Wikimedia Foundation Report, April 2014

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for March:

495 million (+4.44% compared with February; -4.33% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release April data later in May)

Page requests for April:

20.697 billion (-1.6% compared with March; -0.6% 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 March 2014 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

79,352 (+4.59% compared with February / -2.84% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects):

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of March 31, 2014

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of March 31, 2014

(Financial information is only available through March 2014 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date March 31, 2014.

Revenue	40,957,259
Expenses:
Engineering Group	12,358,813
Fundraising Group	2,989,855
Grantmaking Group	1,198,163
Programs Group	1,358,725
Grants	3,961,161
Governance Group	582,854
Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group	2,831,941
Finance/HR/Admin Group	5,034,754
Total Expenses	30,316,266
Total surplus	(10,640,993)
	in US dollars

• Revenue for the month of March is $1.71MM versus plan of $0.01MM, approximately $1.70MM or 29,215% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $40.96MM versus plan of $45.05MM, approximately $4.09MM or 9% under plan.
• Expenses for the month of March is $3.22MM versus plan of $4.57MM, approximately $1.35MM or 30% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants, payment processing fees, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal fees and outside contract services.
• Year-to-date expenses is $30.32MM versus plan of $36.37MM, approximately $6.05MM or 17% 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 – $50.69MM as of March 31, 2014.

Highlights

Wikimedia Labs migrated to the new data center

The Wikimedia Labs platform enables volunteers to host software tools to support the community’s work, and to get involved in the technical operations of Wikimedia servers. As part of the Foundation’s ongoing work to reduce reliance on the old data center in Tampa, Florida (USA), Labs was moved to the new data center in Ashburn, Virginia in April, completing several months of work by WMF staff and by volunteers who operate Labs projects. Among the advantages is the switch to a new file system (NFS) which is much more reliable that the one used used for Labs in the old data center (GlusterFS, which had caused most of the Labs failures and downtime in the preceding months). Also, in the new data center, many Labs projects are now using the internal Labs web proxy, which provides several benefits including HTTPS access and increased user data privacy. The Toolserver, the predecessor of the “Tool Labs” part of Wikimedia Labs, is planned to shut down on June 30.

New MediaViewer starts getting released on Wikimedia sites

The Foundation’s multimedia team released Media Viewer v0.2 on 14 pilot sites in April, in preparation for a wider deployment in May. The overall response was favorable, and a growing majority of survey respondents was finding this new multimedia browser useful. The team also developed a set of metrics dashboards to track how often MediaViewer and its various features are used, and how fast it performs over the Internet, as well as local metrics dashboards for selected sites: first results showed a decline in image load time, and suggest that Media Viewer loads faster than the old file description pages.

New Executive Director and Chief Communications Officer

In April, preparations took place to welcome the Foundation’s incoming executive director Lila Tretikov, who was announced on May 1. She will succeed Sue Gardner on June 1, who will move into a new role as special adviser. Lila Tretikov was born in the Soviet Union and moved to the United States as a teenager. She has been working for technology companies, primarily in open source, in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 15 years, most recently at SugarCRM.

Also in April, Katherine Maher was announced as the Foundation’s new Chief Communications Officer.

Engineering

A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for April 2014 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/April

Department Highlights

Major news in April include:

• the change of format of MediaWiki localization files from PHP to JSON, and the associated modernization of the LocalisationUpdate extension;
• the move of Wikimedia Labs to a new data center (see also general “Highlights” section);
• the “Heartbleed” security vulnerability and how the Wikimedia Foundation’s team responded to it;
• an explanation of how the Mobile team uses Trello to plan their development sprints.

VisualEditor

In April, the VisualEditor team worked to improve the stability of the editor, adding some new features and improving usability so that users can create and edit pages more swiftly and intuitively with VisualEditor than before. When users edit templates, only a few parameters are now shown at first rather than all possible ones (some often-used templates like those for citations or infoboxes can have dozens of parameters). It now also feels more natural to set the size of images, and the page settings tool includes the complete set of page options. The next version of the citation dialog was tested and simplified; “suggested” parameters are now always added, like “required” ones. Finally, a careful audit of all Wikimedia wikis led to fixing broken local community-written code, to ensure that VisualEditor runs on all of them.

The Parsoid team continued to fix bugs and tweak code; Parsoid is the parsing program that works behind the scenes of VisualEditor to convert wikitext to annotated HTML, and vice versa. Two areas in particular received a lot of attention: templates encapsulation and link handling. Template encapsulation refers to how content generated by wiki templates is tagged as such, in order for the post-editing wikitext to be consistent; this is particularly important for templates that interact with tables. We fixed many issues with how links are handled, notably image links and their edge cases. In addition to bug fixes, we also improved Parsoid’s performance: some pages like Barack Obama should now parse 30% faster than before. Last, April saw additional progress providing support for visual editing of transclusion parameters.

Editor engagement

This month, the Flow team focused on behind-the-scenes changes to improve moderation and history viewing, as well as implementing new JavaScript interface templates to make Flow more responsive and easier to add new features onto. We released the ability to close and summarize topics, which will allow users to manage active discussions and end ones that have come to a resolution. Flow is now the default discussion tool for many Beta Features discussions on mediawiki.org, and the team is accepting requests to enable Flow on more pages on that wiki to test complex multi-user discussions.

The Growth team started to focus on a new experimental area: anonymous editor acquisition. The team prepared its first two experimental interface changes, aimed at asking anonymous editors to register accounts (expected to be launched in early May). The team also will be conducting basic research into the role anonymous editors play in Wikipedia − more at Research:Anonymous phenomena and Research:Anonymous editor acquisition.

Mobile

The Mobile Apps team continued to work on the rebooted Wikipedia App for Android and iOS. The team focused on bug fixes, editing refinements, and interface improvements. Several issues related to keyboard, navigation bar, edit summary, and abuse filter were fixed. The app now uses the newly-created Wikifont, which reduced the size of the app and the number of images used Articles should now look even closer to their mobile web counterparts.

The Mobile web team added history and contributions pages, as well as an updated watchlist view, for all users. We also released two new features geared toward “humanizing” Wikipedia for readers and new editors: a prominent “last modified” banner that indicates when articles haven’t been edited in a while and may need some attention, and a user profile feature to provide a mobile-friendly snapshot of users’ contributions and activity. For tablets, we updated typography and layout and worked on adding the ability to add and modify links via VisualEditor in beta, in preparation for redirecting tablets to the mobile site later this quarter.

The Wikipedia Zero team continued to set up the Partners portal and work on graceful reduction of image quality. We continued analytics work on data from the SMS/USSD pilot program, and generated custom pageview analyses for an operator to distinguish traffic by high level device access characteristics.

Additionally, the team worked on the alpha version of the Android Wikipedia app, as well as on the URL format for the forthcoming iOS Wikipedia app to ensure pageview logging.

Mobile carrier IPKO joined the Wikipedia Zero program in Kosovo, bringing us to a total of 28 partners in 26 countries. We delivered 68 million free page views in April. We visited South Africa to meet with MTN (current Wikipedia Zero partner), prospective partners, members of Wikimedia South Africa and the Singenjongo High School. This trip was part of a broader strategy to promote Wikipedia in our partners’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) and education initiatives, increasing awareness and impact locally. We are identifying new collaboration opportunities with MTN and local organizations, including the Wikimedia chapter in South Africa and other mission-aligned nonprofits. Additionally, we will continue to support the local initiative created by Sinenjongo High School teachers and students.

Fundraising

Department Highlights

• Members of the fundraising team responded to questions regarding the WMF’s FDC proposal on Meta-wiki.

Major Gifts and Foundations

• The Foundations and Major Gifts Team raised over $1 million in April.
• Begun planning for a London event for Wikimania sponsors, scheduled for June 25th.

Online Fundraising

• The online fundraising team ran banner tests in the Netherlands and Austria. Approximately $700,000 USD was raised in April (preliminary numbers as donations are still settling).
• 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 Wikimedia Merchandise team launched a redesign of the Wikimedia Shop.

Grantmaking

Department highlights

• Held quarterly review. See the quarterly review minutes and slides.
• 4 proposals for annual plan grants were submitted by the 1 April 2014 deadline and reviewed by the community until 30 April.

Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)

• 4 proposals for annual plan grants are submitted by the 1 April 2014 deadline for 2013-2014 Round 2; reviewed by the community until 30 April:
  • The Centre for Internet and Society, ~US$297,831 requested
  • Wikimedia Foundation, No dollar amount requested
  • Wikimédia France, ~US$826,062 requested
  • Wikimedia Norge, ~US$432,060 requested
• Progress reports for 2013-2014 Round 1 Quarter 1 were submitted by 30 April.
• WMDE and WMUK submitted impact reports for 2012-2013 Round 1:
  • WMUK
  • Wikimedia Deutschland
• Results from survey on 2013-2014 Round 1 of the FDC process are published (see [[#Learning and Evaluation|]] for more information).
• FDC members attend the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, Germany and offer an information session and a session to share feedback.
• WMDE, chapters, and other community members were invited to assess WMF’s annual plan as part of the proposal process.

Project and Event Grants

• 5 new members joined the Grant Advisory Committee.
• 4 new requests were funded and 4 reports were accepted in April 2014.

Grants funded in April 2014

• Wiki-Indaba-2014: To support the first conference of Wikimedians across Africa to discuss strategy, best practices, and promote community building.
• Wikipedia:Rintis: To support Wiki-ID to conduct a series of outreach workshops and edit-a-thons in Jakarta and Bandung, Indonesia.
• Wiki Loves Earth 2014 in Macedonia: To support the implementation of Wiki Loves Earth 2014 in Macedonia.
• Wiki Camp: To support a summer Wiki Camp for active high school editors in Armenia.

Reports accepted in April 2014

• Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 – Philippines
• Turkic speaking wikimedians conference
• Kolkata Book Fair 2014
• Wiki Loves Monuments international team

Travel and Participation Support

• 1 new request was funded and 2 reports were accepted in April 2014.
• A worksprint has begun to improve the program’s pages and workflows. The aim of the sprint is to improve the applicant experience based on learning from the program’s first 2 years, making it easier for more people to get involved. Dustin York joined the sprint team in April as a temporary design contractor who hopes to bring more joy to the program’s interactions. The redesign sprint is expected to run April – July.

Request awarded in April 2014

• OpenStack Summit Atlanta: a request to fund Ryan Lane’s representation of Wikimedia at the design summit in order for OpenStack to continue giving Wikimedia’s software use and interests continued consideration, especially with regard to the future direction of the software. OpenStack is the base infrastructure for Wikimedia Labs.

Reports accepted in April 2014

• OSGEO Cluj
• Free Minds free People and IDEC 2013

Individual Engagement Grants

• We completed eligibility checks on round 1 2014 proposals, and 18 proposals moved forward into a 2 weeks comment period in which input was solicited from the community and other stakeholders. The IEG committee is now scoring proposals, according to a newly updated rubric. Committee scores and qualitative feedback will be shared back on proposals in early May, while WMF due diligence on recommended proposals begins.
• A worksprint is underway on IdeaLab, to make it easier to engage in this space. As of April 1, Jeph Paul joined the sprint team as a short-term contractor, to build gadgets and other tools for use in IdeaLab, other grantmaking spaces, and beyond. The worksprint is expected to continue through July.
• In other individual grants news, 2 Arabic Wikipedians joined the Arabic pilot team to serve as volunteer coordinators in the Arabic Wikipedia Library. The Library build was completed in April from a kit on Meta-wiki, and we’re nearly ready to begin processing Arabic Wikipedians’ requests for books and journals. Although we’d expected to launch the pilot program in April, payments methods for the countries we aim to serve with this pilot have been an ongoing challenge. We hope to have this resolved soon and launch in early May instead.
• IEG program head Siko Bouterse is laying plans to travel to Jordan in May as part of an Education Program Hackathon, in order to attend a meet-up with Arabic Wikipedians to discuss the pilot and other opportunities for supporting individual contributors through grants and other resources.

Reports accepted in April 2014

• Visual editor-gadgets compatibility – Midpoint (blog post)
• Women Scientists Workshop Development – Midpoint
• What is about – C’est quoi. A series of communication tools about Wikipedia. Cameroon pilot project – Midpoint

Wikimania

• Wikimedia Mexico’s proposal to host Wikimania in 2015 has been accepted. The conference is expected to be held in Mexico City in summer 2013.
• The Wikimania scholarships committee finished scoring the hundreds of scholarship applications from Wikimedians hoping to attend Wikimania in London in August 2014. The list of over 100 selected scholars has been finalized and recipients will soon be notified.

Learning and Evaluation

• Grantmaking Evaluation:
  • Overall Grantmaking: Held Quarterly Review on January – March. Key focus areas:
    • Increase support to individuals
    • Publish program evaluation reports
    • Optimize grantmaking requirements
    • Integrate new team
  • Annual Plan Grants: Round 1 2013-14 Process review published.
  • Pilot Experiment: Arabic Wikipedia Library (see IEG section)
• Grantmaking Operations:
  • Fluxx, the grant management platform, was launched and new grant requests are being processed using it.
  • Created a prototype to visualize the number of users from top 10 countries that contribute to target Wikipedias in the Global South.
  • IdeaLab sprint ongoing (see IEG section)

• Capacity building: Led several presentation at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, including those listed below in Program Evaluation, as well as:
  • Presented at the WMF Research&Data showcase for April 2014
  • “Ideas to Experiments“: Session on process of ideas to solve problems, and how to experiment with them.
  • “Your organization and hiring staff“: talking through current research on the hiring of first employees within Wikimedia, as well as why a group should or should not consider it
• External Grantmaking Outreach:
  • Participated in Network Evaluation Convening at Packard Foundation. Part of brainstorming group discussing preliminary methods of evaluating networks of contributors funded through grants.
  • Participated in the “Embrace Complexity” meeting hosted by GEO (Grantmakers for Effective Organizations)
• Governance
  • With Legal, organized a workshop on COI guidelines
  • With Legal, compiled research around purchasing power parity and regulations around transfering funds into certain countries
• Organizational effectiveness and development
  • Gave presentation at the Berlin Wikimedia Conference (see above)
  • Launch of organizational effectiveness survey work alongside members of WMF Board, some Wikimedia Chapters, and AffCom. Survey on governance to be distributed in early May
  • Final report delivered from consultancy TCC, working on benchmarking the way other organizations think about organizational effectiveness and design. Public report forthcoming.

Program Evaluation

In addition to participating with the full Learning and Evaluation team in a strategy session related to our integration under Grantmaking, the program evaluation and design team members:

• Completed, and posted, the Wikipedia Education Program report on Meta as the final one in the Program Evaluation Reports beta series.
• Attended the Wikimedia Conference 2014 in Berlin and presented pre-conference and conference sessions on program evaluation:
  • A full-day workshop facilitating dialogue about evaluation fears and hopes, roles and responsibilities, and program leader strategies as well as presenting content on the Stages and Types of Program Evaluation (slides: PDF/GDoc); Theory of Change and Logic Models (slides: PDF/GDoc), and Data Sources (slides: PDF/GDoc), including a brief overview of Wikimetrics (slides: PDF/GDoc);
  • A half-day of pre-conference workshop sessions on program evaluation: first a workshop on designing effective questions (workshop slides: PDF/GDoc) followed by a brainstorming session on the current metrics and gaps.
  • Two Wikimedia Conference sessions: a presentation and conversation session, titled “How to measure blood, sweat, and tears?” (session documentation) and a demonstration session on evaluation data and tracking tools, titled “An Overview of tracking and reporting points and Wikimetrics”. (session documentation)
• Participated in reviewing the round II annual plan grant proposals related to program evaluation strategy as well as the measures and targets presented.
• Developed and added a learning module on Designing Effective Questions to the learning modules library (this is an expanded version of the workshop presentation)
• Hired Edward Galvez as staff in the position of Program Evaluation Associate.

• Program Evaluation session slides from the Wikimedia Conference
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Wikipedia Education Program

• Floor Koudijs, Global Education Program Manager, transitioned from contractor to employee of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Global programs

• The Wikipedia Education Program continues its support for the Education Cooperative, a group of program leaders with experience in 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.
• The Program team is establishing a baseline of Wikipedia in 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.
• Rod Dunican, Director of the Wikipedia Education Program, traveled to the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin to meet with several educational program leaders who are interested and active in education.

Arab world programs

• Tighe Flanagan, Wikipedia Education Program Manger for the Arab world, conducted a working visit to King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, emphasizing a need to move student translation work online.
• Dr. Mohammed Alghbban, Regional Ambassador for the Wikipedia Education Program in Saudi Arabia, organized a meeting with Dr. Mansour M. Alghamdi, head of digital content and publishing at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, to see how they can support local efforts for Arabic content on Wikipedia.
• Led by Samir Sharbaty, students and professors put on a celebration conference for the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt hosted by Ain Shams University on April 27, celebrating 7.3 million bytes of new Arabic content from 98 students. See photos on Commons.
• WEP Ambassadors are actively working to get a version of the Wikipedia Training up on Arabic Wikipedia, as well as continuing to improve the usage of the education extension to track courses and student activity.
• A new mailing list was created to discuss ideas and coordinate efforts around Wikipedia and education in Saudi Arabia.

Communications

• Sage Ross posted an update on recent improvements to the course page system.
• The Education Coop sent out the April 2014 edition of the This Month in Education newsletter.

Human Resources

April continued to be about supporting the ED and VPE searches, as well as the annual plan and staff planning. We also on-boarded nine FT staff, and are working now on over six for May. We launched the next round of the WikiLead program for leadership development, including a three-day training offsite. We continued to work on staff handbook edits, to reduce the legal speak and increase the core, cultural aspects. The team began the prep work for the annual staff performance reviews, which will take place in June. The team is also excitedly wrapping up recruiting for our Benefits and Wellness Coordinator and the Recruiting Coordinator, with ongoing recruiting for the Recruiting Manager. And of course, ongoing work around benefits and immigration.

April Staff Changes

New Requisitions Filled

• Katherine Maher (Communications)
• Dmitry Brant (Engineering)
• Danny Horn (Engineering)
• Giuseppe Lavagetto (Engineering)
• Sarah Rodlund (F&A)

Conversions (Contractor to Requisition)

• Edward Galvez (Grants)
• Floor Koudjis (Grants)
• Patrick Earley (LCA)

Requisition Department Changes

• (none)

Requisition Departures

• Kenan Wang (Engineering)
• Sara Lasner (Fundraising)
• Ingrid Flores (Grants)

New Interns

• (none)

New Contractors

• Jeph Alapat (Grants)
• Dustin York (Grants)

Contracts Ended

• Ryan Lane
• Donna Peterson

April Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled

April Actual: 168 (was 163)

April Total Plan: 187

April Filled: 8, Month Attrition: 3,

FYTD Filled: 49, FYTD Attrition: 26

Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end

28 → reflects 4 total out of plan req#s 193-196 (for finance)

Finance and Administration

• Funds being held in the short term reserve fund total $21.4 million. Estimated annual income on the short term reserve fund is $756,045 or 3.5% per year gross of fees.
• An RFP for investment advisory services will be released in May.
• WMF has signed a contract with the HUB (a coworking space) to provide staff, based in New York, London and other locations, as an option for a space outside of their home to work, meet and collaborate.

Legal and Community Advocacy

LCA Report, April 2014

Throughout April LCA continued its support of the Wikimedia projects through ongoing litigation and community support.

• Michelle, Yana, Stephen, and Luis attended the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin to discuss topics surrounding COIs, trademarks, movement roles, advocacy and privacy.
• Michelle published a blog announcing the release of our Requests for User Information Guidelines and Procedures. These guidelines inform third parties who seek our users’ nonpublic information of the stringent requirements they must meet before the Wikimedia Foundation will consider releasing any user’s nonpublic information. It’s worth noting that most organizations refer to these kinds of guidelines as “law enforcement guidelines”. However, our guidelines are broader — they are directed not just at law enforcement, but any third party who attempts to compel user information from the Foundation, so our process and requirements are transparent and consistent for all.
• Our deputy legal counsel, Luis Villa, was also featured in a Wikimedia blog post (“Luis Villa: I wanted to be an internet lawyer“) that highlighted his substantial internet experience.

Contract Metrics

• Submitted : 34
• Completed : 36

Trademark Metrics

• Submitted : 14
• Approved: 1
• Pending : 6
• Denied: 2
• Approval not needed : 5

Domains Obtained

wikipedia.expert, wiki-pedia.net, wikimedia.community, wikipedia.community, wiktionary.community, wikiversity.community, wikipedia.community, wikimediacommons.community, wikinews.community, wikisource.community, wiki.community, wiki-pedia.org, wekipedia.com, wikkipedia.org, wikimediacommons.uk, wikimediauk.uk

Coming & Going

• Anna Koval left the LCA team to join the Wikipedia Education Program team.
• Patrick Earley transitioned from the Community Liaison team to Community Advocacy.

Other Activities

• Manprit Brar, a fellow in the legal team, published a blog post entitled Supporting innovation beyond the traditional IP regime: Using Wikipedia as a model. This blog post highlighted the ideas discussed during Yale’s Innovation Law Beyond IP conference, which Manprit attended, and how Wikimedia projects already incorporate some of those ideas successfully.

Communications Report, April 2014

April started with the Belfer Center still in the news, as Sue issued a statement on April 1st addressing concerns about this 2012 program. On April 10th, WMF responded to the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability with a statement on the blog that was translated into 19 different languages by volunteers with the support of the Communications team. The sudden death of Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz on April on 8th after a climbing accident was covered extensively by the media, with obituaries appearing in the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald, among others. Katherine Maher, the new Chief Communications Officer, started on April 14th. The Foundation hosted a camera crew from CBS National News to film b-roll for a future segment on Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia, and the movement. We supported the community review of the 2013/14 round 2 FDC proposals with banner messages on all projects that were translated by volunteers into over 50 languages, and assisted the Fundraising department in organizing responses to questions about the Foundation’s own FDC proposal. The team spent significant time preparing communications documents for the May 1st announcement of the new incoming executive director, Lila Tretikov.

Major Announcements

No major announcements in April.

Major Storylines through April

Adrianne Wadewitz

Adrianne Wadewitz, 37, prolific Wikipedia editor, dies after rock climbing accident.

The New York Times (19 April, 2014). [1]

BuzzFeed (21 April, 2014). [2]

Washington Post (25 April, 2014). [3]

Hillsborough vandalism

Wikipedia edits (vandalism) performed from U.K. government computers.

Daily Mail (24 April, 2014). [4]

The Huffington Post – United Kingdom (25 April, 2014). [5]

BBC (25 April, 2014) [6]

The Telegraph (26 April, 2014). [7]

Bitcoin

Jimmy Wales reveals he is “cautious” about accepting Bitcoin donations.

CoinDesk (14 April, 2014). [8]

PFhub (14 April, 2014). [9]

CoinReport (14 April, 2014) [10]

Heartbleed security bug

The Heartbleed bug made headlines when it affected many top websites including Wikipedia.

International Business Times (28 April, 2014). [11]

RedOrbit (30 April, 2014). [12]

Other worthwhile reads

Wikipedia seems more useful at tracking flu trends than Google.

BusinessWeek (17 April, 2014) [13]

Yahoo (17 April, 2014) [14]

Popular Mechanics (17 April, 2014) [15]

WMF Blog posts

Blog.wikimedia.org published 27 posts in April 2014. Four posts were multilingual, with translations in Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Ukranian, Dutch, Asturian, German, Indonesian, Russian, Hungarian, Malay, Tamil, Japanese, Korean, Czech, Chinese, Catalan and Odia.

Some highlights from the blog include:

Wikimedia’s response to the Heartbleed security vulnerability (April 10, 2014).

Katherine Maher joins the Wikimedia Foundation as Chief Communications Officer (April 15, 2014)

Luis Villa: I wanted to be an internet lawyer (April 16, 2014).

What happens when someone asks us for your information? (WMF releases the Requests for User Information Procedures Guidelines) (April 25, 2014).

Are you the next Wikipedia visiting scholar? (April 25, 2014).

Media Contact

Media contact through April 2014: wmf:Press room/Media Contact#April 2014

Wikipedia Signpost

For lots of detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for April 2014:

• Volume 10, Issue 13, 02 April 2014
• Volume 10, Issue 14, 09 April 2014
• Volume 10, Issue 15, 23 April 2014
• Volume 10, Issue 16, 30 April 2014

Communications Design

We began work with a contractor to redesign the Travel and Participation Support application experience with Grantmaking. We also created a new gadget for Meta-wiki to make it easier for people to endorse learning patterns, ideas and grant projects.

We are redesigning the Wikipedia Zero landing page for more focus and a clear message – to coincide with an upcoming petition.

Communications, Design and Legal are preparing for a community discussion around new visual links for all of the projects.

Visitors and Guests

Visitors and guests to the WMF office in April 2014:

1. Elizabeth Crampton (ReachOut)
2. Christine Cavanaugh (CCSC Inc.)
3. Marieke Spence (TCC Group)
4. Julie Simpson (TCC Group)
5. Tom Hehir (CCSC Inc.)
6. Toni Maraviglia (Eneza)
7. Camille Preston (Aim Leadership)
8. Roger Gu (Coinbase)
9. Adam White (Coinbase)
10. Wilson Fang (Sari.PH)
11. Ibrahim Bernardo (Sari.PH)
12. Owen Davis (Wikia Inc.)
13. Mike Schwartz (Wikia Inc.)
14. Elie Chidiak (Brazilian State Government)
15. Jean Paul Brzezinski (Brazilian State Government)
16. Bryan Van Dyk (Getty Images)
17. David Browning (CBS News)
18. Jonathan Schienberg (CBS News)
19. Simon Phipps (TIS Bolzano)
20. Patrick Ohivewein (TIS Bolzano)
21. Sandy Kirchlechner (TIS Bolzano)
22. Cecilia Doliana (TIS Bolzano)
23. Daniela Di Iulio (TIS Bolzano)
24. Lucia Granziol (TIS Bolzano)
25. Giorgia Pallaro (TIS Bolzano)
26. Eaven Horter (JP Morgan)
27. Dan Ohgi (JP Morgan)
28. Rich Slinn (JP Morgan)
29. Alexis Rossi (Internet Archive)
30. Aalok Patel (Lever)
31. Sarah Nahm (Lever)
32. Wayne Mackintosh (OER Foundation)
33. Katherine Kuhns (SVIC)
34. Lisa Jacobs (SF Law)
35. Didem Ersoz (Mozilla)