You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts. |
Contents
- 1 Data and Trends
- 2 Financials
- 3 Highlights
- 4 Engineering
- 5 Fundraising
- 6 Grantmaking
- 7 Human Resources
- 8 Finance and Administration
- 9 Legal & Community Advocacy Department
- 10 Communications Report, May 2014
- 11 Visitors and Guests
Data and Trends
Global unique visitors for April:
- 465 million (-6.00% compared with March; -9.92% compared with the previous year)
- (comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release May data later in June)
Page requests for May:
- 20.654 billion (-0.2% compared with April; -1.6% compared with the previous year)
- (Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation content projects including mobile access, but excluding Wikidata and the Wikipedia main portal page.)
Active Registered Editors for April 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
- 75,364 (-2.25% compared with March / -7.25% compared with the previous year)
- (Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.
- Note: These numbers were recently adjusted to correct a bug involving IPV6 addresses.)
Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects):
Financials
|
|
(Financial information is only available through April 2014 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date April 30, 2014.
Revenue | 49,194,784 |
---|---|
Expenses: | |
Engineering Group | 13,800,658 |
Fundraising Group | 3,209,299 |
Grantmaking Group | 1,472,907 |
Programs Group | 1,493,168 |
Grants | 4,066,472 |
Governance Group | 725,565 |
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group | 3,256,914 |
Finance/HR/Admin Group | 5,484,592 |
Total Expenses | 33,509,575 |
Total surplus | (15,685,209) |
in US dollars |
- Revenue for the month of April is $8.24MM versus plan of $1.71MM, approximately $6.53MM or 383% over plan.
- Year-to-date revenue is $49.19MM versus plan of $46.76MM, approximately $2.43MM or 5% over plan.
- Expenses for the month of April is $3.19MM versus plan of $4.69MM, approximately $1.50MM or 32% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants, and payment processing fees partially offset by higher legal fees, outside contract services, and travel expenses related to community convening events.
- Year-to-date expenses is $33.51MM versus plan of $41.06MM, approximately $7.55MM or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, legal fees, payment processing fees, staff development expenses, grants and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services.
- Cash and Investments – $55.6MM as of April 30, 2014.
Highlights
12 new individual engagement grants
The Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) support projects from individuals or small teams to organize, build, create, research or facilitate something that enhances the work of Wikimedia’s volunteers. The 12 winning grants from the first round of 2014 were announced on May 30.
Inviting anonymous editors to join the Wikipedia community
On the English, German, French, and Italian Wikipedias, the Foundation’s Growth team conducted two experiments to test user interface changes for encouraging anonymous editors to create an account and join the community of registered users. In the first test, a recommendation to create an account was shown when the user clicks “edit”, and in the second test, the invitation was displayed after the user saved an edit. Preliminary data strongly suggested a positive effect on new registrations.
Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) recommendations announced
In May, the nine-member Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) met for its face-to-face deliberations and published its recommendations to the WMF Board of Trustees on proposals from four organizations (three chapters and the Foundation) on how to spend Wikimedia donation money. The Board will make its decision on these recommendations by 1 July. The Advisory Group to the FDC also met in Frankfurt for their final meeting, to provide the Executive Director of the WMF with a recommendation on whether or not the FDC process (begun in 2012) should continue, and if so, what modifications should be made. They unanimously agreed to recommend to continue the process.
Engineering
A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for May 2014 can be found at:
- Department Highlights
Major news in May include:
- changes to the mobile site to better show the editors behind the curtain;
- the announcement of CyrusOne in Dallas as the location of the new Wikimedia data center;
- the Zürich hackathon and Lila Tretikov’s perspective on it;
- experiments by the Growth team to encourage more contributors to register;
- the one-year anniversary of the launch of Tech News;
- the launch of Wikipedia Zero in Nepal in partnership with NCELL;
- the launch of a second request for proposals for the release management of MediaWiki for third-party users.
VisualEditor
In May, the VisualEditor team worked on the performance stability of the editor, rolled out a major new feature to help users better edit articles, and made some improvements to other features to increase their ease of use and understandability, fixing 75 bugs and tickets. The new citation editor is now available to all VisualEditor users on the English, Polish, and Czech Wikipedias, with instructions on how to enable it on other wikis. The citation and template dialogs were simplified to avoid technical language and some outcomes that were unexpected for users. As part of this, the citation icons were replaced with a new, clearer set, and the template hinting system now lets wikis mark template parameters as “suggested”, as a step below the existing “required” state. The formula editor is now available to all VisualEditor users, and a new Beta Feature giving a tool that lets you set the language of content was made available for testing and feedback. Following a new set of user testing, the toolbar was tweaked, moving the list and indent buttons to a drop-down to make them less prominent, and removing the gallery button which is rarely used and confused users. The mobile version of VisualEditor, currently available for alpha testers, was expanded to also have the new citation editor available, and had some significant performance improvements made, especially for long or complex pages. Work continued on making VisualEditor more performant and reliable, and key tasks like keyboard accessibility have progressed. The deployed version of the code was updated five times in the regular release cycle.
Progress was also made on Parsoid, the parsing program that works behind the scenes of VisualEditor. The team continued with ongoing bug fixes and bi-weekly deployments. Besides the user-facing bug fixes, we also improved our tracing support (to aid debugging), and did some performance improvements. We also finished implementing support for HTML/visual editing of transclusion parameters. This is not yet enabled in production while we finish up any additional performance tweaks on it. As part of the Google Summer of Code program, one student is working on a wikilint project to detect broken/bad wikitext in wiki pages.
Editor engagement
In May, the Flow team prepared the new front-end redesign of this new discussion system. We completed work on sorting topics on a board by most recent activity, and changed hidden post handling so that everyone can see hidden posts. Back-end improvements include optimizations on how we handle unique identifiers and generate standard URLs. We also accepted Special:Flow (a community-created improvement that makes it easier to create redirects to Flow boards) and made fixes for topic submission and replies for users without JavaScript.
The Growth team launched its A/B test of two methods for asking anonymous editors to sign up on the English, German, French, and Italian Wikipedias. Full analysis of the test results is expected in June, though preliminary data strongly suggests a positive impact on new registrations. Last but not least, Growth released two smaller enhancements to our data collection regarding article creation, including adding page identifiers to MediaWiki’s deletion logs and tracking page restorations across all wikis.
Mobile
This month, the Mobile Apps team worked on a series of navigation improvements to the iOS and Android alpha apps, focusing on the interface for searching, saving and sharing pages, and navigating to the table of contents. We also worked on restyling the global navigation menu and article content—typography, color, and spacing—to create a standardized experience across the mobile web and apps. In preparation for the launch of the Android app in June, we tackled a number of user-reported crashing bugs to ensure a more stable and reliable experience for our users.
The Mobile web team continued to build out the basic features of VisualEditor for tablet users, providing the ability to add references via VisualEditor. We hope to finish refining the add and modify references workflow in preparation for graduating VE for tablets to the stable mobile site sometime in July. On the reader features side, we’ve made a number of tablet-related styling improvements (typography, spacing, and Table of Contents) to the stable mobile site. This should greatly improve the reading experience for tablet users who are already accessing the mobile version of our projects, and it is one of the last pieces of work we planned to get done before we begin redirecting all tablet users to the mobile site mid-June.
The Wikipedia Zero team worked on restructuring ZeroRatedMobileAccess into several extensions, and added support for graceful image quality reduction, and worked on a proposal to use GIF images for Zero banners instead of ESI. We also added necessary library support to the reboots of the Wikipedia apps, performed limited app code review, added support for Nokia (now MS Mobile) proxies, and started work with the Design team on the final polish for the Wikipedia Zero experience in the forthcoming apps.
In May we launched Wikipedia Zero with Ncell in Nepal, Sky Mobile (Beeline) in Kyrgyzstan and Airtel in Nigeria. We also added Opera Mini zero-rating in Umniah in Jordan. We served roughly 67 million free page views in May across 30 partners in 28 countries. We met with community members from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan, as well as prospective partners in Brazil, and kicked off the carrier portal design with Noble studios.
Fundraising
Major Gifts and Foundations
- The Major Gifts team welcomed Sylvia Ventura to the team as a Development Consultant on a 3 month contract. Sylvia will be helping plan our fall fundraising events and further developing our relationships with international donors.
- We are working on an event at St. James Palace in London to support Wikimania the last week of June.
Online Fundraising
- The online fundraising team ran low-level banner tests world-wide. Emails were sent to previous donors in the Czech Republic and Norway. Approximately $700,000 USD was raised in May (preliminary numbers as donations are still settling).
- The team held focus groups with donors in the US, primarly focused on optimizing mobile and email fundraising.
- The team prepared translations of fundraising messages into multiple languages for upcoming international banner campaigns. If you would like to help with the translation process, please get involved.
- The fundraising tech team successfully deployed a new credit card processor allowing us to process payments more efficiently internationally, fully customize forms, and have credit card processing redundancy.
Grantmaking
- Department highlights
Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)
- In May, the nine-member FDC met for its face-to-face deliberations and published its recommendations to the WMF Board of Trustees on 2013-2014 Round 2 proposals. The Board will make its decision on these recommendations by 1 July. A more detailed calendar on the process, including upcoming milestones and deadlines, is available on Meta.
- In addition, the Advisory Group to the FDC also met in Frankfurt for their final meeting. Their goal was to provide the Executive Director of the WMF with a recommendation on whether or not the FDC process should continue, and if so, what modifications should be made. Their unanimously agreed to recommend to continue the process; more detailed recommendations are forthcoming.
- The FDC is currently accepting four new members. To that end, self-nominations are accepted through June 15. Four new members will be appointed by the Board of Trustees, and will be announced in July. If you should have questions about the process, contact FDCsupportwikimedia.org.
Project and Event Grants
- 3 new requests were funded in May 2014.
Grants funded in May 2014
- Indigenous Knowledge for Wikipedia: To support a workshop and the development of case studies examining the use of oral citations for improving Wikipedia articles.
- Summer of Monuments 2014: To support Wikimedia US-DC in organizing a photo campaign targeted at select Southern US states to improve coverage of nationally-recognized monuments on Wikipedia.
- Wikimedia Estonia office rental: To support Wikimedia Estonia with their rental office space.
Travel & Participation Support
- 3 new requests were funded and 2 reports were accepted in May 2014.
Requests awarded in May 2014
Three requests involving participation in the 2014 Open Source Bridge Conference to fund:
- Niharika’s talk on a compact interlanguage selector tool that supports the many languages on Wikipedia.
- Rjain’s hack session on Extension Development with Mediawiki.
- Netha’s presentations at both the Ada Camp and Open Source Bridge conferences. At Ada Camp, Netha will hold discussions surrounding the topic of increasing participation in women with plans on tying in ideas to her proposed diversity workshop at Wikimania 2014. At the OSB, her talk is on “The joy of volunteering with open technology and culture”.
Reports accepted in May 2014
Individual Engagement Grants
- 12 new Individual Engagement grants were selected and announced in May! These grants, which range from $600 to $22,600, will support 16 grantees from 10 countries with countless volunteer participants from around the world. Grantees will build tools and partnerships, conduct research, and engage in online community organizing. Some new investment areas in this round include funding mobile app development, Wikipedia research, and projects aimed at improving Wikivoyage and Wiktionary. The round 1 2014 projects are:
- Making Telugu Content Accessible, led by Santhosh, funded at 104,000 Rupees.
- Medicine Translation Community Organizing, led by CFCF, funded at $10,000.
- Open Access Reader, led by Edward Saperia, funded at $6550.
- Optimizing Wikimedia Category Systems, led by Paul J. Weiss, funded at $9750.
- Promoting Wikivoyage, led by Tammy Bennert, funded at $600.
- Pronunciation Recording, led by Rillke with participation from Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV and Infovarius, funded at €1450.
- Reimagining Wikipedia Mentorship, led by I JethroBT, Soni and Gabrielm199, funded at $22,600.
- Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia, led by Vojtěch Veselý with participation from Vojtěch Dostál, Václav Šulc, and Jan Sokol, funded at 160,000 CZK.
- Tools for Armenian Wikisource and beyond, led by Xelgen with participation from HrantKhachatrian and Mahnerak, funded at $7600.
- The Wikiquiz, led by Addis Wang, Mys 721x, and Ericmetro, funded at $1070.
- WikiTrack, led by Hari Prasad Nadig, funded at $2500.
- Women and Wikipedia, led by Amanda Menking, funded at $8075.
- Program Head Siko Bouterse attended the Wikipedia Education Program Hackathon in Jordan to meet with Arabic Wikipedians. While there, we launched the Arabic Wikipedia Library, participated in a group generating a list of online Arabic research materials for use in editing articles, and presented about grantmaking to a group of educators and Wikipedians.
- Siko also facilitated an IdeaLab workshop at Wikiconference USA, where about 15 participants collaborated to develop a handful of ideas into action plans.
- User scripts for an add-me gadget and a new Lua info-box template have been created to facilitate joining and endorsing ideas, as part of the ongoing IdeaLab worksprint. The team is wrapping up bug-fixing on the initial scripts before moving to beta test as gadgets on Meta.
Learning and Evaluation (including Program Evaluation)
In May, much of the L&E teams time was set on developing the L&E logic model and also bringing in new team member Maria Cruz! Also, much time was spent on prepping for the FDC deliberations and advisory group meeting and the revamp of the IdeaLab.
- Migrated the Evaluation portal to the Grants namespace, as part of our ongoing efforts to re-integrate Learning & Evaluation and Program Evaluation.
- Collaborated with the IEG program officer, contract developer Jeph Paul, and designer Heather Walls on the IdeaLab revamp project. See IEG section above for more info.
- Assisted IEG grantee Ocaasi with a 6-month retrospective data analysis of The Wikipedia Adventure.
- Worked with Analytics to develop a framework for gathering active editor geodata.
In addition to participating with the full Learning and Evaluation team in strategy sessions related to our integration under Grantmaking, the program evaluation and design team members:
- Initiated a community dialogue around the evaluation initiative, its evaluation, and grantmaking and posting/linking of Wikimetrics Brainstorm, a metrics dialogue and development prioritization activity, initiated at Wikimedia Conference.
- Posted two blogs: Beginning to Understand What Works: Measuring the Impact of Wikimedia Programs (2 May 2014) and A Collaborative Definition of Impact: Building Metrics Together (30 May 2014).
- Two team members attended WikiConference USA in New York City and presented a two part session Growing the awesome in your Programs overviewing the evaluation tools and resources and providing a demonstration of Wikimetrics.
- Hired Maria Cruz on contract for Program Evaluation Community Coordinator.
- Began L&E Twitter feed @WikiEval (gathered 75 followers in week one).
Grants Programs
- Annual Plan Grants: completed impact analysis for the first round of funding, FDC year 1. Prepped materials for the FDC advisory group (to be published); published financial overviews for the entities applying for funds in Round 2, 2013-14.
- Project & Event Grants: finalized consulting engagement with pro-bono consulting group Inspire. Key topic areas:
- Survey of GAC members, resulting in ongoing discussion on meta with GAC members (facilitated by the PEG team).
- Analysis of the pain points in the grants reporting and application processes; improvements to these areas forthcoming.
Grants Operations and tools
- Migrated the Evaluation portal to a new address at Grants:Evaluation making its contents searchable by default.
- Conducted research on available commercial QDA (Qualitative Data Analysis) solutions.
- Worked with Fluxx labs on fixing major bugs in Fluxx site including bank info, budgets, currencies and others.
- Documentation of GrantsBot! GrantsBot is a critical tool used by the grantmaking team to update and maintain a variety of pages and portals throughout the Grants namespace.
- IdeaLab revamp is underway! See IEG section above.
Org effectiveness
- Closure of the Wikimedia board governance survey developed with of WMF Board, Wikimedia Chapters, and AffCom. Analysis to be done in June. Thank you to all the participants!
Other
- Grants Strategy:
- Prepared a Gephi visualization of users’ interaction on the Grants namespace on Meta-wiki. Future development and interpretation anticipated (ideas welcome!)
- Open questions to the broader community around grantmaking metrics (see Program Evaluation below).
- External Grantmaking Outreach:
- Represented the Wikimedia Foundation at The Funder’s Role in Collective Impact forum.
Wikipedia Education Program
Global programs
- The Wikipedia Education Program team is establishing a baseline of Wikipedia education initiatives worldwide. The team is conducting a large outreach effort to more than 60 programs worldwide that are using Wikipedia in education. Currently, the outreach consists of one-on-one talks with all program leaders to understand their educational initiatives, activities, goals, and potential support needs. Since beginning our outreach efforts in April 2014,Floor, Anna, Tighe, and Rod have spoken to 32 initiatives worldwide that are using Wikipedia in Education.
- The Wikipedia Education Program continues its support for the Education Cooperative, a group of program leaders worldwide committed to working together to share leanings and experiences using Wikipedia in education. Coop members, together with the Wikipedia Education Program team, are currently working on four initial areas for the Coop: Communications, Resources, Recognition and Mentoring. Check out these works in progress:
- Restructuring of the education portal on Outreach wiki continues as we bring together five separate educational portals into one site, combining trainings, materials and brochures, learnings and worldwide Wikipedia in Education efforts. See: Update on the education portal. We’ll be working on the content for each of the pages in the upcoming months.
- Improvements to the monthly community-led newsletter, This Month In Education, including an email subscription option and a single-page edition, resulted in several new subscriptions as well as a significant increase in page views.
- Floor Koudijs, Manager of the Wikipedia Education Program, attended WikiCon USA 2014, in New York from May 30 to June 1.
Arab world programs
- Arab World Education Program Manager, Tighe Flanagan, organized the Wikipedia Education Program hackathon in Amman, Jordan from 16-17 May, 2014 with support from Dr. Nidal Yousef and Isra University; WEP sponsored the participation of 11 volunteers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Lebanon in addition to over 20 local volunteers from Jordan.
- 35 volunteers (Wikimedians, educators and student ambassadors) worked on tasks to improve the Wikipedia Education Program in the region, documenting their teams and work on-wiki; the Editing Wikipedia Brochure was partially translated into Arabic and several new institutions were added to the Education Extension to track student activity and contributions on-wiki.
- Siko Bouterse from Grantmaking and Adele Vrana from Wikipedia Zero helped facilitate the Jordan Hackathon from the Wikimedia Foundation.
- Egyptian students celebrated the accomplishments of the previous semester, featured in the This Month in Education Newsletter.
Communications
Two blog posts:
- Armenian students enjoy editing Wikipedia (May 7)
- Wikipedia Education Program students keep editing in Arabic long after their assignments are finished (May 6)
Human Resources
We supported F&A in the finalization of the WMF annual plan for submisson to the board. We hired two employees, Elena Hernandez, who began with us as benefits and wellness coordinator, and a recruiting coordinator who will begin in June. We completed preparation work for the annual reviews and compensation adjustments, and all the hiring and onboarding for nine new req holders as well as managing our portfolio of immigration-related work.
May Staff Changes
- New Requisitions Filled
- Lila Tretikov (ED)
- Bernd Sitzmann (Engineering)
- Daniel Duvall (Engineering)
- Filippo Giunchedi (Engineering)
- Mukunda Modell (Engineering)
- Rachel diCerbo (Product)
- Abigail Ripstra (Product)
- Elena Hernandez (HR)
- Conversions (Contractor to Requisition)
- Rummana Yasmeen (Engineering)
- Requisition Departures
- Charles Salvia (Engineering)
- New Interns
- Ralph Torres (Office IT)
- Consuelo Jimenez (Office IT)
- Sylvia Ventura (Office IT)
- Mark Verstraete (Legal)
- Chuck Roslof (Legal)
- Joseph Jung (Legal)
- Eric Holmes (Legal)
- New Contractors
- Maria Cruz (Grants)
- Contracts Ended
- Ryan Faulkner
- Monica Breton
- Marshall Olin
- Shaila Nathu
- Jessica Tam
- Genya Vasyanina
- Aaron Arcos
- Sage Ross
May Statistics
- Total Requisitions Filled
- May Actual: 176
- May Total Plan: 196 (full req#, with stage-gating and out of plan)
- May Filled: 9, Month Attrition: 1,
- FYTD Filled: 58, FYTD Attrition: 27
- Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end
- 20 → reflects 4 total out of plan req#s 193-196 (for finance)
Finance and Administration
- In the month of June, the Wikimedia Foundation will be issuing an RFP (Request for Proposal) for investment advisory services.
- Beginning June 14 and ending June 30, the 6th floor or the Wikimedia Foundation office will be undergoing improvements which will shift staff to the 3rd floor and offsite locations.
- The Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation has been reviewed by the Chair of the Audit Committee (Stu West) and is being prepared for submission to the Board of Trustees for approval.
Legal & Community Advocacy Department
LCA Report, May 2014
- Following the closing of a 5.5 month-long community consultation in February, the new draft privacy policy was approved by the WMF Board of Trustees and will go into effect upon completion of an appropriate notice period on 06 June 2014.
- After the vigorous debate during the 5.5 month-long community consultation closed and significant changes were made based off of community feedback, the WMF Board of Trustees approved the new draft Access to Nonpublic Information Policy, which will go into effect upon completion of an appropriate notice period. Importantly, the new Access to Nonpublic Information Policy contains no identification requirement by members of the community who are entrusted with administrative rights that grant them access to certain nonpublic information, but provides clear guidance about the responsibilities that come with those rights and maintains pre-existing minimum age requirements as the previous Access to nonpublic data policy contained.
Contract Metrics
- Submitted : 29
- Completed : 24
Trademark Metrics
- Submitted : 11
- Request withdrawn : 1
- Pending : 4
- Denied: 1
- Approval not needed : 5
Domains Obtained
wikimedia.co.za, wikwipedia.org, wikimedia-commons.wiki, wikimedia.co.za, wikimedia.wiki, wikimediacommons.wiki, wikinews.wiki, wikipedia.expert, wikipedia.wiki, wikisource.wiki, wikiversity.wiki, wiktionary.wiki, wikwipedia.org,
Coming & Going
- We said goodbye to our spring interns, Shaila Nathu, Jessica Tam, and Marshall Olin. We thank them for all of their hard work and wish them the best in the adventures that await them in the future.
- We welcomed our new summer interns, Mark Verstraete, Joe Jung, Chuck Roslof, and Eric Holmes. We are very excited to have them join the Foundation for the summer and look forward to tackling interesting projects with them.
Other Activities
- Roshni, a WMF privacy legal fellow, shared her experience about attending Yale’s Big Data Symposium in a blog post.
- Wikimedia made its debut on the EFF’s annual Who Has Your Back report, earning 4 stars.
- Yana published a blog post announcing our support for the 13 Principles that demand that governments respect human rights in their surveillance actions, which earned Wikimedia an EFF star in the Who Has Your Back report.
- Legal interns published notes in Wikilegal on Copyright Status of Wikipedia Page Histories, Authorship and Copyright Ownership, Uploading UK Banknotes to Wikipedia.
- We updated the Wikimedia Legal Disclaimer to better explain the role of the Legal Team and allow us to more freely discuss legal related issues.
- Manprit is working with OTRS to help them deal with questions from users regarding legal topics. Manprit published a document clarifying trademark related issues often faced by OTRS volunteers. The document is the first of a series meant to provide OTRS volunteers with a resource to consult when legal questions arise to hopefully ease the burden they face.
Communications Report, May 2014
The major news story for the beginning of May was the announcement of the new Executive Director, which resulted in stories in the Economist, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, among others. A ruling by the European Court of Justices in early May on the ‘right to be forgotten’ led to a flood of articles citing the impact of the ruling on Wikipedia. In the UK, it was discovered that vandalism on an article about the Hillsborough stadium disaster could be traced back to government computers, promting numerous articles detailing the way Wikipedia works, including how editors revert such vandalism. A study released at the end of May on the “accuracy” of top-ten medical articles garned wide coverage, but was dismissed as inaccurate and misleading by editors from WikiProject Medicine. A ruling in Chile on the country’s Net Neutrality provisions prompted articles critiquing the potential impact on projects such as Wikipedia Zero. Throughout the month, the Communications team worked to support the onboarding of the new Executive Director, the rollout of the Terms of Use, the launch of Wikipedia Zero in Nigeria, and preparations for Wikimania, as well as finalized the Communications Narrative for the Annual Plan for 2014-2015.
Major announcements
- Airtel offers Nigerians free access to Wikipedia (29 May, 2014)
Major Storylines through May
Lila Tretikov
- Lila Tretikov becomes the Wikimedia Foundation’s new Executive Director
- Wall Street Journal (01 May, 2014) [1]
- New York Times (01 May, 2014) [2]
Jimmy Wales and the EU Courts of Justices ruling
- Jimmy Wales describes the ruling on the “right to be forgotten” as “ridiculous.”
- NY Times (blog) (30 May, 2014). [3]
- BBC News (15 May, 2014). [4]
- International Business Times (15 May, 2014). [5]
- CNET (14 May, 2014). [6]
Hillsborough Wikipedia entries scandal
- Wikipedia page dedicated to the 1989 disaster in which 96 people died was vandalized using government computers.
- The Telegraph (21 May, 2014). [7]
- International Business Times (21 May, 2014). [8]
- Mirror (20 May, 2014). [9]
- The Boar (9 May, 2014). [10]
Wikipedia and medicine
- Study claims that medical articles on Wikipedia contain inaccuracies.
- ABC News Radio (28 May, 2014). [11]
- Yahoo (small business advisor) (28 May, 2014) . [12]
- Huffington Post (Tech) (27 May, 2014). [13]
- The Telegraph (27 May, 2014). [14]
- Time (27 May, 2014). [15]
- The Independent (27 May, 2014). [16]
Other worthwhile reads
- ”Wikipedia is a masterclass in digital democracy”
- Wired (22 May, 2014) [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-05/22/digital-democracy/
- ”100 most edited Wikipedia articles”
- FiveThirtyEight (30 May, 2014) [17]
- Chile blocks free access to Wikipedia and Facebook
- Quartz (30 May, 2014) [18]
- 100 most powerful women – Lila is #99
- Forbes (28 May, 2014) [19]
- ”100 most obsessed-over people” on the internet
- TIME (27 May, 2014) [20]
- Official Wikimedia affiliate organization recognized in Pakistan
- Lahore Times (16 May, 2014) [21]
- An experiment intended to look at whether giving people an arbitrary advantage over their fellows at the beginning of an endeavour led to a significantly better outcome for those people, using Wikipedia.
- The Economist (03 May, 2014) [22]
WMF Blog posts
Blog.wikimedia.org published 32 posts in May 2014. Six posts were multilingual, with translations in English, Spanish, Nepali, Russian, Polish, German, French, Italian, Czech, Catalan, Chinese, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Malay.
Some highlights from the blog include:
- Happy Birthday, Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki (May 26, 2014).
- Donating his estate to the Wikimedia Founation: The story of Jim Pacha (May 12, 2014).
- “No interviews. Except for Wikipedia!” – Documenting the Eurovision song contest on Wikimedia Commons (May 10, 2014).
- Launching a privacy policy built the Wiki way (May 07, 2014).
- Announcing our new Executive Director Lila Tretikov (May 01, 2014).
Media Contact
Media contact through May 2014: wmf:Press room/Media Contact#May 2014
Wikipedia Signpost
For detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for May 2014:
- Volume 10, Issue 17, 07 May 2014
- Volume 10, Issue 18, 14 May 2014
- Volume 10, Issue 19, 21 May 2014
- Volume 10, Issue 20, 28 May 2014
Communications Design
The legal team is creating guidelines for app developers to follow when they create apps that integrate use our projects’ names or content. One of the guidelines is how to create app logos that are not confusingly similar to our trademarks or our own application logos. We developed a few logos to provide as examples. We also created some logo templates for Wikimedia User Groups.
We expanded the endorse gadget on Meta from last month with another function to make it easy for people to join a project page in various roles. Jonathan Morgan and Heather developed a Lua-based infobox to summarize information across ideas and projects (see also the Individual Engagement Grants section).
The staff handbook continues to be shaped on the Office wiki.
Visitors and Guests
Visitors and guests to the WMF office in May 2014:
- Violette (Gemalto)
- Jeremie Acemyan (Gemalto)
- Ajay Kaushik (Gemalto)
- RAY KING (TL Design)
- Tom Hehir (CCSC Inc.)
- Rishi Sharma (Paul Hastings)
- Peter Cooper (Paul Hastings)
- Virgina Sutton (J.D.)
- Kelly Johnson (J.D.)
- Priscilla Imboden (Swiss Radio)
- Hershel Mehta (Stanford)
- Allison Dods (Stanford)
- Alex Martell (Stanford)
- Kent Blake (Stanford)
- Ellie Redding (Stanford)
- Gaurav Handa (Standford)
- Howon Lee (Stanford)
- Amber Rockwood (Stanford)
- Julie Fortuna (Stanford)
- Todd Davies (Stanford)
- Gaurav Handa (Stanford)
- Melissa Cliver (Melissa Cliver Design and Research)
- Charlene Music (Boundless Media)
- Carsten Voecker (WB)
- Tamera White (WB)
- Tom Hehir (CCSC Inc.)
- Joe Zahradka (CNA)
- Craig Aaron (Free Press)
- Josh Levy (Free Press)
- Humberto Chacon (Concern:EAP)
- Rachel Connors (Yellow Leaf)
- Joe Demin (Yellow Leaf)
- Myleen Hollero (Myleen Hollero Photography)
- Gregory Flipo (Sikana)
- Joyce Cruz (Guardian)
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