[Wikimedia Announcements] All four Wikipedia videos published
Hello all, over the last few days, we've been releasing the videos mentioned in a previous announcement through various social media. All four videos are now published, and you can find a blog post with links here: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/09/24/four-videos-of-wikipedias-volunteers/ I'm personally very excited to have these videos: I think they'll be a great outreach tool to help us grow the very special community of volunteers who contribute to our projects. We can use them at conferences, training events, in online tutorials, etc. I hope they'll also help us break out of the perception of Wikipedia as simply a useful product, and contribute to it being understood as a community of shared passion and purpose quite unlike any other online community of comparable scale. We think these videos do speak for themselves beyond any specific use that we'll have for them. If you agree, we appreciate your help in sharing them through various channels available to you :-) Subtitle transcriptions and translations are underway and will be made available soon. All best, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, 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 WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
[Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation Report, August 2010
Hello all, please find below the August 2010 report of the Wikimedia Foundation. If you're so inclined, you can help us improve the wiki version, which has nicer formatting, too: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_August_2010 All best, Erik == Highlights == *Usability improvements deployed to all remaining wikis *[[Google Summer of Code]] participation completed with 6 projects *Public Policy Initiative ramped up with training in Washington, DC and the first advisory board meeting == Data and Trends == :The monthly report card for August 2010 can be found at:br/ :http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_08_detailed.html :Global unique visitors: :373 million (+3.7% compared to previous month / + 21.4% compared to previous year) :Page requests: :13.4 billion (-1% compared to previous month / + 23.9% compared to previous year) We experienced an unusually large drop in traffic during the summer. A seasonal drop is to be expected, but there's no full explanation for the magnitude of the drop; one hypothesis is that the 2010 World Cup in South Africa drew a significant amount of attention from Wikipedia and other highly multilingual websites. Beginning in August, we've started to return to earlier traffic levels. The following changes were made for the August 2010 report card: * The content section now summarizes each project (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, etc.) as a line, as opposed to the more granular project/language view (English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, etc.). The default view shows a normalized growth line for each project, indicating that Wikimedia Commons is currently our fastest growing project in terms of content. * The active editors section now no longer counts Wikimedia Commons contributors, due to the significant number of users who are active on a primary project like Wikipedia and who use Wikimedia Commons as a support project. This leads to a slightly reduced total count. Generally, the active editors count has always double-counted users who are active on more than one project in a given month -- this is expected to be fixed later this year. See the synopsis page at http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_08_synopsis.html for more trends and notes. == Financials == :Operating revenue for August: USD 131K vs. plan of USD 210K :Operating expenses August: USD 0.9MM vs. plan of USD 1.4MM :Operating revenue for year-to-date August: USD 273K vs. plan of USD 398K :Operating expenses for year-to-date August: USD 2.2MM vs. plan of USD 3.0MM. :Unrestricted cash on hand as of the end of September: USD 9.0 MM Revenue is under for the month and year-to-date primarily from unrestricted revenue; additionally, revenue related to mobile (Orange) has not been recorded pending finalization of contract re-negotiation with Orange. Expenses are under for the month and year-to-date due to: * Capital expenditures and internet hosting (budgeted evenly over the year but will start lower and increase as the additional data center is built out and hosting costs increase) * Salaries, taxes and benefits due primarily to hiring delays and underspending in staff development * Professional services including outside contract services This underspending is partially offset by overage in grants and awards due to grant to Wikimania Poland and sponsorship of WikiSym Poland and Wikimania scholarships. == Strategic Planning == During August, the Wikimedia Foundation began distilling the material on the strategy wiki into a high-level document that could easily be shared with Wikimedia partners and supporters. To that end, Jay Walsh hired a writer to begin developing a first draft. The draft document will be vetted and refined over the next several months, and then presented to the Board of Trustees for approval in October. The final outstanding piece of substantive work before the document can be finalized, is the development of a small number of high-level targets for the Wikimedia movement, to be achieved by 2015. The development of the targets has been done on the strategy wiki to date: that work will be supplemented and carried forward with an informal survey of Board members, staff members and community members, the results of which will be shared with the Board, and will influence our approach to target-setting, as well as the final metrics. The targets are expected to be approved by the Board by October 2010, and will then be folded into the final strategy document. == Technology == See http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/10/october-2010-wmf-engineering-update/ for the most recent Wikimedia Foundation engineering update, and see individual project pages on MediaWiki.org for details. '''Personnel:''' * In August, we hired a new operations engineer, Ryan Lane. * Six WMF engineers attended OSCON, the largest open source conference in the US, on passes donated by O'Reilly. We were formally asked there to submit content for two other O'Reilly conferences: a new
[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 WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
[Wikimedia Announcements] Fwd: Notification about Wikimedia user account security issue
FYI. -- Forwarded message -- From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Date: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 10:56 PM Subject: Notification about Wikimedia user account security issue To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org See also: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/October_2013_private_data_security_issue On October 1, 2013, we learned about an implementation error that made private user information (specifically, user email addresses, password hashes, session tokens, and last login timestamp) for approximately 37,000 Wikimedia project users accessible to volunteers with access to the Wikimedia LabsDB infrastructure. LabsDB, launched in May 2013, is designed to give volunteers the ability to write tools and generate reports that make use of data from our databases in real-time. This supports bottom-up innovation by the Wikimedia community. As part of this process, private data is automatically redacted before volunteers are given access to the data. Unfortunately, for some of Wikimedia’s wikis[1], the database triggers used to redact private data failed to take effect due to a schema incompatibility, and LabsDB users had access to private user data for some user accounts in these specific wiki databases. As of October 1, 228 users have access to LabsDB, and the window of availability of this data was May 29, 2013 to October 1, 2013. This issue was discovered and reported by a trusted volunteer, and access to the data in question was revoked within 15 minutes of the report. We have no evidence to suggest that the private data in question was exported in bulk or used for malicious purposes, but we cannot definitively exclude the possibility. As a precautionary measure, we have invalidated all affected user sessions, and are requiring affected users to change their password on their next login. We have also sent an email notification to affected users with a confirmed email address. We regret this mistake. LabsDB is still a new part of our infrastructure, and we will fully audit the redaction process, so as to minimize any risk of a future mistake of this nature. Sincerely, Erik Moeller Vice President of Engineering Product Development Contact information Should you have any questions, please contact us via email to: accountsecur...@wikimedia.org You can also reach the Wikimedia Foundation at: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 149 New Montgomery Street Floor 6 San Francisco, CA 94105 United States Phone: +1-415-839-6885 Fax: +1-415-882-0495 [1] List of affected databases: aswikisource bewikisource dewikivoyage elwikivoyage enwikivoyage eswikivoyage frwikivoyage guwikisource hewikivoyage itwikivoyage kowikiversity lezwiki loginwiki minwiki nlwikivoyage plwikivoyage ptwikivoyage rowikivoyage ruwikivoyage sawikiquote slwikiversity svwikivoyage testwikidatawiki tyvwiki ukwikivoyage vecwiktionary votewiki wikidatawiki wikimania2013wiki wikimania2014wiki -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
[Wikimedia Announcements] Welcome Rachel diCerbo, Director of Community Engagement
Hi folks, It’s my great pleasure to tell you that Rachel diCerbo is joining us as Director of Community Engagement (Product), starting today. In this role, Rachel will manage the community liaison team (Keegan Peterzell, Sherry Snyder, Nick Wilson, and Erica Litrenta) and ensure that our technical projects receive community engagement support throughout their development. Rachel discovered her love for collaborative communities with Couchsurfing. When she joined the community in 2005, Couchsurfing was a small non-profit, with essential functions being filled by volunteers. This included responding to safety issues: staying at someone else’s home or hosting a stranger carries risks, some obvious, some less so. Rachel founded and led the community’s all-volunteer safety team. She was also a member of the non-profit’s Board of Directors from 2007-2011. After volunteering for two years, she joined the organization full-time as Head of Trust Safety in 2008. She was responsible for enacting policies related to incident reporting, profile removal, and other safety issues, and handled any high level legal issues and communications related to Couchsurfing member safety. She implemented training, documentation, and case review processes for her team. As part of her role, she also directly interfaced with Couchsurfing’s engineering team and helped scope functionality related to safety moderation. The work on the safety team also equipped her well for working across culture and languages, as issues would often arise around differing cultural sensitivities. She’s travelled to 38 countries and lived on 5 continents. Prior to Couchsurfing, Rachel pursued a passion for theater while temping in various roles for various companies. Her additional interests include digital rights, women’s rights and safety worldwide, and scuba diving. In her spare time, she seeks to perfect her pulled pork recipe, sews, and reads all the things. Rachel is new to the community, and due to the nature of her role, she’ll be spending some time just learning how to edit and how things work in our weird wonderful world. She’s planning a face-to-face meeting with her team the week of June 9th and will be attending WikiConference USA later this week. Please join me in welcoming Rachel to the Wikimedia Foundation and to the community. Warmly, Erik PS: Big thanks to everyone who’s been part of the search process, to the liaison team for doing awesome work in an emerging structure, and to Philippe, Maggie and Howie for all their work in bootstrapping the team, and for supporting Rachel as she steps into the role. :-) -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
[Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing Arthur Richards as Team Practices Manager
Hi folks, It’s my great pleasure to announce Arthur Richards as Team Practices Manager for WMF. Arthur will lead a group of ScrumMasters and coaches to scale up our ability to support teams in developing robust processes for software delivery. In this new role, Arthur will report to the VP of Engineering (currently, me). Arthur’s first engagement in this role will be with the MediaWiki core team in October. He’s also still transitioning responsibilities for the mobile web team to Kristen Lans, who just joined WMF as ScrumMaster. I am very excited about the work ahead. Please join me in congratulating Arthur and wishing him success in this new role. :-) What follows is some more background about this new group and about Arthur’s leadership in case you’re interested (long): Arthur joined WMF in June 2010 [1] to support fundraising tech. In the context of team process pains, this team was the first one to adopt an agile development process (specifically, Scrum), and Arthur was in the middle of it all. He took this experience with him when he joined the mobile development team under Tomasz Finc in 2012. The mobile team, too, would soon adopt Scrum, and Arthur took on the role of ScrumMaster later that year to be the process owner for the team. What does that actually mean? It means facilitating the rituals that are part of an agile team’s work (e.g. the daily stand-ups, the sprint planning meetings, retrospectives, etc.) and continually facilitating the team’s discovery of improving the way they work. Say it turns out week after week that the team is introducing preventable regressions -- in a situation like this, the ScrumMaster will work with the team to better understand what’s going on and work towards a solution (e.g. collaboration with QA, improved test coverage, etc.). In my experience, every team benefits from process improvement, and the highest performing ones view this as a continuous part of the team’s work. Arthur embodies this and I've long viewed the mobile web team as the canonical example in our org that illustrates the benefits of agile development done right. Throughout his experience as ScrumMaster, Arthur has always made a point of emphasizing the spirit of agile (continued iteration and improvement, problem solving from the bottom up) rather than sticking dogmatically to a specific methodology. He’s also led the development of new processes in the organization that reduce siloed development and improve coordination, e.g. the Scrum of Scrums. Through most of this time we relied on external consultants to get other teams up to speed on agile development practices. While this has worked reasonably well, the ever-changing personal relationships (a new consultant for every project) and the lack of institutional memory has meant that it was hard to customize and scale the process to our needs. When we spun up the Flow team last year, we had to make a decision: Will we continue to rely on external consultants, or will we start building internal capacity for this? We decided to experiment with the latter, and Arthur Richards and Tomasz Finc led a one-time agile workshop with the team which was universally well-received and didn't suffer from some of the false starts of consultant engagements. So, in the budget planning cycle this year Tomasz and Arthur made a pitch to formalize this function in the organization: the Team Practices Group [2]. Given his experience, Arthur is perfectly positioned to lead this group. He’s demonstrated level-headedness, patience, and openness that you want from a coach, guiding teams gently and always focusing on improvements that will be carried forward by the team as a whole. After consulting with multiple teams who were hungry for more support (e.g. a full-time ScrumMaster, or just agile process support), we decided that Arthur would initially bring on two full-time staffers. It’s already become clear that this won’t be sufficient. For example, Analytics is expressing a strong need for a full-time ScrumMaster to support the growing team so that developers can focus on development. Whether this is always the right answer remains to be seen. Arthur will work with teams to find a good balance between custom tailored solutions and process consistency for the org. Ultimately, this new group’s function will be similar to what in traditional organizational models would be a Project Management Office - except that, instead of having a group of Project Managers assign work, we want to facilitate self-organizing and increasingly fluid teams coming up with a process that works for them. We draw lots of inspiration from other orgs (e.g. Spotify’s seminal Scaling Agile paper [3]) but also need to account for the unique requirements of our org (transparency, commitment to open source, etc.). Working with Arthur is a privilege and a pleasure, and I’m thrilled that he’s agreed to take on this new role. If you're interested in being part of the ongoing conversation
[Wikimedia Announcements] Update regarding WMF's reporting practices
Hi all -- Starting this month, WMF will be shifting its organization-wide reports from a monthly to a quarterly cadence. This reflects our growth as an organization, and is intended to make important developments more visible internally and externally. == Background == Shortly after Sue became WMF’s Executive Director, she started giving updates to the Board of Trustees about her work. These reports were compiled for accountability purposes, and not without some trepidation, Sue started sharing them publicly in January 2008. [1] The reports have grown in scope and depth alongside the organization. Where we think we can do better is in the following areas: - We've not defined the threshold for report-worthy work clearly enough, so work that represents a few person hours’ effort could get more space than a whole team’s work over the course of the quarter; - We've not consistently mapped reporting against organizational priorities; - We’re not presenting a strategic view on what we’re learning, where we’re changing direction and why; - We’re not helping users of the reports consistently discover quarterly review minutes, slides and other materials related to a specific area, in part due to the reports not being aligned with the quarterly rhythm. In addition, given the dependency on an increasing multitude of inputs (from across an organization that had fewer than 20 staff when these monthly reports were launched, and now has more than 200), the reports have increasingly gotten backlogged, to the point that we’re just now releasing the August report. At the same time, under Lila the organization has shifted into a recognizable quarterly rhythm. Priorities are defined quarterly, and reviews are being introduced following the end of each quarter for all significantly staffed projects. == A New Reporting Process == It’s come time for us to revisit the model we use for reporting, to clearly define the purpose/audience for these report, and to iterate on the monthly format. Purpose: The purpose of this report is accountability and learning within the movement. The report is not a storytelling tool. Any evaluation will be done with these objectives in mind. Audience: Its audience is chiefly internal, including community members, WMF staff, and interested donors/funders. Format: Effective immediately, we are shifting to a quarterly reporting format. This will impact our reporting, and the October through December reporting period, in the following ways: - Instead of three monthly reports for October, November, and December, we will publish our first quarterly report in February 2015. - We are reviewing the key organization-wide metrics and will improve the selection and presentation of numbers at the top level of the quarterly report. - We will closely align quarterly reports with quarterly reviews, and re-use high level findings from the quarterly reviews, while referring to the slide decks and minutes from the reviews for details. - We will aim to provide high-level synthesis and lessons learned, as well as strategy updates, through this format as well. Many of the more granular updates in the monthly report will no longer be reported. As above, the deadline for publication of the first report, covering October 1 - December 31, is February 15. For this first report, we are being conservative with regard to the deadline, as we will have our resources directed at our staff all-hands and developer summit in January. Tilman and I will begin creating a draft structure for this new report in coming weeks, and will do so in public from the get-go. We will also rethink the “Wikimedia Highlights” alongside other multilingual movements news formats, likely detaching them from reporting functions. Out of scope of this effort for now: - Providing more timely updates on initiatives with high user impact. We’re continuing to provide updates to Tech News [2] and similar newsletters, but we’re not currently doing a major overhaul here. - Replacing the monthly engineering report and its inputs, which also serve as a project status dashboard. [3] We are of course discussing how to improve on those mechanisms, and feedback is welcome. Let me know if you have any immediate questions or thoughts. Thanks, Erik [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2008-January/084883.html [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/Dashboard -- Erik Möller VP of Product Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list WikimediaAnnounce-l@lists.wikimedia.org
