development team addressed the
concerns raised, for example by implementing a user preference to
hide the tool. Tooltips were also added to provide more
information on the meaning of the star ratings. The team continued
to evaluate the data provided by the articles already showing the
feature. The incremental roll-out to all articles on the English
Wikipedia is planned to be completed by mid-July.
* WikiLove <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WikiLove> — The extension
was deployed to the English Wikipedia on June 30 (see announcement
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/24/wikilove-an-experiment-in-appreciation/>).
Mobile
* Mobile Research
<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile/Research> — In June, we
completed our fieldwork in Brazil, consisting of 16 interviews in
São Paulo, Salvador and Porto Alegre. We conducted extensive
in-home interviews with three kinds of participants: readers of
Wikipedia on a mobile phone, potential mobile readers (i.e. who
currently use a computer, but could become mobile readers) and
editors (primarily of the Portuguese Wikipedia, and to a lesser
degree of the English Wikipedia). The team also received about six
proposals from US firms in response to our RfP, to conduct
research in three cities in the US. The mobile survey is scheduled
to be launched at the end of July.
* Mobile site rewrite — We issued a call for testers
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/10/testing-mobile-prototype/>
to help test the prototype in English, Japanese and Hebrew. Next
steps include the integration of the extension with our caching
architecture, so that we can have the advantages of the mobile
device detection database with an acceptable performance.
Special projects
* Wikipedia version tools — Work continued to port the WP 1.0 bot to
a MediaWiki extension. We implemented an assessment template
processing feature, and are now working on a WP 1.0 bot
replacement feature that will automatically include real-time
assessment statistics on project pages. A feature to filter and
select articles based on assessment criteria is planned to be
added in July.
* Kiwix UX initiative — The next beta of Kiwix was released. Users
of Kiwix can now easily download new openZim files right within
the interface. We are looking at connecting it to the Collections
extension so that anyone can easily download new books collections.
Platform
* MediaWiki 1.17 <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.17> —
MediaWiki 1.17.0 was released in June. Besides many bug fixes,
MediaWiki 1.17 features a new install wizard, the ResourceLoader
(a tool to load JavaScript and CSS assets), category sorting
improvements, and improved localization (see full release notes
<http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/REL1_17/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES>).
* MediaWiki 1.18 <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.18> —
Thanks to the efforts of the code review team, the backlog of
unreviewed commits for MediaWiki 1.18 was drastically reduced in
June. A discussion between developers on the wikitech-l list led
to a proposal of a "20% policy", according to which every eligible
Wikimedia engineer would spend 20% of their time doing service
work that directly benefits the rest of the community.
* Academic publications authentication proxy — The goal of this
project is to allow selected Wikimedians to access third-party
academic publishing sites to help with content verifiability.
* Wikimedia Report Card — We started a development sprint and worked
on the back-end infrastructure. The information stored in a
database is accessed via a new MediaWiki extension, and the
visualization part uses JQplot. The team hopes to demonstrate a
prototype for the next report card in early July.
* Summer of Code 2011
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2011> — Our eight
Summer of Code students continued working on their projects
full-time, and all are now committing code. Wikimedia employees
and volunteers are mentoring the students. They are preparing for
their mid-term evaluations, to take place in mid-July.
==Research and Strategy==
* -1 to 100 Analysis - We continued the analysis of data produced by
the new -1 to 100 features (AFT
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Data>, WikiLove)
prepared guidelines and documentation for the release of datasets
to the general public.
* External research - We reviewed and processed several requests for
support (endorsement, funding requests, support for subject
recruitment, access to private data) that we received from
external researchers. All projects seeking or obtaining support
will now be filed under the Research project directory
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects>.
* Research Committee - We organized and hosted the 5th meeting of
Research Committee
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Meetings/Meeting_2011-06-30>
during which three main developments were discussed:
o the announcement of the Wikimedia Research Index
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Index>, a project
promoted by RCom to
facilitate communication and access to research-related
resources with the external research community
o problems and a number of proposed solutions for external
surveys of WIkipedia editors (including a proposal for an
omnibus survey
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Omnibus_Survey>)
o an open data policy for WMF-supported projects
* Open Data Policy - We drafted a policy proposal
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Editor-data_policy_proposal>
(currently under
discussion) for the publication of research datasets based on
public Wikimedia data and containing editor information. We also
drafted guidelines for consent forms for Wikimedia-sponsored
interviews (in collaboration with the Community and Legal departments)
* Open Knowledge Conference - RCom member Mayo Fuster Morell
organized and animated a workshop on current challenges for
Wikipedia research at the Open Knowledge Conference
<http://okcon.org/2011/programme/wikipedia-research-the-innovative-character-of-wikipedia-research-and-the-new-challenges-and-opportunities-associated-with-it>.
==Community==
Summer of Research
The *Summer of Research*
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/01/summerofresearchannouncement/>
began in earnest in June, with eight researchers from around the world
joining the Foundation either locally in San Francisco or remotely. They
produced a variety of research sprints
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011>
throughout the month,
which you're encouraged to read and comment on at Meta. Topics ranged
from how new editors ask for help to the workload of the editors who
patrol new articles.
Data Competitions
* Kaggle Data Competition <http://www.kaggle.com/c/wikichallenge> -
Community Department researcher Diederik van Liere and Howie Fung
launched a *Data Competition*
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/28/data-competition-announcing-the-wikipedia-participation-challenge/>
that invites external researchers to build a predictive model of
new editor retention. After 1 week of the competition being launched:
1. more than 300 people downloaded the datasets
2. 55 teams are participating
3. 51 submissions so far
4. The best submission has improved our internal benchmarks by more
than 40%
* WikiViz 2011 Challenge
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/07/05/wikiviz-2011-visualizing-the-impact-of-wikipedia/>-
To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Wikipedia, WMF and WikiSym
jointly launched WikiViz 2011, a data visualization challenge
calling for the most insightful visualization of Wikipedia’s
impact. The challenge, sponsored by El Mundo and the leading
outlets in data visualization (FlowingData, Information
Aesthetics, Visualizing.org, Periscopic), spearheads the idea of
open licensed visualizations based on open data. Dario Taraborelli
organized the challenge with WikiSym chair Felipe Ortega.
Fundraiser
* Storytellers - Victor Grigas, Aaron Muszalski, and Matthew Roth
joined the Community team in June as Storytellers. They began
gathering new effective creative material for the 2011 fundraiser
by capturing stories from editors, readers, donors, staff and more.
* Testing <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2011/Testing>
We began weekly testing
of fundraising messages and operational processes. We were excited
to find new appeals from WMF staff members that perform at the
same level as the founder appeal from Jimmy Wales.
* Fundraising Summit - Wikimedia Austria hosted a fundraising summit
for chapters and WMF staff to discuss the upcoming fundraising
campaign. More than twenty people attended the summit,
representing eleven Wikimedia chapters. Topics discussed included
the Fundraising Agreement, testing, messaging, CiviCRM, and
general fundraising practices.
* Production Coordination - Some of our new Production Coordinators
(the staff who will be coding banners and landing pages around the
world each day of the fundraiser) were ramped up and trained, and
started implementing great improvements such as rewriting and
cleaning the codes to the Fundraiser landing pages and banners, as
well as setting up automated currency localization. The entire
work will be soon documented on the 2011 StyleGuide.
Major Gifts and Foundations
* Completed a report to the Sloan Foundation, concluding our first
three-year grant from them.
* Began communications with three new foundation prospects.
* Received gifts from two new major individuals donors.
Public Policy Initiative
* PPI Transition to Global Education - In early June, the PPI team
had an off-site to start the discussion of how to best transition
and document key PPI activities to the new Global Education team.
* Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit - The team spent the entire
month booking travel for all 120 attendees for the Wikipedia in
Higher Education Summit, dealing with summit details (i.e. hotel,
food, venue considerations, agenda, lining up speakers and
facilitators).
* Quality Analysis - Amy began pulling PPI project and article
quality data and started her initial analysis.
Supporting and helping readers
* We responded to 68 urgent or emergency requests for help from
readers or editors, and worked on ways to scale volunteer systems
to handle such inquiries.
* Maggie began designing a FAQ for interested parties to answer
questions like "What does XYZ do?".
* We put in place the infrastructure to run a test implementation of
a system for sending queries to the community liaison for followup
(the system will eventually be operated by volunteers, but led by
the liasion).
OTRS Analysis
Survey of OTRS - With collaboration from the OTRS administrators, we
designed a survey to assess satisfaction among OTRS volunteers and
identify areas for additional support. We received about 80 survey
responses so far, and will start analysis soon.
New Account Creation Project
The Account Creation Improvement Project had its final weeks during
June. It began with a test live
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive224#And_now_the_Account_Creation_tests_are_live>
on English Wikipedia, with three separate versions of the account
creation process, of which two are new, and the old one is used as a
control. Preliminary results show some promising directions in which to
work.
Cultural Partnerships
Fellow Liam Wyatt participated in GLAM outreach activities in the UK,
Belarus and Germany. At the invitation of Wikimedia UK Liam participated
in meetings and meetups
<http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/June_2011/Contents/UK_report>
in Edinburgh (with Museums & Galleries Scotland), York (with the
National Railway Museum) and London (with Wellcome Trust). He then
visited Minsk
<http://wizardist.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/great-wikimeetup-in-minsk/>
to deliver the keynote presentation (slides
<http://www.slideshare.net/wittylama/wikipedia-libraries-ideas-to-enrich-content-through-collaboration>)
at the annual conference of EIFL, a consortium of libraries from
developing nations (official blog post [translated
<http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=be&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nlb.by%2Fportal%2Fpage%2Fportal%2Findex%2Fdetailed_news%3Fparam0%3D38733%26lang%3Dru%26rubricId%3D424>]).
At the invitation of Wikimedia Deutschland he gave a plenary and
convened the "Wikipedia lounge", with representatives from seven
Chapters, at the 2011 Communicating the Museum conference
<http://www.communicatingthemuseum.com/2011/dusseldorf> in Düsseldorf.
WikiHistories Project
Five summer researchers (graduate students from various fields in the
humanities) began a three-month project
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/20/summer-fellowships-continued-wikihistories-fellows/>
to study the history of selected (non-English) Wikipedia editing
communities. After a short training at the beginning of June, they
officially started their travel and research. The first blog post
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/29/tagalog-wikipedia-lets-talk-about-language/>
from this project appeared at the end of June, with more to come
throughout the summer.
==Global Development==
Highlights
* Barry, Jessie and Carolina traveled to Brazil to meet with the
community and support the growth of Wikimedia in Brazil.
* The India Education Program launched with the kick-off of the Pune
pilot project in early June.
* The Ibero-American Wikimedia summit was held in Buenos Aires with
the support of WMF.
<Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iberocoop.jpg
Participants of the "Iberocoop" summit in Buenos Aires>
Grants Awarded and Executed
* Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit held June 24-26 in Buenos Aires,
made possible through a WMF grant
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_AR/Ibero-American_Wikimedia_Summit_2011>.
Chapter Relations
* Wikipedia Challenges - In cooperation with Google and WMZA, we
began planning for a new Wikipedia Challenge in three African
languages: isiZulu, Setswana, and Afrikaans.
* Fundraising Agreements - We completed chapters 2011-2012
fundraising agreements signed with WMAU, WMHU, WMSE, WMUA.
* Reporting - We submitted WMF and chapter raised amounts for June
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports#Fundraising_campaign_2010>.
* Chapters Agreements - We are completing a chapters agreement
signed with Norway and are reviewing final requested changes in
agreement with the Israel chapter.
* WMF 2010 FR revenue sharing transferred from WMSE. For more
updates, kindly check the updated tracker
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tracking_Progress_for_2011_chapters_fundraiser_and_reporting>
for 2010/2011 FR.
Non-chapter News
* Wikimedians in Kazakhstan held an inauguration event (June 16th)
to celebrate Wikimedian activity in KZ, as well as the mass-upload
of a large modern Kazakh encyclopedia to Kazakh Wikisource and
Wikipedia. Ting Chen attended and spoke at their event.
* Trademark agreement signed with Wikimedians in Kazakhstan for
their event (see above) and general outreach work.
* Trademark agreements signed with Wikimedians in Belarus and
Romania for Wiki Loves Monuments 2011.
Brazil Catalyst <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Catalyst_Project>
* Barry Newstead, Jessie Wild and Carolina Rossini (consultant)
traveled to Brazil to meet with the community and explore ways to
support the growth of the Wikimedia projects in Brazil.
* Community meetups were held in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro,
allowing Wikimedia community members to share their experiences
and discuss future work needed to catalyze community growth.
* Held meetings with organizations (lawyers and executive search
firms) who might be able to provide services to WMF in setting up
a small team to support the community.
* Met with a few local companies who might be interested in
partnerships that would increase the reach of the Wikimedia
projects within Brazil.
* Barry and Jessie attended the FISL-12 conference in Porto Alegre.
FISL is a national conference for the free and open source
software community in Brazil. Barry gave a presentation
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF-Barry_Newstead-FISL-Brazil-29June2011.pdf>,
and Barry and Jessie gave an interview
<http://softwarelivre.org/fisl12/fisl12/noticias/tv-software-livre-entrevista-com-barry-newstead-e-jessie-wild>
with TV Software Livre.
India Programs
* WM India was granted money to produce hardcopies of Bookshelf
materials for its upcoming series of Wikipedia Academy events.
Global Education Program in India
* Wikipedia India Education program - The program was rolled out
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_-_India_Programs/India_Campus_Program_Reports#Pune_Pilot:_Roll_Out>
in 4 institutions in Pune, India - College of Engineering,
Symbiosis School of Economics, Modern College of Engineering &
SNDT Women's University. 13 teachers have signed up and more than
1000 articles will be written by about 500 students (all of whom
are newbies.)
o Articles are going to cover engineering, software, economics
and media / communication
o Next steps: 1-on-1 meetings with faculty (to determine
potential articles), followed by student editing workshops
and actual editing.
India Office
* Started team building and issued offer letters to the first 2 of
the 4 consultants. These two will look after participation and
Indic language initiatives.
* Due to procedural delays, the setup of the proposed independent
trust is behind schedule.
Mobile Strategy and Business Development
* Research - Mani conducted user experience research in Brazil along
with Parul Vora. We conducted interviews in three cities in
Brazil: São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Salvador, with mobile readers,
potential readers and editors.
* Kul traveled to Europe (Austria, France, Sweden, Russia) to meet
with several partners and potential partners for our mobile
strategy. We are continuing conversations to secure arrangements
that would increase the reach of Wikimedia projects on mobiles.
Kul met with members of the Russian Wikimedia community in Moscow
where they did some impromptu usability testing of Wikipedia on
mobile phones.
Editor Survey
We have started sharing research insights from the Editor Survey with
the community and others on the blog. Mani is working on a comprehensive
research report from the survey.
Communications
Communications supported the first Campus Ambassador training in Pune,
India, which resulted in positive coverage from publications such as the
Times of India, The Hindu and Sakaal Times (a local, indic language
newspaper in Pune). Coverage was accurate and supportive of the Global
Education Program and overarching Wikimedia Foundation India initiatives.
Major stories and coverage
* The Hindu - Wikipedia to be promoted in educational institutions
<http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article2095004.ece>
* The Times of India - Online encyclopedia promotes itself as
teaching-learning tool
<http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-06-07/pune/29629403_1_online-encyclopedia-wikipedia-articles-pilot-project>
* Indian Express - Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors Pilot Project to
begin in Pune
<http://www.indianexpress.com/news/wikipedia-campus-ambassadors-pilot-project-to-begin-in-pune/799546/0>
* The Hindu - Malayalam Wiki activists, online users make the
language lively: Ekbal
<http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/kerala/article2096471.ece>
* Washington Post - Wikipedia adding ‘love’ button
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/faster-forward/post/wikipedia-adding-love-button/2011/06/27/AGJXfVnH_blog.html>
* ReadWriteWeb - Wikipedia is Adding a Love Button Next Week
<http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_to_add_a_love_button.php>
* The Atlantic - Wikipedia Adds WikiLove Button in Attempt to Stem
Criticism
<http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/wikipedia-adds-wikilove-button-in-attempt-to-stem-criticism/241031/>
Blogging
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/
Media contact
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#June_2011
Wikipedia Signpost
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-06-06
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-06-13
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-06-20
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Archives/2011-06-27
==Human Resources==
Staff Changes
*New Permanent Position Hires*
* Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships Program (Community) –
Perm FT Employee
* Mark Hershberger – Conversion to Perm FT Employee
*New Other Position Hires*
* Victor Grigas, Storyteller (Community) – Temp FT
* Matthew Roth, Storyteller (Community) – Temp FT
* Aaron Muszalski, Storyteller (Community) – Temp FT
Summer Fellows (Community) joining Aaron Halfaker
* Stuart Geiger
* Yusuke Matsubara
* Jonathan Morgan
* Fabian Kaelin
* Melanie Kill
* Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia
*Contract Extended*
* Guillaume Paumier
* Sam Reed
* Russ Nelson
*New Contractors*
* Doreen Strubhar
*New Postings*
* Systems Engineer - Data Analytics
* QA Lead
* Product Manager (Analytics)
* Operations Engineer (Networking)
* Director of Sustainability
* Director of Features Engineering
* Director of Community Operations
*RFPs*
* Internationalization and Localization Outreach
* Internationalization and Localization Feature Development
* Logging Analysis
* Caging Services
Statistics
Total Employee Count
Plan: 92
Actual: 74
Attrition: 4
Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 18
Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or
http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork
Department Updates
* Hiring in 2011-12 - The annual plan is finished (yay!) including
the staffing plan, so we are all set for a great hiring sprint
next year. We have added a lot of firepower in the form of
temporary screeners and recruiters; so although this isn't the way
we will go forward in the future to handle our staffing, for the
next 6-9 months of heavy lifting, we will be relying on contractor
support to get the job done.
* Document Redesign - The team did a thorough review of our internal
docs and templates to get them up to snuff, and has rolled out a
brand new set of clean ones for the staff to use. They are more
lightweight and easier to use, so we're pretty happy.
* HR Management Tool - We have had to (reluctantly) abandon our use
of OrangeHRM as our internal HR managment tool; the security and
development ability is just not up to the professional standards,
as we need to keep our data confidential and effectively manage
benefits and other personnel data. We have decided on a new
product called EPICOR, which has more firepower than we need right
now, but will grow with us as we develop the organization. It will
certainly help us with recruiting as it has a really nice module
that helps track and schedule prospects.
* Hiring Manager Training - We had our first hiring manager training
at the end of June in anticipation of the annual review process
that takes place at the beginning of each fiscal year. It was a
good meeting, and we are looking forward to working with that team
in the future.
==Finance and Administration==
* The 2011-12 annual plan was completed and forwarded to the Board
for approval; the plan was approved unanimously.
* Audit timing was set for the 2010-11 audit.
* Wikimania travel bookings are substantially complete.
==Legal==
* New donor privacy policy now before the Board
* Joined EFF brief in Golan v. Holder (along with American
Association of Libraries, Association of College and Research
Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, and the Internet
Archive). See blog post
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/22/fighting-for-the-public-domain/>
Metrics:
1. Contracts/agreements signed in June : 14
2. Trademark requests in June : 13; approved: 5; denied: 4; pending: 4
==Visitors and Guests==
1. Phoebe Ayers (Board member)
2. Lydia Mazzie (Senior Manager - New Business Development, Google)
3. Udi Manber (VP of Engineering, Google)
4. Jeff Cordova (CTO/Co-Founder, GLM)
5. Nicole Buckberg (Agile coach)
6. Mike Schwartz (Senior Vice-president, Engineering, Wikia)
7. Inez Korczyński (Engineering Manager, Wikia)
8. Felipe Ortega (Researcher, Project manager at GSyC/Libresoft &
Co-coordinator of WikiSym)
9. Andrew Maguire (InternMatch)
10. Heather Ford (former Advisory Board member for WMF and a CC activist)
11. Naomi Norman (Director of Learning, Epic)
12. Edo Navot (PhD student, University of Wisconsin)
13. Kaliya Hamlin (Personal Data Ecosystem)
14. Jason Heidema (TalentBin)
15. Peter Kazanjy (TalentBin)
16. Chris Yates (Device Anywhere)
--
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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Please join me in welcoming Garfield to the Wikimedia Foundation. He
doesn't yet have a Wikimedia e-mail address, so you can't actually
reach him yet, but he will start work with us August 3.
Thanks,
Sue
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
415 816 9967 cell
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