Wikimedia Foundation Report, April 2012

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Information 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.
Monthly Metrics Meeting May 3, 2012.ogv

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of April (May 3, 2012)

Global unique visitors for March:

489 million (+2.7% compared with February; +22.3% compared with the previous year)
(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release April data later in May)

Page requests for April:

17.3 billion (+0.4% compared with March; +18.2% compared with the previous year)
(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for March 2012 (>= 5 edits/month):

85.09K (+0.2% compared with February / -4.5% compared with the previous year)
(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for March 2012: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

Financials

(Financial information is only available for March 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – March 31, 2012.

Revenue $32,054,861
Expenses:
 Technology Group $7,788,192
 Community/Fundraiser Group $3,212,763
 Global Development Group $2,984,100
 Governance Group $718,116
 Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group $4,607,656
Total Expenses $19,310,826
Total surplus/(loss) $12,744,035
  • Revenue for the month is $1.9MM vs plan of $3.9MM, approximately $2MM or 53% under plan.
  • Year-to-date is $32.1MM vs plan of $28.6MM, approximately $3.5MM or 12% over plan.
  • Expenses for the month is $2.3MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $112K or 5% higher than plan.
  • Year-to-date is $19.3MM vs plan of $21.1MM, approximately $1.8MM or 8% lower than plan.
  • Cash position is $30.6MM as of March 31, 2012 – approximately 13 months of expenses.

Highlights

Expanding fundraising and affiliation models

After the resolutions of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees at its meeting in Berlin, work is ongoing to implement a new model for distributing the money raised via Wikimedia project sites. Except the costs for the core operations and operating reserves of the WMF, all of it (including funds for chapters and non-core operations of the WMF) will be distributed based on the recommendations of the new volunteer-driven Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). Another resolution of the Board recognizes new models of affiliation with the Wikimedia movement: “Movement Partners” (like-minded organizations that actively support the movement’s work), “National or Sub-national Chapters” (which includes the existing chapter model), “Thematic Organizations” (non-profits representing the movement and using the Wikimedia trademarks, which are supporting work focused on a specific topic), and “User Groups” (open membership groups which may or may not choose to incorporate).

Indic language outreach

Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead visited India meeting Wikimedians in Bangalore and attending Wikisangamotsavam, the Malayalam community conference, as part of work to support Indic language projects. The India team is working actively with seven Indic language communities on outreach, social media strategy and initiatives to build community momentum.

Page views to the Wikipedia mobile site (red: non-English versions) compared to the 2 billion target from the annual plan

Mobile pageviews target reached

At the end of April, the Wikipedia mobile site reached the milestone of 2 billion monthly page views – one of the goals for the 2011/12 WMF annual plan.

Towards a rapid software deployment cycle

Wikimedia engineers have begun switching to a more rapid deployment cycle, starting to deploy the latest MediaWiki software to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites every two weeks.

Technology

A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for April 2012 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/April
Department Highlights

Major news in April include:

Operations

  • Search — After months of preparation and refactoring work with our dated Lucene implementation at the Tampa data center, we are glad to report that Peter Youngmeister (with help from Asher Feldman, Robert Stojnic and Jeff Green) successfully built and deployed the new Search infrastructure at our EQIAD data center. The performance improvement is quite amazing; at the 99th percentile level, search latency dropped from a high of 9 seconds to 1 second, and the average search is only 100ms, down from 700ms. In addition, the new infrastructure addresses some of the previous single point of failures and capacity limitations.
  • Wikimedia Labs — Ryan Lane released a new version of OpenStackManager, adding project filters for all interfaces, usability fixes and a number of bug fixes. OpenStackManager and LdapAuthentication were switched to Git, allowing a few more changes to be pushed thanks to being able to keep a stable master branch. Notable changes were per-project sudo management, allowing sysadmins in a project to manage who gets which sudo permissions in a fine grained manner for their projects, and a change in how groups are added to LDAP for projects. Sara Smollett added Per-project ganglia monitoring, displaying resource graphs for instances in projects. Andrew Bogott finished work on a plugin framework for OpenStack Nova, and has added an example plugin for a SharedFS driver, which would allow us to manage gluster volumes via an API.
  • Data Dumps — The gluster share with the last 5 or so good dumps for all projects is ready for use by Wikimedia Labs projects. A first copy of uploaded media, accessible via rsync, was announced, and some work was done on the infrastructure to generate downloadable bundles of media per project. We’re working with the Internet Archive to produce media bundles that they can host for download as well. A new version of the dump scripts was deployed with some minor bug fixes. Christian Aistleitner wrapped up work on the PHPUnit tests for the dump maintenance scripts, and discovered a problem with the database schema, which we will need to discuss with the user community in order to find a resolution that works for everyone.

Features Engineering

  • Visual editor — Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal are rewriting the underlying data model to achieve feature compatibility with the parser and correct a variety of problems that have been previously deferred. Inez Korczynski and Christian Williams have been continuing their work to stabilize and integrate the content editable layer and have been working with Rob Moen, who has focused on getting the user interface elements working with the content editable layer. Gabriel Wicke has been working on improving the parser‘s ability to parse pages more quickly as well as increasing compatibility with existing features such as thumbnails. A template-heavy page like Barack Obama can now be expanded in similar time as the production parser.

Internationalization and Editor Engagement Experiments

  • Internationalization and localization tools — The team has completed the first round of UI designs for a Universal language selector (ULS) for desktop and mobile. UI/UX team members (Pau Giner and Arun Ganesh) are now implementing a prototype to showcase the first version of ULS. The team also added keymaps for language support to Narayam, added notification support to Translate, fixed bugs, reviewed code for localization support in MediaWiki 1.19, and discussed language support metrics.

Mobile engineering

  • Mobile design — The final selection of section styles was supported by user experience testing. We also added switches between Mobile/Desktop view and Images on/off to the footer. These changes have now been deployed as the default view of mobile Wikipedia. The first working prototype of the new navigation UI has been completed in rough form and sent out for feedback.
  • Wikimedia Apps — Yuvaraj Pandian released new versions of our Android app and our first ever PhoneGap version of the iOS app. Issues were identified with iOS 4.x and we released a update to fix them. Yuvaraj also continued work on the API move branch. Brion Vibber pushed out a final build of the Wikipedia App to the BlackBerry market, and started experimenting with a Windows mobile version.

Platform Engineering

  • MediaWiki 1.20 — As of April 2012, core software deployments to Wikimedia sites are done from git (instead of Subversion) through incremental “wmf”-branches. The first deployment of the 1.20 release cycle, labeled 1.20wmf1, was deployed to all Wikimedia sites this month; it notably brought new diff colors for improve readability. The 1.20wmf2 deployment cycle began on April 30. The 1.20.0 stable tarball is expected to be released in fall of 2012.
  • Summer of Code 2012 — Wikimedia engineers have chosen nine students for this year’s program. For the next few weeks, until May 21st, the students and their mentors are working together to train the students in MediaWiki development, so that they’ll have all the basic domain knowledge they’ll need to succeed during the summer.

Fundraising

Major Gifts and Foundations

  • Secured a sponsorship from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation for Wikimania.
  • We began our push to renew Benefactors who gave in FY2010-11, but not yet in FY2011-12 by June 30.

Fundraiser

  • Posted a full report from the 2011 fundraiser
  • Researched improvements to make for the fundraiser in Spain, Italy and Belgium. Held focus groups with donors to optimize messaging, payment methods offered, donation forms and translations.
  • Heavy research on the new payment methods to be added in 2012. Roadmap and timeline to be released soon.
  • Held a one hour systems test in the US.
  • Continually iterating on forms and landing pages as well as the A/B testing infrastructure.
  • Implemented GlobalCollect recurring payments, bringing our recurring monthly income up to approximately $40K/month, nearly a half-million dollars a year.

Global Development

New fellowship launched to focus on EN:WP help pages, good progress on Teahouse projects and welcome Siko and fellows to global development team!
New grants to the community in support of activities in seven countries
Barry attends the Malayalam community conference in Kollam, India and visits with chapter and community in Bangalore (see also general “Highlights” section)

Grants Awarded and Executed

Fellowships

Updates

Gender Gap – Fellow Sarah Stierch completed wrap-up documentation of outcomes and lessons learned from WikiWomen’s History Month.

New Fellowships

  • Peter Coombe was announced and started work this month as our newest Wikimedia Community Fellow. Pete’s fellowship project is piloting a data-driven approach to reorganize and rewrite key help pages on English Wikipedia in order to make them more usable, particularly for new editors. His work can be followed on the Help redesign project page.
  • Two new 2012 Fellowships will be announced in May.

Teahouse Project

The Teahouse has been live on English Wikipedia for two months and we’re beginning to see evidence of the project’s impact for participating new editors. Some relevant metrics from April’s report include:

  • In April, the Teahouse had an average of 50 questions posted in the Q&A forum per week and served about 20-30 new editors visiting for the first time each week, in addition to repeat visitors (the average guest asks 1.5 questions, 22% of guests asked more than one question, and many guests return to the Teahouse more than once). The median response time for questions is 30 minutes. The project’s greatest challenge continues to be making Teahouse known to all new editors in need of help, as our hosts have capacity to assist more new editors than are making their way to the space via personal invitation.
  • Comparing a sample of 75 new editors who participate in the Teahouse with a control group (of equivalent size and similar first-day editing activity) points to Teahouse having a positive impact on new editor engagement: New editors who participate in Teahouse edit 10x the number of articles than the uninvited control group and make on average 6x more global edits. The average participant adds 26x more bytes of content that survive on Wikipedia (i.e. content that isn’t reverted or deleted) than the uninvited control group.
  • Among the 224 editors in our three experimental groups, 28% of new editors who participate in the Teahouse were still active on Wikipedia at least 10 days later, compared with 12% of new editors who receive an invitation but don’t actively participate in the Teahouse, and only 5% from a similar uninvited control group.

Editor Growth and Contribution Program

  • The Global Development Department launched the Editor Growth and Contribution Program in mid-April, and announced Haitham Shammaa as program consultant. This program will focus on designing, testing, and implementing online programs to attract and retain new editors in small-to-medium sized Wikimedia projects.

Arabic Language Initiative

  • Haitham Shammaa visited Algeria to meet Wikipedians and other supporters who can sustain Wikipedia activities in the future. The visit included a lecture and Wikipedia workshop for students of Médéa University in northern Algeria.
  • Currently, we are working with a number of associates and NGOs in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia to explore the possibility of supporting Wikimedia program activities with grants.

Brazil Catalyst

Summary: A rich month for outreach and institutional relations, as well as advances in the institutional of scenario establishing the representative office in Brazil: a relatively good start in community engagement process

Brazil background notes

  1. Brazil is a huge country with 27 states: São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast have the highest populations, the strongest economies, and stronger infrastructure.
  2. São Paulo also has the greatest number of Wikipedia-PT editors, followed by Rio de Janeiro. Minas Gerais curiously doesn’t play a significant role in editorship now, but should be explored.
  3. Until now major work has been done with the Wikimedia Brasil community, but plan to increase focus in relationship building with the Wikipedia-PT community.

Brazil outreach

  • Trip to São Paulo to talk with community members, investigate locations for the office, meet with lawyers, and meet with potential partners
    • Learnings: need to generate more compelling agendas for community meetings to generate more interest and also need to work with the community to find times/locations that would make it more convenient to increase attendance
    • Recommendations: set up a programatic agenda to organize meetings objectively to highlight their value and in advance and focus on mapping real resources based on what the community will actually do.
  • Trip to Uberlândia to participate in event at the Computing College of the Federal University of Uberlândia. Jonas from Recife joined the activity and contacted local editors, but no local editors showed up.
    • Learnings: students don’t know much about free licensing or Wikipedia, bringing volunteers to events like this fosters trustful relationships within the community.
    • Recommendations:follow up to encourage future participation and gather contact details of participants.
  • Trip to Goiânia to bring community members together and participate in an event at the Federal University of Goiânia, no community members showed up but the event was successful (popular with students and professors).
    • Learnings: There’s a possibility to develop the education program in the communications college of the Federal University of Goiania. We can’t miss the chance to get local editors’ contacts. Alexandre Guiote (another lecturer in the event), living in Spain, has done very interesting research on Wikipedia.
    • Recommendations: consider developing an education program here and maintain contacts.
  • Second trip to São Paulo to attend a community workshop at Casa Fora do Eixo and met with community members, as well as meet with Banco do Brazil Foundation.
    • Learnings: community members have a lot of knowledge (editing, licensing, etc.), but outreach methodologies might be improved to improve results.
    • Recommendations: work with the community to build and share methodologies and build outreach materials.

Brazil program updates

  • Possible coworking places have been explored: the Hub in São Paulo seems to be the most neutral, but no decision yet
  • Partnerships update: Discussion of partnerships with Fiocruz (institution related to the Ministry of Health for research and development) to develop a validation process based on social participation, the National Library is excited about doing things together on access to books/reading programs and digital archives

India Programs

Indic Languages

  • Kannada: Support for translated articles enhancement project and enabling transwiki export
  • Assamese: Medicine project outreach support at Jorhat medical college. Ideas for 10th anniversary, Community translated outreach ppt to Assamese, Ideas and inputs for a potential Assamese Wikipedia CD project
  • Odia: Helping Odia community for a medical project including outreach at SCB Medical College. Supported 3 outreach events in Odisha
  • Hindi: conducted Hindi Wikipedia outreach at Delhi University
  • Bengali: support to enable sub pages in bn wikisource, support to enable proof read extension in bn wikisource
  • Malayalam: ad hoc support for Malayalam community conference

India Outreach

  • Commons outreach handbook that community members can adapt/adopt
  • Worked on train-the-trainer program design
  • Documented outreach correspondence with all institutes
  • Supported outreach in four communities – AS, GU, MR, ML
  • Translation work on outreach documents being done by community members. 4 Indic languages have successfully finished translating.

Communications, Wikipatrika

  • Work on the Wikipatrika newsletter is in progress
  • First set of mails to contact previous issue coordinators
  • Received response, initiated GU,NE,OR,AS pages on wiki
  • Tech news done, AS,MR done
  • Hope to publish it by May first week
Storytelling for community building
Internal communications
  • Announcement for Communications + Outreach IRC meeting: India Program#IRC_Meetings
  • Supported Malayalam community with press release draft and journalist contacts
  • Supported Kannada Translation project with messages for social media
  • Started journalist database
  • Contacted Indic journalists
  • Made brief digest to post on all village pumps
  • Supported Ahmedabad meetup with local press contacts
  • Worked on train-the-trainer program design for outreach capacity building

Wikimania Scholarships

Scholarship recipients for Wikimania were announced! We have 130 scholars from 57 countries around the world. Chapter scholarships are also being organized now.

For more information, see the blog post: http://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/25/wikimania-2012-scholarships/

US Cultural Partnerships

  • Final preparations for the American Association of Museums conference, which took place April 29 – May 2. Wikimedia will be represented throughout the conference, including in a traditional and a virtual Wikipedian in Residence session, a Wikipedia basics table, a nomination for QRpedia at the MUSE tech awards, and highlights in the Association of Children’s Museum’s session.
  • Featured on the Library of Congress blog in the post “Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums with Wikipedia (GLAM-Wiki): Insights Interview with Lori Phillips“
  • Coordination and updates to the GLAM/US portal in preparation for the American Association of Museums conference
  • Ongoing coordination with US cultural organizations, including support and advisement for early stages of planning processes. (Partnerships not yet publicly announced.)
  • Ongoing coordination on recommendations for technical tools from cultural professionals
  • Preparations for the Wikipedia Lounge at the MuseumNext conference in Barcelona in May and session proposal writing and coordination for the Museum Computer Network conference

Mobile and Business Development

This month has been primarily dedicated to testing and implementation of our new Free Access to Mobile Wikipedia programs with Orange and Telenor. This has been a very complicated process as we work through bugs and other technical problems but we have made great progress with our first territories. We’ve spent most of this month on working through browser support issues, landing pages, translation, banners, caching issues, etc.

  • Orange status update: Tunisia and Uganda are both live, although features still need to be implemented
  • Telenor status update: Digi Malaysia is ready from a technical perspective. Currently preparing for a market launch.

Global development research

Our gender ratio held steady with only 9% of editors being women. We also found that compared to other countries US fares better on the gender divide, 14% of editors from US being women compared to other countries for which we had a significant sample.

Outreach results

  • First report from outreach events was delivered to the India team.

Education program research

A quantitative analysis undertaken by Ayush Khanna and Mani Pande from the Global Development Research and Analytics team shows that Wikipedia Education Program participants from the United States added more than three times as much quality content as regular new users to the English Wikipedia. The data also shows that students who are introduced to editing Wikipedia through the U.S. Education Program are just as likely to continue editing as any other newcomer. Read more on the Wikimedia Foundation blog: http://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall-2011/

Wikipedia Education Program

  • In order to determine the future of U.S. and Canada education programs, we invited Wikipedia Ambassadors, class instructors, and the Wikipedia community to contribute to an on-wiki application process for joining a “Working Group” that will meet in July 2012 for a kick-off meeting of the planning process. This is the first step in a year-long open and collaborative process to make the U.S. and Canada program more volunteer-driven and to discuss the creation of the Education Program Structure that will be in charge of the day-to-day operations of the program. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group
  • Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the Fall 2011 term. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. See more of the survey results: http://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/23/students-see-benefits-from-wikipedia-assignment/
  • University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor Edward Erikson wrote a post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog explaining why he is glad he is asking students to contribute to Wikipedia. He argues that Wikipedia is part of the classroom whether the professor likes it or not, and by making Wikipedia the destination rather than the route, students have a better learning experience. http://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/02/wikipedia-in-my-classroom/
  • Canadian class adds two Good Articles: University of Alberta – Augustana Psychology Professor Paula Marentette asked her students to expand two articles on course-related topics this year for her Language Acquisition class. The result? The seven students in her class worked together to get two articles, “Vocabulary development” and “Joint attention,” to Good Article status on the English Wikipedia. In a blog post published on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, the students describe their reaction to the assignment, and Dr. Marentette describes the learning outcomes for her students: http://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/30/psychology-class-collaborates-on-two-good-articles/
  • A lot has happened in the Cairo Pilot, with students contributing on-wiki at an increasing pace. Campus Ambassadors conducted several workshops this month, and some outstanding student articles are now live on the Arabic Wikipedia. Updates with the program are documented in detail on the Arabic Wikipedia. Annie is also putting together a document with more updates about the Cairo Pilot as a whole and each class individually (coming soon, in next month’s GD report).
  • More than 200 students and faculty members at Ain Shams University in Cairo showed up to an in-person outreach event organized by Wikipedia Ambassadors from the Cairo Pilot and a local student group. Attendees learned how the Arabic Wikipedia works and how they could contribute to it. Check out the group’s photo album to see photos from this successful event

Communications

No major new projects, announcements, or media issues unfolded in April. Tech press and culture blogs, as well as some main stream media, continued to focus on the Wikipedia blackout and post-SOPA musings.

The communications team, along with the Wikimedia blogging and social media teams have been putting considerable work into an effort to increase the number and quality of Wikimedia blog postings. This month 37 posts hit the blog, including deeper profiles of active Wikipedians and media creators from Wikimedia Commons.

Over the next few months we hope to bring a basic metrics/traffic measurement tool back to the blog, bring in new volunteer contributors, and revise the structure and design of the blog to create a more engaging front page.

Major announcements

No major press releases or announcements in April.

Major stories through March

PRSA on Wikipedia accuracy (April 17, 2012)

In April, The Public Relations Society of America published a study by Marcia W. DiStaso, Assistant Professor of PR at Penn State University, surveying the wide range of views of PR practitioners and their experiences with Wikipedia. The original summary incorrectly asserted that ‘60% of Wikipedia articles are wrong’ – an error that was repeated across dozens of global main stream media press (the actual claim was “60% of respondents found errors with their company’s articles”). PRSA, at the urging of Wikimedia community members, revised the study headline and press release (thank you!).

(updated PRSA survey data: http://media.prsa.org/article_display.cfm?article_id=2582)
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/04/60-percent-wikipedia-entries-about-companies-contain-errors/51236/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/wikipedia-survey-shows-60-percent-of-entries-have-errors-and-public-relations-people-cant-correct-them/

Wikipedia Zero gaining attention in Africa (April 5, 2012)

February’s announcement from Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation about providing free access to Wikipedia on mobile devices in specific markets is beginning to get positive attention in the region. Regional programs advertising the service are appearing as Orange affiliates expand the program.

http://bikyamasr.com/65057/ugandans-access-wikipedia-for-free-through-orange-uganda/
http://allafrica.com/stories/201204220118.html

Wikipedia mobile switches to OpenStreetMap (April 5, 2012)

A large number of tech press picked up on the fact that a revised Wikipedia mobile app chose Openstreetmaps over Google maps in a recent update.

(original blog post https://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/05/new-wikipedia-app-for-ios-and-an-update-for-our-android-app/ )
http://9to5google.com/2012/04/05/wikipedia-dumps-google-maps-for-openstreetmap-marks-industry-trend-to-alternative-service/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57410234-93/wikipedia-dumps-google-maps/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/7/2931320/wikipedia-updates-mobile-apps-drops-google-maps-for-openstreetmap

Other worthwhile reads

Clips from the Malayalam Wikipedia gathering in April

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/malayalam-wikipedia-could-be-emulated/253196-60-116.html
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/youths-come-forward-to-fill-up-odia-wikipedia/247114-60-117.html

Download all of Wikipedia (from https://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/09/download-the-text-of-the-entire-english-wikipedia/)

http://www.webpronews.com/download-wikipedia-in-english-all-9-7gb-of-it-2012-04

Sarah Stierch on bringing women to Wikipedia in the Smithsonian

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2012/04/how-many-women-does-it-take-to-change-wikipedia/

Guardian on the ‘mapping Wikipedia’ project

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2012/apr/04/wikipedia-world-language-map?newsfeed=true

AllAfrica.com on the recent visit of Jimmy Wales

http://allafrica.com/stories/201204090023.html

The UCLA ‘Daily Bruin’ on the Foundation’s Wikipedia Education Program

http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/04/professors_students_worldwide_work_to_improve_wikipedias_credibility_by_editing_articles

FastCompany also reported on the Wikipedia Education Program

http://www.fastcompany.com/1830315/wikipedia-education-program-college-university

Wikipedia Signpost

WMF Blog posts

http://diff.wikimedia.org/2012/04/

Media Contact

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#April_2012

Human Resources

Wikimedia Foundation extended HR video.ogv

“Work with Wikimedia” outreach video produced for the HR department, featuring WMF employees

This month, HR is experimenting with new metrics and presentation styles, depicting better views of Foundation staff and contractor composition as well as beginning to report on recruiting metrics.

On the jobs.wikimedia.org site, we premiered a new video created with the support of the Communications team. Victor Grigas and Matthew Roth did a fabulous job. See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us

We are still in the midst of implementing our Human Resources Information System (HRIS) system. We are set to complete that by end of June. We completed our bi-annual assessment of exempt/non-exempt employees. In terms of new policy, we initiated out a comprehensive Paid Time Off Policy, with an Immigration policy set to roll out next week. These policies will all be codified in an updated employee handbook. In the arena of benefits delivery, we kicked off a new 401K committee comprised of employees interested in managing and diversifying the retirement options for the organization.

HR is sponsoring the work of a qualitative, anthropological analysis of culture and also leadership profiling. This will support later work in leadership development. We have also initiated a coaching program for WMF managers.

Staff Changes

New Hire
  • Renee Bracey Sherman, Development Associate (Fundraising)
  • Andrew Otto, Software Developer – Analytics (Engineering)
  • Chris Steipp, Security Engineer (Engineering)
New Other Position Hires
  • Mathias Mullie, Contractor, Software Developer, Features (Engineering)
  • Haitham Shammaa, Contractor, program consultant for the Editor Growth and Contribution Program (Global Development)
Conversions
  • Rob Moen, Software Developer Front-end (Engineering)
Promotions
  • Sumana Harihareswara, Engineering Community Manager (Engineering)
New Contractors
  • Daisy Chen (Legal and Community Advocacy)
  • Arun Ganesh (Engineering)
  • Faidon Liampotis (Engineering)
  • Tauhida Parveen (Engineering)
  • Ricardo Saavedra (Fundraiser)
  • Sandra Senderovich (Fundraiser)
Contract Extended
  • Rayne MacGeorge (IT)
Exit
  • Nimish Gautam
  • Dana Isokawa
Contract Ended
  • Farhan Choudary
  • Emmanuel Engelhart

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled:

Actual: 106
April Plan: 115 April Filled: 6, April Attrition: 2
YTD Filled: 48, YTD Attrition: 16

Remaining open requisitions to fiscal year end: 16

Department Updates

Department Changes, effective April 15, 2012
  • Siko Bouterse joins Global Development
  • Karyn Gladstone, Ryan Faulkner, Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling join Engineering

Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

Independent contractors traveling on business for the Wikimedia Foundation, outside their home country now have limited medical and travel coverage.

Our search for a Director of Administration is continuing with final interviews in process.

We are beginning to look at the option of doing online expense reimbursements for employee exepenses.

Based on feedback received on her IRC office hours, the Chief Talent and Culture Officer is looking at socially responsible options for investing some of the reserve for the Foundation.

  • Updated terms of use becomes effective May 25, 2012.
  • Proactive trademark actions (e.g., successful challenge to third-party “Wikimedia UK” use & and winning globe logo in Mexico) and trademark review for Wikidata
  • Finalizing decision on appropriate license for Wikidata (probably CC0)
  • Kelly Kay, Deputy General Counsel, will represent WMF at the Open Source Initiative.
  • Discovered and worked through backlog of trademark requests sent to wrong email address
  • Two strong candidates identified for the junior legal counsel, including an active Wikimedian. Final decision: likely by May 15.
  • Welcome to the newest Arbitration Committee, English Wikinews
  • Working on electronic contract storage and approval process
  • Agreed to support the Free Culture Conservacy through endorsement
  • After winning signature issue as expected, we decided not to pursue appeal on German Loriot case regarding the stamps and public domain issue.
  • Reappointed the ombudsman commission
  • Ongoing legal and community work on a wide variety of issues and topics, including AFT5, CC 4.0, litigation, trademark portfolio, new fundraising agreement, template agreements, FDC, Wikipedia town, budget, privacy, internal policies, board issues and governance, etc.
  • Daisy Chen joined as a paralegal (temporary contract) to help handle workload.
  • New interns expected to start end of May. Our last semester interns have left (except for Stephen), and we wish them well. They did a great job. New full-time summer interns will be from Harvard, Stanford, and University of Minnesota.
  • This month’s posted discussions on topics of community interest:
  • Metrics:
    • Number of contracts in April – 14 (159 contracts to date in FY 2011/12)
    • Number of trademark issues in April – 61
      • Number of backlogged trademark issues that were sent through to the team in April (included in above total count) – 50
      • Approved – 7
      • Denied – 8
      • Request Withdrawn – 7
      • Pending – 34
      • Approval not needed – 2
      • No known response – 1
      • Closed due to lack of response – 2

Visitors and Guests

  1. Tammy Davidson (Chartis)
  2. Jennifer Hills (Chartis)
  3. Yanina Budkin (World Bank Senior Communications Officer for Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay)
  4. Gabriele Niola (Italian tech journalist for Punto Informatico and Wired Italy)
  5. Elisa Manheim (Institute for International Education)
  6. Matjaz Panjan (Fulbright scholar, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
  7. Cristiano Boccolini (Fulbright scholar, UC Berkeley)
  8. Alona Sekan (Fulbright scholar, US Department of Agriculture, Western Research Regional Center, Agricultural Research Service)
  9. Phoebe Ayers (board member)
  10. Tom Simonite (Computing Editor, MIT Technology Review)
  11. Frieder Bronner (writing dissertation on parts of Wikipedia)
  12. Matt Zimmerman (Technical Leader of Ubuntu)
  13. Craig Newmark (Craigslist founder, visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
  14. Dan Perkel (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
  15. Megan Finn (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
  16. Nick Arnett (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
  17. Aakash Desai (Product Manager, Mozilla)
  18. Raj Ramabadran (Microsoft)
  19. John P. Alioto (Microsoft)
  20. Randall Benson (Benson Consulting)
  21. Aaron Halfaker (WMF Research Analyst)
  22. Ryan Merkeley (COO of Mozilla Foundation)
  23. Faidon Laimbotis (visiting contractor)
  24. Laura Lanzerotti (Bridgespan Group)
  25. Libbie Landles-Dowling (Bridgespan Group)
  26. Daniel Stid (Bridgespan Group)
  27. Meera Chary (Bridgespan Group)
  28. Divya Narayanan (Bridgespan Group)
  29. Deborah Bezona (D. Bezona & Company)
  30. Kelley Cope (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
  31. Alice Komarnicki (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
  32. Sandy Urgel (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
  33. Kate Antonini (First Data)
  34. Patricia Brizio (First Data)
  35. Thomas Tucker (First Data)
  36. Anne Hiaring Hocking (Hiaring Smith)
  37. Vijay Toke (Hiaring Smith)
  38. David Evan Harris (Global Lives Project and Institute for the Future)
  39. Gavin McConnon (BoxPay)
  40. Kyle Hitchcox (BoxPay)
  41. Aaron Nobles (BoxPay)
  42. Tim Otten (CiviCRM)
  43. Anand Gupta (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  44. Benedikt Lotter (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  45. Brandon Paton (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  46. Brianna Smrke (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  47. Charlie Javice (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  48. Charlie Stigler (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  49. Chris Olah (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  50. Clay Allsopp (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  51. Connor Zwick (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  52. Dylan Field (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  53. Eric Chang (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  54. Henry Lui (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  55. Ilya Vakhutinsky (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  56. Isaac Dietrich (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  57. Jimmy Koppel (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  58. Jon Lim (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  59. Kettner Griswold (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  60. Kevin Ma (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  61. Lindsay Haskell (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  62. Michael Moore-Jones (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  63. Noor Siddiqui (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  64. Omar Rizwan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  65. Oskar Niburski (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  66. Param Jaggi (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  67. Paul Sebexen (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  68. Rebekah Austin (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  69. Rijul Gupta (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  70. Ritik Malhotra (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  71. Ryan Lelek (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  72. Saku Panditharantne (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  73. Samir Devalaraja (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  74. Semon Rezchikov (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  75. Shai Kiriati (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  76. Spencer Hewett (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  77. Tara Seshan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  78. Taylor Wilson (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  79. Tony Ho (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  80. Vaibhav Kumar (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  81. Vijay Viswanathan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  82. Wole Idowu (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  83. Yoonseo Kang (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
  84. Maggie Dennis (visiting staff)
  85. Sumana Harihareswara (remote staff)
  86. Daniel Phifer and Kevin McCracken (Social Imprints)
  87. Christina Dragwidge (Arthur J. Gallagher)
  88. Henrik Bennetsen
  89. Majd Abbar, Qatar Foundation
  90. Ginny Jarrett (AJLI)
  91. Alice Gardner-Boreta (AJLI)
  92. Jodi Penn (AJLI)
  93. Eileen Goodwin (AJLI)
  94. Cynthia Foster (AJLI)
  95. Olivia Thomas (AJLI)
  96. Becker Holland (AJLI)
  97. Delly Beekman (AJLI)
  98. Sandra Thomas (AJLI)
  99. Sarah Berthelot (AJLI)
  100. Laurel Lee-Alexander (AJLI)
  101. Liz Murley (AJLI)
  102. Julie Siebel (AJLI)
  103. Karla Wallace (AJLI)
  104. Toni Freeman (AJLI)
  105. Mary Jo Hunt (AJLI)
  106. Kathy Rabon (AJLI)
  107. Deann Cook (AJLI)
  108. Liz Davis (AJLI)
  109. Subha Lembach (AJLI)
  110. Gwin Londrigan (AJLI)
  111. Karen Miller (AJLI)
  112. Terri Nass Reeder (AJLI)
  113. Dona Ponepinto (AJLI)
  114. Diann Rohde (AJLI)
  115. Evelyn Zabo (AJLI)
  116. Susan Danish (AJLI)
  117. Anne Dalton (AJLI)
  118. Maureen Mackey (AJLI)
  119. Janine le Sueur (AJLI)
  120. Carrie Holmes (AJLI)
  121. Heather Mcleod-Grant (AJLI)
  122. Rebecca Petzel (AJLI)
  123. Kristin Cobble (AJLI)
  124. Kat Walsh (Board Member)
  125. Arthur Richards (Remote staff)
  126. Martin Kalfatovic (Smithsonian)
  127. Chris Freeland (Missouri Botanical Garden)
  128. Diane Peters (Creative Commons)
  129. Marion Strecker (Brazilian journalist)
  130. Michiel Minderhoud (Mobile Code Challenge Winner)

2012/05/14: Edited to correct an error in the “Financials” section (changed “5% lower than plan” to “5% higher than plan”)

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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