Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
Looking a bit further into the best way to do this - since mailman doesn't have any sensible export/import features that retain list member settings, we'll probably need to make a full copy of the list on the server, and then remove the members of the old one. I'll ask Daniel to look into that next week and have held off for now. As for archives, Daniel says it shouldn't be a problem to keep the old archives under the old URL, but to also to copy them (with new URLs) into the new list. The only disadvantage I see that in the event we need to do any removals of old posts, we'll need to remember to do it in both places. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] help.wikimedia.org - QA site
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Peter Coombe thewub.w...@googlemail.com wrote: Wasn't there a proposal a while back for a Stack Exchange [1] site like this? It seems like the ideal software for it. StackExchange and the open source OSQA equivalent are indeed powerful tools and worth experimenting with. Anyone wanting to set up a public instance of these or other tools to play with can do so through Wikimedia Labs and of course the toolserver. See https://labsconsole.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Access for Labs access and policies. We've focused on creating a more integrated help experience with two projects, the feedback dashboard (FD) and the teahouse. The FD gives new editors an opportunity to ask a question or register a complaint. It pops into view the moment you first click edit, which is a more obvious affordance than a separate help site you have to find out about and visit. It's been active on en.wp and nl.wp for a few months, and was recently activated on French Wikisource as well. On en.wp, we register about 100 feedback submissions a day, and about 30-50 responses. FD includes a few features which elevate it above ordinary talk page responses: - an in-line response tool on the dashboard itself which shortcuts the path to the user's talk page - a mark as helpful feature which the recipient of a message can use to indicate that they were helped. - friendly email notifications (not the standard talk page notifiers) - a leaderboard of top responders, which has been helpful at incentivizing participation FD for English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard FD for Dutch Wikipedia: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:DashboardTerugkoppeling FD for French Wikisource: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Sp%C3%A9cial:FeedbackDashboard We're currently letting the project sit for a while to gather metrics about any impact it has on editors who are being helped. The teahouse is a less technical and more social initiative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse It is supported by some shiny templates and a nice little in-line response gadget. But it's primarily an effort to mobilize lots of people to engage in user-to-user help. As you can see, lots of folks have signed up as hosts (people who respond), and early metrics indicate that there's indeed a positive impact on retention. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Teahouse/Metrics IMO setting up a separate Q/A site would be in some ways a workaround for Wikimedia's poor internal discussion system, and would incur lots of disadvantages (detached from workflows, no easy login integration, no easy integration of wiki markup / templates, separate technical infrastructure with additional maintenance/scalability/security burden, need for additional policy development on copyright, terms of use, etc. ..). But it's worth experimenting with, for sure, if only to find out what UI/UX patterns are worth applying to our own solutions. LQT is on hold for now, because it's an overambitious and underresourced project. We're going to start work soon on this project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications) This is a larger effort to improve Wikimedia's notifications infrastructure, and will lay the groundwork for messaging improvements, as well as other next generation features. We hope that we'll be able to improve user-to-user messaging features in this process, which would be a technical foundation for improved direct user support systems. For the tech side of things, our goals for next fiscal are still draft, but give a good idea what we're thinking about (pending approval of associated staffing/funding): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2012-13_Goals Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 9:46 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: What about personal development? Do your managers play an active role in helping their reports develop with objectives, feedback, training, etc? Yes, of course. There's a standard $ allotment for each employee in the budget to support training, courses, coaching, etc. and managers/employees are encouraged to explore options together. In practice, some people take more advantage of this than others, of course -- and to be fair, some managers do a better job at it than others, which in my experience is more a function of management experience and personality than it is of number of reports. Gayle's office plays an important role in bringing fairness into the process, sharing info about development opportunities and options, setting standards about goal-setting and performance management, being available for deeper conversations, exploration of coaching options, etc. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
Hi folks, as I mentioned in a response to Liam the other day, we've been working on having org charts generated in a more automatic, scalable form. A contractor, Mark Holmquist, has been working on an open source tool for this the last few weeks to do this. It's still highly experimental. In particular, we're exploring alternative layout options (full horizontal only works well for small org charts). Don't be surprised if it breaks or behaves weirdly, and Mark may be making changes to the labs setup at any time. Most importantly, it's only engineering right now. I've plopped in a couple of examples for the other depts, but ignore those until they're built out, provided my colleagues are happy with the tool. This is not authoritative, and there are almost certainly errors, beyond the aforementioned omission of all other departments. :) Explanations: * The little flags represent locations. Typically they're ccTLD country codes, except for SF for the SF office. * Mousing over a node in the chart gives you extended information. * (E) = employee, (C) = contractor * Dashed border = this is a contractor role that's not part of the overall capacity plan and funded out of the general outside contractor services budget The tool makes it possible to have unique URLs for any subset view of the chart, and that's the best way to use it. These are the departments in engineering/product: TechOps: http://orgcharts.wmflabs.org:/#of-unit-box-for-4f5e806d0b3d0d0f2e09 Features: http://orgcharts.wmflabs.org:/#of-unit-box-for-4f5e806c0b3d0d0f2e03 Platform: http://orgcharts.wmflabs.org:/#of-unit-box-for-4f5e806c0b3d0d0f2e07 Mobile: http://orgcharts.wmflabs.org:/#of-unit-box-for-4f6cd85eeef7b9380402 I18N/RD: http://orgcharts.wmflabs.org:/#of-unit-box-for-4f6cff2d9f293f1b1301 Product: http://orgcharts.wmflabs.org:/#of-unit-box-for-4f6d01199f293f1b1303 All of engineering: http://orgcharts.wmflabs.org:/#of-unit-box-for-4f5e806c0b3d0d0f2e02 Code is currently here and will be moved to WMF git repo soon: http://code.marktraceur.info/?p=wmf-orgchart;a=summary If you'd like to be involved or provide detailed feedback for improvement, please post to the talk page here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_tools/Org_chart_tool All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com wrote: Has this been an observed issue within the WMF? In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing, because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the success or failure of their own work. Where we're trying to complete complex projects with a part of a person's time here, a part of a person's time over there, we lean heavily on managers to help with the resource scheduling and project organization, and that's where things are currently getting iffy at times. In our 2012-13 hiring plan submission, we're proposing a Dev-Ops Program Manager position to help with some of the particularly hairy cross-coordination of complex, under-resourced backend projects with operations implications (an example of that kind of project is the SWIFT media storage migration). There'll likely also be another layer of depth in the org chart as we grow and evolve further, but that's something to do very carefully because it increases real or perceived distance between people, and making people managers of 1-2 people is fairly inefficient. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: I think wikimedia-l would work fine and make sense. We probably don't need an additional list, a lot of the lists we have now are lightly used. Picking this up again .. I'll go ahead and make this change on Saturday 4/7, unless there are strong objections. Moving this list to wikimedia-l seems like the least disruptive change for now, acknowledging that its scope has long expanded beyond WMF matters. This is the only change -- all other list parameters would stay the same, so as to not surprise and annoy people by rolling up unrelated changes. In future we may - a) find that this is perfectly sufficient and leave it at that, b) create movement-l to discuss the wonderful bureaucracy that we're busily creating in more dedicated and extensive depth, c) create any other divisions that make sense, or not. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pages very slow to load since March 21
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Sarah slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: Could someone from the Foundation confirm that they're looking into it? It's getting to the point where it's quite hard to edit. Tim's investigating it now. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Pages very slow to load since March 21
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Could someone from the Foundation confirm that they're looking into it? It's getting to the point where it's quite hard to edit. Tim's investigating it now. This appears to have been a networking issue causing packet loss and timeouts, which should be resolved. Please reopen bug 35448 and provide details if you can reproduce the issue at this time. Thanks to Leslie and Tim for investigating. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Announcement: New editor engagement experiments team!
On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: I think it would greatly help if we could have an updated organisation chart of who is reporting to whom, and what departments they are all in. The static graphics stopped being maintainable. We're exploring a couple of options for data-driven org chart generation and should have a publicly visible up-to-date org chart again soon. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Guidelines for the use of iframes?
HR recently switched to an externally hosted applicant tracking system called Jobvite. It's sadly proprietary, but very feature-rich and used by many tech companies, including e.g. Mozilla. Basically the previous process was for candidates to be dumped in a shared inbox, where recruiters and hiring managers would have to keep track of them with the aid of tracking spreadsheets and lots of emails. An ATS automates a lot of the tracking and workflows, and helps ensure that people don't get dropped. It also sends hiring managers reminders to submit all the required hiring documentation, etc. So in general it's a good thing, although we sometimes curse at aspects of its UI. The rationale for the iframe is to automate the job listings on the WMF site and surface the various Jobvite features. Yes, that means that the user's browser will contact hire.jobvite.com when loading the page (although all its resources will be loaded in the context of the iframe). AFAICT the main issue here is to clarify in the footer that job applications and job descriptions are run through an external service called Jobvite and subject to the Jobvite privacy policy, to avoid any confusion. Whether the iframe is a good idea still remains to be seen. Jobvite makes it unnecessarily hard to link to JDs directly (because their ideology is that everyone should come through some social media funnel, I think), and the navigation is heavily JS dependent right now. So we might want to switch back to a hybrid format. The job pages are also still actively being re-designed, and the setup might change significantly in coming weeks. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] introduction (community communications for Wikidata)
On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:36 PM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Wikidata/ I haven't looked at that in a while. Heh, I wonder what the current status is? Kipcool's the primary maintainer, and I believe it's exclusively used on http://www.omegawiki.org/ at this point (which is still alive, warts and all). -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
Hi all, We currently have this public list for Wikimedia Foundation matters, as well as a private list called internal-l which in practice is in large part used for WMF/chapters discussions, because chapter board members are added to it by default. The latter is often used for discussions that impact community members, but neither the discussions nor the results are always a matter of public record. Unfortunately, the name foundation-l is also one which signals exclusion; it pre-dates the very complex and large network of organizations and individuals that we are today. Others have made this suggestion before me, and I like it, so I've tried to put it into a proposal: Let's have a public list that's clearly named and scoped to be relevant to all Wikimedia matters. We're too big and too complicated to fit comfortably under the Foundation umbrella any longer. That new list wouldn't be intended to replace foundation-l (which would continue to be used for matters strictly related to the Wikimedia Foundation) or to internal-l (which may have some legitimate uses, although I personally find it unnecessary and unsubscribed from it). The full proposal is here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l_proposal I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments here or on-wiki. All best, Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A discussion list for Wikimedia (not Foundation) matters
On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: That sounds reasonable. Most things discussed on this list are not specially relevant to the Foundation. OK. Any strong objections to changing the list name and scope (the latter being the description at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ) to be all-encompassing for Wikimedia-wide issues? The rename would likely occur by unsubscribing current members from this list and re-subscribing them to the new one, to avoid breaking links or accidentally corrupting archives -- meaning that list archives pre-move would be accessible via a different URL, which could be prominently advertised in the list description. I do think many discussions can be moved from internal-l to this list; and on occasion people have suggested that foundation-l is a less suitable place for an otherwise public discussion simply because the name seems exclusive to the WMF. Agreed -- creating a forum that feels welcoming to everyone, regardless of their specific affiliations, is one of my strongest motivations here. Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Mid-Year Presentation to the Board of Trustees
Hi folks, on February 3, the Wikimedia Foundation senior staff gave a presentation to the Board of Trustees as part of its Board meeting in San Francisco, recapping the fiscal year so far (our year begins July 1) and looking ahead. The slide deck is now available here: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Mid-Year_Review_February_2012.pdf All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Communicating effectively: Wikimedia needs clear language now
On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:16 AM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: Mostly though, thanks to the Internet and multinational corporations, godawful business jargon crosses all national borders. Words and phrases like 'onboarding', 'stakeholders', 'mission statements', 'platforms', 'proactive', 'sectors' and pretty much anything 'strategic', for instance. Terms like strategy, mission statement and stakeholder have concrete organizational meaning. Yes, they are also often used as part of marketing copy or organizational copy in ways that are unhelpful, because people who aren't good writers feel the need to plug holes by picking from the shared vocabulary of organization-speak. That doesn't make them meaningless, anymore than the fact that every idiot has an opinion on quantum physics makes quantum physics meaningless. Where I agree with you: It's the job of any writer to make their message accessible and understandable, where possible by using plain language. It's probably good to maintain a healthy degree of prejudice against organizational jargon, just because it is so prevalent and often used poorly. However, organizational development and management are serious human endeavors that merit open-mindedness and willingness to discover and learn on the reader's part just as much as they merit clarity and brevity on the writer's or speaker's part. Being simplistic about the corporate world is no more charming or noble than is ignorance about any other field. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Terry Chay joins WMF as Director of Features Engineering
Hello all, It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing that Terrence (Terry) Chay is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Director of Features Engineering. Terry comes to us from Automattic, where he helped improve the WordPress.com user experience by implementing an A/B testing framework, improving the blog domain name registration process (which contributed to doubling the revenue for WordPress.com), creating better support mechanisms for fist-time users, and making many other changes. In that role, he was an individual contributor to the WordPress codebase. Before Automattic, Terry worked as an engineering manager and software architect for multiple start-ups and tech companies between 1999 and 2009, most recently at Tagged and Plaxo. He has a B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). If you’ve ever been to OSCON, you may have seen Terry present one of his infamous PHP talks there (he’s been invited back repeatedly for some reason). All in, he’s given more than 25 public talks about web development. He’s also a prolific blogger and photographer ( http://terrychay.com/ ), joining the nascent photography cabal at Wikimedia. As Director of Features Engineering, Terry will be responsible for helping ensure the success of some of our key feature teams: the visual editor team, the editor engagement team (including the article feedback project), and the fundraising engineering team. This announcement also means that Alolita Sharma will be transitioning into a new director-level role at the Wikimedia Foundation. While we’ve not finalized all details, the role will include responsibility for the internationalization team, for experimental features projects and technology evaluation. We’ll announce details about that shortly. I want to thank Alolita for her track record of excellent leadership at Wikimedia to-date. Terry's first day will be February 27. Please join me in welcoming Terry to the Wikimedia movement. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Building a new Legal and Community Advocacy Department Promotion of Philippe Beaudette
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:46 PM, Theo10011 de10...@gmail.com wrote: Then my suggestion would be, rename the department. I think the name's pretty spot-on, actually: advocating on behalf of the community. It's the elucidation of that concept that needs to happen to avoid confusion. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Building a new Legal and Community Advocacy Department Promotion of Philippe Beaudette
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org wrote: Advocacy is a much more general term in this context than people seem to be taking it as. It does not mean lobbying or fighting for something controversial with outside organizations. As I understand it, it's the opposite: advocating to the Wikimedia Foundation on behalf of the community. Yeah, that's my understanding of the game plan here as well. I think the announcement could have been clearer in that regard, but that's pretty much what Philippe and Maggie have already been doing, and what they'll continue to do in a structure that's set up for growth. Sometimes we have a tendency to speak in management lingo when we should be choosing simple, crisp clear terms. Honest feedback: Burn the chart on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_and_Community_Advocacy/LCA_Announcement and draft a super crisp mission statement to slap on the first page for this group. I know, I've been guilty of this as well -- no criticism of the team. When working in an organization this kind of communication style is often expected from you in day-to-day work, but it's not necessarily helpful when communicating with people who have very little time and interest to parse it. I think the brainstorming page is a great start and hope it'll be utilized and further advertised in coming days: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal/Community_Advocacy Congratulations to Philippe and Maggie for their new roles. I think it's about time that we're creating this structure, and I think it'll generate lots of tangible value for the community. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation monthly meeting video
Every month, there's a meeting at the Wikimedia Foundation offices (with remote call-in) where we review recent metrics and activities in the different departments for the previous month. Starting with the meeting covering January, which took place on February 2, we are now capturing these meetings on video. You can see the video capture for the most recent meeting here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monthly_Metrics_Meeting_February_2,_2012.theora.ogv Going forward, we will simply link to these videos from the monthly report and not announce it separately. Note that I've uploaded the highest resolution copy, which clocks in at 1.9G (this should allow you to see pretty well what's going on on the screen). This is inconvenient for streaming unless you have a very good connection, so I recommend downloading. In future, videos will be automatically transcoded to multiple resolutions, but if you'd like to make a lower resolution copy available for the interim, it's appreciated. Feel free to respond in this thread if you have any questions about the contents of the meeting. Generally the structure is as follows, interspersed with questions, discussion and lawyer jokes: * Erik, Garfield and Gayle walk through impact, finance and HR metrics, respectively * Department heads give updates about their respective areas * Sue closes with some final words, typically referring to recent events or organizational priorities All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Vice President?
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: Many organizations have dozens or hundreds of vice presidents, like Vice President of Vending Machines and Vice President of Pencil Sharpeners. Heh. I've certainly been in the VP of Odds and Ends role before. :) A little bit of context. As Stu and Kaldari mentioned, the VP title is fairly common in the US, where it's actually often situated below the C-level in the org. The reason Sue and I agreed on the title VP of Engineering/Product for the engineering department has more to do with the organizational vocabulary in this part of the world, where that title does carry a very specific meaning relative to the CTO title. You can read more about the differences in these posts: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/want-to-know-difference-between-a-cto-and-a-vp-of-engineering/ http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engineering.html http://falseprecision.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engin.html Right now, we don't have a CTO, but we do have three Lead Architects in the engineering department (Mark, Brion, and Tim). We may choose to ultimately create a CTO role again, but it would probably be different from the way we've treated that role in the past (as architectural lead/visionary and process/delivery manager combined into one person). We may also need to split the product/engineering responsibilities if scale requires it. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing Howie Fung as Director of Product Development
Hello all, It’s with great pleasure that I announce the promotion of Howie Fung to the position of Director of Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation, effective February 1. Howie joined us in October 2009 as a consultant for usability projects, and became a permanent staff member in May 2010. Prior to Wikimedia, Howie was Senior Product Manager at Rhapsody, where he helped grow the music site's traffic five-fold within the the first year on the basis of extensive customer research, including web analytics, focus groups, user testing, and customer surveys. Prior to that, Howie was Product Manager at eBay, prioritizing features based on business objectives, usability studies, and economic impact. He has an MBA from The Anderson School at UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. I’m really proud of all the work Howie’s done for Wikimedia since he’s joined, calmly and rationally introducing method where there was madness, always challenging us to increase our understanding of our communities and to use our limited resources for the projects that are likely to have the highest impact. In addition to the work he’s done on the Usability Initiative, he’s worked on a variety of projects, including the Editor Trends Study, the Former Contributors Survey, the Article Feedback Tool, Moodbar, and the Feedback Dashboard. We’re very lucky to have him in this new role. This announcement also means that we’re formally establishing a Product Development department at Wikimedia, which is part of the larger Engineering department. Product, in our context, means really digging into what we want our projects to look like in a year, in two years, in three years, and working together with software developers and architects, as well as across Wikimedia, to make that vision a reality. Our work will be organized along the following product areas: Editor Engagement, Mobile, Analytics, and Internationalization/Localization. The following staff and contractors will be part of the Product group, going forward: Phil Chang, Brandon Harris, Fabrice Florin, Diederik van Liere, Siebrand Mazeland, Dario Taraborelli, Oliver Keyes, and the new Interaction Designer, when hired. The Mobile team, which works on both mobile apps (such as the Wikipedia Android app) and the mobile web experience, is a good example of how this works in practice. It has Phil as a product owner (reporting to Howie), Tomasz as a scrum master and engineering director, and Patrick, Arthur, Max, and Yuvi as engineers (reporting to Tomasz). The team itself is the most important unit here: it drives the success of any given initiative. The connection into the Product Development group helps to ensure we follow a consistent strategy and coordinate efforts across the board. [1] This is an important step in our organizational development and will help us parallelize and coordinate product and engineering work more effectively. Please join me in congratulating Howie, and WMF. :-) All best, Erik [1] In case you’d like to learn more about agile product development and software engineering, this presentation is a good intro to scrum, a specific methodology we've started to use on a couple of teams: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/presentations/30-an-overview-of-scrum -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Official Wikipedia Android App Released
In case you missed our blog post or reports in the tech media: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/26/announcing-the-official-wikipedia-android-app/ https://market.android.com/details?id=org.wikipedia We recently released the first version of a Wikipedia smartphone app for Android phones. It's based on Apache Cordova (AKA Phonegap), and of course fully open source. I'm really proud of our mobile team; it's a great app and if you haven't tried it already, you should. :-) This is still an early release and lots of fixes and enhancements are yet to come. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FW: [Wikitech-l] proposed tech conference anti-harassment policy
On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 2:57 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I think it'd be difficult to have a discussion about Wikimedia Commons with a rule like this. Right now, the policy is pretty much framed around technical events like hackathons, because that was what motivated its creation. In that context, explicit presentation content is definitely an edge case. It's less of an edge case for general Wikimedia events. There have been efforts to generalize these kinds of policies by stating that explicit content is acceptable if it fits the content and the purpose of the presentation, and if the presentation is clearly marked as such so that attendees can choose not to go. I think we should try to find some language to that effect for a generalized version of the friendly space policy. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout notice errors (English Wikipedia)
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 9:35 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: internet - Internet zip code - ZIP code Should be fixed. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] mobile website
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 1:09 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Only bots (I think) and some WMF people can edit en:wp today. Stewards and staff. No bots. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Discussion duration and the SOPA shutdown
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Mono monom...@gmail.com wrote: I do agree that this kind of action must be severely limited. We cannot go on like this; we've used up our shutdown for about five years. The shutdown makes waves, but its effect will diminish with overuse. This is the kind of thing we should not repeat for a long while. +1 (personal opinion). This is an extraordinary measure and should be used extremely judiciously. I believe it has been, here. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.
Dear Till, thanks for the clarifications and comments. I wasn't referring here to any other aspect of the campaign than the specific set of banner choices, and like I said, WMF made the same choices in the previous campaign. Wikimedia CEO: Yes, we titled Pavel as Wikimedia CEO in the thank you banner - since that would be the translation of his position at Wikimedia Deutschland. As you can see on the refering landingpage his position was written out as CEO, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. We had to shorten his function on the banner in order to have a short message. Yeah, same as WMF in 2010 with the Wikimedia Executive Director banner, with the same reasoning. http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=20101210_SA004A_US http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFSG011/en/US Admittedly, that was preceded by the Wikipedia Executive Director banner faux pas, which is what really got people up in arms in 2010. But we stuck with Wikimedia Foundation in the banner this year to be safe.Thanks for clarifying that the urgent banner was tested repeatedly but didn't perform as well as other banners. Depending on where the current discussions about fundraising practices go, if we do stay within a model more or less like the current one, I think it's important that we incorporate any agreed upon lessons from each campaign into a shared code of Wikimedia fundraising practice. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Fabrice Florin joins Wikimedia
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Bod Notbod bodnot...@gmail.com wrote: holds up big WELCOME sign If I say that this sounds like a hugely important role the rest of the office will fold their arms and rightly harumph at me for the implied negation of their value, so I won't say that. But you can't keep up with Wikipedia news without being made constantly aware that gaining new editors is a serious business. I will be fascinated to see what you make of the ideas for volunteer recruitment we've had so far and any innovations you can come up with. Congratulations and welcome to the other recent new hires as well. It would be lovely if each of the new hires could guest post on the Foundation blog and/or write a page for Signpost once they've settled in and let us know what their average day is like and some insight into what they're working on. The staff is now getting to a size where even close followers of Wikimedia are liable to lose track. Some effort to keep the community feeling that they know all the staff would be much appreciated. Hi Bod, I like the idea of having some kind of first month at WMF post, especially from someone in a very community-facing position like Fabrice. Let's plan to do that in February. I don't think it's a blog post but we can broadcast it here and in a couple of places. Cheers, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcement: Fabrice Florin joins Wikimedia
Hello all, I’m really happy to announce that Fabrice Florin is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Product Manager for New Editor Engagement. In this position, Fabrice will take the lead in articulating and refining, in partnership with the community and the engineering team, the requirements for some of our most important features: those which will help us increase the engagement and retention of new contributors to Wikimedia projects. Fabrice has already been supporting us as a contractor on the Article Feedback V5 project, and I’m really pleased that he’s joining us full-time, starting next week. Six years ago, Fabrice founded NewsTrust, a non-profit organization dedicated to to helping people find quality journalism. As its Executive Director, Fabrice built the organization and the product from scratch, with a small team. NewsTrust is a fascinating community in its own right, and Fabrice and I first met when we discussed what lessons could be learned for Wikimedia’s own forays into rating/assessment tools. Before that, Fabrice had a long carreer in the tech and media industry. He was VP of Online Entertainment at Macromedia, CEO of Zenda, Executive Producer at Apple, and President of Videowest. Read more in his online bio: http://bit.ly/fab-bio Fabrice is perhaps the first WMF staffer with an IMDB entry. He directed the 1984 documentary “Hackers” which featured early tech luminaries like Bill Atkinson, Lee Felsenstein, Richard Stallman and Steve Wozniak. Please join me in giving him a big welcome to the Wikimedia movement. :-) Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Foundation-L, the public mailing list about the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. For more information about Foundation-L: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.
On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 4:36 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: It got worse. They changed it to Wikimedia Executive Director At the risk of reviving this thread, I find it worth noting that the German chapter apparently used very similar banners this year to these banners you criticized last year: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=WMDE_Fundraiser_End_anon http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=WMDE_Test_Jan03_JimmyJacketUrgent This is not a criticism of WM-DE: We used that language last year, and I felt much of the criticism of it was unreasonable, especially yours. I find it interesting, though, in the context of the discussion that's happening on Meta right now regarding funds dissemination. It is also worth noting that we didn't use either choice of words this year in the WMF campaign in response to the concerns from last year. From the standpoint of creating a balanced, community-friendly campaign that's respectful and responsive, decentralizing decision-making about the shape of the campaign to the geographic level is IMO likely to do the opposite: It will create more pressure (because it's a more competitive environment) between fundraising entities to maximize revenue and push the limits, while reducing visibility of (and associated accountability for) specific choices like the above among the wider Wikimedia community. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 5:34 AM, Domas Mituzas midom.li...@gmail.com wrote: This year pictures at top left, blinking banners, etc - are becoming a norm. This is simply untrue hyperbole. The fader was used in the same way as last year, at the same time. (In fact, I think last year they used the word urgent, which I don't believe was used this year.) So what's your slippery slope argument? That we've had photographs on the left side of the banner this time? While at the same time, 1) we've shortened the fundraiser, 2) we've disabled banners for logged in users more quickly, 3) we've (for the first time) disabled banners for donors once they made a donation, 4) we've reduced reliance on Jimmy dramatically. Yeah, sure sounds like a slippery slope to dancing monkeys to me. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] A fundraiser for editors
On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 8:53 AM, James Heilman jmh...@gmail.com wrote: The fundraiser for money has been working exceedingly well with our number of donors increasing 10 fold since 2008. What we need now is a fundraiser for editors. I meet well educated professionals who use Wikipedia but have no ideas that they can edit it. We need to run a banner with the same energy we use to raise money to raise editor numbers. This idea has been trialed to a limited extent here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Invitation_to_edit but the effort did not have sufficient data crunching behind it to determine if it works. James, thanks for this note! The problem, as I see it, is that we know that new editors, once they attempt to make their first edit, hit an enormous number of barriers. Even if they master mark-up (which is a big IF), they're likely to fail when their edits get reverted due to lack of proper citations or other issues. We built http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:FeedbackDashboard as a way to surface what frustrations new editors have. Ignoring the noise (people who shouldn't edit or who're trying to do harm), you'll get the same issues again and again: - basic editing is very hard - communication via talk pages is very confusing - copyright issues are complicated and unfamiliar - article rejections or reverts feel arbitrary and unfair - finding the right way to upload images is complicated It's now possible to help those users with a built-in response tool, and it's possible for new users to mark these responses as helpful or not. Over time, this may surface easy ways in which the community can ease the pain of new users. (FeedbackDashboard is on English and Dutch Wikipedia and on Incubator. We're happy to install it on more wikis, but it probably won't work well in smaller communities due to lack of scale.) There are certain types of new user recruitment which do _not_ hit as many issues. One is the high-touch recruitment at universities via assignment or other means. It requires a fair amount of effort per student, but provided that the preconditions are right, those students tend to turn out high-quality work. The biggest issues have been in India where the quality of edits was much lower than hoped for. See: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program and related links -- again, there's lots of opportunity here to help these students. A second area is multimedia campaigns. While finding the right way to upload is hard when you're a new user, if you point people directly at a customized UploadWizard at Commons, the success rate is pretty high. This has been demonstrated by community/chapter campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 (~180,000 photos) and TamilWiki Media Contest (~5,500 photos so far), which have brought lots of new users into the fold. I'd love to hear other successes/failures. I'm skeptical about a sitenotice/banner-focused approach until we've addressed some of the _known_ issues that new users are likely to encounter. We could shortcut things a little by focusing a lot on mentoring tools, but IMO that would be more band-aid -- we need to address the fundamental issues. Here are some of the things we're doing: 1) Steven and Maryana in the Community Department have been running tests to see if different types of warning messages reduce people's early frustration and increase their retention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_user_warnings/Testing 2) The Feedback Dashboard itself has response mechanisms, including now a Mark as Helpful feature for new users to quickly acknowledge whether a given response has been useful to them. 3) The Visual Editor, once completed, will hopefully reduce a huge amount of the basic usability challenges people encounter. Projects like UploadWizard help with that, as well. 4) Tools like AFTv5 potentially offer a casual entry-way into the world of editing without the risk of reversion or other negative experiences. Some users may only ever submit comments/suggestions, but hopefully some of them will also graduate to editing given sufficient encouragement. 5) Next we're going to experiment specifically with the mechanisms used for patrolling and creating pages. See: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Page_Triage http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_creation_workflow This is a frequent pain point both for new and experienced editors and we hope we can take some of that away by working closely with the community in reforming processes and tools. 6) After that we'll have to think about challenges like messaging (talk pages are horribly broken), identity (user profile setup), and affiliation (joining and managing WikiProjects etc.). Lots to do :) -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Foundation-l] Blink tag jokes are now obsolete.
On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 12:59 AM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: We appear to have actual blinking ads. Unfortunate. Still I suppose the occasion should be marked. You're a year late to mark it. The year-end fader banner was first used in 2010, e.g.: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=20101229_JAFS003fader_US A fundraising campaign is not a switch-on/switch-off affair. It has an arc. It's that arc that helps it be successful. This is the last day of the campaign, and a final invitation to give to reach our goal. It should communicate a sense of urgency towards closure and resolution, coinciding with people's increased year-end willingness to give (which isn't just about taxes). Utilizing a tasteful but slightly unconventional banner that one time is entirely appropriate to wrap things up. Last year's December 31 was, up until this year, our most successful fundraising day ever. This year's first day of the campaign seems likely to stay our most successful fundraising day of all time, followed by this year's December 31. Those are great successes worth celebrating. But what's especially worth noting is that the fundraising team has worked enormously hard this year to build a fundraising story that's _not_ simply about maximizing revenue. This deserves celebration, too, but I'll send a separate note about that. Happy new year all - Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Celebrating the 2011 campaign
Hello all, I just want to send a note to celebrate the enormous success of the 2011 fundraiser. It used to be the case that I was pretty involved in the annual campaign. For the last two fundraiser, Zack Exley's been running the show, and I'm enormously impressed by and proud of what he and his team have been able to accomplish. When we prepared the budget for 2011-12, I worried that we'd need to cross new lines in order to generate that much revenue. The 2010 campaign already felt like we were hitting the ceiling of how much can be raised from a large number of individual donations. Last year, we were showing Jimmy's face and appeals in many different variations through much of the fundraiser. We had tried some pretty aggressive banners, like these ones: http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=2010_JA1_Banner3_rtl http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=2010_JA1_Banner4_US http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=2010_JA1_Banner7 http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/viewtemplate=2010_JA1_Banner6 Jimmy certainly didn't crave this level of attention, but he was a good sport and gave his approval. The campaign was tremendously successful. But after it was over, we weren't just worried that our readers might be feeling Jimmy fatigue, we were all feeling it, including, I'm sure, Jimmy himself. But it simply remains true that people strongly identify with him, and that his appeals tend to motivate people to give more clearly than anything else. So it was with some anxiety that we approached the 2011 campaign. Zack isn't the kind of person who makes a grand master plan and then sticks to it, so until it played out, I really didn't know what the 2011 campaign would look like. Instead of dreaming up plans, though, Zack and team had spent the months leading up to the fundraiser A/B testing and experimenting with ways to shorten the fundraiser and reduce our reliance on a single message/message-bearer. And so they learned tons of stuff: How long an appeal needed to be to work, what kind of photo/lighting/background was effective, what payment process would work, etc. And there was the usual usability testing, optimization of donations forms, etc. This, by the way, told us that we didn't need graphically obnoxious banners -- the simple text on plain white with a photo worked just fine. (But it needed to be the right kind of photo, and yes, moving it to the left helped as well.) And Zack hired storytellers, not an uncontroversial idea at the time, whose job it would be to go out there and collect the most compelling personal stories from people in our movement, wherever they may be and whatever role they may play. This allowed us to share lots of those stories, both through the testing and then through the actual fundraiser itself. There's more -- prior to the campaign, the tech team worked enormously hard to integrate a new payment system, GlobalCollect. This would allow us to accept payments not just in all major currencies, but also through bank transfer, direct debit, and country-specific payment methods: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give/en This, too, in combination with more effectively organized efforts by hundreds of volunteer translators, meant that banner impressions that were previously wasted (because people had no way to actually donate) were now going to turn into support for our work. All the testing and infrastructure improvements meant that the first day of the fundraiser was our most effective day ever, by far. And it meant that we could raise our goal in less time than before. We've also turned off the banners for registered users in record time, and for the first time disabled banners for anyone making a donation. But most importantly it allowed us to share appeals like these: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/22/who-is-asking-you-to-donate-to-wikipedia-and-the-wikimedia-foundation/ These letters help people understand what Wikimedia is about through many different voices, metaphors and experiences. The story of an editor like Sengai Podhuvanar from India, or of a donor like Akshaya Iyengar, or Ward Cunningham's own story. The storytellers worked hard to capture the essence of these voices, so that they would be heard loud and clear. The team could have chosen to use that time to show more effective Jimmy banners, or to pick one or two other banners and focus the entire campaign on them. Instead it sacrificed short term revenue impact for a more diverse and interesting campaign. Years ago, we used to worry that people wouldn't/didn't understand that Wikimedia is a non-profit, that it's created by volunteers, that it's international/multilingual. Many misconceptions still exist, but for anyone paying attention, we've demolished them. I know that everyone involved is enormously proud of working their butts off for
Re: [Foundation-l] Article Feedback Tool 5 testing deployment
On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:57 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: One thing I'd like to ask (which may be in the on-wiki documentation, sorry if you've already answered there) is what is going to happen to the other articles that are not part of this new test group? Hi Liam, this is the first time we're experimenting with free text feedback in a serious way. We've not decided yet whether that's a good idea or not. This will depend in large part on the signal/noise ratio and volume of the feedback we're getting, which will be coded through the process described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5/Feedback_evaluation Note, also, that some of the forms include different forms of quantitative feedback as well. We'll evaluate those as well, and compare our findings with what we've learned, and are still learning, from AFTv4. This evaluation will precede any site-wide changes to the current AFT deployment. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 9:52 PM, David Richfield davidrichfi...@gmail.com wrote: What effect would a less aggressive tone have had? Would you have been more likely to convince your audience? less likely to alienate people? It's a fair point. I think part of the problem is that people are feeling that reasonable, calm, friendly inquiries are likely to be ignored and making noise is necessary to get attention. I want to make sure we do our best to respond to reasonable inquiries in a timely manner, and would ask all WMF staff and contractors to help me in that regard. In general, if you feel that an engineering issue merits escalation, never hesitate to email me directly and, unless I'm totally swamped, I'll try to help. There are other folks whose job it is to help with triaging, like Mark Hershberger (mah at wikimedia dot org) and Sumana Harihareswara (sumanah at wikimedia dot org, especially for things like patch review), and of course you can also contact any of the engineering directors for tech issues, raise them on IRC, on Bugzilla, etc. It's true that sometimes people complaining loudly helps us to take an issue more seriously, but ideally that shouldn't be necessary and our processes should work to understand what's causing pain and what isn't. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 7:55 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously wrongly rotated and were fixed by the feature? * How many existing uploads, used on the wikis, were previously correctly rotated and were messed up by the feature? As far as I understand the issue, and others can jump and correct me if I'm getting it wrong: Technically, nothing was messed up by the feature. Rather, the software previously did not take EXIF rotation into account, and some images had incorrect EXIF rotation information to begin with. Those images are now shown in an incorrect rotation to the user, because the incorrect EXIF rotation info is being evaluated. It's important to understand this, because it means that those images have been causing problems for re-users all along. If you open those images with modern image editing/viewing software, they will either be automatically rotated, or you'll be prompted by the software whether to apply the rotation noted in the EXIF tag. The situation has been significantly exacerbated by a recent need to purge old thumbnails to free up diskspace. So, while the cleanup that's happening now is very frustrating (and I definitely agree we could have anticipated and communicated this better), it's a cleanup that's long overdue. (Either by stripping EXIF info from files altogether, or by ensuring that the rotation of the image matches the one in the metadata.) Is there more that we can do at the present time to help? Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:12 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: What was messed up was the presentation of images that were already displayed correctly. Well, technically, they were displayed incorrectly. ;-) The image told the software Please rotate me, and the software didn't. But the image would tell any other software the same thing, causing pain for re-users. So it was definitely an issue that needed to get resolved, one way or another. I don't know off-hand how many images are affected (the estimate on Commons is about 50,000, but I don't know what that's based on). The thing is, we've always gotten drive-by uploads by users who didn't bother to fix any rotation issues with their images after upload, and so we can't just go back and strip EXIF info from all old files, because some old files were fixed by the change. It looks to me like the only sensible response is human review followed by rotation of images that need to be fixed -- which is precisely what's happening, with a bot performing rotations as needed. I've asked Rob Lanphier to look at this as well and determine if an additional response is needed; if you think there's more we can/should do to help, please let him know. The best place for further discussion of this issue is: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Rotation -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 7:48 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: The best place for further discussion of this issue is: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Rotation And, lots more discussions here as well: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bots/Work_requests#Maintenance_category_for_files_with_EXIF_rotation_other_than_0_degrees If I interpret that discussion correctly, the number of globally used files that were affected is estimated to be about 20,000, with an additional 35,000 files that weren't globally used, based on analysis of the image metadata dumps. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising is for men
On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:42 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: Hey Nathan, a bit OT from the thread title, but just clarifying a couple of points: * The WMF spends over $2 million on fundraising alone In FY 2010-11, WMF raised $23M in contributions, not counting $ restricted to future time periods. In the same time period, $2.142M expenses were allocated to fundraising, including $556K in credit card processing fees. [1][2] That's altogether less than 10 cents on the dollar, which by the standards of charity watchdog organizations, is qualified as an excellent fundraising efficiency (cf. [3][4]). This includes very different types of fundraising activity (grant-writing and grant management, donor cultivation, usability testing of credit card forms, etc.). * The travel budget is nearly $2m (that's right, two million dollars in travel costs) The 2011-12 travel budget is $1.742M [5]. A little bit of detail as to how this breaks out is included in the Audited Financials FAQ [1], but in a nutshell: * WMF is a global organization and is doing work on the ground in many corners of the world, in partnership with chapters where they exist, and WMF staff routinely have to travel internationally as a normal part of their day-to-day work; * WMF sponsors volunteer travel extensively, for Wikimania, for hackathons, for WMF site visits and meetings, and for many other purposes; * Many contractors work for WMF from all over the world, and it's part of the cost of doing business in this way that you bring people together for face-to-face meetings on a regular basis. Travel is regulated by the WMF travel policy which ensures that individual travel expenses are not excessive or profligate. [6] * The budget includes a whopping $14 million on staffing costs (at the planned 117 number of staff, that is nearly $120k per staff member) The 2010-11 staffing budget is $13.3M. [5] Staffing costs include payroll taxes, recruiting costs, and benefits, and of course pay bands for different roles vary significantly, but are consistent with similar non-profit organizations, i.e. below the market rate paid at for-profit companies. More background about the guiding principles of Wikimedia's compensation practices can be found in [7]. * The last fundraiser sent over $6 million to chapters, with little insight or transparency into how that money is spent Chapters processing donations in the 2010 fundraiser were required, as part of their participation, to commit to various obligations. See [8] for the Wikimedia UK agreement as an example. Specifically with regard to transparency, WMF, community, and chapters have worked together to ensure that key information about chapter activities and financial information can be easily found. [9] At its July 2011 Board meeting, the WMF Board of Trustees agreed to a letter regarding fundraising accountability [10] which further emphasized principles of accountability, transparency, and fairness, and led to shifting chapters increasingly towards applying for grants to fund program work. Program plans both for chapters receiving grants and processing payments through the fundraiser are shared and reviewed publicly. [11] * The number of staff is planned to more than double between 2009-10 and 2011-12, with almost 70% of that increase attributed to non-tech staff The planned staffing increase from FY 2009 to FY 2012 is from 50 to 117 (+67). [12] In the same time period, tech staffing specifically is projected to grow from 22 to 50 (+28). That's 41.8% of the increase, not 30%. The tech share is higher in the current fiscal year, where it accounts for 56% of the planned staffing growth. Simply put, the Global Development and Community Department did not exist and were newly created; WMF has decided to tackle new areas of work that never happened before, as exemplified e.g. by the Summer of Research, the Global Education Program, etc. And, let's be honest - aside from the $3m or so spent on hosting, The costs that you find labeled Internet hosting in the Annual Plan should never be confused with the cost of hosting Wikipedia. Those are two very different numbers (and we should make this clearer in the next plan). The hosting cost only covers bandwidth and operating expenses for running our sever farms. There's a separate cost center called capital expenditures which covers actual hardware purchases ($2.6M budgeted in 2011-12). To arrive at a meaningful cost of hosting Wikipedia (without any software improvements) one would have to back out of that experimental projects like Wikimedia Labs, but further add essential engineering staffing and contractors. But the 11-12 plan called for the Visual Editor and Wikimedia Labs to go into initial production mode in December 2011 - which is in two days, without any recent announcements or updates about either improvement. (Labs closed beta has 13 users in its active list, defined as more than 1 edit in the last 30 days. Only 2 have
Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists
On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 10:21 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Unfortunately, the issue is not dead. That's correct; nobody from WMF has said otherwise. What's dead is the idea of a category-based image filter, not the idea of giving additional options to readers to reversibly collapse images they may find offensive, shocking, or inappropriate in the context in which they're viewing them (e.g. at work). However, Sue has made it clear that she wants the WMF staff to work with the community to find a solution that doesn't mean strong opposition. Her presentation on the issue in Hannover begins with this slide: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3APresentation_Gardner_Hannover.pdfpage=15 My personal view is that such a solution will need to take into account that actual current editorial practices and perceptions in our projects vary a great deal, as did the image filter poll results by language. As I pointed out before, projects like Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia are currently collapsing content that's not even on the radar in most of these discussions (e.g. the 1866 painting L'Origine du monde in Hebrew Wikipedia), while German Wikipedia put the vulva photograph on its main page. A solution that pretends that this continuum of practice can be covered with a single approach, one which doesn't give a lot of flexibility to readers and editors, is IMO not a solution at all. I'm not convinced that the collapse image one-by-one approach to develop a filter list is very valuable in and of itself due to lack of immediate practical impact and likely limited usability. The idea of making it easy to build, import and share such lists of images or image-categories would move the process of categorization into a market economy of sorts where individual or organizational demand regulates supply of available filters. This could lead to all kinds of groups advertising their own filter-lists, e.g. Scientology, Focus on the Family, etc. From there, it would be relatively small step for such a group to take its filter list and coerce users to only access Wikipedia with the filter irreversibly in place. While third parties are already able to coerce their users to not see certain content, creating an official framework for doing so IMO puts us dangerously close to censors: it may lead to creation of regimes of censorship that did not previously exist, and may be used to exercise pressure on WMF to change its default view settings in certain geographies since all the required functionality would already be readily available. My personal view on this issue has always been that one of the most useful things we could do for readers is to make NPOV, well-vetted and thorough advice too users on how to manage and personalize their net access available to them. Wikipedia is only one site on the web, and whatever we do is not going to extend to the rest of the user's experience anyway. There are companies that specialize in filtering the Net; we could point people to those providers and give advice on how to install specific applications, summarizing criticism and praise they have received. On the other hand, such advice would be pretty removed from the experience of the reader, and l do think there are additional reasonable things we could do. So I'm supportive of approaches which give an editing community additional flexibility in warning their readers of content they may find objectionable, and give readers the ability to hide (in the general or specific case) such content. As I said previously, this wouldn't create a new regime of filter lists or categories, merely a broad community-defined standard by which exclusion of some content may be desirable, which could vary by language as it does today. Kim, I just read the conversation on your talk page. In general, I agree that more research into both the current practices of our editing communities as well as reader expectations and needs would be valuable. Right now we have some anecdotal data points from the projects, Robert's original research which mostly focuses on establishing definitions and principles, and the image filter poll results. I think the latter are useful data if carefully analyzed, but they do mingle low-activity users who are chiefly readers with the core editing community in ways that don't give us tremendously clear information by group. The poll also referred to a filtering concept that's now been rejected. At the same time, I do think that we shouldn't hesitate to build some cheap prototypes to make abstract ideas more understandable. I think to advance our understanding, as well as the state of the conversation, through both additional pointed research, as well as discussion of some interactive prototypes, without spending tremendous amounts of time and money on either, feels like a response that's commensurate to the scale and importance of the issue. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development,
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia India Program Trust
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Hisham hmun...@wikimedia.org wrote: Announcement of Wikimedia India Program Trust Congratulations, Hisham. I know this has been a lot of work for you and the team over the last few months. I look forward to seeing the programs that the trust and the chapter develop together. There's tons of work to do. :-) -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia India Program Trust
On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Bishakha Datta bishakhada...@gmail.com wrote: My personal view is that there is enough work ahead for not just one, or two, but numerous entities, formal and informal, to enter the fray and actualize this potential. Already, there are many more requests for collaboration within India than either WMIN or WIPT or both put together can handle. No kidding. Nor do I think there's any point in playing blame games when a first pilot (!) like the India Education Program doesn't meet expectations. The point of trying things is to learn so we can improve over time. I look forward to seeing some of you based in India at the Hackathon and WikiConference next week: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011 Cheers, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia India Program Trust
On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 11:04 PM, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.com wrote: to get a feeling about the size, the number of readers, contributors, and a trend in it, i tried to find the india country statistics on editing and reading: The major program initiative undertaken by Hisham's team so far is the India Education Program. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Courses So far there's been a pilot program, which uncovered lots of serious issues with the quality of content contributed by the participating courses. This is now driving further iteration of the program, as it should. The pilot very much built on, and was informed by, the lessons learned in the Public Policy Initiative, which was the largest and most successful student engagement program ever undertaken in the Wikimedia movement (!). Both the India Education Program and the PPI have been led by Frank Schulenburg, who is an experienced and accomplished Wikipedian. at the same time, another part of the world, a foto competition, no trust, no consultants, no KPMG involved, but a lot of volunteers and chapters. it gave 160'000 images for wikimedia commons, in one month. and, 30% new contributors. [2] WLM is a wonderful project, one which WMF actively supported (most importantly by improving Upload Wizard to directly support the management of the upload campaigns). It really is credit to all the people who developed it, and built on the lessons from last year's WLM in the Netherlands. It's also a photo competition, which by its very nature is a very different kind of program than something like the IEP, with very different risks and opportunities. It's easy to compare apples and oranges and say those apples are rotten, my oranges are so much nicer. But they are very different fruit entirely. :) I don't think anyone is served by stereotyping people or programs. We're all pulling towards the same goal. That doesn't mean constantly patting ourselves on the back, but let's focus on the the substance of the work rather than on peddling stereotypes about ignorant consultants and outsiders. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove
On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 12:14 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: A user preference or some other way of disabling the use of WikiLove on a per-user basis might be nice. Absolutely, disabling it on the recipient side (so that a sending user gets a disabled icon saying This user prefers more personal notes to WikiLove messages or something similar) is in the backlog. I've held that the existing preference to disable should go both ways. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Community consensus for software changes (Re: Show community consensus for Wikilove)
On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 6:54 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: I see Brandon replied to this thread several times; did anyone notice if the question in the OP (if community consensus is required for implementation, where was it demonstrated for en.wp) was answered? As a matter of general practice, the Wikimedia Foundation aims to be responsive to the community both before and after the deployment of software, but it doesn't obtain community consensus before deploying software which it would like to deploy on its sites and services, nor does it necessarily write or deploy software changes if a consensus to do so exists. That has always been the case; indeed, there was no explicit consensus ahead of time for the vast majority of major software changes in Wikimedia's history. Being responsive and applying appropriate effort towards a problem shouldn't be confused with a constitutional commitment to act only with, or never against, a consensus in a community. We've never made such a commitment as a general principle. Some features, like WikiLove, require community customization to be useful in the first place; others, like FlaggedRevs, influence a community's practices so deeply that they require both the community's expertise and buy-in to succeed. And of course there are lots of small tweaks and customizations that communities can request from us, but we can only respond to them if they can demonstrate that there's a consensus to proceed. However, if we found evidence that, say, WikiLove turns out to be the best thing since sliced bread (which of course it isn't, duh -- it's just a small bit of culture shift), then we might put lots of effort towards working with the community to localize it and deploy it globally. As it is, that particular feature is still experimental, and will likely continue to change shape and application, as we better understand the dynamics of how it is used. The partnership between WMF and the community is founded on mutual trust. If you don't trust WMF, you can - and probably should - contribute your effort elsewhere, because WMF may - and probably will - do things you won't like. HTH, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community consensus for software changes (Re: Show community consensus for Wikilove)
On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote: If I understand correctly, the English Wikipedia is the main test deployment for this as an experimental feature. While the feature remains experimental, additional deployments to other wikis would only happen if requested by community consensus. That's right. Because we're not actively organizing or vetting any efforts to localize the feature beyond its initial test deployment, we can't deploy to other languages unless there's a clear, proposed configuration and a consensus to use it. Given the still experimental nature of the feature, and the relatively high cost to manage a community-wide change, that's purely a pragmatic choice. We've made the same choice for ArticleFeedback and other experimental features, and will likely do so with others. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Community consensus for software changes (Re: Show community consensus for Wikilove)
On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: That's a pretty bold statement for the WMF to make - If you don't trust the WMF, don't contribute to WMF projects. Are you sure that's what you meant? Hi Nathan, let me try to clarify what I mean by trust in this context. We can, indeed must, talk very openly about what works and what doesn't, and whether we're doing the right kinds of things. That discourse, and the readiness to engage in it and to change course for the right reasons, is key for a relationship based on mutual trust to work. It's easy for us to accidentally send mixed messages, though, as this thread has shown. Because so many things are done in response to community consensus, there may be an expectation that this is always the case, and that that's just how we work. Change in Wikimedia projects has, however, always been a continuous process of give and take, with a certain element of arbitrariness, seeking to find the right balance between acceptance and progress, and being bold to try new things. That process can be very messy, as the image filter discussion has shown. So, what I'm saying is that if you (generic you) believe, for whichever reason (lack of trust, philosophical reasons, or whatever), that WMF shouldn't be permitted to make meaningful changes in Wikimedia projects without obtaining upfront community consensus, you'll probably find more satisfaction and joy in volunteering in a different context. That's not how WMF projects operate, and they are very unlikely to ever do so, for reasons that have been articulated here and elsewhere. Indeed, it's part of WMF's understanding of itself that part of its job is to continually challenge existing agreements and practices in order to support positive change. Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Ideas for newbie recruitment
On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Would it be overwhelmingly hard to program a pop-up dialogue which would first ask which type of source the editor is citing from, which would lead to a form with labeled textboxes for the various elements of a reference citation with an asterisk beside the elements considered vital. My guess is that quite a few of the elements of such are already in the code. A lot of this already exists in the cite toolbar on the English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cite_toolbar_2.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Citing_sources_tutorial,_part_2.ogv It's very en.wp specific (because the templates are), and the usability is still a bit poor. It's one of those low-hanging fruit things where a little bit of effort could go a long way. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] On certain shallow, American-centered, foolish software initiatives backed by WMF
On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 3:00 PM, Teofilo teofilow...@gmail.com wrote: Now we are seeing the appearance of a feedback tool on the English Wikipedia ? How long are the non-English Wikipedias going to be free from this new stupid tool which has nothing to do with writing an encyclopaedia ? In addition to English Wikipedia, WikiLove has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Norwegian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, MediaWiki.org and Commons. So, WikiLove is spreading. Maybe one day it will even come to German Wikipedia. I'm guessing 2020. ;-) -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Office Hours on the article feedback tool
On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 3:11 AM, Oliver Keyes scire.fac...@gmail.com wrote: To be clear, we're not talking about junking the idea; we will still have an Article Feedback Tool that lets readers provide feedback to editors. The goal is more to move away from a subjective rating system, and towards something the editors can look at and go huh, that's a reasonable suggestion as to how to fix the article, I'll go do that or aw, that's really nice! I'm glad they liked it so much And, the idea is to experiment with some alternative approaches in parallel with the existing deployment, not to scrap the existing deployment and start over immediately. We don't know yet which reader feedback mechanisms are going to be the most useful to meet the two core objectives (engaging readers as much and as usefully as possible in article development, and measuring change-over-time in quality). Initial wireframes to be tested against each other can be found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5/Feature_Requirements -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 1:16 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: This would appear to indicate the opposition is to *any* personal image filter per the Board resolution, and the category-based proposal additionally as an example of such rather than as the main topic of the vote. I think that says should be scrapped pretty blindingly clearly. The literal translation of what was being voted on: Persönliche Bildfilter (Filter, die illustrierende Dateien anhand von Kategorien der Wikipedia verbergen und vom Leser an- und abgeschaltet werden können, vgl. den vorläufigen [[Entwurf]] der Wikimedia Foundation) sollen entgegen dem Beschluss des Kuratoriums der Wikimedia Foundation in der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia nicht eingeführt werden und es sollen auch keine Filterkategorien für auf dieser Wikipedia lokal gespeicherte Dateien angelegt werden. Personal image filters (filters, which hide illustrating files based on categories and which can be turned on and off by the reader, see the preliminary [[draft]] by the Wikimedia Foundation) should, contrary to the Board's decision, not be introduced in the German Wikipedia, and no filter categories should be created for locally uploaded content. The [[draft]] link pointed to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Personal_image_filter So it was pretty closely tied to the mock-ups, just like the referendum was. Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: There has always been a consensus that what you are proposing is evil and against what we as a non-profit free content site stand for. What am I proposing, Jussi-Ville? So far, the only material proposal I've made as part of this debate is here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/069077.html And, I don't think you're being accurate, historically or otherwise. Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedia have implemented their own personal image hiding feature (http://ur1.ca/5g81t and http://ur1.ca/5g81w), and even paintings like The Origin of the World are hidden by default (!) e.g. in Hebrew Wikipedia ( http://ur1.ca/5g81c ) , or images of the founder of the Bahai faith in Arabic Wikipedia ( http://ur1.ca/5g81s ). Do you think that the Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedians who implemented these templates are evil? Do you think that it is evil to leave it up to editors whether they want to implement similar collapsing on a per-article basis (and to leave it up to communities to agree on policies around that)? Because that's what I'm proposing. And I don't think it's particularly evil, nor inconsistent with our traditions. Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com wrote: No one said it would be evil. But since we already have working solutions for this projects, why do we need another, now global, solution, based on categories? Thats when it becomes hairy. The Board of Trustees didn't pass a resolution asking for the implementation of a filter based on categories. The Board asked Sue in consultation with the community, to develop and implement a personal image hiding feature that will enable readers to easily hide images hosted on the projects that they do not wish to view, either when first viewing the image or ahead of time through preference settings. Based on the consultation and discussion that's taken place so far, I think it's pretty safe to say that a uniform approach based on categories has about a snowball's chance in hell of actually being widely adopted, used and embraced by the community, if not triggering strong opposition and antagonism that's completely against our goals and our mission. With that in mind, I would humbly propose that we kill with fire at this point the idea of a category-based image filtering system. There are, however, approaches to empowering both editors and readers that do not necessarily suffer from the same problems. Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com wrote: What approaches do you have in mind, that would empower the editors and the readers, aside from an hide/show all solution? 1) Add a collapsible [*] parameter to the File: syntax, e.g. [[File:Lemonparty.jpg|collapsible]]. 2) When present, add a notice [*] to the top of the page enabling the reader to collapse collapsible images (and to make that the default setting for all pages if desired). 3) When absent, do nothing. [*] The exact UI language here could be discussed at great length, but is irrelevant to the basic operating principles. Advantages: * Communities without consensus to use collapsible media don't have to until/unless such a consensus emerges. It can be governed by normal community policy. * One community's judgments do not affect another community's. Standards can evolve and change over time and in the cultural context. * Readers of projects like Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedia (which are already collapsing images) who are currently not empowered to choose between collapsed by default vs. expanded by default would be enabled to do so. * Readers only encounter the notice on pages that actually have content where it's likely to be of any use. * Respects the editorial judgment of the community, as opposed to introducing a parallel track of controversial content assessment. Doesn't pretend that a technical solution alone can solve social and editorial challenges. * Easy to implement, easy to iterate on, easy to disable if there are issues. Disadvantages: * Doesn't help with the specific issues of Wikimedia Commons (what's educational scope) and with issues like sorting images of masturbation with electric toothbrushes into the toothbrush category. Those are arguably separate issues that should be discussed separately. * Without further information about what our readers want and don't want, we're reinforcing pre-existing biases (whichever they may be) of each editorial community, so we should also consider ways to continually better understand our audience. Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 2:56 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 22 October 2011 22:51, Tobias Oelgarte And, in detail, why is a hide/show all solution inadequate? What is the use case this does not serve? Clearly Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedia found a show/hide all solution inadequate. Are folks from those communities on the list? It would be interesting to hear from them as to why they ended up with the collapsing approach they took. To the extent that there's a discernible institutional view as to why these options are being discussed in the first place, it's not about morality of the images, but it's about helping our audience to not be freaked out, alienated or pissed off by the editorial choices we make in our projects. And they might be so because they're in a public or professional setting, or because they're using our projects together with their kids, or they don't know what to expect when looking up a given topic, or because they have particular sensibilities. A show/hide all images function is likely too drastic to serve some of these use cases well. So for example, if you're at work, you might not want to have autofellatio on your screen by accident, but you'd be annoyed at having to un-hide a fabulous screenshot of a wonderful piece of open source software in order to mitigate that risk. True, most of the time it's fairly self-evident what images an article might contain and you could make the choice to show/hide before looking it up. Not always, though, and of course it's somewhat illusionary to think that Wiki[mp]edia consumption always follows a highly predictable, intentional pattern. Making it easy for editors to say, based on normal editorial judgment and established practices in their project, Hey, reader, there's something here you might not want to see ... and BTW, would you like to remember that choice? seems like a more straightforward accommodation of the concerns that we're talking about than saying We're not censored! Click here to turn off images if you don't like it. With that said, the mobile site already has a generic Disable images view and something similar would definitely make sense on the main site as well. If both options were available (marking images as collapsible in a standard way, show/hide all for all media), communities could evolve standards and practices within that framework as they see fit. Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 4:14 PM, Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelga...@googlemail.com wrote: Isn't that the same as putting some images inside the category inappropriate content? Will it not leave the impression to the reader that we think that this is something not anybody should see? Can it be easily used by providers to filter out this images? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Censornamespace=1limit=500 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Bad_image_list http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_men Simply in the process of doing our normal editorial work, we're already providing a number of ways to identify content in the broad area of someone might be upset of this or even in specific categories, and of course censorship also often relies on deriving characteristics from the content itself without any need for additional metadata (keyword filters, ranging from simple to sophisticated; image pattern matching, etc.). It's not clear that a low-granularity identification of content that some editors, in some projects, have identified as potentially objectionable to some readers, for a wide variety of different reasons, adds meaningfully to the existing toolset of censors. A censor who's going to nuke all that content from orbit would probably be equally happy to just block everything that has the word sex in it; in other words, they are a reckless censor, and they will apply a reckless degree of censorship irrespective of our own actions. Erik ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation Report, September 2011
Hello all, please find below the WMF report for September, in plain text. As always, the editable and formatted version is on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_September_2011 The reports are posted on the Wikimedia blog, too: http://blog.wikimedia.org/c/corporate/wmf-monthly-reports/ As an experiment, we are publishing a separate Highlights summary of key Wikimedia Foundation reports. Please consider helping non-English-language communities to stay updated on the most important WMF activities in the past month, by providing a translation: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Highlights,_September_2011 Let us know how we can make this more useful for you :-) Many thanks, Erik -- * 1 Data and Trends * 2 Financials * 3 Highlights o 3.1 Public Policy Initiative and Global Education Program o 3.2 Technology o 3.3 Community o 3.4 Global Development * 4 Technology o 4.1 Tech Highlights o 4.2 Operations o 4.3 Features Engineering o 4.4 Mobile o 4.5 Special projects o 4.6 Platform Engineering * 5 Research * 6 Community o 6.1 Projects o 6.2 Fundraising o 6.3 Public Policy Initiative o 6.4 Fellowship Program * 7 Global Development o 7.1 Grants Awarded and Executed o 7.2 Chapter Relations o 7.3 Global South o 7.4 Brazil Catalyst + 7.4.1 Research on Portuguese Wikipedia o 7.5 MENA Catalyst o 7.6 Mobile Strategy and Business Development o 7.7 Editor Survey o 7.8 Reader Survey o 7.9 Mobile Research o 7.10 Global Education Program o 7.11 Student organizations o 7.12 India Programs o 7.13 Communications + 7.13.1 Global Communications + 7.13.2 Storylines through August + 7.13.3 Other worthwhile reads + 7.13.4 Global media coverage + 7.13.5 Wikipedia Signpost + 7.13.6 WMF Blog posts o 7.14 Media Contact * 8 Human Resources o 8.1 Staff Changes o 8.2 Statistics o 8.3 Department Updates * 9 Finance and Administration * 10 Legal * 11 Visitors and Guests == Data and Trends == Global unique visitors for August: 422 million (+7.9% compared with July; +13.7% compared with the previous year) (comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release September data later in October) Page requests for September: 15.8 billion (+5,1% compared with August; +9.0% compared with the previous year) Report Card for August 2011: The report card is currently undergoing a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard. == Financials == (Financial information is only available for August 2011 at the time of this report.) Financial information as of August 31, 2011 Revenue: $1,415,075 Expenses: * Technology Group: $1,474,075 * Community/Fundraiser Group: $493,102 * Global Development Group: $552,953 * Governance Group: $183,732 * Finance/Legal/HR/Admin. Group: $921,318 Total Expenses: $3,625,273 Total surplus/(loss): ($2,210,198) Revenue was ahead of plan at $1.4M due to an increase in donations. Expenses were below plan at $3.6M actual vs. $4.5M plan. Expenses were below plan due to lower than plan expenditures in Capital Expenditures, Chapter Grants and other activities due to being only two months into the fiscal year. Cash of $15.5M, which is six months of cash reserves at current spending levels. == Highlights == === Public Policy Initiative and Global Education Program === Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-Ambassador-Program-Logo.png Logo of the Wikipedia Ambassador Program (which originated as part of the Public Policy Initiative) In September, the Public Policy Initiative wrapped up after 17 months. Collaboratively, the team created a final report for the Stanton Foundation (awaiting financial summary) and documented achievements, best practices and lessons learned. Other team activities included: Overall project documentation for Chapters Report; last PPI Regional Ambassador trainings throughout the United States; wrapping up the project research components and presenting results on-wiki, in papers and at the end of the month in a final presentation to the rest of the staff at one of the Wikimedia Foundation's brown bag meetings. Additionally, we transitioned specific project activities to the new Global Education Team. With the end of the Public Policy Initiative, the contracts of three team members, Sage Ross, Amy Roth and Mishelle Gonzales, ended by convention. We thank them for their hard work and their commitment to our mission. Sage's, Amy's and Mishelle's involvement in the Public Policy Initiative was key in linking Wikipedia peer production with higher education. We wish them all the very best for their future. Also in September, the new Global Education Program team worked on preparing the first Global Education Program Metrics and Activities
Re: [Foundation-l] Blackout at Italian Wikipedia
On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 4:00 AM, Domas Mituzas midom.li...@gmail.com wrote: Except that WMF as steward of the open information can roll any of that blackout crap back. The only thing we truly could do is restore read access. But if the it.wikipedia community really wants to strike, there's very little we can do to stop them. :) Wikis are great for organizing work. By necessary extension, they are also great for organizing its discontinuation. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 11:45 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: The complete absence of mentioning the de:wp poll that was 85% against any imposed filter is just *weird*. The intro and footer of Sue's post say: The purpose of this post is not to talk specifically about the referendum results or the image hiding feature She also wrote in the comments: What I talk about in this post is completely independent of the filter, and it’s worth discussing (IMO) on its own merits So it's perhaps not surprising that she doesn't mention the de.wp poll regarding the filter in a post that she says is not about the filter. ;-) Now, it's completely fair to say that the filter issue remains the elephant in the room until it's resolved what will actually be implemented and how. And it's understandable that lots of people are responding accordingly. But I think it's pretty clear that Sue was trying to start a broader conversation in good faith. I know that she's done lots of thinking about the conversations so far including the de.wp poll, and she's also summarized some of this in her report to the Board: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/Sue%27s_report_to_the_board/en#What_has_happened_since_the_referendum The broader conversation she's seeking to kick off in her blog post _can_, IMO, usefully inform the filter conversation. What Sue is saying is that we sometimes fail to take the needs and expectations of our readers fully into account. Whether you agree with her specific examples or not, this is certainly generally true in a community where decisions are generally made by whoever happens to show up, and sometimes the people who show up are biased, stupid or wrong. And even when the people who show up are thoughtful, intelligent and wise, the existing systems, processes and expectations may lead them to only be able to make imperfect decisions. Let me be specific. Let's take the good old autofellatio article, which was one of the first examples of an article with a highly disputed explicit image on the English Wikipedia (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Autofellatio/Archive_1 ). If you visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Autofellatio , you'll notice that there are two big banners: Wikipedia is not censored and If you find some images offensive you can configure your browser to mask them, with further instructions. Often, these kinds of banners come into being because people (readers and active editors) find their way to the talk page and complain about an image being offensive. They are intended to do two things: Explain our philosophy, but also give people support in making more informed choices. This is, in other words, the result of reasonable discussion by thoughtful, intelligent and wise people about how to deal with offensive images (and in some cases, text). And yet, it's a deeply imperfect solution. The autofellatio page has been viewed 85,000 times in September. The associated discussion page has been viewed 400 times. The options not to see an image page, which is linked from many many of these pages, has been viewed 750 times. We can reasonably hypothesize without digging much further into the data that there's a significant number of people who are offended by images they see in Wikipedia but who don't know how to respond, and we can reasonably hypothesize that the responses that Wikipedians have conceived so far to help them have been overall insufficient in doing so. It would be great to have much more data -- but again, I think these are reasonable hypotheses. The image filter in an incarnation similar to the one that's been discussed to-date is one possible response, but it's not the only one. Indeed, nothing in the Board resolution prescribes a complex system based on categories that exists adjacent to normal mechanisms of editorial control. An alternative would be, for example, to give Wikipedians a piece of wiki syntax that they can use to selectively make images hideable on specific articles. Imagine visiting the article Autofellatio and seeing small print at the top that says: This article contains explicit images that some readers may find objectionable. [[Hide all images on this page]]. As requested by the Board resolution, it could then be trivial to selectively unhide specific images. If desired, it could be made easy to browse articles with that setting on-by-default, which would be similar to the way the Arabic Wikipedia handles some types of controversial content ( cf. http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D8%B6%D8%B9_%D8%AC%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%8A ). This could possibly be entirely implemented in JS and templates without any complex additional software support, but it would probably be nice to create a standardized tag for it and design the feature itself for maximum usability. Solutions of this type would have the advantage of giving Wiki[mp]edians full editorial judgment and responsibility to use them as they see fit, as opposed to being
Re: [Foundation-l] A Wikimedia project has forked
On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Tempodivalse r2d2.stra...@verizon.net wrote: I thought the Wikimedia community should know that a large portion of WIkinews' contributor base has forked into its own project (http://theopenglobe.org) Congratulations to the successful launch of the fork and good luck! Hopefully this will lead to some new discoveries that will benefit all efforts in this space. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Tragedy: videos and slides from presentations Wikimanias (lately 2011 in Haifa)
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 11:02 AM, Brion Vibber br...@pobox.com wrote: The code exists and has been revamped a few times in response to reviews, but I'm not sure whether there are actually any assigned resources for pushing it to production at this time. Yes, there are. Ian and Neil are scheduled to do a code review of TMH, once remaining high priority issues with UploadWizard have been resolved, later this month. Before we've done an initial assessment of the code, it's hard to give a realistic deployment estimate -- there may be parts that need to be rewritten or taken out. So I won't commit us to a public date just yet, just to say that it's definitely something I'd like to see user-visible progress on this calendar year. Whatever remaining bugbears are lurking in the code, TMH definitely represents the key set of features that are needed to make video in Wikimedia projects suck significantly less (multi-codec and multi-bitrate derivatives generation; a non-ugly player skin; subtitle support). This is really a baseline feature set that we have to get done (this and better large file upload support) to not give users an embarrassingly bad video experience. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Start questions and answers site within Wikimedia
On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 1:25 AM, Oliver Moran oliver.mo...@gmail.com wrote: The issues you raise about open-source vs. proprietary software, that's an open-source vs. proprietary software debate - and one that sounds like it is on the ideological edge of that arena. As a software engineer who develops proprietary software, I can almost guarantee that a whole bunch of open-source software (e.g. MIT licenced) is in the Stack Exchange software. Indeed, just by looking at their web source its possible to see proof of that. Because of this, the matter of the benefits of open source software vs. the proprietary software is a theoretical one. In modern practise, the two cannot be so cleanly separated. There's a simple question: Can you run all key services relevant to Wikimedia using only free/open software? If the answer is no, we're losing something very important, which isn't merely about sticking to our guns, but about ensuring the survivability of what we're doing for not just years, but decades to come. I think the idea of a dedicated Q/A site is an interesting one -- but not necessarily the best way to address the underlying problem. We're test-deploying a small feature for microfeedback (including requests for help) from new users next week. The initial deployment is designed to assess the signal/noise ratio of such microfeedback make a decision about whether to iterate further on that model. You can read a bit more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VPT#Quick_Feedback_on_Editing_Experience:_New_Editors Such systems could potentially be expanded further, as can systems like the new Article Feedback tool, to carefully manage, curate and respond to a wide variety of subjective information flows from questions to comments to reviews. In the meantime, StackOverflow, Quora friends are spending very substantial effort improving their editing features, e.g.: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/faster-edits-with-inline-editing/ IMO the convergence of curation and collaboration systems for subjective objective information flows is a pretty natural development and one which we shouldn't be afraid of. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Welcome Tilman Bayer to the Wikimedia Foundation
Welcome HaeB! Great to have you on-board. :-) I've been waiting for this announcement -- lots of stuff to do! -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: Announcement: WMF engineering promotions and role changes
FYI :-) -- Forwarded message -- From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Date: Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 5:58 PM Subject: Announcement: WMF engineering promotions and role changes To: Wikimedia developers wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org Hi folks, I’m pleased to announce the following promotions and role changes in engineering, effective immediately. * Rob Lanphier is the Director of Platform Engineering. * Tomasz Finc is the Director of Mobile and Special Projects. * Alolita Sharma is the acting Director of Features Engineering. Alolita has gracefully agreed to take on this role, for which we’re kicking off a full search process. * Mark Bergsma is now the Lead Operations Architect, reporting to CT. * Tim Starling is now the Lead Platform Architect, reporting to Rob. I’ll explain a bit more what these roles mean below, but first, please join me in congratulating Rob, Tomasz, Alolita, Mark and Tim! :-) Let me also take this opportunity to thank Danese Cooper for helping to build and professionalize the Wikimedia Foundation engineering organization as Wikimedia’s CTO. She also set these changes in motion, and our overall strategy is one that we’ve begun developing and socializing together in the last few months. Here’s how these roles fit together. The engineering department is principally structured into four sub-departments, each headed by a director who is the functional manager of all people within that sub-department: * Technical Operations - CT Woo: Keep Wikimedia Foundation sites and services running, increase uptime and performance, support code deployments, and ensure recoverability of data and services. * Platform Engineering - Rob Lanphier: Maintain and support the MediaWiki platform; ensure reliability, maintainability, and performance of our software; lead the release management process; grow and nurture the developer community and ecosystem. * Features Engineering - Alolita Sharma (Acting): Advance Wikimedia’s strategic priorities by focusing resources on specific feature projects such as the visual editor, or interventions designed to increase editor retention. * Mobile and Special Projects - Tomasz Finc: Advance Wikimedia’s mobile platform and ensure that mobile devices are fully considered across the engineering development process; execute projects with strong overlapping requirements (e.g. offline delivery of Wikimedia content). We’re also recognizing the importance of architectural engineering leadership in the development of a mature engineering organization (which also represents an additional career path for our distinguished engineers beyond “become a manager”). The three architects - Tim, Mark and Brion - will work together as follows: * Brion Vibber, as Lead Software Architect, has key architectural responsibility for getting MediaWiki ready to be the world’s leading tool for mass collaboration, by enabling the development of new technologies like the visual editor (his current priority), real-time collaboration, improved discussion systems, etc. This also includes architectural leadership to support bottom-up feature development. Brion reports directly to me. * Mark Bergsma, as Lead Operations Architect, is responsible for creating and communicating the vision and roadmap for the infrastructure needed to run all Wikimedia projects, for ensuring the design/implementation of our operating environment is reliable, scalable, supportable, secure and cost-effective, and for driving cross-functional alignment, especially with other engineering functions. * Tim Starling, as Lead Platform Architect, is responsible for the performance, stability, security and architectural cleanliness of the MediaWiki platform. Tim is leading potentially transformative engineering projects like the HipHop support in MediaWiki. He’s also a key mentor to all MediaWiki developers and is keeping us honest while we’re pursuing our feature dreams. In addition, we’re considering the shape of product and project management outside the Director-level leadership in the department. Currently, Howie Fung (Senior Product Manager) and Dario Taraborelli (Senior Research Analyst) are continuing to support our feature development projects to ensure that 1) development is aligned with strategic priorities, 2) we’re focusing the development on the needs of the user, 3) we’re making data-driven decisions and working effectively with the global wiki research community, 4) we’re engaging with the Wikimedia editor and reader community on complex feature development projects. I’m taking on the role of VP of Engineering and Product Development, on an interim basis for now. We’re not going to immediately hire either for that role or a CTO role. Thanks to Mark, Tim and Brion, we have very strong architectural leadership in the department. Moreover, we’ve got more than enough disruptive change as an engineering organization to absorb for now, so we’ve decided that it doesn’t make sense to immediately bring
Re: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Elections 2009 ( 2011 ? ) Bots
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 7:41 AM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote: In this case, the bot qualified on Norwegian Wikipedia. It's looking like global bots which aren't flagged everywhere are an edge case that should be addressed next time around. I for one welcome our new interwiki bot overlords. Thanks Andrew for getting this out, and our apologies for the quirks this time around. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] CentralNotice use
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 2:48 AM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com wrote: Are there any devs on your proposal? Or is development planned in this area? (If these are two noes, it might be an idea for WMDE's community project budget) I hope we can get some of the annoy-me-not stuff with CentralNotice fixed during the sprints leading up to the fundraiser, but beyond that, there's not yet a dedicated project to build better messaging/broadcasting tools. So if it's a possibility for WMDE (or another chapter/group/individual) to take this on, that would be great. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Very slow load time for the last few days
[Also posting to Bugzilla] According to the ops team, there are a number of separate and unrelated ops issues that have come up in the last few days: 1) Not all users are experiencing slowness, but a subset of users are. There's no definite smoking gun, but the most likely cause are ongoing issues with one of our routers in Tampa. The router will have to be taken down for maintenance to fix this issue, and order to perform this maintenance operation with minimal disruption, we need to have key ops engineers on standby to deal with any issues that may arise. My understanding is that the best available maintenance window is Tuesday next week. 2) There was a software deployment on May 18 which caused an application server overload; it was reverted the same day. 3) The mobile servers are currently intermittently overloaded, throwing internal server errors, and servers to provide additional capacity have been racked today. 4) In case you're looking at it, ganglia.wikimedia.org is not displaying correct server status information (as of yesterday); it's in the process of being fixed. We're still in the process of setting up a new primary data center location in Ashburn, VA, which will give us higher site reliability in general, and also create the possibility of safe failover in maintenance or emergency situations. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] CentralNotice use
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:52 AM, church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com wrote: There are several ways of minimizing negative effects: 1. Display it for logged-in users only. This is especially useful for information concerning active Wikimedians, e.g. Wikimania, POTY, etc. 2. Reduce weight - don't display a banner on every page view, but only on one in ten. (We have to use blank banners to do that, right?[3]) 3. Reduce duration. (e.g. Don't display banners for a month, only a week) 4. Reduce banner size and intrusiveness. Use text banners instead of colorful images. There are also specific CentralNotice features that would make it significantly less annoying, e.g. instant global dismiss. In general, if all you have is a hammer^Wbanner campaign management tool, everything looks like a banner campaign ... It's clear that there's a need for community broadcasting tools that allow for a degree of personal flexibility, whether it's by means of subscription or otherwise. We see this need expressed again and again, and answered by bots, banners, or even manual talk page notifications to large numbers of users. As an alternative approach, Wikia implemented an extension that placed dismissible messages on top of the talk page: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SiteWideMessages Combined with tags/subscriptions, a similar approach could be very powerful. I'm glad that we have CentralNotice -- it's become immensely flexible. But it's driven largely by the needs of the fundraiser and I hope that WMF will be able to invest in this toolset also from the point of view of community/chapter/WMF communication needs. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Very slow load time for the last few days
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:23 AM, Sarah slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: Could someone from the Foundation or one of the developers say whether this is being looked into? I've requested an assessment of the current situation and will post more to this thread when I hear back, unless someone beats me to it. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Outdated manual
2011/4/9 Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com: May someone update manual in which it is written that Wikipedia is the fifth site by traffic? For the most of 2010 and whole 2011 it has varied between 6th and 8th place [1]. WMF sites are the fifth popular web property in the world according to comScore, where web properties are all sites operated by a single entity. Indeed, WP by itself would still be -- as of February, 376M out of 379M uniques go to Wikipedia.org; there's substantial audience overlap with the other sites, the largest of which is Wiktionary.org with 10.4M uniques So, it's equally accurate to say that Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property (as stated e.g. in http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1c/Key_Facts_wikipedia_March_2011.pdf ). It's inaccurate to say it is the fifth most popular website when using the common definition of website as a collection of documents/services provided from a single domain name, which is why I would prefer for us to consistently use web property, even though it's a less common term. The link Nemo provided is worth reading re: limitations of the comScore data: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia#Limitations For internal analysis, internal data is much preferable, but for communication where we're situated relative to the rest of the web, comScore is, as Sue stated, the industry standard. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: March 2011 Wikimedia Foundation Report
[FYI] -- Forwarded message -- From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Date: 2011/4/9 Subject: March 2011 Wikimedia Foundation Report To: wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org As always, the wiki version with images is on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_March_2011 All best, Erik ==Data and Trends== :Global unique visitors for February: :379 million (-8.3% compared to previous month / +9.9% compared to previous year) :(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release March data later in April) :NB: Drop is caused by shorter number of days in February; comScore does not normalize the data. :Page requests for March: :15.1 billion (-2.5% compared to previous month / N/A for accurate previous year comparison) :(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) :Report Card for February 2011: : http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_02_detailed.html ==Financials== (Financial information is only available for February 2011 at the time of this report.) :Operating revenue for February: USD 0.2MM vs plan of USD 0.2MM :Operating revenue year-to-date February: USD 19.9MM vs plan of USD 17.1MM The successful 2010 fundraising campaign has resulted in the Wikimedia Foundation exceeding its revenue targets year-to-date. :Operating expenses for February: USD 1.3MM vs plan of 1.7MM :Operating expenses year-to-date: USD 11.9MM vs plan of 13.5MM Expenses MTD and YTD are under due to both the timing of capex spending related to the build-out of the data center, as well as to personnel-related expenses, which were under due to slower hiring. Underspending was partially offset by spending in outside contract services and travel. Cash and investments as of February 2011 totaled USD $20.4MM (approximately 12 months of expenses). ==Highlights== === Editor Trends Update Published === On March 11, 2011, Executive Director Sue Gardner shared a message with the global Wikimedia community focusing on the trends we are seeing with regard to participation in Wikimedia projects, and specifically the retention of new users. This message summarized data from the simultaneously published Editor Trends Study, a project undertaken by Diederik van Liere and Howie Fung under the supervision of Erik Moeller. The Editor Trends Study specifically examined changes in the long-term retention of users newly joining Wikimedia projects. From Sue Gardner's update: : Here’s what we think the Editor Trends Study tells us: Between 2005 and 2007, newbies started having real trouble successfully joining the Wikimedia community. Before 2005 in the English Wikipedia, nearly 40% of new editors would still be active a year after their first edit. After 2007, only about 12-15% of new editors were still active a year after their first edit. Post-2007, lots of people were still trying to become Wikipedia editors. What had changed, though, is that they were increasingly failing to integrate into the Wikipedia community, and failing increasingly quickly. The Wikimedia community had become too hard to penetrate. : http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/March_2011_Update Since it was posted, Sue's update has been fully or partially translated into more than 20 languages. The software and data underlying the editor trends study is available to the community as well. The update also summarized the Wikimedia Foundation's priorities for the year ahead with an eye to this data: * Create a visual editor * Improve the new user experience * Support growth in developing countries * Serve audiences on all devices * Create an improved experience for contributing and reviewing multimedia With regard to the product development priorities, a more detailed analysis can be found in the Wikimedia Foundation Product Whitepaper, which summarizes both internal and external trends, presents a full taxonomy of product development opportunities, and justifies product development priorities according to our strategic plan and the overall data: : http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper === Chapters, Wikimedia Foundation Staff and Board meet in Berlin === The annual Chapters Conference was held in Berlin from March 25-27. The conference was hosted by Wikimedia Germany and brought together representatives from Wikimedia's 30 chapters and additional groups that are in the formation stage, including South Africa (which became an official chapter on March 27), Canada, Kenya and Chile. WMF had eight staff members in attendance. The conference covered a range of topics including the Editor Trends Study, cultural and educational partnerships, chapter-WMF communications and chapter organizational development. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met in Berlin alongside the Chapters Conference. The meeting was chaired by Ting Chen and attended by trustees Phoebe Ayers, Bishakha Datta, Jan-Bart de Vreede, Matt Halprin, Samuel Klein, Arne Klempert
Re: [Foundation-l] Foundation too passive, wasting community talent
2011/4/5 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: What I see is grants supplying money to get initiatives that have been long-wanted happening. The near-impossibility of getting even quite simple things through a bureaucratic kudzu-choked community process has been noted on this list *many* times. To clarify, the Article Feedback Tool isn't funded by grant money. Measuring Public Policy Initiative article improvement was one of the timeline constraints for the project, but it had been in our list of wants and needs before that, it is being funded out of the core budget, and it's being tested on non-PPI articles. We'll wrap up this iteration of the tooling soon, and after that, will likely post an RfP for next-generation work so the core team can focus on rich-text-editing and new user interventions. Guillaume is working on some draft specs for next-generation work here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Extended_review if you want to jump in with thoughts, but note that it's still being iterated quite heavily. It's very easy to expand these kinds of tools into all different directions -- ratings/comments/tagging/sharing etc. -- and we're focusing on quality measurement as the main objective, but you'll see in the extended proposal that we're thinking about ways that readers can add extended feedback, going into a review database from where it could be promoted to the talk page if it's considered especially useful. In the current iteration we're also testing whether ratings can be a form of user engagement, by running a few post-rating invitations (create an account / edit the article / take a survey) -- if those invitations work, the tool could also play a significant role in our new user work. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Vector, a year after
2011/4/4 Rodan Bury bury.ro...@gmail.com: As Erik Möller said the qualitative analysis is the user testing with a few dozens of users. This user testing was conducted several times during the development cycle, and it was thorough. The best user testing consist of no more than 30 users, and I can tell the user testing conducted by the Usability Team is high quality and standard. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing#How_many_users_to_test.3F which has links to relevant research. Note that we did both in-person and remote testing. Remote tests were still focused on US subjects for a variety of reasons (need for reliable connectivity, increasing recruiting and scheduling complexity, etc.). Ultimately I hope chapters can get more involved in on-the-ground user testing in additional locations to surface more culture/language-specific issues. As for the quantitative analysis, the one made during the beta testing of Vector was detailed. It clearly showed that most users - and especially newbies - preferred Vector over Monobook (retention rates of 70 - 80 % and more). That's correct. See http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beta_Feedback_Survey for details which included quite a bit of language-specific analysis and follow-up bugfixes. It was the largest feedback collection regarding a software feature we've ever done and surfaced key issues with specific languages, many of which were resolved. Now, the Usability Initiative endend in April 2010, soon after the deployment of Vector to all Wikimedia Wikis. The Wikimedia Foundation did not place usability as one of their main priorities That's not correct. Firstly, we continued deployments and bug fixes after the grant period. As a reminder, full deployment to all projects in all languages was only completed September 1 as the Phase V of the roll-out. A lot of this time was spent gathering data and feedback from these remaining projects/languages regarding project or language-specific issues, promoting localization work, etc. Wikimedia is a big and complex beast (or bestiary). There's also the separate usability initiative concerning multimedia upload, which is ongoing (see http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/uploadwizard-nearing-1-0/ for the most recent update). Post-Vector, there were three primary projects that kept the folks who had worked on the original grant-funded project busy: 1) After the deployments, the engineering team working on the initiative asked to be able to spend time on re-architecting the JavaScript/CSS delivery system for MediaWiki, as a necessary precondition for more complex software feature. The result was the ResourceLoader project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader which is now deployed to all WMF projects. 2) The Article Feedback tool. With the Public Policy Initiative we had taken on the largest project ever to improve content quality in Wikipedia, and Sue asked us to implement a reader-driven article quality assessment tool in order to provide additional measures of success for the project. We also needed article feedback data in order to measure quality change over time on an ongoing basis for other quality-related initiatives. The tool is in production use on a few thousand articles and we're still analyzing the data we're getting before making a final decision on wider deployment. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Early_Data for our findings to-date. 3) MediaWiki 1.17. One of the side-effects of focusing on usability for so long had been that MediaWiki core code review was neglected and backlogged, much to the dissatisfaction of the volunteer developer community. A lot of joint effort was put into clearing the code review backlog to ensure that we could push out a new MediaWiki release, which happened in February. Balancing strategic projects with code review and integration for volunteer-developed code (which in some cases can be quite complex and labor-intensive) is still very much a work-in-progress. Nimish specifically also spent a lot of his time helping to support the development and piloting of OpenWebAnalytics as a potential analytics framework to gather better real-time data about what's happening in Wikimedia projects, precisely so we can better measure the effects of the interventions we're making. The going-forward product development priorities of WMF (not including analytics work) are explained in more detail in the product whitepaper. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper Mind you, I'm not at all satisfied with the rate of our progress, but that's generally not because we're not making X or Y high enough of a priority or we suck and we don't know what we're doing, but because we simply don't have enough engineers to do all the development work that it takes to really support a huge and important thing like Wikimedia well. We're continuing to hire engineers in SF and contractors around the world, and we're
Re: [Foundation-l] Vector, a year after
2011/4/4 Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il: For example, in the Hebrew Wikipedia there was a Search and Replace gadget long before the advent of Vector's Search and Replace dialog. It was developed due to popular demand, bottom-up, by a volunteer, and - here's the scariest part - without any grants. It is still used in the Hebrew Wikipedia, probably much more often than the Vector thingy, which is still rather useless due to bugs such as 20919 and 22801. As lovely as bottom-up gadget development is, it also highlights the complexity of our challenge in improving usability: By allowing every community to independently develop improvements to things like the toolbar, we're very much creating a risk of degrading usability over time. After all, if you're complaining about the lack of data and formal testing supporting Vector, what justification is there for the vast majority of user-contributed JS changes, which in many cases have terrible UIs and have no formal or informal user testing or supporting data? And honestly, Hebrew Wikipedia is a great example of this. Just a year after Vector, the standard edit page that even logged out users see has a whole new row of icons in the Advanced section of the toolbar, including some very non-intuitive or just plain ugly design choices which are inconsistent with any of the existing icons. Is there any supporting data for the choices that were made as to what was added to the toolbar? Of course the answer isn't to prevent gadget development, but I do think we need (as Brion highlighted in the wikitech-l thread) much better support systems, consistently enforced style guides, etc. In addition to better analytics systems, that _should_ ultimately include access to WMF design and user testing resources to validate gadget changes, better standard code and icon libraries that gadgets can use, etc. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] LiquidThreads redesign?
2011/4/1 Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org: LQT has been put on hold. It is now a Frontier project. To clarify: Frontier Projects are investment areas that could help us make leaps towards our strategic goals, but which come with some risk and complexity. These are areas toward which the Wikimedia Foundation will invest some resources, typically involving considerable prototyping and data analysis to better understand impact and risks. [1] We're not adding resources to LQT at present, but we've also not put the project on hold. Andrew Garrett continues to be assigned to it as contractor. His current priorities are here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads/Milestones After the most recent Brandon/Andrew/team meeting, it was decided that LQT needed some fundamental re-architecturing work for us to be able to build the kind of user experience we want, and that's what Andrew's currently focused on. It's not getting the resource push it would need to reach major milestones quickly -- just because we don't have the resources (see [1] for where most resources are going and why). But the work is continuing and we'll be able to ramp up resourcing if/when we progress in other areas. [1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Dario Taraborelli joins Wikimedia Foundation
Dear all, it is my pleasure to announce that Dario Taraborelli (User:DarTar) is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Senior Research Analyst, Strategy, reporting to me. As of this week, Dario is based in San Francisco, having relocated from the UK. Dario joins Howie Fung and me as part of the Wikimedia Foundation Strategy Team. Our job is to advance Wikimedia's strategic thinking on an ongoing basis, and to help organize relevant research and analytics. Dario most recently was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey in the UK. Previously he was Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Psychology, University College London. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France, an MSc in Cognitive Science, and an MA in Philosophy of Science. He has taught at various universities, including Sciences Po in Paris, Université Paris 7, and École Normale Supérieure. He has served as advisor and editor for numerous scientific publications, organizations and conferences. Notably, Dario has participated in wiki-related research and development since 2004. He is lead developer of WikkaWiki, an open source wiki engine; developer of WikiTracer, a prototype toolkit for wiki analytics; and founder and developer of ReaderMeter, a mashup visualizing readership of scholarly publications. He has led or participated in many other projects relevant to wikis and social media. See http://nitens.org/taraborelli/research for a list of his research projects and publications. Dario has supported the Wikimedia Foundation as a contractor since December 2010. Since then he has worked on a number of projects for us, including: - Analysis of data from the pilot of the Article Feedback Tool. You can see his initial findings here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/February_2011 - Organizing meetings and priorities of the Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee. See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee - With Daniel Mietchen and Giota Alevizou (members of RCom), organizing a survey of expert participation in Wikipedia projects. See: http://survey.nitens.org/?sid=21693 - In collaboration with Moritz Stefaner and Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, an analysis and visualization of AfD discussions in the English Wikipedia: http://notabilia.net I'm very excited to have Dario on our team. He and his family are still settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dario's official start date is April 18. Please join me in welcoming him! All best, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Vector, a year after
2011/3/31 Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il: The Vector skin, the main product of the Usability Initiative, was deployed on Wikimedia projects in April 2010. Quoting usability.wikimedia.org: The goal of this initiative is to measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation. In the year that passed since then, did anyone measure whether the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors increased? The usability initiative was accompanied by three qualitative studies: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Evaluation_Study http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability_and_Experience_Study http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Study Our studies validated that the changes we made did indeed by and large have the intended effect of simplifying the experience of new users. With that said, the aggregate editing trends continue to be troubling. See, for example, this page for a comparison of active editors across languages: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm .. and, of course, the editor trends study and the New Wikipedians numbers. But, these larger trends aren't purely technical trends -- they're social trends as well, and it's entirely possible that no amount of technical improvement is going to even make a meaningful dent unless/until we also make progress on making Wikimedia projects more open and more welcoming. We haven't deployed some of the last-stage features of the project yet. These include an in-editor outline of the article headings, a tabbed view of preview/edit, and a default collapsed view of templates. Making template collapsing work cleanly in all browsers and for all document operations turned out to be very hard (due to the wrangling required to make the browser's rich-text-editor behave essentially like a beefed-up code editor), so we may not ever add that feature to a wikitext editor (as opposed to a visual editor). The other two features are likely doable with some more effort, but we're prioritizing them against other improvements and the visual editor effort itself. So, in sum, 1) our qualitative research has shown an improvement for new users, 2) the quantitative trends are troubling, and it's not demonstrable that we've made a difference either way in the larger trends (which aren't purely technical but also social trends), 3) there's still quite a bit of code that we may end up picking up again but that's not currently running on WMF projects. I'm happy that we've done Vector as a first step, but it's just that - a first step. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] please announce translations earlier
2011/3/23 Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org: I definitely think that the letter was way too rushed, but that is not the norm. I can also understand the desire to try to be transparent and post notifications as soon as possible, so that's a different case. I'm not convinced that frontloading a waiting period and repeated calls for translation for something like the March 2011 update is the right way to go. It slows down processes, and without having an actual message out there providing context, it's not necessarily clear to translators why this or that translation project should be prioritized. In spite of no notice whatsoever, the letter was translated very quickly into quite a few languages, IMO in part _because_ anyone could see that it was a significant communication. On the other hand, I realize that it sucks to have an English message pushed out to other languages, and it's frustrating for translators especially who know they could have provided a translation if they had been given advance notice. Perhaps we could make CentralNotice more flexible so that users can choose whether they want to receive English messages or not. Then, if you're on e.g. German Wikipedia, you could have a choice between receiving the English update when it comes out, or waiting for a translation. The English message would then also act as a notice for translators, and for internal community newsletters and noticeboards that want to pick up stuff as it happens. Together with a more flexible subscribe/unsubscribe system for topics, this could help us to communicate more regularly and more quickly with our communities without annoying users who don't want to receive updates in a language they don't speak, or who don't want to receive any WMF messages at all. Regardless of how we go about it, I do agree that we need documented protocols for this that WMF, chapters and others can follow, so as to not surprise or burden translators, whose work is amazing and much appreciated. :-) -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikimedia Foundation Report, February 2011
[FYI] -- Forwarded message -- From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Date: 2011/3/19 Subject: Wikimedia Foundation Report, February 2011 To: wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org As always, you can find the formatted version on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_February_2011 Plain text below feedback welcome :-) All best, Erik Contents * 1 Data and Trends * 2 Financials * 3 Highlights o 3.1 Strategic Plan Summary Published o 3.2 New General Counsel o 3.3 MediaWiki 1.17 Deployment o 3.4 Data Summit o 3.5 Gender Gap Conversations Begin o 3.6 History of the Russian Wikipedia Published * 4 Technology o 4.1 Conferences + 4.1.1 GNUnify 2011 (February 11-12, Pune, India) o 4.2 Operations + 4.2.1 Data Center Racking Party o 4.3 Features + 4.3.1 Personal Image Filter + 4.3.2 Community Feature Prototyping o 4.4 General Engineering + 4.4.1 Wikilytics o 4.5 Moblie/Offline + 4.5.1 openZim for Collections * 5 Research and Strategy o 5.1 Internal Research Progress o 5.2 Research Committee Activity o 5.3 Research Outreach Initiatives * 6 Community o 6.1 Wiki Guides Experiment o 6.2 New Account Creation Project o 6.3 Fundraising o 6.4 Public Policy Initiative * 7 Global Development o 7.1 Global Development Highlights o 7.2 Chapter Relations and Grants o 7.3 Brazil Catalyst o 7.4 India Programs o 7.5 Mobile Strategy o 7.6 Editor Survey 2011 o 7.7 Offline o 7.8 Global University Programs o 7.9 Communications + 7.9.1 Major Stories and Coverage through February + 7.9.2 Major Announcements and Releases in February 2011 + 7.9.3 Major Product Releases in February 2011 + 7.9.4 Blog during February 2011 + 7.9.5 Media contact through February, 2011 * 8 Human Resources o 8.1 Staff Changes o 8.2 Statistics o 8.3 New Events * 9 Finance and Administration o 9.1 Finance o 9.2 Administration * 10 Legal * 11 Visitors and Guests == DATA AND TRENDS == Global unique visitors for January: 414 million (+4.7% compared to previous month / +13.5% compared to previous year) (comScore for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release February data later in March) Page requests for January: 15.2 billion (+8.8% compared to previous month / +21.7% compared to previous year) Page requests for February: 15.5 billion (+1.9% compared to previous month / +24% compared to previous year) (Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) Report Card for January 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_01_detailed.html == FINANCIALS == (Financial information is only available for January 2011 at the time of this report.) Operating revenue for January: USD 1.6MM vs plan of 1.7MM. Operating revenue year-to-date: USD 19.7MM vs plan of 16.8MM. The successful 2010 fundraising campaign has resulted in the Wikimedia Foundation exceeding its revenue targets year-to-date, despite lower than planned revenue for the month of January. Revenue for January includes a USD 108K donation from Wikimedia Switzerland. Operating expenses for January: USD 2.9MM vs plan of 1.8MM. Operating expenses year-to-date: USD 10.6MM vs plan of 11.8MM. Expenses are over plan for the month due to data center purchases, which were budgeted over 12 months but occured primarily in January, with some additional spending in subsequent months. The Wikimedia Foundation is underspent year-to-date due to the timing of additional capex spending and Internet hosting, as well as under-spending in staffing costs. Cash and investments as of January 2011 totaled USD $21.5MM (approximately 13 months of expenses). == HIIGHLIGHTS == Strategic Plan Summary Published On February 25, we released the summary report of the Wikimedia Foundation's five-year strategic plan. It synthesizes the effort of the collaborative strategic planning process that took place through 2009 and 2010 and involved more than a thousand participants. A wiki version and links to the PDF can be found here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary New General Counsel In February, Geoff Brigham was announced as the Wikimedia Foundation's new General Counsel, replacing Mike Godwin who left the organization in October. Geoff has been a lawyer for 20 years, including eight years at eBay during its main growth period, which gives him important experience managing the legal challenges and risks inherent in operating
Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy and translations
2011/3/19 KIZU Naoko aph...@gmail.com: Hi, I noticed Wikimedia privacy policy on wmf site replaced with pdf version and have no link to other (informal) language versions. I'm not seeing either a PDF or a link to one. Can you give me steps to find it? Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Privacy policy and translations
2011/3/19 Casey Brown li...@caseybrown.org: I think she's referring to the link on here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Policies. I thought I remembered seeing another similar pdf updated version uploaded, but can't seem to remember if I actually saw it or where it was. I see no reason why this page still linked to the PDFs since the wiki versions include all the 2008 changes, so I changed it. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is Google allowing users to block Wikipedia?
2011/3/19 Kul Takanao Wadhwa kwad...@wikimedia.org: Somebody just contacted me to let me know that he thinks Google is experimenting with their search result options: one option is to allow users to block Wikipedia articles from showing up in Google's search results. Sometimes this option comes up and sometimes is doesn't. Has anyone else seen this? Does anybody know anything about this? Corroboration: http://www.bechrome.com/como-bloquear-sitios-en-los-resultados-de-google/ Looks like it's one of their small percentage experiments. Haven't been able to reproduce it myself. Not clear whether it's just wikipedia.org or other/all sites. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Is Google allowing users to block Wikipedia?
2011/3/19 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: Looks like it's one of their small percentage experiments. Haven't been able to reproduce it myself. Not clear whether it's just wikipedia.org or other/all sites. Bence pointed to this explanation: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Not working as an WMFR employee anymore
2011/3/17 Bastien Guerry b...@altern.org: it's now official: I'm no longer working as an employee of Wikimédia France. Thanks for the note, Bastien! The GLAM event was great, and I really enjoyed meeting you in Paris. Sorry to hear you're leaving the chapter as an employee, but hope to see you around :-) Best wishes, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/15 SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com: Speaking of the CREDO accounts, several people have asked that their accounts be reassigned, but they don't know how to do it. Could Erik advise? See here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Credo_accounts#I_gave_up_my_account_in_June As per my earlier message, Credo is willing to give away up to 400 additional accounts, so we really shouldn't be too worried about reassigning the existing ones until we've handed these out. Here's what I wrote in September: - - - - As a general update: Credo has generously offered a large number of additional accounts (up to 400 additional ones). The process that I used for the first batch was pretty clunky and time-consuming, so I've been using this as an opportunity to look into better strategies for Wikimedia to interface with external databases like Credo. As part of his contract work for the Wikimedia Foundation, User:^demon is currently evaluating what it would take to build a standard technical interface between Wikimedia and information providers (starting with an evaluation of EZproxy, a commonly used but unfortunately proprietary proxy for external databases). This is a slow-burn project, so I don't expect that we'll be able to find a solution quickly, but I hope we can keep moving this along steadily, as I think it could enable many more partnerships with information providers. In the short term, if someone wants to volunteer running a process to get an additional batch of user accounts (I need a spreadsheet of home wikis, e-mail addresses and user names, and enforcement of some reasonable minimum requirements like edit counts), I'd be more than happy to relay the final list to Credo and get those accounts created. That'd be easier than trying to identify and re-allocate unused accounts (which we can always do later if we run out of free ones). Anyone up for volunteering to run a process for an additional, say, 200 accounts? - - - Is anyone volunteering to organize the process for giving away these accounts? The September discussion stalled in lack of consensus about the parameters, but nobody actually stepped up to take this forward. Again, I can't spend a huge amount of time on this, but if someone volunteers to generate a list of usernames using whichever process is deemed acceptable, I'm happy to move it forward. I think Chad's project to look at technical parameters for interfacing with other databases stalled in the midst of the code review and release push, so let me ping him about getting that restarted. Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)
2011/3/15 SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com: I'd be willing to help organize the names. It's just a question of coming up with some sensible criteria, so I'll restart the discussion about that on the previous talk page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Credo_accounts Thanks Sarah. It looks like the discussion is moving a bit in circles again -- if we can't reach a consensus, then I'd encourage you to just be bold and set something up (and be ready for the inevitable abuse ;-). One point to remember that may get lost in the en.wp discussion is that folks in other wikis (including other languages) may care about this as well. Last time I sent a note to wikipedia-l, which still has a fair number of subscribers from multiple languages. Also, people need to have an email address set, and consent to WMF looking it up and sharing it with Credo. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser
2011/3/4 church.of.emacs.ml church.of.emacs...@googlemail.com: In that regard, I believe we have to think about how we can ensure that we're being friendly and respectful towards our readers and donors, raise enough money, define what 'enough money' is and how all that affects our mission. Yes, I think we're all in agreement on that. Thanks for raising these points again. I do want to note that there's been quite a bit of discussion on some of these issues back in January already. In response to Domas I wrote these two posts, which included some possible strategies we could employ to reduce the annoyance factor. http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-January/063299.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-January/06.html New ideas are very much welcome, and now's a good time to raise them. I do think it's important not to conclude too much about other people's experiences based on your own -- the experience of a heavy Wikimedia project user of the 2010-11 fundraiser, for example, was very different from someone who uses one site, in one language, a few times per month. Some members of the former group experienced the banners as disruptive/invasive. Many members of the latter group may not even have noticed them. It's IMO very likely the case that for the vast majority of our 400M or so readers, the experience of the 2010-11 fundraiser was a uniformly positive or neutral one: either they didn't notice it, or they did notice it but would characterize it as positive or neutral. I can't prove that, and I'd love to see better data on that, but I'd be very surprised if that wasn't true. In addition to being transparent, honest and true to our values, I think there are two variables we want to optimize: the percentage of our audience who experience the fundraiser as positive or neutral, and the number of donations in support of our cause. I'm optimistic that we can do better on both counts in 2011-12 -- we don't have to cause more disruption or annoyance to raise more funds. Wikimedia is an amazing cause, and if we can tell our story well, we will be able to motivate more and more people to join it. (Gee, perhaps we should hire someone for that storytelling job. ;-) On the target itself, I want to note that the strategic plan numbers aren't set in stone. The financial targets for the 2011-12 fiscal year are defined in the annual plan process, which just kicked off. This plan, when approved by the Board, will decide the target that we're aiming for in the next fundraiser, and the process is informed by the most recent projections. It's also very much informed by these kinds of discussions (versions of which are happening internally all the time), and it will be, every year. To not continually iterate and revise our assumptions would be madness. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] FAQ: Consultant for National Programs, India
2011/2/15 MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com: The purpose of the strategy wiki was to create a five-year plan. That purpose has been served, so it's now time to move any remaining content to Meta-Wiki and move on. That's a legitimate viewpoint, but not the one that's informing StrategyWiki's current use by WMF. Our current use is for StrategyWiki to be a place to develop and document strategic research (which is an ongoing process that doesn't end with the five-year plan), where we can easily refer back to and develop some of the accumulated wisdom on StrategyWiki, and where we can pick up work using some of the established practices and processes when necessary (launch a new call for proposals, build new task forces, etc.). In other words, StrategyWiki has an identity and a purpose that extends past the strategic planning process. We may be able to ultimately accomplish all these things by creating spaces within Meta to do them, importing supporting tools/namespaces, etc., or within some future wonderful information architecture, but for the time being, StrategyWiki lives. :-) The FAQ, on the other hand, definitely did not belong there. I've commented a bit more on the issue of merging wikis in this post, and the same arguments apply here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-January/063690.html -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Report, January 2011
of testing on a single machine. As the new Upload Wizard is coming closer to production-quality release, we are trying to anticipate a substantial increase in media contributions. *Monitoring* We signed a deal with Watchmouse, a global website and application performance monitoring company. The community can expect us to broaden the public information we make available on performance of our wikis around the world. *Virtualization Cluster* We continued to work on creating an environment to deploy temporary machines for testing and experimentation, for use by WMF staff and volunteers working on important projects (as capacity allows). WMF Ops Engineer Ryan Lane announced the release of the OpenStackManager extension for MediaWiki, which interacts with OpenStack, an open source toolset for cloud computing. There was a bit of a setback, however, with some missing features in OpenStack testing, so we are waiting for the next OpenStack release before deploying this. We have a little more hardware to configure as well. Features *Threaded Discussions - Liquid Threads* A formal evaluation of LiquidThreads, a new discussion system for talk pages, is underway. This includes its UI, code and database architecture. We are modifying the design to incorporate input from several community discussions as well as from our engineering staff. We plan to consolidate all of our documentation on these discussions on mediawiki.org in the next month. *Other Features* Tomasz Finc began work with two new engineering contracts on offline content projects. Tomasz blogged about it here: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/01/update-on-offline-wikimedia-projects/ - Research and Strategy - Wikipedia's 10th anniversary saw several scholarly outlets call for experts and researchers to join Wikipedia and help overcome the prejudices against Wikipedia in academic circles [1-2]. To this aim, Dario Taraborelli, in collaboration with Daniel Mietchen and Panagiota Alevizou from the Wikimedia Research Committee, designed a survey to better understand the barriers to expert participation in Wikimedia projects [3]. The pilot phase started in December and ended in January and the official launch of the survey is due on February 8, 2011. On January 10, 2011, Dario Taraborelli published, in collaboration with Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Moritz Stefaner, an interactive visualization of the 200 longest Article for Deletion discussions in the history of Wikipedia [4], introducing scholarly research on the functioning and impact of AfD discussions to a broader audience. Research continued on the Article feedback study and Dario Taraborelli joined Howie Fung in analyzing the early data, with new results to be published later this month. Members of the Research Committee continued the discussion on subject recruitment guidelines for Wikimedia research projects in collaboration with WMF staff. The committee also started to explore possible venues for a research panel, with the goal of discussing research directions of strategic importance to the Wikipedia community at a major social computing conference. Howie Fung, Diederik van Liere and Erik Moeller continued review of first data from the Editor Trends Study [6] conducted by Diederik van Liere. The study is an in-depth quantitative analysis of major trends in Wikipedia editing communities, and will be published on StrategyWiki in February. Howie and Erik also continued work on the Product Whitepaper, a comprehensive assessment of product development priorities in strategic context. [7] [1] http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125899/ [2] http://www.jmir.org/2011/1/e14/ [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Expert_involvement/2011_survey [4] http://notabilia.net [5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_Committee/Areas_of_interest/Subject_recruitment_processes [6] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study [7] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Product_Whitepaper - Community - Fundraising Team The fundraising team wrapped up the successful 2010 fundraising campaign in January. The team ran contribution banners that asked people to get involved with Wikipedia by starting to edit. These banners were later replaced by banners that highlighted Wikipedia's 10 year anniversary. The team spent the rest of January beginning an in-depth retrospective on the testing and operations of the 2010 fundraiser. Public Policy Initiative The Public Policy Initiative Team kicked off the new year with a two-day train-the-trainer session in San Francisco prior to the start of the spring semester. A group of current ambassadors were trained as trainers to prepare them to lead five two-day regional ambassador trainings in various US locations: San Francisco, New York
Re: [Foundation-l] Making wikimediafoundation.org more open to contributions
2011/1/29 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com: Having many wikis is an ongoing source of irritation for many, and it would be great to resolve this issue. Are there good arguments *for* having separate sites? Yes, and I think most people generally underestimate the complexity of the issue. The reasons for WMF to spin up separate sites have varied, but to try to put it as simply as possible, a dedicated wiki, in all technical and social respects, focuses collaborative activity, which can enhance productivity and reduce barriers to participation. In the case of e.g. StrategyWiki, it also allowed us to try some radical changes (like using LQT on all pages, or receiving hundreds of proposals as new page creations) without disrupting some surrounding context. I have absolutely no regrets about our decision to launch StrategyWiki, for example -- I think it was the right decision, with exactly the expected benefits. Meta itself has grown organically to support various community activities and interests that had no other place to go. It has never been significantly constrained by its mission statement. The What Meta is not page only enumerates two examples of unacceptable use: 1. A disposal site for uncorrectable articles from the different Wikipedias, and it is not a hosting service for personal essays of all types. 2. A place to describe the MediaWiki software. Its information architecture, in spite of many revisions, has never kept up with this organic growth, making Meta a very confusing and intimidating place for many, especially when one wants to explore or use the place beyond some specific reason to go there (vote in an election, nominate a URL for the spam blacklist, write a translation). So, let's take the example of OutreachWiki as a simple case study to describe the differences between the two wikis. 1) The wiki's main page and sidebar are optimized for its stated purpose; 2) As a new user, you receive a welcome message that's specifically about ways you can support public outreach ( http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcome ) 3) All special pages remain useful to track relevant activity or content without applying further constraints; 4) Userboxes and user profiles can be optimized for the stated purpose (e.g. http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Languages_and_skills ) 5) There's very little that's confusing or intimidating -- the content is clean, simple, and organized. 6) If the OutreachWiki community wants to activate some site-wide extension, it can do so, focusing only on its own needs. On the other hand: 1) Activity is very low; 2) The wiki is largely in English; 3) Meta has a long tradition of hosting outreach-related content, and many pages still reside there or are created there. 4) The existence of yet-another-wiki brings tons of baggage and frustration (more dispersed change-tracking for users who want to keep up with all activity, more creation of meta/user page/template structures, more setup of policies and cross-wiki tools, etc.). It's not a given that 1) and 2) are a function of having a separate wiki. As we've seen with StrategyWiki, activity is largely the result of focused activation of the community. The small sub-community that cares about public outreach on Meta is ridiculously tiny compared with the vast global community that could potentially be activated to get involved through centralnotices, village pumps, email announcements, etc. So the low level of activity on OutreachWiki is arguably only a failure of WMF to engage more people, not a failure of a separate wiki. (It certainly makes all the associated baggage much harder to justify.) But, I think the disadvantages of working within a single system can be rectified for at least the four most closely related backstage wikis (Meta/WMF/Strategy/Outreach). I do think working towards a www.wikimedia.org wiki is the way to do that, importing content in stages, with a carefully considered information architecture that's built around the needs of the Wikimedia movement, a very crisp mission statement and list of permitted and excluded activities, a WikiProject approach to organizing related activity, etc. But it also would need to include consideration for needed technological and configuration changes, in descending importance: - namespaces (e.g. for essays, proposals, public outreach resources, historical content) - template and JS setup to support multiple languages well (e.g. mirroring some of the enhancements made to Commons) - access controls (e.g. for HTML pages) - FlaggedRevs/Pending Changes (e.g. for official WMF or chapter information) - LiquidThreads (e.g. for a movement-wide forum that could increasingly subsume listservs) - Semantic MediaWiki/Semantic Forms (e.g. for event calendars) To simplify security considerations, we might want to have all fundraising-related content elsewhere (e.g. donate.wikimedia.org). An alternative strategy, of course, is to focus on making the distinction between
Re: [Foundation-l] Making wikimediafoundation.org more open to contributions
2011/1/27 MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com: In the spirit of being bold, I've taken a number of steps to correct what I view as deficiencies in the current contribution system, all of which I'll outline in this e-mail. If anyone has objections to these changes, they're more than welcome to revert them and we can discuss ways to improve the overall situation.[2] Looks great to me :-) I agree that the edit restrictions on the WMF wiki are very unfortunate and there's still much more that can be done (perhaps one day leading toward www.wikimedia.org as a single information, collaboration and discussion hub, subsuming both WMF and Meta, and possibly other backstage wikis). -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow
2011/1/20 whothis whoth...@gmail.com: I hope others reading this realize the implication of your appointment. I had no idea who you were before this, and still don't I had no idea who you were before this. Then I checked my mail archives and saw that the only other thread you've been engaged in was a different set of accusations about the existence of a cabal and the impropriety thereof. This is not a constructive conversation, because it confuses and conflates a bunch of very complex issues (questions of NPO governance and ethics, which you clearly have a very limited understanding of, vs. questions of effective and transparent operations, vs. community participation, etc.), and has from the beginning taken the tone of prosecutorial questioning. If you're interested in having a constructive conversation e.g. about the grants process and the fellowships program without attacking individuals, I'll be happy to join it, here or on Meta. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow
Thanks Achal :-) In addition to what Achal said, it's important to note that this fellowship was processed as a grant, and is transparently documented at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_Fellowships/Oral_Citations consistent with the principles of the grantmaking process. It's a short-term engagement, and the total budget includes a strong focus on documentation so that whatever lessons are learned can be easily accessed by any member of the community. Money not spent will be returned. In the same way that the usability videos showing the experiences of real users editing Wikipedia helped the community to have conversations about the editing interface, we hope that the film documentation that Achal will create will help the community have conversations about citations and sources, and offer practical approaches to deal with lack of published materials in many of the languages in which Wikipedia is available. Given our desire to help foster healthy Wikimedia projects e.g. in the languages spoken in India, this isn't a theoretical but very practical issue. As always, a public report will document the deliverables and results. The fellowship program is intended to leverage great opportunities for volunteers with a proven track record to help us accomplish extraordinary things. Whether that volunteerism is in the form of editing, engineering, event organizing, chapters development, cat herding, evangelism, etc. shouldn't really matter. They can all be things that greatly advance the movement's goals. Achal has put countless hours into efforts to help get Wikimedia India and Wikimedia South Africa off the ground, and his proven track record through this and other volunteering was key to our decision to engage him. With all that said, as we scale up the fellowship program, it would be good to have more open conversations about the criteria and process through which fellowships (but also Wikimedia Foundation grants) are awarded. While WMF will always need to exercise judgment and discretion when money changes hands, I do think it's important to give the community more of a voice in both proposing and selecting individuals and projects, perhaps through some form of review committee which makes a preliminary recommendation, and which strongly interfaces with WMF to align the program with our strategic priorities. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Fwd: December 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report
[FYI] -- Forwarded message -- From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Date: 2011/1/14 Subject: December 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report To: wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org This is the e-mail version, please visit http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_December_2010 for the formatted version that you can edit. Note: As of this report, we no longer align the metrics reporting period with the activity reporting period (that is, if no December data is available yet by the time we create the report, we will include November data). This change allows us to release the monthly reports sooner, instead of waiting for certain metrics (e.g. comScore data) to become available. Also note that we're shifting to having a content-heavy highlights section at the top, followed by slightly more terse updates on other activities. This will hopefully give you a better sense of key accomplishments/milestones. Feedback on how to improve the reports is always welcome. All best, Erik ==Data and Trends== :Global unique visitors: :411 million (+0.6% compared to previous month / +18.8% compared to previous year) : (comScore data for November, all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release December data later in January) :Page requests: :13.9 billion (-6.7% compared to previous month / + 22.9% compared to previous year) : (Wikimedia Foundation data for December, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) Recent community metrics are not available as of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump production server that provides the underlying source data. ==Financials== [See the November report for November data. December data will be finalized later in January, and will be included with the January report.] == Highlights == === 2010 fundraising campaign reaches record target === December began with the fundraiser's daily numbers far too low to make our goal by December 31. There was even a question whether we could make the goal by January 15, as we knew we had used up all the easy-to-get donors in our first weeks in November. Our challenge for December was to communicate our authentic urgency to the community. We felt strongly about making our goal as early as possible in order to free the site from fundraising banners as soon as possible. But instead of going straight to an urgent message from Jimmy Wales or Sue Gardner, we took time to run banners and appeals from Wikipedia editors - most of whom had been featured in the Wikimedia Foundation's videos produced in Gdansk alongside Wikimania 2010. We thought it was important to spend time highlighting the community directly for some portion of the campaign. Finally, we did return to appeals from Jimmy and experimented with a wide range of approaches to both messaging, graphical treatment, ask amounts, and other variables. We were able to get the numbers back up and get within striking distance of our goal by the last days of December. With a strong end-of-year push, were were able to make our goal by midnight (San Francisco time) on December 31, and Thank You banners were launched. On January 1, we announced the unprecedented success of the 2010 fundraising campaign, and thanked everyone for this extraordinary expression of support: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Half_a_Million_People_Donate_to_Keep_Wikipedia_Free In just 50 days, the shortest fundraiser in recent Wikimedia history, the Foundation received more than 500,000 individual donation from people living in about 140 countries, reaching its goal of raising $16 million. We received more than twice as many individual donations as in 2009, which garnered 230,000 total contributions. ===Public Policy Initiative: First Semester Wrap-Up === The first semester of classes assigning Wikipedia improvements as coursework to their students has wrapped up. Participating universities and courses are listed at: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy/Courses/Fall_2010 Statistics and additional links are at: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy/Leaderboard Project staff member Sage Ross contributed a detailed perspective regarding the first semester, and regarding the Wikipedia Ambassadors program launched to support these types of assignments, to the Wikipedia Signpost: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-12-27/Ambassadors Sage writes: Overall, 207 students in these classes contributed more than 2 million bytes of new content to articles—an average of more than 10,000 bytes each to articles. ===India technology fact-finding trip=== Danese Cooper, Alolita Sharma and Erik Moeller traveled to India for about two weeks of meetings with various groups, organizations, and individuals. The purpose of the trip was to assess technical barriers to growing the India community of Wikimedia contributors and users
[Foundation-l] Fwd: October 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report
[FYI] -- Forwarded message -- From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Date: 2011/1/12 Subject: October 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report To: wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org This version is for e-mail consumption. Formatted, living version: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_October_2010 All best, Erik ==Highlights== * Wikimedia Foundation projects serve more than 400 million unique visitors * Events: Hack-a-Ton in Washington, DC; Inside the Globe event in New York * Board meeting in San Francisco ==Data and Trends== :The monthly report card for October 2010 (partial data) can be found at: :http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/ : Global unique visitors: : 408 million (+2.6% compared to previous month, +18.5% compared to previous year) : (comScore data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects) : Page requests: : 14.5 billion (no change compared to previous month / +18.6% compared to previous year) : (Wikimedia Foundation data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) : Note: Page request data now includes all projects (previous months only reported Wikipedia pageviews), including the mobile site. Source data can be found at http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyAllProjects.htm and http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyMobile.htm . :Full community metrics for the month of October are not available as of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump production server that provides the underlying source data. ==Financials == :Operating revenue for October: $3.2MM vs plan of $750K :Operating revenue year-to-date: $3.6MM vs plan of $1.4MM The MTD and YTD overages were due to unrestricted gifts including an anonymous $2MM gift and several hundred thousand dollars of revenue related to community gifts as a result of pre-fundraiser testing. :Operating expenses for October: $1.4MM vs plan of $2.0MM :Operating expenses year-to-date: $4.6MM vs plan of $6.5MM For MTD, underspending was due to: timing of capital expenditures and internet hosting ($180K-capex and internet hosting-amounts were budgeted evenly over 12 months rather than reflecting the timing of the data-center build-out and consequent increased hosting costs), timing of office expansion ($250K-costs incurred in Nov and Dec) and underspending in staff-related costs ($218K-salaries, taxes and benefits due primarily to hiring delays as well as staff development partially offset by immigration expenses). Overspending for the month primarily in travel and conference expenses ($50K). For YTD, underspending is also due to above items of timing of capex and internet hosting ($1.3MM) and staff-related costs ($0.7MM) as well as outside contract services and volunteer development ($0.2MM combined). Overspending YTD is primarily in travel and conference expenses ($80K) as well as grants and awards ($165K) related to Wikimania scholarships, grant to Wikimania Poland and sponsorship of WikiSym Poland (scholarships were budgeted over 12 months instead of 1 month). Cash and investments as of October 31 totaled $11.6MM. ==Board of Trustees Meeting== In October, the Board of Trustees met in San Francisco. This was the first time the full 10-person board met in San Francisco, and included new board member Phoebe Ayers. The meeting was chaired by our new chair, Ting Chen. Major agenda items included: *'''Governance Committee update and board member evaluation process:''' The board was joined by Jim Schwarz, a consultant from BoardSource who is helping with board development work. Major outcomes included (1) extending the terms of appointed expertise seats to two years from one year, and (2) a plan to run a self-evaluation process, in which all board members, as well as Sue Gardner, fill out detailed questionnaires assessing the performance of the individual board members. The assessments are meant to allow individual board members to strengthen their performance, as well as provide Ting and the governance committee with a more holistic picture of the board. *'''Chapters, financial controls and movement-wide transparency:''' The board was joined by staff members Erik, Barry, Veronique and Zack to discuss the legal status of the chapters, current fundraising practices, and the current state of chapters’ reporting mechanisms for both activities and financial reporting. The board passed a resolution that you can read here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_principles . It essentially called for the Wikimedia Foundation to ensure that agreements with chapters for money transfers coming out of the 2010 fundraiser be based in sound legal frameworks and be vetted to ensure they're legally valid, enforceable and responsible. It also called for adherence to donor privacy policies and high standards of transparency and accountability, and it amended the audit committee's charter to add responsibility for ensuring
[Foundation-l] Fwd: November 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report
[FYI] -- Forwarded message -- From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Date: 2011/1/12 Subject: November 2010 Wikimedia Foundation Report To: wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org This version is for email consumption, formatted version is at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_November_2010 All best, Erik ==Highlights== * 2010 Wikimedia fundraising campaign launches on November 12 * New upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons launches in beta * Preparations begin for 10th anniversary celebrations with launch of ten.wikipedia.org * Public Policy Initiative launches leaderboard showing results ==Data and Trends== :The monthly report card for November 2010 (partial data) can be found at: :http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/ :Global unique visitors: :411 million (+0.6% compared to previous month / +18.8% compared to previous year) : (comScore data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects) :Page requests: :14.9 billion (+2.8% compared to previous month / +24.5% compared to previous year) : (Wikimedia Foundation data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including Wikipedia mobile) Full community metrics for the month of November are not available as of this writing due to an extended outage of the database dump production server that provides the underlying source data. ==Financials== :Operating revenue for November: $6.5MM vs plan of $3.9MM. :Operating revenue year-to-date November: $10.1MM vs plan of $5.3MM. Revenue YTD is on or over target in all areas. :Operating expenses for November: $1.4MM vs plan of $1.7MM :Operating expenses year-to-date November: $5.9MM vs plan of $8.2MM Underspending MTD is due to: timing of capital expenditures and internet hosting ($300K- capex and internet hosting-amounts were budgeted evenly over 12 months rather than reflecting the timing of the data center build-out and consequent increased hosting costs) and underspending in staff-related costs ($160K-salaries, taxes and benefits due primarily to hiring delays as well as staff development partially offset by recruiting and immigration expenses). Overspending for the month was primarily in bank fees ($86K), legal fees ($32K) and travel and conference expenses ($34K). Underspending YTD is also due to above items of timing of capex and internet hosting ($1.4MM - these funds will be spent), staff-related costs ($0.9MM) as well as outside contract services ($0.1MM) and volunteer development ($0.1MM). Overspending YTD is primarily in bank fees ($0.1MM), travel and conference expenses ($0.1MM) as well as in grants and awards ($0.1MM). Overages in grants and awards were due to the the Wikimania scholarships, grant to Wikimania Poland and sponsorship of WikiSym Poland-scholarships being budgeted over 12 months instead of 1 month. However, by year-end, grants and awards are expected to be near budget. Cash and investments as of November 2010 totaled $16.5MM (as of Nov 30, approximately 10 months of expenses) ==Preparations for Wikipedia's 10th anniversary== We launched ten.wikipedia.org, a dedicated wiki to support community celebrations of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary on January 15, 2011. We finalized designs for related merchandise and overall event branding, and made them available to the community for customization and localization: http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design We finalized our media outreach plan related to the 10th anniversary and began contacting long-lead monthly magazines. Wikimedia Fellow Steven Walling will provide support throughout the preparations and celebrations, by reaching out to communities, helping organize the event pages, supporting the distribution of event kits, etc. == 2010 fundraising campaign launches == On November 12, the Wikimedia Foundation soft-launched the 2010 fundraising campaign, with an official launch on November 15. It is the most ambitious fundraising campaign in Wikimedia's history, with a campaign goal of $16 million. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Seventh_Annual_Campaign_to_Support_Wikipedia_Kicks_Off As always, the fundraiser represents a large, collaborative undertaking both within the organization (community department staff, engineering, communications, global development, finance, legal), between the Wikimedia Foundation and the international Wikimedia chapter organizations, and with the larger global Wikimedia community. The 2010 fundraising team had sought deep community and chapter engagement from the start, and through November, we saw unprecedented participation from the entire Wikimedia movement in running a successful campaign. The following Wikimedia chapters worked directly with the Wikimedia Foundation and processed funds in their respective countries: Wikimedia Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. This was possible in part because Wikimedia Foundation had spent time in prior months to work with chapters in clearing any legal
Re: [Foundation-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis
2011/1/4 Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com: Thanks, interesting. Go to http://www.wiki4enterprise.org/index.php?title=Editoraction=edit That's just FCK, an existing MediaWiki extension. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FCKeditor_%28Official%29 Their own editor still appears to be under active development at this point. I didn't see any pointers to either a code repository or a demo yet. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
2011/1/2 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: I'm familiar with the concept of trying to get people to donate immediately because they probably won't get around to donating at all otherwise. That isn't an excuse for lying, though. All the messages with the word urgent in were misleading. You received plenty of money to keep the sites up and running within the first few weeks of the fundraiser. There never was any urgency. You were telling people that if they didn't donate Wikipedia would go offline and that wasn't true. That is a lie. We'll have to agree to disagree that having a banner that includes the text urgent is misleading. Where were we telling people that if they didn't donate Wikipedia would go offline? Can you cite the specific language (banner or landing page) that you're objecting to? Or is this just you again objecting to the word urgent? -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion
2011/1/3 Domas Mituzas midom.li...@gmail.com: Thanks for greetings, and even more thanks for such an effort in trying to address the concerns. Thanks for raising them. I'll pick and choose a bit in my responses or this thread would expand fairly quickly into all different directions, but let me know if you feel I'm ignoring a key point you're making. As far as I understand your main concern, you view the fundraising practices this year as so disruptive that they distract too much from the main purpose of providing a service to readers. I don't agree with your characterization here: Well, there's a single maybe he will consider once distraction and there's let's not allow to read the text distraction. They are different. I don't think any of the fundraising banners that ran made it substantially harder to access the information that people were coming to look up, and indeed, around 97-99% of people who came to look at an article did just that and nothing else. We unfortunately don't know if some of them closed the page _because_ of the banners, which is something I'd like to track in future. We do know that the delayed banner display (due to e.g. the geo-lookup) caused some people to accidentally click it, which is essentially a bug that needs to be fixed. As per my earlier note, there are quite a few things we can experiment with to reduce annoyance after the first display of a banner to a user. For example, a reader might get a banner appeal, which also has a prominent Remind me later button which disables the banners for some time. If/when they donate, they might get a big Permanently hide fundraising banners option. And those preferences should ideally be active across sites. So, where I would agree with you is that, as generating revenue receives more attention than it ever has before, mindfulness towards the reader experience needs to be more systematically part of the planning than it's ever been as well, so we don't carelessly slide down a slippery slope of annoying, distracting and frustrating our readers. I think the fundraising team deserves more credit for thinking about these issues in 2010 than they're getting, but I also consider it a personal responsibility to ensure this point remains very high on the agenda in our postmortem and planning for the future. We have been balancing it forever. Yes, and every single fundraiser in recent memory has had its fair share of internal controversy and criticism, usually related both to the prominence of the banners and the messaging employed. In 2007 Sue even asked Brion to implement a marquee tag, which he reluctantly did and which was later removed. ;-) And you may recall the issues with the Virgin Unite logo in 2006. In 2009 we annoyed people inefficiently for a while with banners bearing large slogans that didn't work. It worked, right? For some definition of worked. Yes, WMF and the Wikimedia community have managed to keep WMF sites up and running in the face of staggering and stressful growth, for which you and others deserve much credit. But as you well know, even on the most basic level of our operations infrastructure, many vulnerabilities remain to this day. The recent extended unavailability of database dumps is an example of serious failure, but failures like this happen when an organization is understaffed/underresourced and only able to focus on the immediate, not the longer term. And whether you agree with this or not, WMF's mission extends beyond operating the websites, and it's performed arguably insufficiently poorly in other categories, such as keeping up with a dramatically changing technology environment, and supporting and growing the free knowledge movement world-wide. Organizations need to think about worst-case scenarios, and work towards avoiding them. On the operations front, worst-case scenarios include serious attempts to destroy data, complete failure of our primary data center, etc. On the technology front, they include being displaced by a technologically disruptive (likely for-profit) competitor. With projects like Knol and Freebase, we've already seen well-funded technologically proprietary projects operating in related spaces, and we'll see more of them in future (and we've seen successful competitors aided by state censorship in China). On the community front, they include stagnation and ultimately decline, which diminishes the utility of our services and makes us more vulnerable to scenarios of being displaced. Yes, a long-term perspective on our growth needs to take into account both what we've been able to accomplish with far less, and what the cost to our readers is to add prominent pleas for support. But we also need to have enough realism to understand that the position we're in is arguably the result of a fortunate accident of history. This places with us a great degree of responsibility to support Wikimedia projects and the community of purpose behind them as effectively as possible, so as
