Re: [Wikimedia-l] Assessing this round of FDC proposals, including the WMF's proposal

[Michael Peel]

Hi Risker,

Thanks for your thoughts. 

> Instead I suggest that the FDC seek authorization from the Board for an
> independent third party review if it feels that there is not the necessary
> ability for the FDC to produce its own assessment.

I'm personally curious to know whether you have any suggestions of third 
parties that might be able to carry out this sort of review, considering the 
requisite knowledge of the Wikimedia movement? It might be an option worth 
thinking about in future years.

Thanks,
Mike


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Assessing this round of FDC proposals, including the WMF's proposal

[Michael Peel]

Hi all,

One thing we forgot to mention is that the FDC staff will still be doing the 
financial and other quantitative data analysis, since this is a quantitative 
analysis that is based on public data and standard calculations. WMDE (and 
anyone else) are invited to point out any discrepancies they find with these 
data from the proposal on the talk page.

Thanks,
Mike

On 24 Apr 2014, at 21:54, Nicole Ebber  wrote:

> Dear Mike and FDC members,
> 
> Thank you for approaching us, we feel honoured and gladly agree to help
> assessing the WMF FDC proposal.
> 
> Given the short time frame, we are only able to assess the Infrastructure
> and Mobile part of the proposal. We will focus on the plan's
> comprehensibility and its consistency with the strategy.
> 
> Please note that we will only be able to determine the detailed scope of
> the assessment in the course of the analysis.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Nicole Ebber
> International Affairs
> 
> Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
> 
> http://wikimedia.de
> On 24 Apr 2014 21:09, "Michael Peel"  wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> This round of proposals to the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)
>> presents a new and interesting challenge - that of reviewing the entirety
>> of the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF's) plan for the next year. As part of
>> the FDC process, the WMF/FDC staff normally assemble a staff assessment of
>> each proposal. In this case, however, the WMF/FDC staff have a potential
>> bias here, since their work is included in the WMF's proposal.
>> 
>> As a result, we have asked Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE), the second
>> largest entity in our movement, to do the staff assessment of the WMF's
>> proposal, and they have agreed to do this. WMDE will be adapting the
>> framework of the standard staff assessment as they see fit in order to
>> appropriately assess the WMF's proposal; the main expectation we have is
>> that they will help identify the key strengths and weaknesses of the
>> proposal in their assessment. They will be sharing their assessment with
>> the WMF on the 7th May, on the same day that the FDC staff will share their
>> assessments with the other applicants, in both cases to check for factual
>> inaccuracies. The assessment will be posted publicly on the 8th May, on the
>> same day that the FDC staff will publicly post their assessments.
>> 
>> We would also like to encourage the other Wikimedia organisations to
>> review the WMF's proposal, and to post comments and questions on the talk
>> page for the proposal. It goes without saying that we also encourage
>> Wikimedia community members to also review the WMF's proposal, and the
>> other proposals in this round, and to similarly post comments and
>> questions. Community feedback is important for the FDC work. The FDC will
>> take all feedback into account during its deliberations next month. We will
>> also be inviting specific community members with particular
>> experience/skills to ask for their input on the proposals; please get in
>> touch if you have any suggestions of community members that should be
>> invited to do this.
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Dariusz and Mike on behalf of the FDC
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[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia engineering report, March 2014

[Guillaume Paumier]

Hi,

The report covering Wikimedia engineering activities in March 2014 is now
available.

Wiki version:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/March
Blog version:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/04/18/engineering-report-march-2014/

We're also proposing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this
report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2014/March/summary

Below is the HTML text of the report.

As always, feedback is appreciated on the usefulness of the report and its
summary, and on how to improve them.

--

Major news in March include:

   - an overview of
webfonts,
   and the advantages and challenges of using them on Wikimedia sites;
   - a series of
essays
written
   by Google Code-in students who shared their impressions, frustrations and
   surprises as they discovered the Wikimedia and MediaWiki technical
   community;
   - 
Hovercards
now
   available as a Beta feature on all Wikimedia wikis, allowing readers to see
   a short summary of an article just by hovering a link;
   - a subtle typography
change
across
   Wikimedia sites for better readability, consistency and accessibility;
   - a recap of the upgrade and
migration
of
   our bug tracking software.

*Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of
this report

that
does not assume specialized technical knowledge.*

Engineering metrics in March:

   - 160 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
   - The total number of unresolved
commitswent
   from around 1450 to about 1315.
   - About 25 shell requests
 were
   processed.

Contents

   - 1 
Personnel
  - 1.1 Work with
us
  - 1.2 
Announcements
   - 2 Technical
Operations
   - 3 Features
Engineering
  - 3.1 Editor retention: Editing
tools
  - 3.2 Core
Features
  - 3.3 
Growth
  - 3.4 
Support
   - 4 
Mobile
   - 5 Language
Engineering
   - 6 Platform
Engineering
  - 6.1 MediaWiki
Core
  - 6.2 Quality
assurance
  - 6.3 
Multimedia
  - 6.4 Engineering Community
Team
   - 7 
Analytics
   - 8 
Kiwix
   - 9 
Wikidata
   - 10 
Future

 Personnel Work with us 

Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up,
and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.

   - VP of 
Engineering
   - Software Engineer –
Growth