en.planet.wikimedia

Catalan Atlas from 1375

One of the great things about Wikipedia is getting to know people with a variety of academic interests. In the geography department, this means working side-by-side with Wikipedians who know the map of Ancient India like the backs of their hands, others who spend hours creating categories about rivers and lakes in Kazakhstan and those who seem determined to write articles about every single nook and cranny in Uruguay.

Although information on all these far-flung and exotic (from the Catalan perspective) places is a huge asset to Wikipedia, knowing our own geopolitical backyard remains as important as ever. While there is a lot of information on the Catalan Wikipedia for some European countries (like Spain, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands), in many other cases information on European countries is conspicuous for its absence. In an effort to address this issue the European Union Wikiproject was launched on the Catalan Wikipedia.

The aim of the Wikiproject is threefold. First, we seek to create and expand articles on the culture, history, economy and traditions of the EU Member States. Second, we aim to write about the European institutions themselves. Thirdly, we organize and participate in related free knowledge and free data projects. These project often include Wikipedia edit-a-thons on European topics, as well as interviews and photography of European politicians and officials for Commons. Editors were are also sent to take part in the Wiki Loves Parliaments visit to the European Parliament, which brought together several European Wikimedia chapters and was led by Olaf Kosinsky.

Since the Wikiproject began in early 2013, we have created well over 1,000 articles on the EU and its Member States. The Member State on which we focus changes every six months in synch with the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU. Because it is such a broad project, there is something for everyone, ranging from space exploration geeks and art lovers to foreign press fans and political enthusiasts. This broad appeal has made it one of the most successful Wikiprojects ever on the Catalan Wikipedia, next to the big push to reach first place on the list of Wikipedias by sample of articles.

Our geopolitical background is one gigantic puzzle with lots of holes in it but, step by step, article by article, Catalan Wikipedians are filling in the pieces.

Author of the text: User:Leptictidium - Amical Wikimedia

• only one technology to manage all media files
• improvements in technology and data will be shared everywhere
• search will become possible in all supported languages
• media files need to be stored only once
• it will simplify the administration of media files a lot
• it will compartmentalise any license and community issues

Participants at the Wikipedia Contributor day organized by Wikimedia Bangladesh and Grameenphone

On Sunday and Monday, 16/17 February 2014, Wikimedia Bangladesh (WMBD) and Grameenphone (a Telenor concern) jointly arranged a two-day long event titled ‘Wikipedia Contributor Day’ with i-Genius students.

Grameenphone/Telenor is a Wikipedia Zero partner. We organized two days of workshops on Bengali Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Grameenphone chose the participants from last year’s i-Genius students, which are selected from all over the country through a year-long program conducted by Grameenphone and the daily newspaper Prothom Alo. Usually one i-Genius is selected from every district of Bangladesh.

The goal of the workshops were to introduce Wikipedia (especially Bengali Wikipedia), and show the attendees how to edit the articles and contribute photographs to Wikimedia Commons. Most participants were new to Wikipedia, but at the same time we found several of them were already contributing to Wikipedia. It was very inspiring for us.

Munir Hasan, President of Wikimedia Bangladesh, conducted the introductory session. He said that the chapter is trying to focus on creating new editors and volunteers and this initiative will be helpful to create new Wikimedians.

I (Nurunnaby Chowdhury) and another Bengali Wikipedia sysop and Wikimedia Bangladesh EC member, Nasir Khan, conducted workshops at this two-day event with i-Genius students. Grameenphone Limited provided the event venue, at their corporate headquarters located in Dhaka city. On the event days, another sysop of Bengali Wikipedia, Nahid Sultan, was present and helped the attendees to edit and create new articles and so on.

Altogether, over 53 participants attended on the two days of the workshop. We planned for 70 participants, but some of the i-Genius students could not join due to the exam schedule. A few of the interested attendees had experimented with editing Wikipedia, and they had started asking questions to the organizers even before the event was launched!

The workshop was an all-day event with a lot of fun activities. More than 30 participants attended on the first day. After the introduction session, we divided the participants into several groups and one facilitator was assigned to each of the groups. The facilitator helped their group to create and expand a Wikipedia article by themselves. The participants moved around and made friends with each other and the organizers during the lunch break. During the afternoon session, the participants asked to clarify their doubts about editing. Organizers gave a brief introduction about the Wikimedia Bangladesh chapter, and they conducted sessions on how to add references to a Wikipedia article and how to upload pictures to Commons. On the second day, another 30 students joined this program. During the program we delivered hands-on presentations on how to edit, how to contribute, and how to donate photos to Commons. Moreover, we enriched some articles that seemed incomplete. After the successful completion of the program, all i-Genius students receive certificates and my written book about Bengali Wikipedia. This book was published at the last Ekushey Book Fair in 2013.

There were many interesting and engaging queries from a few of the participants who had already edited articles on Wikipedia. It was nice to discover that some of the participants wanted to connect with the local Wikimedia community. Several participants and the organizers wrote to thank us for conducting the workshop. The event was a success in that it introduced the audience to various ways of getting involved with the Wikimedia movement, thereby changing the perception that the only way to get involved is by writing articles online.

Nurunnaby Chowdhury & Nasir Khan, Wikimedians

Look! I’m media! So cool!

I leave the Sochi Paralympics today. As a reporter, I met my publishing goals that I set before I left. I need to remember that: 1 article a day is a lot on many levels, and anything else was just bonus. Also, I’m not getting paid to be here, I’m a citizen journalist writing articles for a Wikimedia project. I do not have to answer to an editor “back home” or justify the expense of going to Sochi.

But at the same time, I would have liked to have done more. One of the inherent problems with not being able to dedicate yourself to the craft of journalism is there is a lack of contacts, sometimes a lack of knowledge, and a lack of practice. Reporting relies on contacts. Reporting also relies on boldness. Be bold. Ask the questions. Go where things are. I do not have the contacts, and I can get only 2/3rds of the way there on boldness. (I might have gotten more had I done more research.)

A selfie from the cross country on Sunday

This is why at times I am frustrated by my reporting here: For a few things I wrote, I feel like 70% of what I wrote came from information sheets journalist are given, 25% from pictures I took on a journalist (not photography) accreditation. The color feels hard to come through when my knowledge of things like curling fails me. Plus, I feel like I should write about all four curling sheets, all four matches… not just one. One well placed rock in one end that does not appear like it had a result on the outcome. How do you write that well?

In the afternoon match of wheelchair curling, the United States threw some really bad rocks, weren’t playing aggressively to win initially against the Russians. They went to an 8th end down by three rocks. My understanding is after the 7th end, if you do not think you can win, no 8th end required. The United States wheelchair curlers played the final end much more aggressively. They were assisted in the 8th end by some bad Russian stones which shot the gap between US stones and left the scoring area. This could only be banked on so much, and the Russians did not always misplace rocks. Despite much better playing and having three stones in the scoring area with 2 rocks to go, Russia managed to place a stone the USA could not get out. The United States ended up short, scoring only two of the three points they needed in the 8th end. Unlike the game Canada was playing against Norway on the sheet next to them, there was no forcing an extra end.

Having done so much writing for Wikipedia at times, I struggle with how to write neutrally. I second guess and end up neuturing things. That felt like the case here.

When I get back somewhere (Spain or the USA), I will write more on some of

The United States enters during the Opening Ceremony

the issues involved with Sochi, better planning thoughts, how to be more successful at this sort of thing, and the metrics at the end of the day.

Let’s move on to other news agencies coverage of the Paralympics. In London during the Paralympics, the Associated Press was not to be found. I read the news often, and I rarely if ever any coverage of the Paralympics. I did not see any reporters on the ground. Here in Sochi, it is a different case. There are USA journalists, several of whom are based up in the mountains. There is media coverage. There is television coverage. (Though I have been told NBC has few people here, with most of the NBC people using OBS feeds and as a consequence being based in the USA.)

I’m not entirely certain I am happy with other United States coverage that I have seen. It appears to take three forms: 1) Ukraine. 2) Oscar Pistorious. 3) Crashes.

I feel tremendous sympathy for the Ukraine. That situation has to a degree impacted my ability to do my reporting here. It is horrible what is going on in the Ukraine, and I cannot imagine the additional stress on the Ukrainian athletes and officials. But some of the reporting appears to hugely political. Craig Spence and Philip Craven were right about things being about sport. So when journalists appear to use the Paralympics as a throwaway line to make a political point about Putin while ignoring the broader issues of inclusion and the elite sport going on, it gets annoying. This is especially annoying when the Paralympics are not contextualized and most USAians have no idea what the Paralympics are about. Many of these sportspeople here get little news coverage outside the Paralympic period, so taking away their moment in the sun by making their participation part of some political disalogue gets annoying. Did I mention annoying? Perhaps I would find this news coverage about the Ukraine aspect less annoying if for every mention of the Ukraine in a Paralympic context, there was a sports articles about the performance of sportspeople… you know, like the Olympics.

The other thing that is annoying is the Oscar Pistorious thing. I don’t know whether I should be blaming the IPC here or the media. Everything is fundamentally political on some level in decision making. The IPC embracing of Vladmir Putin was political. The IPC embracing Oscar Pistorious and chosing to highlight his accomplishments on the big screen was a political decision of sorts. The IPC is chosing to align itself with a man who killed a woman (murdered is to be determined, killed is not disputed), who allegedly cheated on another woman and who liked to play with guns. The IPC chose to align with some one who, after winning silver in the London Paralympics, protested that the person who won gold had an unfair competitive advantage because of his blade. This was a guy who went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to say his own blades did not give a competitive advantage. Hypocrisy, thy name is…

Anyway, back to Oscar and the media. The Associated Press was asking sportspeople about that. You’re a Ukrainian Paralympian. Your race ends. You have won a medal. A United States journalist asks you about… OSCAR PISTRIOUS! You are an American Paralympic medalist and your race ends and a United States journalist asks you about OSCAR PISTORIOUS! ZOMG. So awesome. Where was this during the Olympics? During the Olympics, I did not see a single Associated Press article where, following a person winning their medal in Sochi, the winner was asked, “Are you following the Oscar Pistrious situation? How does his actions impact your Olympic experience? How do you feel as an Olympian being connected to Oscar?” This feels like lazy journalism. Bold to be sure, but lazy. Maybe I have been too inside the movement, but I think the key to Paralympic success and disability access being improve is to focus on the sports. These are elite athletes. They train really hard. They give up a lot to be where they are. When their moment in the sun comes, when they become the best in their field, they get asked about Oscar. Their own accomplishments are ignored.

The last thing I have seen involves crashes and hospitalizations. That make news. I have a harder time faulting this one, though I would like to see more emphasis on success. Great Bitain can do that. Why can’t the USA media?

This post was written by Michael Maggs, Chair of Wikimedia UK

I am very pleased to be able to announce that the board of Wikimedia UK has formally adopted a five year strategy for the charity.

The strategy sets out not only our mission (‘to help people and organisations create and preserve Open Knowledge, and to help provide easy access for all’) but also the way in which we aim to achieve that in practice.

To ensure that our day-to-day activities are closely focussed on attainment of our mission, we have committed to record and publish a wide range of measured outcomes which will indicate, on an ongoing basis, how we are performing against a range of strategic goals. These measured outcomes will build up over time into a comprehensive picture of the practical impact the charity has been able to make.

In preparing the strategy we consulted widely with the Wikimedia UK community, the Wikimedia community at large, other chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation, and interested individuals. The draft strategy documents were open for public consultation during the month of February, and feedback received was taken into account along with staff and board contributions. We have replied to the community feedback on-wiki.

We are confident that as the end result of this process we have a robust strategy that will serve us well in the years to come. It will enable us to maintain and track challenging but achievable targets while retaining operational flexibility to focus our day-to-day efforts on whichever individual activities and initiatives will best help us achieve practical impact.

We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the process, and we look forward to continuing to work with the community with renewed focus and vigour.

Ooops. Lost my pen cap.

Sport continued yesterday at the 2014 Winter Paralympics in Sochi. With four sports on offer, I chose to go to the cross country skiing as I’d never seen that sport live before. At 11 C at start time, it was a strange temperature for skiing. Looking at the course walking past it, I could see the snow conditions looked iffy because the snow was rather dark in spots. Bundled up, I was too warm. Ski socks,jeans, long under wear, a t-shirt and winter coat. Not the thing to be wearing to watch skiing while in Sochi. At least the waterproof boots came in handy…

It was a beautiful and warm day up in the mountains.

There were two races on offer, the men’s sitting 15km in the morning and the women’s sitting 12km in the afternoon. Both were good races and fun to watch. The crowd was less problematic feeling than the one at the sledge hockey. Russia swept the men’s side, but the USA managed to pick up a silver medal on the women’s side. Ukraine also won a medal, continuing their dominance on the medal table. They currently rank second, behind only Russia. Spain is ahead of the United States, because while they have only one medal, it is gold. Jon Santacana won it in the men’s visually impaired downhill. The United States has five total medals, three silver and two bronze. This puts them ninth overall in the medal count. Despite the United States’s relative success at the Olympic Games, there is no history of medal dominance on the Paralympic side. Neither Australia nor New Zealand have medalled yet at these Games.

As a reporter, the day felt mildly disappointing.  Sochi does not feel like it is set up with journalists in mind. It is not easy to report from these Games.  I do not know if this is deliberate or not.  I talked to some other reporters.  Everyone appears to have had issues with their accreditation arriving late. The lack of English problem is a huge problem.  (Speaking Italian or German or Spanish does not appear to be any advantage.) Failure to understand in some cases leads to people speaking slower to you in Russian, as if that would help. I’ve done this to others as an English speaker a few times, and you know, I may think twice about doing that because it is annoying. No, I do not understand and speaking more slowly to me does not help.

I have tried to get my Ukrainians to talk to people for me, translate what they are saying and get a better feel for what is going on. Thus, we talked to some eastern Ukrainians who had been living in Russia for six years. The attitude apparently was why don’t I know Russian? I must have a problem. When asking for help, in Russian, I know on at least two occasions, my Ukrainian has been rudely asked, “Can’t you read? What’s your problem that you can’t read the sign?” Well, as we’ve learned, signs in Sochi often do not point you where you need to go at all. Buses that say they are going one place often end up in another place. You want to hit your head against the wall.

While trying to talk to others, I had the Ukrainian talk to a journalist from Kazakstan and just generally find out which “side” he was taking in the Crimea situation. Apparently, he wanted the side of peace, which was apparently implying with Russia. Following the press conference the other day, two Russian reporters asked one of the Ukrainians (tag teamed him, they did) why they would not accept Russia trying to bring peace to the Ukraine? Why did they reject Russian efforts to bring peace to their country?

Met some Americans yesterday and talked to them. They had similar issues that I’ve experienced in terms of the language problem and the getting around problem and the general vibe issue. In talking to the Ukrainian, they were more on his “side” and asked questions about how it was impacting him personally. This was completely different than the experience with others.

And this political thing hangs heavy over the Games. It does. No matter how much Craig Spence and Philip Craven would like to think otherwise or hope it would be otherwise, it hangs heavy. London political issues were flash in the pan, small stuff compared to this.

I doubt the Ukraine will leave the Games now. They are second on the medal tables, and their performance as sportspeople gives testament to their strength.

But that doesn’t mean all is good and outside the Ukrainians doing their thing, everyone else forgets. Apparently a 16 year old Russian competitor told the media he thinks the Ukrainians should accept Russia’s offer to try to bring peace. Erk?

Today is my last full day reporting on the Games. The strangeness of yesterday left me feeling unmotivated to write any news articles yesterday. I’m not connected with the United States Paralympic Team. I didn’t prep Wikipedia articles like I did for the Australian team before London. I don’t have the contacts. I’m the only one writing in English. While I managed about three articles the day before and met my writing goal for the Games already, I feel like I could have and should have done better yesterday by producing something. But no desks, the encroachment of the fans in the media section doing lots of Russian chanting, seating where I was worried about my stuff falling under it (lost my pen to that), the lack of power to plug things into, the tables in the press center being standing only for the most part, the smallness of the space, not being based in the mountain cluster and spending at least an hour trying to figure out the confusing bus system… just not conducive to writing news articles. (The bus situation is truly awful. There is no real special media transport, so you end up on busses where you are packed like sardines with lots of spectators while you have all your reporting equipment. You don’t know where you are going and finding people to help is near impossible. The buses were not running frequently despite the events for the day having just concluded.)

I am hopeful I can get something published about today’s events. I’m not optimistic. I am trying to remember the important thing was that as a Wikimedian, I made it here as accredited media. It took a lot of work and I succeeded. Arriving here was an accomplishment in its own right.

• France report: National Archives; Sèvres & mass uploads; Wikipedians in the European Parliament
• Germany report: Claim open culture, again and again
• India report: National Museum, New Delhi, India (January 2-5, 2014)
• Netherlands report: Art and Feminism; Wikipedian in Residence; War memorials
• Norway report: Women on Wikipedia
• Sweden report: Local portal and CC toolkits
• UK report: Wikimedia UK
• Open Access report: Open Access at Wikimania; Signalling OA-ness
• Calendar: March’s GLAM events

• build a feature
• test in test
• promote to live environment
• bug Magnus with a bug (reiterate process)

The Awesome team Canada takes to the ice for their first game of the Winter Paralympics.

Today was the first day of sports after last nights’ inauguration ceremony. Still having some small yet annoying issues that impact my reporting. The kettle in my room doesn’t work.  The Russians still do not know where things are.  The signage is awful in many places.  The bank is not open.  There is no currency exchange around.  Food options outside my hotel and the Olympic Park do not appear to exist.  The signs in the hotel say leave towels on the floor if you want new ones, and to leave them hanging if you did not: I left them hanging and the towels went away but no new towels. All I am eating is McDonalds, free cookies and Coca Cola. There was a sign in the bathroom at the hockey stadium that said do not put toilet paper in the toilet.  The USA embassy sent me an e-mail saying avoid certain parts of Moscow because of a protest. The host country is invading some one else. That’s the picky stuff.  Maybe I am obsessing because London built my expectations so high?

It is now time for sports. Because of waking up late and feeling sick, I missed the biathlon so I went to ice hockey instead. This time, everything went smoothly.  Buses were where I expected them.  They took me where I wanted to go.  The signage for sledge hockey venue for the media was better, so I was able to easily find where I needed to be.  Happiness.

I had three sports I wanted to see while in Sochi: Sledge hockey, cross country or biathlon, and wheelchair curling.  Since I’ve been interested in the Paralympics, I have been living in countries where these are not the winter Paralympic sports of choice and I have not seen them live.

Sledge hockey was awesome, though a bit disconcerting at first because the sledge the players sit on has two parallel blades under at most a third of the sledge.  They are tall enough that the puck passes under them.  When watching, I had a few moments of whut? Where? How?  Mental processing.

I showed up to see the overtime shootout win of Norway over the Czech Republic.  I watched the Canadians just totally dismantle Sweden 10 – 1.  All fine, all awesome.  The fans were great in supporting both teams and supporting good hockey.

And then we hit the game where Team USA played Italy.  Since I’ve been in Spain, I have been a bit more conscious that I am an American.  It is just a fact of the language barrier.  I can’t feel Spanish like I could feel Australian.  In any case, neither here nor there.  I am an American. I love my country in my own special way.  People treat me like I am an American.

The wonderful view from my hotel room.  Notice the Paralympic flame.  It is perfectly placed for me to look at from bed.

Thus the Russian fans worked to grate on my nerves.  Sir Philip Craven talked about how sports should transcend politics.  Some one should have told the Russian fans that.  They were openly partisan.  They cheered loudly every time the Italians got the puck.  They rocked the house and wildly waved their Russian flags when the Italians scored their lone goal in Team USA’s 5-1 victory over Italy.  When the USA scored, there was little applause and most of it came from the section where the American fans were sitting.  During the intermission, the person doing the big screen in house entertainment went to talk to fans of Team USA. The nice female presenter asked the pair of USA bedecked male fans to do the Team USA chant.  They did.  A number of people in the audience booed.  Booed.

They booed.  It grated hugely on my nerves.  I was in London for those Paralympics.  Those are my benchmarks for awesomeness.  They were truly awesome on multiple levels.  This includes the volunteers and the fans.  The huge numbers of fans and the locals cheering for high quality play, no matter the country: This was a standout of the London Paralympics.  In London, I did not hear this sort of political, partisan booing against teams Great Britain has issues with, including when Iran played Argentina before a home crowd.  Remember that little Falklands War? Yeah.

So I am clearly not impressed with the Russian fans here.  I was also less impressed with the opening ceremony, which at times felt slightly militaristic in tone.  I liked the inclusion of sexual orientation in things that should not be discriminated against during the Games. I liked less the personal public thanks from Sir Philip Craven to Vladmir Putin. (Hey! I saw Putin live in person before Obama! What a strange place this world?)  It felt uncomfortable, more uncomfortable when I woke up and read the morning news about Russian actions and statements regarding the Ukraine.

In London, I felt like I got a sense of place.  Everyone wanted to talk, including volunteers and other reporters.  It was awesome.  Everyone wanted to help.  I don’t get that here.  It is sad.  I don’t quite get a feel of Russia so much.  I have memories of watching Pat O’Brien during the Lillehammer Olympics, reporting from the International Broadcasting Center before a fire and getting this awesome feel every night that it was a small Norwegian ski resort town that felt homey and Norwegian, with the fireplace.  Now that I am at a Games on par with that, I kind of want and crave that Olympic feeling that Pat O’Brian gave me during Lillehammer as a kid, only in person.

How much of this is my own cultural baggage of growing up in the United States in the dying days of the Soviet Union, I do not know. I’d like to think I have transcended such bias, or at least am at a point where I can own and recognize it.

But hey the sport is good so far.

Articles published so far:

• 8 March 2014: Canada routs Sweden in sledge hockey at Winter Paralympics
• 8 March 2014: Norway beats Czech Republic in sledge hockey overtime win in first match at Winter Paralympics
• 8 March 2014: Winter Paralympics Opening Ceremony takes place in Sochi
• 7 March 2014: Ukrainian Paralympic Committee announces decision to compete at Games so their goal of peace will not be forgotten
• 7 March 2014: IPC President Sir Philip Craven says Paralympic Games should not be about politics
• 6 March 2014: Jon Lujan named United States flag bearer for 2014 Winter Paralympics opening ceremony
• 6 March 2014: Preparations underway for start of 2014 Winter Paralympics
• 4 March 2014: Rail border between the Ukraine and Russia remains open
• 3 March 2014: Canada has no plans to boycott Winter Paralympics

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This post was contributed by Allan Aguilar (User:Ralgis).

In English

The attendees of the first meeting of users of Wikimedia projects in Costa Rica

Users of Wikimedia projects in Costa Rica met for the first time on March 3, 2014 at San José, the capital city of that country, to discuss the first steps that Wikimedia Costa Rica must take in order to become a Wikimedia chapter recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation. The encuentro was held at the Miguel Obregón Lizano National Library, a state institution that collects and preserves the national bibliographic heritage.

Among the comments and proposals, a draft of bylaws was submitted, and it was determined that in Costa Rica there are many editors, mainly active in Spanish Wikipedia, which are not known to other Costa Rican Wikimedians. Therefore, the main issue addressed was to involve these editors in Wikimedia Costa Rica, and conduct activities for the dissemination of the Wikimedia projects at universities and other educational institutions. A concern was raised about the small amount of Wikimedian women. The desire to contribute to the dissemination and Wikipedia and its sister projects among women professionally engaged in informatics was also expressed.

Other topics were presented and treated, thus organizing the tasks of Wikimedia Costa Rica, including soon a participation in Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments, and an active collaboration with the Regional Cooperation Initiative for Ibero-America (Iberocoop). Also, this meeting counted on the support of Iberocoop.

Wikimedians from Costa Rica and other regions of Ibero-America feel that this meeting was an important development for Wikimedia Costa Rica and for the dissemination of the Wikimedia projects in the country. Although there remains much to do, surely it will be done with the same enthusiasm as shown at this meetup.

Allan Aguilar
Spokesman for Wikimedia Costa Rica

En Español

Wikimedistas costarricenses se reunieron por primera vez

Los asistentes del primer encuentro de usuarios de los proyectos Wikimedia en Costa Rica

Usuarios de los proyectos Wikimedia en Costa Rica se reunieron por primera vez el 3 de marzo de 2014 en San José, la capital de ese país, para discutir los primeros pasos que Wikimedia Costa Rica debe tomar para convertirse en un capítulo Wikimedia reconocido por la Fundación Wikimedia. El encuentro se realizó en la Biblioteca Nacional Miguel Obregón Lizano, una institución estatal que recopila y conserva el patrimonio bibliográfico nacional.

Entre los comentarios y las propuestas, se presentó un borrador de estatutos y se determinó que en Costa Rica hay muchos editores, principalmente activos en Wikipedia en español, que no son conocidos por otros wikimedistas costarricenses. Por esto, el tema que se trató principalmente fue el de incorporar a estos editores a Wikimedia Costa Rica, y realizar actividades para la difusión de los proyectos Wikimedia en universidades y otras instituciones educativas. También se expresó una preocupación por la poca cantidad de mujeres wikimedistas, y el deseo de aportar con la difusión Wikipedia y sus projectos hermanos entre las mujeres dedicadas profesionalmente a la informática.

Otros temas fueron expuestos y tratados, organizando así los cometidos de Wikimedia Costa Rica, entre ellos una pronta participación en los concursos fotográficos Wiki Loves Earth y Wiki Loves Monuments y una activa colaboración con la Iniciativa de Cooperación Regional para Iberoamérica (Iberocoop). A su vez, este encuentro contó con el apoyo de Iberocoop.

Los wikimedistas costarricenses y de otras regiones de Iberoamérica consideran que esta reunión fue un paso importante para el desarrollo de Wikimedia Costa Rica y para la difusión de los proyectos Wikimedia en el país. Aunque queda mucho por hacer, seguramente se hará con el mismo entusiasmo de este encuentro.

Allan Aguilar
Portavoz de Wikimedia Costa Rica

My friend Noah mentioned the game VVVVVV. I was confused because I thought he was talking about the visual programming language vvvv. I went to Wikipedia to clear up my confusion but ended up on the article on VVVVV which is about the Latin phrase “vi veri universum vivus vici” meaning, “by the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe”.

There is no Wikipedia article on VVVVVVV. That would be ridiculous.

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Español  • English

English

Paola Ricaurte Quijano

Paola Ricaurte Quijano is a full time professor at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Mexico City Campus and an expert on cyberculture, e-politics, digital activism and digital literacies. Her pedagogical philosophy includes having students create academic content that is free and open to the public. Despite her short experience with Wikipedia, she has made uploading Wikipedia articles an integral part of her class.

Ricaurte Quijando began this project two years ago, encouraging her students to create works that not only benefit the student or result in a grade, but also to develop consciousness of “collective intelligence,” or the production of new knowledge for everyone. Equally, she encourages students to not simply be passive consumers of online content, but also to create content in a professional manner.

Ricaurte Quijando gives classes in “Communication and Media Studies, “Communication and Cultural Studies,” “Media Culture and New Media” among others, teaching students from various majors from medicine to communications, asking all to create Wikipedia articles. The classes contain between 20 and 25 students, working in groups of four, which usually results in five or six new articles each semester.

These articles can be on any topic related to Mexico, related to the class or issues related to students’ majors. Most find topics to write about searching Wikipedia in other languages. Examples of uploaded articles include Teoría de dos pasos [1], Elihu Katz [2], and Final Cut Pro (video software) [3].

Writing for Wikipedia is not easy and requires a certain amount of work as well as the development of new abilities, such as seeing the topics from the point of view of the course. This starts with the ability to do research. Often students need to learn how to synthesize information and discriminate among sources of information and sometimes students need to learn how to consult traditional sources of information such as books. All this adds up to a large amount of work. In addition, students must work as a team, develop critical thinking and decide which information is valuable to the article and which is not. Language issues include Wikipedia’s own requirements of a neutral point of view, often requiring students to present more than one point of view without favoring any.

Writing for Wikipedia is an activity that is part of the course material, however from my point of view I see it as an enriching activity that helps generate neutral content and contribute to a network like Wikipedia successfully. At the same time I view it as giving back to my community, because not everybody has knowledge in different languages and their search for information can be cut short because the information appears in languages that they do not understand.

Lizbeth Márquez M., Wiki Borregos

Español

La Dra. Paola Ricaurte Quijano es profesora de cátedra en el Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México y experta en cultura electrónica, activismo político en línea, activismo digital y alfabetización digital. Tiene una política de enseñanza en la que considera que los contenidos producidos por los alumnos sean abiertos y públicos, para que estén al alcance de todos. Ella, a pesar de no tener relación estrecha con Wikipedia, pide como parte de su clase que sus alumnos suban contenido a esta enciclopedia.

Desde hace dos años, Paola ha estado promoviendo en sus alumnos que realicen trabajos que no sean solamente benéficos para la clase o una calificación, sino que se desarrolle una conciencia sobre la inteligencia colectiva, es decir, que se produzca nuevo conocimiento entre todos. A su vez, busca el que los alumnos no solo sean consumidores pasivos de la red, sino que se maneje la producción de contenidos de manera profesional.

Paola ha impartido clases de “Comunicación y Estudio de Medios”, “Comunicación y Estudios Culturales”, “Cultura mediática y nuevos medios”, entre otras, y a pesar de que ha tenido estudiantes desde Medicina hasta Comunicación, a todos por igual les ha pedido realicen esta actividad. Las clases que imparte, en promedio son de 20 o 25 alumnos, creando equipos de cuatro o cinco personas, teniendo de esta manera cinco o seis publicaciones por semestre.

El contenido que pide se publique puede ser de cualquier tipo, promoviendo información sobre México, sobre la clase, o cuestiones asociadas con la carrera de los alumnos, puesto que muchas veces encuentran los artículos que necesitan en otros idiomas. Se han publicado desde artículos estrechamente relacionados con la clase, como el de “Teoría de dos pasos,” hasta aquel artículo sobre “Elihu Katz,” o “Final Cut Pro (video software)”.

Escribir para Wikipedia no es tan simple, requiere de cierto esfuerzo, además de que desarrolla varias competencias, vistas desde la perspectiva del curso. Empezando por la capacidad de investigar, es una de las que más trabajo les cuesta a los estudiantes; muchas veces no se sabe sintetizar información, discriminar las fuentes relevantes, o no se consultan fuentes tradicionales como libros. El trabajo en equipo, desarrollo del pensamiento crítico, en el que se debe saber discernir de la información valiosa y aquella que no lo es. La redacción, además de que debe ser bajo ciertos parámetros, puesto que Wikipedia tiene su propio lenguaje, redacción neutral, presentando los diversos puntos de vista sobre el tema del que se habla, sin tomar postura alguna.

Es una actividad que forma parte del plan de la materia, sin embargo, como estudiante y persona en general, me parece una actividad enriquecedora dado que te ayuda a generar contenido de manera neutral y contribuir a una red como Wikipedia, de manera acertada. A su vez, lo veo como una retribución hacia mi comunidad, puesto que no todos tienen conocimientos en otros idiomas y su búsqueda se trunca cuando la información aparece en otro idioma diferente a español.

Lizbeth Márquez M., Wiki Borregos

At a press conference earlier today, the Ukrainians affirmed their decision to compete non-politically in the Paralympic Games, though they left open the option to leave should Russia take further military intervention in their country. That press conference was hugely wow, tense. You could feel the guy’s passion. It was wow. Seriously intense.

Wikimedia wikis are available in nearly 300 languages, with some of them having pages with mixed-script content. An example is the page on the writing systems of India on the English Wikipedia. We expect users to be able to view this page in full and not see meaningless squares also known as tofu. These tofu squares represent letters written in the language, but cannot be rendered by the web browser on the reader’s computer. This may happen due to several reasons:

• The device does not have the font for the particular script;
• The operating system or the web browser do not support the technology to render the character;
• The operating system or the browser support the script partially. For instance, due to gradual addition of characters in recent Unicode versions for several scripts, the existing older fonts may not be able to support the new characters.

Fonts for most languages written in the Latin script are widely available on a variety of devices. However, languages written in other scripts often face obstacles when fonts on operating systems are unavailable, outdated, bug-ridden or aesthetically sub-optimal for reading content.

Using Webfonts with MediaWiki

To alleviate these shortcomings, the WebFonts extension was first developed and deployed to some wikis in December 2011. The underlying technology provides the ability to download fonts automatically to the user if they are not present on the reader’s device, similar to how images in web pages are downloaded.

The old WebFonts extension was converted to the jquery.webfonts library, which was included in the Universal Language Selector—the extension that replaced the old WebFonts extension. Webfonts are applied using the jquery.webfonts library, and on Wikimedia wikis it is configured to use the fonts in the MediaWiki repository. The two important questions we need answered before this can be done are:

1. Will the user need webfonts?
2. If yes, which one(s)?

Webfonts are provided when:

• Users have chosen to use webfonts in their user preference.
• The font is explicitly selected in CSS.
• Users viewing content in a particular language do not have the fonts on their local devices, or the devices do not display the characters correctly, and the language has an associated default font that can be used instead. Before the webfonts are downloaded, a test currently known as “tofu detection” is done to ascertain that the local fonts are indeed not usable. The default fonts are chosen by the user community.

Webfonts are not applied:

• when users choose not to use webfonts, even if there exists a valid reason to use webfonts (see above);
• in the text edit area of the page, where the user’s preference or browser settings are honored.

See image (below) for a graphical description of the process.

‘Tofu’ Detection

The font to be applied is chosen either by the name of the font-family or as per the language, if the designated font family is not available. For the latter, the default font is at the top of the heap. However, negotiating more complex selection options like font inheritance, and fallback add to the challenge. For projects like Wikimedia, selecting appropriate fonts for inclusion is also of concern. The many challenges include the absence of well-maintained fonts, limited number of freely licensed fonts and rejection of fonts by users for being sub-optimal.

Challenges to Webfonts

Merely serving the webfont is not the only challenge that this technology faces. The complexities are compounded for languages of South and South-East Asia, as well as Ethiopia and few other scripts with nascent internationalization support. Font rendering and support for the scripts vary across operating system platforms. The inconsistency can stem from the technology that is used like the rendering engines, which can display widely different results across browsers and operating systems. Santhosh Thottingal, senior engineer for Wikimedia’s Language Engineering team who has been participating in recent developments to make webfonts more efficient, outlines this in greater detail.

Checkbox in the Universal Language Selector preferences to download webfonts

A major impact is on bandwidth consumption and on page load time due to additional overhead of delivering webfonts for millions of users. A recent fallout of this challenge was the change that was introduced in the Universal Language Selector (ULS) to prevent pages from being loaded slowly, particularly when bandwidth is a premium commodity. A checkbox now allows the users to determine if they would like webfonts to be downloaded.

Implementing Webfonts

Several clever solutions are currently in use to avoid the known challenges. The webfonts are prepared with an aim to create comparatively smaller footprints. For instance, Google’s sfntly tool that uses MicroType Express for compression is used for creating the fonts in EOT format (WOFF being the other widely used webfont format). However, the inherent demands of a script with larger character sets cannot always be overridden efficiently. Caches are used to reduce unnecessary webfonts downloads.

FOUT or Flash Of Unstyled Text is an unavoidable consequence when the browser displays text in dissimilar styling or no text at all, while waiting for the webfonts to load. Different web browsers handle this differently while optimizations are in the making. A possible solution in the near future may be the introduction of the in-development WOFF2 webfonts format that is expected to further reduce font size, improve performance and font load events.

Special fonts like the Autonym font are used in places where known text—like a list of language names—is required to be displayed in multiple scripts. The font carries only the characters that are necessary to display the predefined content.

Additional optimizations at this point are directed towards improving the performance of the JavaScript libraries that are used.

Conclusion

Several technical solutions are being explored within Wikimedia Language Engineering and in collaboration with organizations with similar interests. Wikipedia’s sister project Wikisource attempts to digitize and preserve copyright-expired literature, some of which is written in ancient scripts. In these as well as other cases like accessibility support, webfonts technology allows fonts for special needs to be made available for wider use. The clear goal is to have readable text available for all users irrespective of the language, script, device, platform, bandwidth, content and special needs.

For more information on implementing webfonts in MediaWiki, we encourage you to read and contribute to the technical document on mediawiki.org

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation

Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador

This post was initially published on the Jisc Inform website here

Wikipedia is meant to be a starting point, not a final source of knowledge. It is permanently incomplete and evolving, with continuous formal and informal review. Delving into that process, learners can explore critical reading, digital literacy and deep questions of knowledge. Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia ambassador, gives us his top ten tips for educators using Wikipedia…

1. Discuss and review
Discussion is central to Wikipedia. Click on “Talk” at the top of an article to see discussions, sometimes very extensive, about the article’s problems and how it could be improved. This link will also show the quality rating that Wikipedians have given the article. These formal and informal reviews are an opportunity to promote critical reading: get learners in the habit of reading these discussions and weighing in with their own comments.

2. Question the policies
Wikipedia requires originally-worded statements of fact with a citation to a reliable, published source which is independent of the thing written about. Each aspect of this definition can be explored and challenged in class discussion: why are many sources not “reliable”? What makes an article “neutral”? Why not just copy text from other sites? These questions can frame a discussion of general information literacy or of how scholarly values apply to a subject area.

The encyclopaedia’s many policies and guidelines are potential starting points. Reading the summary at the top of a policy, you can ask what that policy seeks to prevent and how it advances the site’s goal of summarising all human knowledge.

3. Look beyond the English language
There are more than 280 language versions of Wikipedia and their differences are a window onto cultural and linguistic variety. Ruth Page of the University of Leicester has used the English and Italian versions of the Murder of Meredith Kercher article to teach about the challenges of writing about controversial topics. An article’s language versions are linked from the bottom left on the desktop version. Manypedia is a tool for comparing different language versions of an article.

4. Look under the bonnet
A wiki stores all changes made to it. With the “View history” button you can see all the versions of an article and the differences between them. The evolution of a controversial article over time can show different agendas competing to shape the structure, sources and phrasing. The article history also shows when the article was vandalised and how long it took to be fixed. It is a way to get learners thinking of Wikipedia articles as contested and in flux rather than as fixed or finished.

If a learner improves the article, you can use article history to compare it before and after their involvement. The article history also has links that show who contributed to the article and how many people read it each day.

5. Look beyond Wikipedia
Wikipedia is just one of eleven sites creating freely-reusable, interlinked education and reference materials. The Wikimedia family includes Wikisource for texts, Wikibooks for manuals and Wikidata for facts and figures.

6. Create customised books
All pages on Wikimedia sites have a “Print/Export” link. One of the options is to “Create a book” by choosing a group of articles. The results can be exported in e-book formats such as PDF or, for a small charge, as physical books from a print-on-demand publisher. Phil Wane, an academic at Nottingham Trent University, uses this tool to create customised books for his courses about new media.

7. Make changes
The author Martin Gardner said that whenever he wanted to learn a subject, he wrote a book about it. Wikipedia offers that opportunity to any learner: if you really want to learn a topic then create or improve the Wikipedia article and get it reviewed. Educators at all levels are getting learners to do this, most often final-year undergraduates or beginning postgraduates. These assignments need careful planning to align the on-wiki activity with the course objectives and to get active support from Wikipedians. Wikimedia’s educator portal has tips, resources and case studies.

8. Wikimedia Commons
Digital media shared through Wikimedia Commons can be embedded in Wikipedia and other sites, reaching a massive public audience. With free licences, the copyright owner can keep ownership and specifies that any reuse has to involve attribution. Anything from a figure in a journal article to digitised historical documents could be put to work. You can even assign learners to create diagrams illustrating concepts for Wikipedia.

9. Ask for help
Wikimedia is not just a set of web sites but a set of communities. There are real people behind the screen, and many are keen to help. They can be useful in navigating Wikimedia’s often confusing rules, interfaces and culture. Jisc and Wikimedia UK can connect educators and researchers to appropriate Wikipedian expertise.

10. Take and use
All Wikimedia content – text, media and software – is free to reuse for any purpose. You have to obey the licences, usually explained at the foot of the page. Normally this will mean clearly attributing the owner and the licence. Wikimedia Commons currently has 20 million images, video clips and audio clips with an educational or research purpose, including many shared from cultural institutions or open access journals. Take a look at these ten extraordinary images from the Wikimedia Commons from Nicola Yeeles.

I have seen a fair amount of criticism lobbed at the media for their failure to cover a number of Russian related topics during the Olympic Games.  The LGBT topic should have gotten more attention.  Orphan children should have gotten more attention.  The deplorable situation regarding the environmental impact and the unhappiness of the locals in Sochi over the Games should have gotten more attention.

All of these are likely true, but ignore certain reporting constraints that take place during a major event like this.  I write for Wikinews, a Wikimedia Foundation project. I feel lucky to be able to attend the Paralympics because I am not part of a major newspaper, am not a broadcast rights holder, write for a volunteer driven project.  In order to get media accreditation, my news organization has to do a lot of work to demonstrate that we cover winter sports.  This involves going to world championships or other events, interviewing people, and otherwise demonstrating that we know something about the Paralympics.  We’re basically on some level showing we can promote the Paralympics.  For the Olympics, this process is particularly competitive and readership plays a huge part.  Freelancers are just not able to get media accreditation.  You have to be part of a media organization.  Most media organizations going are going to report on The Games.  Full stop.

My visa to get to Russia for the Games arrived February 14.  I could have probably left immediately and tried to do some reporting on those issues for Wikinews.  Several problems though: 1) Lack of funding.  I could not afford to do that if I wanted to.  If you look on Kickstarter and other funding projects for journalism, there isn’t much money being given to that. 2) I do not speak Russian.  This is a huge hurdle.  It makes it very difficult to do reporting. 3) I do not have the contact base to do reporting from Russia on these issues.  Contacts matter in reporting.  It means people talk to you, know you, trust you.  They are key to getting things done. 4) I wanted media accreditation to primarily cover sports and provide attention to disability sport.  I did not come to Sochi primarily to cover these other topics, which would mean spending time and energy away from The Games.

I have not been inside other news organizations, so I can only guess what is going on but I would think their issues would be similar.  It costs money to do that sort of reporting.  Newsrooms across the globe have been shedding global staff, and shuttering their international correspondences desks.  Instead, they have opted for freelancers and stringers.  The economics of this reporting then are not great.  (In my case, I am a volunteer so the economics are what can I afford? And the sister project to Wikinews is Wikipedia, which allows no original reporting.  They just repeat the main stream media.) Many of the people going to the Paralympics and Olympics are sport reporters. They are here to report on sports.  That is what they know how to do.  That is what they are paid to do.  Would you go to a neurosurgeon for knee reconstruction?  Probably not.  Larger news organizations with more media accreditations may be able to afford to do that.  They may also be able to be better placed to hire stringers who can report on these issues because visas are not an issue if a person is a local reporter already inside Russia.  In London, a lot of these questions got asked at press conferences because the local media asked them.  The local media here is unlikely to be asking those questions. But by and large, it just isn’t very feasible here.

There are ways to report on these issues from inside the Games in Sochi.  They just take work, and editorial people back at home base approving of this.  I’ll try to do my bit, but please do not be hugely disappointed if I cannot deliver a lot on Putin, the Ukraine and lastly the Paralympics.  Not what I am here for though I am really going to make the effort to try.

View from my room at night

I have a lovely view from my hotel room at night.  When the flame is lit, I should have able to see it.  The only problems I have with my room are my kettle does not work, and there is no desk to work from.  (Rather, there is a desk occupied by a large television.)

I am up early because my Ukrainian team arrives this morning, though I am not exactly sure when.  I am very excited to meet them given everything that is going on.  The last time I saw any of them was when we discussed going to Sochi at the November 2013 Wikimedia Central and Eastern European conference.

Today’s plans include taking them to the media center, picking up opening ceremonies pictures and seeing what else is going on.

As I am writing on my iPad, I have some problems copy/pasting.  I had two news stories published overnight: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Jon_Lujan_named_United_States_flag_bearer_for_2014_Winter_Paralympics_opening_ceremony and https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Preparations_underway_for_start_of_2014_Winter_Paralympics .

Today I had the honor of presenting to faculty at the University of Sydney, as part of Dr. Robert Cummings’ “Wikipedia in Higher Education” symposium. Here are my notes.

Accept a position on the board of a small charity.

I guess I won’t be editing the Kent Hovind article any time soon, then.

(2014 fundraiser in progress! And if you don’t have money, START EDITING. We accept souls.)

Since a few years we present monthly deduplicated totals for active and very active editors. Deduplicated meaning: every editor only counts once, regardless of number of wikis edited. We never collected similar trends on a per project basis. So to make up for this, last week I ran some special iterations of Wikistats to collect active editors trends per project.

I want to share with you four charts, as they were presented at today’s Metrics Meeting. There will be a follow-up study, but here are a few quick observations:

1) First chart is the big picture,

• where English editor community is still somewhat shrinking (but most of that happened earlier)
• where all non-English Wikipedias combined are fairly stable
• where non-Wikipedias combined show significant growth especially in 2013

2) Second chart focuses on two largest non Wikipedia projects: Commons and new project Wikidata (together these make up most of the orange line in first chart).

Note how the large peaks in Commons editorship in September are result of hugely successful Wiki Loves Monuments contests

3) Third chart shows smaller Wikimedia projects which are stable or growing

4) Fourth chart shows smaller projects which are slightly or significantly shrinking

Thanks to Dario Taraborelli for inquiring about these metrics. He and I will look into this further, possibly checking correlation with page view trends.

When watching the Olympic news coverage, one of the first things that struck me was the journalist complaints about accommodation. I have had no such problem.  It is fine. The toilet works.  There are no dogs in the hallway.  The door is on my hotel room.  If there were kinks at the Olympics, they are all gone for me at the Paralympics.  I don’t have any complaints.

My issues would be elsewhere.  Whine whine.  Complain complain.  There has been a huge amount of media attention given to how the Olympics (and Paralympics) were supposed to show case Russia, and sell it to the world.  With the current political situation with Russia, one would think this might be even more key.

But I don’t quite feel it.  I have only the London Paralympics as a member of the media to baseline my experience from.  Everyone I talked to said the London Games were potentially the best Games ever.  The best.

In London, there were volunteers at the airport.  There were volunteers at the train station.  They were bubbly and enthusiastic.  They wanted to help you.  My media accreditation lamination process was handled in Heathrow.  I came into Sochi via plane in Moscow.  (And then I took a train down to Sochi.)  There was a special line at the airport, but that was the visa and special ended there.  (Though to be fair, my flight got in at 4am.)  No help, no volunteers, no one there.  I saw signs that indicated they might possibly have such assistance, but no luck.  (Then the metro in Moscow and the train station where you catch the train to Sochi had poor English language signage.  Few to no people spoke English.)  When I got to the Adler train station, no real sense of volunteers and I got a free ticket to get to Olympic Park.  No enthusiastic volunteers,  No yellow line directing you where to go.  No clear signage.  They assume you knew which way the train route went.  When I got to the Olympic Park Train Station, assistance was again non-existent.  The extent to which I had it was “Not this line.”  A taxi driver eventually pointed me at the direction of my hotel.

I’m staying at an official media hotel.  There was an accreditation help desk in the lobby.  The person could not tell me 1) where the main press center was, 2) how to get there, 3) where to go to get my accreditation laminated.  Joy.  I wandered back to the Olympic Park area, looking and looking for signs.  None.  I saw a sign for accreditation but it was not really media accreditation.  They did help me get it, no explanation.  And then no follow up as to where the Main Press Center was, or no opportunity to ask this.

I know media accreditation lets me into venues pretty much unfettered.  I took advantage, wandered on in, and started looking for signs for the main press center.  I stopped volunteers, security and others asking where it was. Most responses I got were “No English”, or people pointing me in the completely wrong direction.  This was hugely different than London, where volunteers who could not answer got on the walkie talkie and asked to find some one who could answer your question.  It is hard to enjoy where you are when you’re walking around lost, cannot find assistance, have no map of the venue and have people pointing you in the completely wrong direction.  Welcome to Russia eh?

With assistance of two people, I was gradually pointed in the right direction.  This took up a lot of time and energy. Also, unlike London, there were few cheap food options around walking around the area outside the Park.

There was a lot of talk about security for the Olympics.  I thought there would be a lot for the Paralympics.  To be honest, outside the train stations where bags all go through metal detectors, I am not getting a sense of it being very high.  It seems no different than London, possibly even more laid back at this point.  In London, I felt like I was forever having my badge checked.  Here? Outside when I entered the park and exited, no one seems to want to see it or verify it.

The major advantage I see right now to Sochi is the internet is free for journalists.  There was a 100 GBP charge to use the Internet in London.  Sochi has wifi in the MPC and it is free. This is great, and there does not appear to be a charge for special access to a journalist information system where the exact same information appears on the Sochi 2014 website for free.

We’ll see how thing progress as we go along.  I’m trying not to be pessimistic, but my first gut feel is things will be different than London, and not as great. Putin’s grand vision of winning over the world hasn’t personally won me over yet, even if the Ukrainian situation could be forgiven.

Current published Wikinews stories about the Sochi Paralympics:

• 4 March 2014: Rail border between the Ukraine and Russia remains open
• 3 March 2014: International Paralympic Committee comments on Russian adherance to Olympic Truce
• 3 March 2014: Canada has no plans to boycott Winter Paralympics

(How we puppetized, upgraded and moved Bugzilla to another server)

Though we currently also evaluate Wikimedia’s project management tools, we will have to stick with our current infrastructure for a while. Among many other tasks, I spent the last months preparing the upgrade of Wikimedia’s Bugzilla instance from 4.2 to 4.4. Some reasons for upgrading can be found in this Bugzilla comment.

In late November 2013 I started by cleaning up Wikimedia Bugzilla’s custom CSS which was copied about five years ago and not kept in sync. It turned out that 16 of 22 files could be removed as there was no sufficient difference to upstream’s default CSS code (Bugzilla falls back to loading the default CSS file from /skins/default if no custom CSS file is found in /skins/custom). Less noise and less diffing required for future upgrades. In theory.

After testing these CSS changes on a Wikimedia Labs instance and merging them into our 4.2 production instance, I created numerous patches and put them into Gerrit (Wikimedia’s code review tool) by diffing upstream 4.2 code, upstream 4.4 code, and our custom code.

At the same time, Wikimedia’s Technical Operations team wanted to move the Bugzilla server from the kaulen server in our old Tampa datacenter to the zirconium server in our new Ashburn (Eqiad) datacenter. While you’d normally prefer to do only one thing at a time, Daniel Zahn (of Technical Operations) and I decided to create a fresh Bugzilla 4.4 instance from scratch on the new server to see into which problems we would run. During this process Daniel Zahn turned the old setup on kaulen, which was largely manual and had organically grown over the years, into a proper Puppet module. For every “missing module” error we ran into we avoided installing anything from Perl’s CPAN in Bugzilla’s /lib folder and ensured we just rely on distribution packages, for a much cleaner install. Daniel Zahn installed the needed packages by adding them to puppet code. While doing this we also removed Bugzilla’s Sitemap extension as it created sporadic Search::Sitemap errors when running Bugzilla’s checksetup.pl (plus it’s unmaintained anyway). Furthermore I ran into another runtime error to fix.

After fixing all checksetup.pl issues and having Bugzilla accessible via a web browser, only Bugzilla’s upstream CSS was displayed instead of our custom CSS. Neither was Wikimedia’s custom CSS offered as an option in the browser, nor could I log into the new Bugzilla (to check which theme is set as default in the admin settings) as the database dump we used for testing predated the creation of my user account.

After Sean Pringle of Technical Operations deployed a more recent Bugzilla database dump I expected further problems due to upstream changes to CSS loading. I was happy to see that I had been wrong: No problems with our custom CSS theming anymore. Instead, I ran into problems with our custom “See Also” field changes: Adding and removing such URLs triggered errors, and URLs themselves were not displayed (but their corresponding “Remove” checkbox). Thanks to upstream help in #bugzilla on Mozilla IRC I finally found out that Perl’s use base instead of use parent was the culprit.

After creating symlinks to /extensions/WeeklyReport/ to avoid 404 errors for the “Weekly Bug Summary” link in the sidebar (our setup is slightly busted) and after fixing two problems with our cronjobs for whining and data collection we agreed on a date to copy the database, do some maintenance work, and switch the DNS entry. This was announced one week in advance by adding a banner to Bugzilla via its announcehtml parameter.

A few hours before the switch on February 12th 2014, Daniel lowered the Time-to-live (TTL) values of the DNS entry of our Bugzilla. When the migration started, I set Bugzilla’s shutdown parameter to make the web UI inaccessible and also the WebService API return a 503 error for the Bingle script that syncs Bugzilla with Wikimedia’s Mingle instance. This was important to make sure that nobody can write anymore to the old database. We updated the IRC channel topic in #wikimedia-tech to tell that Bugzilla is under scheduled maintenance and logged the action in #wikimedia-operations so it got added to Wikimedia’s Server admin log. All in all we had only forgotten two minor things: Our Gerrit integration (a bot adding Gerrit notifications about related patches as comments in Bugzilla) bot was not able to write and got a 503 error back – Chad quickly disabled it. And our Nimsoft watchmouse sent an “ALERT! Bugzilla: Service Temporarily Unavailable” message to the Operations mailing list.

Sean Pringle migrated the old database from db9 in Tampa, to a new database on db1001 in Eqiad. After this was done, Daniel Zahn ran checksetup.pl to apply the scheme upgrades needed for 4.4.

After 30 minutes of testing to make sure everything works as expected we deployed two more custom patches: Showing common queries on the frontpage and making saved reports work. While having the downtime I also switched off bugmail to do some mass-changes without spamming everybody: I merged some version numbers in the “MediaWiki” product to have a shorter Version dropdown, removed the wikibugs-l watcher account from some bug reports as it is unneeded (set as a global watcher in Bugzilla anyway, hence a potential issue if a ticket was moved to a restricted product like “Security” still triggering public bugmail).

A few minutes before the end of the announced downtime of three hours, Daniel switched DNS so the new Bugzilla on the new server became available to the public. A few hours later, to work around isses for clients not supporting SNI, Daniel changed the order in which Apache loads virtual hosts. This ensures that older clients like Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows XP will always get to see Bugzilla instead of other miscellaneous web services sharing the same hardware. I had also overlooked a small UI issue that I fixed two days later.

Now that all is done, the result can now be seen on bugzilla.wikimedia.org. All steps to upgrade Wikimedia Bugzilla from 4.2 to 4.4 were documented on a wiki page. You can find all of our custom modifications here.

My ogv.js JavaScript Theora video player project now has synchronized audio and video, which makes it possible to watch videos of people talking without going mad.

Try it out!

This works both with Web Audio in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari and with the Flash audio shim for IE; basically we have to keep track of the audio playback position and match up decoding frames with that. Took a little poking in the ActionScript code but it’s now working!

This brings us much closer to being able to integrate ogv.js as a fallback video player for Wikimedia on IE 10/11 and Safari 6/7. Thanks to the guys hanging out in #xiph channel who encouraged me to keep poking at this!

Additionally there’s now an override selector for the video size, so you can try decoding larger than 360p versions, or switch a slow machine down to the little 160p versions.

I’ve also started investigating an all-Flash version using Adobe’s Crossbridge, which if it works would be a suitable replacement for the Cortado Java applet on old browsers (think of all those IE 6/7/8/9 systems out there!). I seem to be able to build the ogg libraries but haven’t gone beyond that yet… will be interesting to poke at.

1. write code to try new ways to encourage people to edit Wikipedia (Growth engineer)
2. keep our users' data safe (operations security engineer)
3. make sure our designers and multimedia engineers build the right things (multimedia product manager)
4. help other Wikimedians figure out how to design their outreach and mentoring initiatives better and evaluate them for effectiveness, so we learn what works (program evaluation community coordinator)
5. automate more of the systems that help developers test new code to find bugs early (Test Infrastructure Engineer)
6. like 14 other jobs, seriously, we're hiring a lot

And of course everything you make at the Wikimedia Foundation is freely licensed, so you can suggest your buddies use it to solve their problems, write public blog posts about it, talk about it at parties and conferences, and link to it on your résumé. Isn't open source rockin'?

(Many WMF workers, including me, telecommute. You might also like our Pluralism, internationalism, and diversity policy.)

Some other places that make open source software or free culture and are hiring: Linaro, MongoDB, Participatory Culture Foundation, CollectionSpace, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Mozilla, Kaltura, Boundless, Acquia, OpenStack-using companies, Varnish Software, Red Hat, InkTank, wikiHow, the libraries and similar institutions seeking Wikimedians/Wikipedians in Residence, Canonical, Collabora, the Linux Foundation, Eucalyptus, New York Public Library Labs, Pro Publica, Nebula, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation.

That's just a fraction of who's hiring. You can check the FSF jobs board, OPW's list and the liberationtech-jobs mailing list for more.

If you're looking specifically for internships, the OpenHatch list, Google Summer of Code, and Outreach Program for Women should help you.

This is a followup to a similar post I made in late 2012.

The Indian Wikimedia community is pleased to invite you to participate in Women’s History Month events, 2014. We started off with a pre-event Wikipedia workshop at Roshni Nilaya School of Social Work, in Mangalore on the 26th of February. We have planned events all through this month. They aim at creating new articles, expanding the existing stubs and translating English articles to various Indic languages.The schedule includes Wikipedia workshops, online edit-a-thons and wikiparties. You could edit articles, translate them, blog about the events or even be an enthusiast. Visit this page to learn more about getting involved.

Real-life Wikipedia workshops will be conducted in different parts of India. Two online edit-a-thons have been planned. The first one on the 8th & 9th of March focuses on women parliamentarians and the second one on the 15th & 16th will be looking to expand the work done during the last year events on women scientists from India. Participants of the Women’s History Month events in India are requested to fill up this opt in form to help the organizers evaluate the quantum and quality of the edits made. Centre for Internet and Society (Access to Knowledge) has extended their support to the Women’s History Month events in India this year.

The Indian events are being conducted as a part of the global event supported by the Wikiwomen’s Collaborative. We look forward to welcoming all participants at this year’s event.

By, Jeph Paul and Netha Hussain, Wikimedians

I am off to Russia today.  I’ve submitted another article to Wikinews before I left, and we’ll see if it clears publication.  A friend has joked that my most recent articles have been “No one says anything.  No one does anything. Nothing has changed.”

A number of friends are concerned about the safety issues regarding going to Russia.  All responsible things done.  People know where I am staying, my train information and my plane information.  I’ve informed my embassy that I am going.  People inside my media organization know I am going.  All the logical steps I could take be safe have been taken.

Last night, I chatted with a Ukrainian affiliated with the team going with me to Sochi.  They are pretty much set to go, and in a healthy head space to go and do responsible reporting.  The only possible hangup at the moment is the Russian rail crossing situation: Will the border stay open between the Ukraine and Russia?  Will they be able to cross?  If yes, I should be meeting with them by the end of the week.  Fingers are crossed that my Ukrainians stay safe and the border remains open.

My goal is to try to keep blogging a bit about my experiences in Sochi, in addition to the reporting I am trying to do.  We’ll see what happens.

A session  from   FDC site visit  to WMDE.

I had the first opportunity to learn about Wikimedia chapters when I participated in the Wikimedia conference in 2011, representing the newly formed Wikimedia India chapter. While  presentations and interactions were useful, the visit to Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE)  chapter office was very helpful, as I had the chance to meet the staff and learn about the chapter’s various activities. After that, as a member  of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) from 2012, I had the opportunity to learn even more about chapters. Though the initial FDC framework and process was the result of extensive deliberations of FDC Advisory  group supported  by consultants from Bridgespan, some of the gaps became apparent after the first round of FDC deliberations. My major concern was that the process/framework  did not account for the diverse attributes of chapters and relied on impersonal wiki pages for discussions, even when substantive funds are at stake.

When the opportunity to visit WMDE came up, I signed up immediately, as it  gave me the opportunity to meet with the chapter’s leadership and stakeholders in person  - allowing me to better understand their plans and the challenges they face. I, Mike Peel, another FDC Member along with WMF staff team of Anasuya, Garfield and Frank visited WMDE during  Feb 5-7,  2014 in Berlin.

In this report, I would like to highlight my impressions on the chapter programs and their evolution as well as share thoughts on WMDE chapter performance and areas for improvement.

Chapter Structure and Infrastructure

Pavel explaining the  WMDE Events for the year marked on wall calendar

Pavel informed us that the chapter had recently moved into their new facility. He  took us for  a tour of the facility, highlighting the thought process behind the design which allows flexible use of space and also meets the requirements of various stakeholders. The chapter has about 64 full time and part time staff (equivalent to 45 FTE). They are organized into four program teams and one operational/admin team. Each team has appropriate workspaces and computing infrastructure. There was a good number of small meeting rooms and a large conference room. The facility also includes an event room which can accommodate up to 99 participants. The room is used at least two days a week for various chapter programs and its partners. A large calendar on the event room wall has  the details of programs that have been planned till the end of the year, leaving no doubt about the effective use of infrastructure. The event room is designed in such a way that part of it can be used as workspace if required by putting up partitions.

Chapter Programs

Chapter priorities  are Community support,  Institutional engagement, Political and legal advocacy and Software development. Community support is provided through various schemes such as literature request, library support, support for events, small meetups and also the large annual event Wikicon. The support is mostly reactive. The chapter had also been successful in liaising with the community, through the efforts of a community coordinator, who is hired from within the community. Thanks to such initiatives, introduction of new technology features in German wikipedia have become smooth. The politics and legal team is spearheading its efforts to be a key contributor to changes to EU member state copyright laws, which in many cases inhibit free sharing of photographs and GLAM resources. The international support  team is helping the movement  by supporting events such as Wikimedia conference,  Diversity Conference and Chapters Dialogue. In the open educational resources spaces, WMDE contributed to developing Wikipedia teaching material  working with a local partner Klicksafe. This was adopted by few state education departments.  The results are  expected to be available by the end of year.

Wikipedia Teaching material in German (Wikipeda Gemeinsam Wissen gestalten)

Theory of Change Model
All the initiatives are based on a well thought out change model called Theory of Change. This theory gives importance to short, medium and long term objectives and their linkages. Indicators are identified for each outcome. Manuel,  the head of evaluation explained that this approach is expected to improve the focus on impact and  outcomes rather than outputs.

Free form discussions
Apart from two days of structured sessions, we had a day of free discussions based on the FDC teams interest in digging into specific areas of interest. I was able to utilize that day to gain better insight into community/ Chapter member relationships, Chapter recognition program, the change model and the priorities for Wikidata. Pavel explained that the long term plan for the chapter is to develop four pillars of funding, with two pillars focused on programs of immediate benefit to Wikimedia projects and the other two pillars focused on long term benefits to the free knowledge movement.

Community and Board interaction

The community meetup and dinner with WMDE board members was another interesting  event where I was able to address questions on the FDC process. I gained better insight into WMDE community and its focus areas and their feedback on the FDC process. I  encouraged them to utilize the opportunity of FDC process session at the Wikimedia conference 2014 so that their input can be helpful for the FDC  process review, due in 3-4 months.

Wrapup

We had a wrap up session with WMDE team, where we exchanged  feedback from the visit. Though three days of visitation could be a disruption to everyday operations, I  was happy to know that WMDE found it useful. I thanked WMDE for its various initiatives and support for the movement – for being an inspiration for several budding chapters. I appreciated their efforts in managing the Wikimania panel discussion on future of Wikipedia  and wanted such initiatives to be continued. I encouraged the WMDE team  to increase their involvement further in shaping the movement. On the evaluation front, I shared the expectation that the programs be explored in such a way so that the results are available at quarterly intervals  so that the change models can be evaluated and improved rapidly. Pavel expressed his happiness about the outcomes of the visit and suggested that the presence of FDC volunteer members had made a  big difference.

I would like to thank the WMDE  Board, Executive Director Pavel and his staff, as well as the community. I also want to thank my FDC colleagues and WMF staff who took an active part in deliberations. Overall I found the site visit  very useful in understanding the WMDE priorities, plans and  challenges.

I’ve started writing about Sochi early, using synthesis reporting.  So far, I have had two articles published.  They are:

•  International Paralympic Committee comments on Russian adherance to Olympic Truce
• Canada has no plans to boycott Winter Paralympics‎

Translatewiki.net features a good user experience for non-technical translators. A crucial or even critical component is signing up. An unrelated data collection for my PhD studies inspired me to get some data on the translatewiki.net user registration process. I will present the results below.

History

At translatewiki.net the process of becoming an approved translator has been, arguably, complicated in some periods.

In the early days of the wiki, permissions were not clearly separated: hundreds users were just given the full set of permissions to edit the MediaWiki namespace and translate that way.

Later, we required people to go through hoops of various kind after registering to be approved as translators. They had to create a user page with certain elements and post a request on a separate page and they would not get notifications when they were approved unless they tweaked their preferences.

At some point, we started using the LiquidThreads extension: now the users could get notifications when approved, at least in theory. That brought its own set of issues though: many people thought that the LiquidThreads search box on the requests page was the place where to write the title of their request. After entering a title, they ended up in a search results page, which was a dead end. This usability issue was so annoying and common that I completely removed the search field from LiquidThreads.
In early 2010 we implemented a special page wizard (FirstSteps) to guide users though the process. For years, this has allowed new users to get approved, and start translating, in few clicks and a handful hours after registering.

In late 2013 we enabled the new main page containing a sign-up form. Using that form, translators can create an account in a sandbox environment. Accounts created this way are normal user accounts except that they can only make example translations to get a feel of the system. Example translations give site administrators some hints on whether to approve or reject the request and approve the user as a translator.

Data collection

The data we have is not ideal.

• For example, it is impossible to say what’s our conversion rate from users visiting the main page to actual translators.
• A lot of noise is added by spam bots which create user accounts, even though we have a CAPTCHA.
• When we go far back in the history, the data gets unreliable or completely missing.
  • We only have dates for account created after 2006 or so.
  • The log entry format for user permissions has changed multiple times, so the promotion times are missing or even incorrect for many entries until a few years back.

The data collection was made with two scripts I wrote for this purpose. The first script produces a tab separated file (tsv) containing all accounts which have been created. Each line has the following fields:

1. username,
2. time of account creation,
3. number of edits,
4. whether the user was approved as translator,
5. time of approval and
6. whether they used the regular sign-up process or the sandbox.

Some of the fields may be empty because the script was unable to find the data. User accounts for which we do not have account creation time are not listed. I chose not to try some methods which can be used to approximate the account creation time, because the data in that much past is too unreliable to be useful.

The first script takes a couple of minutes to run at translatewiki.net, so I split further processing to a separate script to avoid doing the slow data fetching many times. The second script calculates a few additional values like average and median time for approval and aggregates the data per month.

The data also includes translators who signed up through the sandbox, but got rejected: this information is important for approval rate calculation. For them, we do not know the exact registration date, but we use the time they were rejected instead. This has a small impact on monthly numbers, if a translator registers in one month and gets rejected in a later month. If the script is run again later, numbers for previous months might be somewhat different. For approval times there is no such issue.

Results

Image 1: Account creations and approved translators at translatewiki.net

Image 1 displays all account creations at translatewiki.net as described above, simply grouped by their month of account creation.

We can see that approval rate has gone down over time. I assume this is caused by spam bot accounts. We did not exclude them hence we cannot tell whether the approval rate has gone up or down for human users.

We can also see that the number of approved translators who later turn out to be prolific translators has stayed pretty much constant each month. A prolific translator is an approved translator who has made at least 100 edits. The edits can be from any point of time, the script is just looking at current edit count so the graph above doesn’t say anything about wiki activity at any point in time.

There is an inherent bias towards old users for two reasons. First, at the beginning translators were basically invited to a new tool from existing methods they used, so they were likely to continue to translate with the new tool. Second, new users have had less time to reach 100 edits. On the other hand, we can see that a dozen translators even in the past few months have already made over 100 edits.

I have collected some important events below, which I will then compare against the chart.

• 2009: Translation rallies in August and December.
• 2010-02: The special page to assist in filing translator requests was enabled.
• 2010-04: We created a new (now old) main page.
• 2010-10: Translation rally.
• 2011: Translation rallies in April, September and December.
• 2012: Translation rallies in August and December.
• 2013-12: The sandbox sign-up process was enabled.

There is an increase in account creations and approved translators a few months after the assisting special page was enabled. The explanation of this is likely to be the new main page which had a big green button to access the special page. The September translation rally in 2011 seems to be very successful in requiting new translators, but also the other rallies are visible in the chart.

Image 2: How long it takes for account creation to be approved.

The second image shows how long it takes from the account creation for a site administrator to approve the request. Before sandbox, users had to submit a request to become translators on their own: the time for them to do so is out of control of the site administrators. With sandbox, that is much less the case, as users get either approved or rejected in a couple of days. Let me give an overview of how the sandbox works.

All users in the sandbox are listed on a special page together with the sandbox translations they have made. The administrators can then approve or reject the users. Administrators usually wait until the user has made a handful translations. Administrators can also send email reminders for the users to make more translations. If translators do not provide translations within some time, or the translations are very bad, they will get rejected. Otherwise they will be approved and can immediately start using the full translation interface.

We can see that the median approval time is just a couple of hours! The average time varies wildly though. I am not completely sure why, but I have two guesses.
First, some very old user accounts have reactivated after being dormant for months or years and have finally requested translator rights. Even one of these can skew the average significantly. On a quick inspection of the data, this seems plausible.
Second, originally we made all translators site administrators. At some point, we introduced the translator user group, and existing translators have gradually been getting this new permission as they returned to the site. The script only counts the time when they were added to the translator group.
Alternatively, the script may have a bug and return wrong times. However, that should not be the case for recent years because the log format has been stable for a while. In any case, the averages are so big as to be useless before the year 2012, so I completely left them out of the graph.

The sandbox has been in use only for a few months. For January and February 2014, the approval rate has been slightly over 50%. If a significant portion of rejected users are not spam bots, there might be a reason for concern.

Suggested action points

1. Store the original account creation date and “sandbox edit count” for rejected users.
2. Investigate the high rejection rate. We can ask the site administrator why about a half of the new users are rejected. Perhaps we can also have “mark as spam” action to get insight whether we get a lot of spam. Event logging could also be used, to get more insight on the points of the process where users get stuck.

Source material

Scripts are in Gerrit. Version ’2′ of the scripts was used for this blog post. Processed data is in a Libre Office spreadsheet. Original and updated data is available on request, please email me.

The Barbican Centre.

In under six months, the tenth annual Wikimania will be held in London, in the nigh post-apocalyptic,^[1] brutalist Barbican estate.  In preparation, Wikivoyage have been building a special Wikimania 2014 guide, now in a somewhat useable form (with similar pages being constructed in Mandarin and Spanish).

This is the first mainspace page to which I made a significant contribution and I think it’s turning out quite well.  I’ve actually learned a lot about the city (and, for that matter, The City) from helping here. The guide should cover everything else to see and do around the conference, which run the gamut from Roman relics and medieval churches to the world’s first website—coincidentally, on display in the same building as Wikimania, along with a Digital Revolution exhibition.  You could have a burger and milkshake at a halal diner or a beer in one of the (tenuous) claimants to the title of “oldest pub in London”.  Those staying on could even visit the World Science Fiction Convention and the Great British Beer Festival, both taking place in the following week.

On the highwalks around the Barbican Estate.

The guide isn’t finished yet and it’s already looking like a great August.

With reference to my earlier post about enlightened self-interest, this is the sort of thing that got me interested in the ‘voyage project.  Working on a guide like this, I’m not only helping to make other people’s lives richer but I’ve also found new things to enrich my own.

[1] Well, I think so anyway.  It has the look of a set from a 70s sci-fi movie about a totalitarian dystopia. The fact that this area has actually been abandoned once and completely destroyed twice in its history helps too.

The brutalist towers of the Barbican dominating the local skyline.

I should be reporting on this for Wikinews, but I am not.  At the present, despite the military situation in the Ukraine with what appears to be an effective Russian invasion? incursion? foreign power putting a military force into to protest its ethnic people who make up 60% of the local population… the trains between the Ukraine and Russia appear to be operating normally.  This includes in the Crimea and along other parts of the border.

Over in Canada, the Government has ordered their Ambassador to Russia to leave Moscow because of the ongoing situation.  On a Paralympic note, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has announced he and members of his Cabinet do not plan to attend the Sochi Paralympic Games because of the Ukrainian situation.

The United States Government has advised its citizens to avoid the Ukraine (especially the Crimea region), and the USMNT has moved a game scheduled for today to Cyrpus (where a referee was recently beaten).  No extra alerts for Americans going to Russia though. I’m not feeling particularly unsafe about going, but I am a bit queasy given everything.  Russia is not LGBT friendly.  The USA doesn’t have a particularly good relationship with Russia at the moment, and Russia culturally has always been held up as one of the great threats to the United States.  I grew up in the dying throws of the Soviet era, but I can remember the picture painted of Russia, and it wasn’t pleasant.

That said, on a Paralympic level, I have information on tickets to the opening ceremony.  I have registered to attend the IPC Hall of Fame induction ceremony.  I’ve watched a ton of Team USA Paralympic videos. I’ve read more on the rules of the various sports and the classification process.  I feel ready and knowledgeable, and like I should be able to do some good reporting.

I’ve spent the past seven weeks on the same error logging patch. Being stuck on a patch is a new sort of purgatory; I’ll spend several days working on the next patchset, only to be sent back to the beginning when my team members discover a new error, ask for a new feature, or suggest different implementations.

Scoping is probably the biggest reason why the patch has dragged on for so long. The patch replaces every error and warning log in Parsoid with my logging function, which means that it’s used in a large number of files (23 at last count). In the beginning, this made for very slow going, since I wanted to test every call site to make sure that I was referencing the logging function properly and that it generated the desired output. Besides this, the potential for error increases along with the number of lines of code. As time goes on, my patchset gets larger and harder to review, and it’s easy for me and my reviewers to overlook important details.

Another reason is that I’m not very familiar with some of the underlying technologies. Not only is Parsoid a somewhat complicated project, but it relies on frameworks that I’m not very familiar with: Node.js (sever-side Javascript), Connect (a middleware framework for Node), and Express (a web development framework for Node). Whenever we run into a framework-related issue on Parsoid, I spend a day reading about the framework instead of writing code. I like to take the time to completely understand the problems with the current patchset before making any changes…which often results in too much rabbit-holing, and not enough coding.

A good example of this was an infinite error-logging bug that the team discovered on February 11th. It crashed the Parsoid servers by filling up the disk with identical error logs. The Parsoid web server uses Connect, which comes with its own default error handler. The web server also had its own error handler, which set HTTP headers and send an HTTP response with information about an error. If we called the custom error handler but set HTTP headers again afterwards, we ended up with a “Can’t set headers after they are sent” error that would go to Connect’s default error handler. The default error handler would try to set headers again, resulting in another “can’t set headers error”, sending Parsoid into an infinite error recursion tailspin.

It took me a couple of days of reading about Connect and talking to my mentor to even understand what had caused the error recursion in the main branch of Parsoid, and another several days to process my mentor’s suggestions for how to structure my logging function to avoid error recursion. Ten days passed before I felt confident enough about the restructured code to submit my next patch.

I’m now on my 22nd iteration of the patch and feeling (delusionally?) hopeful that the next patchset will be the last. If I were to do it all over again, I’d have kept my patch smaller and more tightly scoped; since it’s too late for that (we’re down to revising the same two files each time), I’ve devised a coping strategy to speed up the feedback cycle. I’ve been sending my mentor gists for specific files, instead of waiting for his input until I’ve submitted a patchset. I’d be curious to hear whether other people have suggestions for dealing with never-ending patches.

Vol: 4 • Issue: 2 • February 2014 [contribute] [archives]

CSCW ’14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism; like-minded editors clustered; Wikipedia stylistic norms as a model for academic writing

With contributions by: David Ludwig, Morten Warncke-Wang, Maximilian Klein, Piotr Konieczny, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Dario Taraborelli and Tilman Bayer

CSCW ’14 retrospective

The 17th ACM Conference on Computer-supported cooperative work and Social Computing (CSCW ’14) took place this month in Baltimore, Maryland.^{[supp 1]} The conference brought together more than 500 researchers and practitioners from industry and academia presenting research on “the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and networks.” Research on Wikipedia and wiki-based collaboration has been a major focus of CSCW in the past. This year, three papers on Wikipedia were presented:

Unique editors per quarter in conventional and alternative WikiProjects, 2002-2012	Edits per quarter in conventional and alternative WikiProjects, 2002-2012
Slides from Editing beyond articles[1]

The rise of alt.projects in Wikipedia

Jonathan Morgan from the Wikimedia Foundation and collaborators from the University of Washington^[1] analyzed the nature of collaboration in alternative WikiProjects, i.e. projects that the authors identify as not following “the conventional pattern of coordinating a loosely defined range of article creation and curation-related activities within a well defined topic area” (examples of such alternative WikiProjects include the Guild of Copy Editors or WikiProject Dispute Resolution). The authors present an analysis of editing activity by members of these projects that are not focused on topic content editing. The paper also reports data on the number of contributors involved in WikiProjects over time: while the number of editors participating in conventional projects decreased by 51% between 2007 and 2012, participation in alternative projects only declined by 13% in the same period and saw an overall 57% increase in the raw number of contributions.

Categorizing barnstars via Mechanical Turk

Paul Andre and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University presented a study showing how to effectively crowdsource a complex categorization task by assigning it to users with no prior knowledge or domain expertise.^[2] The authors selected a corpus of Wikipedia barnstars and showed how different task designs can produce crowdsourced judgments where Mechanical Turk workers accurately match expert categorization. Expert categorization was obtained by recruiting two Wikipedians with substantial editing activity as independent raters.

Understanding donor behavior through email

A team of researchers from Yahoo! Research, the Qatar Computing Research Institute and UC Berkeley analyzed two months of anonymized email logs to understand the demographics, personal interests and donation behavior of individuals responding to different fundraising campaigns.^[3] The results include donation email from the Wikimedia Foundation and indicate that among other campaigns, email from a wikimedia.org domain had the highest score of messages tagged for spam over total messages read, which the authors attribute to spoofing. The paper also indicates that the Wikimedia fundraiser tends to attract slightly more male than female donors.

Clustering Wikipedia editors by their biases

review by User:Maximilianklein

Building on the streams of rating editors by content persistence and algorithmically finding cliques of editors, Nakamura, Suzuki and Ishikawa propose^[4] a sophisticated tweak to find like- and disparate-minded editors, and test it against the Japanese Wikipedia. The method works by finding cliques in a weighted graph between all editors of an article and weighting the edges by the agreement or disagreement between editor. To find the agreement between two editors, they iterate through the full edit history and use the content persistence axioms of interpreting edits that are leaving text unchanged as agreement, and deleting text as disagreement. Addressing that leaving text unchanged is not always a strong indication of agreement, they normalize by each action’s frequency of both the source editor and the target editor. That is, the method accounts for the propensity of an editor to change text, and the propensity of editors to have their text changed.

To verify their method, its results are compared to a simplified weighting scheme, random clustering, and human-clustered results on 7 articles in Japanese Wikipedia. In 6 out of 7 articles, the proposed technique beats simplified weighting. An example they present is their detection of pro- and anti-nuclear editors on the Nuclear Power Plant article. An implication of such detection would be a gadget that colours text of an article depending on which editor group wrote it.

Monthly research showcase launched

 

Video of the February 2014 Research Showcase

The lifetime of deleted articles by year of creation

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Research & Data team announced its first public showcase, a monthly review of work conducted by researchers at the Foundation. Aaron Halfaker presented a study of trends in newcomer article creation across 10 languages with a focus on the English and German Wikipedias (slides). The study indicates that in wikis where anonymous users can create articles, their articles are less likely to be deleted than articles created by newly registered editors. Oliver Keyes presented an analysis of how readers access Wikipedia on mobile devices and reviewed methods to identify the typical duration of a mobile browsing session (slides). The showcase is hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation every 3rd Wednesday of the month and live streamed on YouTube.^{[supp 2]}

Study of AfD debates: Did the SOPA protests mellow deletionists?

Wikipedia’s SOPA blackout

A paper titled “What influences online deliberation? A wikipedia [sic] study”^[5] studies rationales used by participants in deletion discussions, in the larger context of democratic online deliberation. The authors reviewed in detail deletion discussions for a total of 229 articles, listed for deletion on three dates, one of them being January 15th, 2012, three days prior to the the English Wikipedia’s global blackout as part of the Wikipedia:SOPA initiative. The authors looked into whether this event would influence rationales of the deletion discussions and their outcome. They also reviewed, in less detail, a number of other deletions from around the time of the SOPA protest. The authors display a good knowledge of relevant literature, including that in the field of Wikipedia studies, presenting an informative literature review section.

Overall, the authors find that the overall quality of the discussions is high, as most of the participants display knowledge of Wikipedia’s policies, particularly on the notability and credibility (or what we would more likely refer to as reliability) of the articles whose deletion is considered. In re, notability far outweighs the second most frequent rationale, credibility (reliability). They confirm that the deletion system works as intended, with decisions made by majority voters.

Interestingly, the authors find that certain topics did tend to trigger more deletion outcomes, said topics being articles about people, for-profit organizations, and definitions. In turn, they observe that “locations or events are more likely to be kept than expected, and articles about nonprofit organizations and media are more likely to be suggested for other options (e.g., merge, redirect, etc.) than expected”. Discussions about people and for-profit organizations were more likely to be unanimous than expected, whereas articles about nonprofit organizations, certain locations, or events were more likely to lead to a non-unanimous discussion. Regarding the SOPA protests’ influence on deletion debates, the authors find a small and short-lived increase in keep decisions following the period of community mobilization and discussion about the issue, and tentatively attribute this to editors being impacted by the idea of internet freedom and consequently allowing free(er) Internet publishing.

The authors sum up those observations, noting that “the community members of Wikipedia have clear standards for judging the acceptability of a biography or commercial organization article; and such standards are missing or less clear when it comes to the topics on location, event, or nonprofit organization … Thus, one suggestion to the Wikipedia community is to make the criteria of judging these topics more clear or specific with examples, so it will alleviate the ambiguity of the situation”. This reviewer, as a participant of a not insignificant number of deletion discussions as well as those about the associated policies, agrees with said statement. With regards to the wider scheme, the authors conclude that the AfD process is an example of “a democratic deliberation process interested in maintaining information quality in Wikipedia”.

Word frequency analysis identifies “four conceptualisations of femininity on Wikipedia”

Girl with Cherries by Ambrogio de Predis (the current lead illustration of the article femininity)

In a linguistics student paper^[6] at Lund University, the author reviews the linguistic conceptualisation of femininity on (English) Wikipedia, with regards to whether language used to refer to women differs depending on the type of articles it is used in. Specifically, the author analyzed the use of five lexemes (a term which in the context of this study means words): ladylike, girly, girlish, feminine and womanly. The findings confirm that the usage of those terms in non-accidental. The word feminine, most commonly used of the five studied, correlates primarily to the topics of fashion, sexuality, and to a lesser extent, culture, society and female historical biographies. The second most popular is the word womanly, which in turn correlates with topics of female artists, religion and history. Girlish, the fourth most popular world, correlates most strongly with the biographies of males, as well as with the articles on movies and TV, female entertainers, literature and music. Finally, girly and ladylike, respectively 3rd and 5th in terms of popularity, cluster together and correlate to topics such as movies and TV (animated), Japanese culture, art, tobacco and female athletes. Later, the author also suggests that there is a not insignificant overlap in usage between the cluster for girlish and the combined cluster for girly and ladylike. He concludes that there are three or four different conceptualisations of femininity on Wikipedia, which in more simple terms means, to quote the author, that “people do indeed represent women in different ways when talking about different things [on Wikipedia]“, with “girly and girlish having a somewhat frivolous undertone and womanly, feminine and ladylike being of a more serious and reserved nature”.

The study does suffer from a few issues: a literature review could be more comprehensive (the paper cites only six works, and not a single one of them from the field of Wikipedia studies), and this reviewer did not find sufficient justification for why the author limited himself to the analysis of only 500 occurrences (total) of the five lexemes studied. A further discussion of how the said 500 cases were selected would likely strengthen the paper.

Wikipedia and the development of academic language

Ursula Reutner’s article “Wikipedia und der Wandel der Wissenschaftssprache”^[7] discusses Wikipedia’s linguistic norms and style as a case study for the development of academic language.

The article is divided into three main sections. After providing some historical context about Wikipedia and the history of encyclopedias (section 1), the article focuses on linguistic norms in Wikipedia and their relation to linguistic norms in academic language (section 2). Reutner identifies five crucial linguistic norms in Wikipedia: (1) non-personal language such as the avoidance of first- and second-person pronouns, (2) neutral language as expressed in the policy of a “neutral point of view”, (3) avoidance of redundancies, (4) avoidance of unnecessarily complex wording, and (5) focus on simple syntax and the use of short independent clauses. Although Reutner mentions many well-known differences between Wikipedia and traditional forms of academic writing (e.g. the dynamic, collaborative, and partly non-academic character of Wikipedia), she stresses that the policies of Wikipedia largely follow traditional norms of academic writing.

The third section focuses on case studies of Wikipedia articles (mostly fr:Euro and it:Euro) and finds a large variety of norm violations that suggest a gap between linguistic norms and actual style in Wikipedia. Reutner’s examples of biased, clumsy, and long-winded formulations hardly come as a surprise as these quality issues are well-known topics in Wikipedia research^{[supp 3]}. However, Reutner’s analysis is not limited to quality problems but also addresses further interesting features of Wikipedia articles. For example, she points out that Wikipedia differs from many print encyclopedias in Romanic languages such as the Grande Dizionario Enciclopedico (1964) or the Enciclopedia Treccani (2010) through a focus on accessibility as illustrated by the use of copular sentences at the beginning of articles and the repetition of crucial ideas and terms. Furthermore, Reutner argues that Wikipedia differs from other forms of academic writing through narrative elements and a generous use of space.

Reutner’s findings raise general questions regarding the relation between Wikipedia and the development of academic language and her short conclusion makes three suggestions: First, Wikipedia’s policies largely follow traditional norms of academic writing. Second, the digital, collaborative, and partly non-academic character of Wikipedia leads to “emotional and dialogic elements that are surprising in the tradition of encyclopedias“ (p.17). Third, the focus on accessibility follows an Anglo-American tradition of academic writing (even in the Italian and French language versions). Although Reutner’s conclusions seem well-justified, they leave the question open whether Wikipedia reflects or even influences the general development of academic language. For example, one may argue that many of Reutner’s findings are effects of the partly non-academic character of Wikipedia and therefore not representative of the development of academic language. Other linguistic features are arguably effects of collaborative text production and it would be interesting to compare Reutner’s findings with other collaborative and non-collaborative forms of academic writing. Finally, one may worry that some of Reutner’s findings are artifacts of a small and biased sample. For example, Reutner only considers articles (de:Euro, en:Euro, es:Euro, fr:Euro, and it:Euro) that are created by large and diverse author groups but does not discuss more specialized articles that usually only have one or two main authors. However, it is well-known that the style and quality of Wikipedia articles depends on variables such as group size and group composition^{[supp 4]} and diverse forms of collaboration patterns^{[supp 5]}. It would therefore be interesting to discuss Reutner’s linguistic findings in the context of a more diverse sample of Wikipedia articles.

Briefly

Wikipedia’s assessability

A paper to be presented at the upcoming Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14)^[8] by Forte, Andalibi, Park, and Willever-Farr introduces a vocabulary for “assessable design”. Their framework considers social and technological approaches to information literacy in combination with consumption and production. From interviewing Wikipedians, librarians, and novices about their understanding of Wikipedia articles, the authors identify two important concepts of assessable design: provenance and stewardship. The authors then test these concepts in an experiment, finding that exposing readers to these can have large effects on their assessment of not only articles but Wikipedia as a whole. Considering whether their framework can be generalized to the assessability of content on other informational websites, the authors caution that “Wikipedia is a remarkably conservative resource given its reputation as a renegade reference. Policies surrounding citation defer to well-established publishing processes like scientific peer review and traditional journalism and prohibit the production of personalized content.”

“Finding missing cross-language links in Wikipedia”

This is the title of a paper^[9] in the Journal of Information and Data Management. Using a combination of feature extraction and a decision tree classifier, the authors seek to discover missing inter-language links (ILL) between the English and Portuguese Wikipedia editions. The authors hypothesise that there are roughly 165,000 missing ILLs in each of the Wikipedias, but do not appear to take previous research on the overlap of Wikipedia content into consideration.^{[supp 6]} Two novel features are introduced: category linking and ILL transitivity. Performance is evaluated using a dataset of known connected and disconnected articles where the French, Italian, and Spanish Wikipedias are used as intermediate languages for discovering link transitivity. Category linking is identified as a useful way of discovering candidate articles for linking, while link transitivity is the key feature for correctly identifying links. Today, Wikidata‘s central repository of ILLs makes link transitivity mostly a moot problem, but that is not addressed by the authors.

“Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content”

A discussion paper^[10] by economists at the Centre for European Economics Research (ZEW) reports an analysis of content curation and consumption under spikes of attention. The authors analyzed 23 examples of pages that underwent a sudden surge of attention, either because they were featured on the main page of the German Wikipedia, or because of a real-world news event (e.g. earthquakes). The result is that an increased exposure predictably leads to increase of both consumption and curation on neighbouring pages, as measured in terms of page requests (for consumption) and edits (for curation), though the author reports that content generation is small in absolute terms.

New papers on the use of Wikipedia in education, by practitioners

In a Portuguese-language conference paper, Brazilian Wikipedian and professor Juliana Bastos Marques “presents an experience with critical reading and edition of Portuguese Wikipedia articles in the university, in extension activities, conducted at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (Unirio), in 2012″, according to the English abstract. In an essay for the sociology journal Contexts,^[11] Wikipedian and sociologist (and contributor to other parts of this research newsletter) Piotr Konieczny, who has also made Wikipedia the subject of his own teaching, discusses the benefits of Wikipedia use in academia, citing the view that “a primary reason for academic reservations about Wikipedia is [a] philosophy of knowledge based on the control and management of intellectual capital”.

“World’s largest study on Wikipedia: Better than its reputation”

This is the title of the Helsinki Times‘ English-language summary of a study of the Finnish Wikipedia‘s reliability, carried out by journalists and published in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.^[12]. Participating researcher Arto Lanamäki explained on the Wiki-research-l mailing list that the superlative referred to the fact that the study had “the biggest sample of articles (134) of all studies that have assessed Wikipedia content quality/credibility.” Not too dissimilar to the approach of the landmark Nature study from 2005, the authors recruited “an university-level researcher with knowledge on the subject matter to be an evaluator” for each article in their sample. As summarized by the Helsinki Times, the result was that “the Finnish Wikipedia is largely error-free. The lack of errors is the area in which Wikipedia clearly got its best score. … No less than 70 per cent of the articles were judged to be good (4) or excellent (5) with respect to lack of errors. According to the indicative evaluation scale a four means that the article has only ‘scattered small errors, no big ones’.” (See also earlier coverage of studies that systematically evaluate the reliability of Wikipedia articles: “Pilot study about Wikipedia’s quality compared to other encyclopedias“, “90% of Wikipedia articles have ‘equivalent or better quality than their Britannica counterparts’ in blind expert review“)

References

Supplementary references:

For versions in other languages, please check the wiki version of this report, or add your own translation there!

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for January 2014, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

New community-centered trademark policy

After a seven-month long community consultation, the Foundation’s legal team concluded work on the new trademark policy. The community discussion, which had more words than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, resulted in a policy that is unconventional in how it provides liberal use of the Wikimedia marks, while maintaining legal protection. The final policy was approved by the Board of Trustees on February 1, effective immediately.

After one year, Individual Engagement Grants demonstrate potential for impact

Projects from the first round of IEGs

One year after Individual Engagement Grants program was launched in January 2013, the Foundation’s Learning & Evaluation team completed an impact assessment of the projects funded in the first round. One of the projects, The Wikipedia Library, generated $279,000 worth in donations from commercial research database providers, enabling Wikipedia editors to use high quality sources for free. At a grant cost of only $7,500, this represents a 37x return on investment. Another project, on generating publicity in China for Wikipedia, gained 10,000 followers for a new Wikipedia account on social networking site Weibo (25% of whom are women). Applications for the first round of 2014 start in March.

Multimedia vision for 2016, and request for comment on MP4 video

 

Video explaining the multimedia vision for 2016 ((slides)

The Foundation’s recently formed Multimedia team presented a multimedia vision for 2016. It is a scenario describing possible new tools for collaborating on multimedia on Commons, Wikipedia and other projects. The team invited community feedback on these ideas.

Separately, the multimedia team started a request for comment (RfC) on whether to support video files in the MP4 format on Wikimedia sites, in addition to the existing software support for the free formats Ogg Theora and WebM. Currently, only about 0.2% of the around 20 million files on Commons are videos, and it is assumed that MP4 support would make uploading and viewing videos much easier for many users, especially on some mobile devices that cannot play videos in the existing free formats. However, MP4 is a proprietary format covered by patents. Most users in the RfC preferred not to support MP4, maintaining the current practice of only using free formats.

New search engine

A new search infrastructure is being rolled out out to all Wikimedia wikis. It is based on the existing open-source software “Elasticsearch”, instead of the “Lucene-search” software that was written especially for MediaWiki. “Lucene-search” has worked well on Wikimedia sites for around 8 years, but developed some technical problems in 2013. The new search system for MediaWiki is called “CirrusSearch“. Its search results will reflect page updates much quicker than the old system. The text of templates in an article will now be found too, and some new search options were added. CirrusSearch is first becoming available as an optional Beta feature (see the timeline).

Data and Trends

2013 traffic trends (presentation slides)

Global unique visitors for December:

490 million (-7.98% compared with November; +3.73% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release January data later in February)

Page requests for January:

20.678 billion (+13.2% compared with December; -7.0% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation content projects including mobile access, but excluding Wikidata and the Wikipedia main portal page.)

Active Registered Editors for December 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

75,441 (+0.99% compared with November / -2.72% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)

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

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of December 31, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of December 31, 2013

(Financial information is only available through December 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date December 31, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of December is $20.14MM versus plan of $19.61MM, approximately $535K or 3% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $34.75MM versus plan of $36.32MM, approximately $1.57MM or 4% under plan.
• Expenses for the month of December is $3.65MM versus plan of $4.43MM, approximately $778K or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, payment processing fees, and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services.
• Year-to-date expenses is $18.78MM versus plan of $22.86MM, approximately $4.08MM or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, legal fees, payment processing fees, staff development expenses, and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services and recruiting fees.
• Cash position is $55.34MM as of December 31, 2013.

 

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of January (February 6, 2014)

Other highlights from the Wikimedia movement

Project to record voices of Wikipedia subject gains support from Stephen Fry and the BBC

<audio class="kskin" controls="" data-durationhint="8.916462585034" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="Stephen_Fry_voice.flac" data-startoffset="0" id="mwe_player_4" poster="//bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.23wmf15/skins/common/images/icons/fileicon-ogg.png" preload="none" style="width:220px;height:23px"><source data-bandwidth="66448" data-height="0" data-shorttitle="Ogg Vorbis" data-title="Ogg Vorbis" data-width="0" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/7/78/Stephen_Fry_voice.flac/Stephen_Fry_voice.flac.ogg" transcodekey="ogg" type="audio/ogg; codecs="vorbis""></source><source data-bandwidth="197780" data-height="0" data-shorttitle="FLAC source" data-title="Original FLAC file (198 kbps)" data-width="0" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Stephen_Fry_voice.flac" type="audio/flac"></source>
<track data-dir="ltr" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="TimedText:Stephen_Fry_voice.flac.el.srt" kind="subtitles" label="Ελληνικά (el) subtitles" src="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Stephen+Fry+voice.flac.el.srt?action=raw&amp;ctype=text/x-srt" srclang="el" type="text/x-srt"></track> <track data-dir="ltr" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="TimedText:Stephen_Fry_voice.flac.en.srt" kind="subtitles" label="English (en) subtitles" src="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Stephen+Fry+voice.flac.en.srt?action=raw&amp;ctype=text/x-srt" srclang="en" type="text/x-srt"></track> <track data-dir="ltr" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="TimedText:Stephen_Fry_voice.flac.mt.srt" kind="subtitles" label="Malti (mt) subtitles" src="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Stephen+Fry+voice.flac.mt.srt?action=raw&amp;ctype=text/x-srt" srclang="mt" type="text/x-srt"></track> <track data-dir="ltr" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="TimedText:Stephen_Fry_voice.flac.ru.srt" kind="subtitles" label="русский (ru) subtitles" src="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/:Stephen+Fry+voice.flac.ru.srt?action=raw&amp;ctype=text/x-srt" srclang="ru" type="text/x-srt"></track>Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player.
You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser.</audio>

The voice of Stephen Fry, recorded for the WikiVIP project

The Wikipedia voice intro project (WikiVIP) invites people who are the subject of a Wikipedia article to record a short sample of their voice, which is then uploaded to Commons. The recording allows a Wikipedia reader to hear who the person sounds like, and how the person’s name is pronounced. Founded by UK Wikipedian Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing), the project gained the support of celebrity Stephen Fry in January. Andy Mabbett is also collaborating with the BBC to provide extracts from its audio archives for WikiVIP. Volunteers identified over 300 such clips at an event in January, which the BBC will upload to Commons – the first time that the organization releases content from its broadcast archive under a free license.

The temporary logo of the Georgian Wikipedia in the colors of the Ukrainian flag

Ukrainian chapter and Wikipedia community protest laws proposed by Ukrainian government

In January, Wikimedia Ukraine protested against several laws proposed by the country’s government (under the since ousted president Viktor Yanukovych). The chapter was concerned that the bill would make it obligatory for hosting providers and/or domain name registrators to block access to websites without a court order under certain conditions, such as claims of copyright infringement. After the law was passed, the Ukrainian Wikipedia decided to protest by blacking out the site for 30 minutes each day. Also in late January, the Georgian Wikipedia temporarily changed its logo to a version involving the colors of the Ukrainian flag, in support of the Ukrainian Euromaidan protests. (Later in February, Wikimedians worldwide would mourn the death of 22-year old Ukrainian Wikipedian Ihor Kostenko – User:Ig2000 -, who was shot by a sniper at a demonstration during the last days of the protests before the fall of the Yanukovych government.)

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

 

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of January (February 6, 2014)

Data and Trends

2013 traffic trends (presentation slides)

Global unique visitors for December:

490 million (-7.98% compared with November; +3.73% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release January data later in February)

Page requests for January:

20.678 billion (+13.2% compared with December; -7.0% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation content projects including mobile access, but excluding Wikidata and the Wikipedia main portal page.)

Active Registered Editors for December 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

75,441 (+0.99% compared with November / -2.72% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.)

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

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of December 31, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of December 31, 2013

(Financial information is only available through December 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date December 31, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of December is $20.14MM versus plan of $19.61MM, approximately $535K or 3% over plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $34.75MM versus plan of $36.32MM, approximately $1.57MM or 4% under plan.
• Expenses for the month of December is $3.65MM versus plan of $4.43MM, approximately $778K or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, payment processing fees, and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services.
• Year-to-date expenses is $18.78MM versus plan of $22.86MM, approximately $4.08MM or 18% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, legal fees, payment processing fees, staff development expenses, and travel expenses partially offset by higher outside contract services and recruiting fees.
• Cash position is $55.34MM as of December 31, 2013.

Highlights

New community-centered trademark policy

After a seven-month long community consultation, the Foundation’s legal team concluded work on the new trademark policy. The community discussion, which had more words than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, resulted in a policy that is unconventional in how it provides liberal use of the Wikimedia marks, while maintaining legal protection. The final policy was approved by the Board of Trustees on February 1, effective immediately.

After one year, Individual Engagement Grants demonstrate potential for impact

Projects from the first round of IEGs

One year after Individual Engagement Grants program was launched in January 2013, the Foundation’s Learning & Evaluation team completed an impact assessment of the projects funded in the first round. One of the projects, The Wikipedia Library, generated $279,000 worth in donations from commercial research database providers, enabling Wikipedia editors to use high quality sources for free. At a grant cost of only $7,500, this represents a 37x return on investment. Another project, on generating publicity in China for Wikipedia, gained 10,000 followers for a new Wikipedia account on social networking site Weibo (25% of whom are women). Applications for the first round of 2014 start in March.

Multimedia vision for 2016, and request for comment on MP4 video

 

Video explaining the multimedia vision for 2016 ((slides)

The Foundation’s recently formed Multimedia team presented a multimedia vision for 2016. It is a scenario describing possible new tools for collaborating on multimedia on Commons, Wikipedia and other projects. The team invited community feedback on these ideas.

Separately, the multimedia team started a request for comment (RfC) on whether to support video files in the MP4 format on Wikimedia sites, in addition to the existing software support for the free formats Ogg Theora and WebM. Currently, only about 0.2% of the around 20 million files on Commons are videos, and it is assumed that MP4 support would make uploading and viewing videos much easier for many users, especially on some mobile devices that cannot play videos in the existing free formats. However, MP4 is a proprietary format covered by patents. Most users in the RfC preferred not to support MP4, maintaining the current practice of only using free formats.

New search engine

A new search infrastructure is being rolled out out to all Wikimedia wikis. It is based on the existing open-source software “Elasticsearch”, instead of the “Lucene-search” software that was written especially for MediaWiki. “Lucene-search” has worked well on Wikimedia sites for around 8 years, but developed some technical problems in 2013. The new search system for MediaWiki is called “CirrusSearch“. Its search results will reflect page updates much quicker than the old system. The text of templates in an article will now be found too, and some new search options were added. CirrusSearch is first becoming available as an optional Beta feature (see the timeline).

Engineering

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

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

Department Highlights

Major news in January include:

• the transition of our search engines on Wikimedia sites to ElasticSearch (see also general “Highlights” section);
• an invitation to comment on the 2-year vision of the multimedia engineering team;
• a request for comments on whether the MP4 video format should be supported on Wikimedia sites.

Presentation slides on VisualEditor

VisualEditor

In January, the VisualEditor team continued their work on improving the stability and performance of this visual editing interface to edit pages on Wikipedia and its sister sites; they also added some new features. You can now edit page settings like whether to display a table of contents or whether to show section edit labels. You can also specify the size of a media file manually, see a list of keyboard shortcuts, and create and edit media galleries using a very basic stand-in editor whilst the final form is being designed. Work also continued on a dialog for quickly adding “citation” references based on templates, more media and page settings, setting content language and right-to-left indicators, and equation editing.

The Parsoid team (developing the program that converts wikitext to annotated HTML, behind the scenes of VisualEditor) did a lot of bug fixing around images, links, references and various other areas. We also mentored students, participated in discussions relating to the architecture of MediaWiki, and started to work on “packaging” Parsoid to make it easier to install.

Maryana Pinchuk presenting about Flow (slides)

Editor engagement

This month, the Core Features team worked on integrating MediaWiki tools for dealing with spam and vandalism (AbuseFilter and Spam Blacklist) into Flow, a new wiki discussion system. We also launched an updated visual design and user interface for Flow, based on the first round of experienced user feedback last month, as well as ongoing user testing with new users. Lastly, we created a script to disable Flow and convert its content, so that we can begin testing Flow on two WikiProjects that volunteered on the English Wikipedia while being able to revert to wikitext if needed.

The Growth team improved the GettingStarted extension, in part to support local configuration for different Wikipedias. The latest version of GettingStarted and GuidedTour will be released in English and 23 other languages in early February. The team also completed several iterations of design and data analysis in support of upcoming work on Wikipedia article creation. We presented new designs for the Draft namespace, and completed a series of remote usability tests. We also finalized and published extensive quantitative analysis of trends in article creation across the largest Wikipedias.

Presentation slides from the quarterly review of the Mobile Web & App team

Mobile

During the last month, the Wikipedia Zero team worked on supporting secure HTTPS connections for partners in the Zero program, which allows mobile subscribers to access Wikipedia content at no data cost. We also continued to work on a proof-of-concept HTML5 web app for Firefox OS, fixed bugs in the legacy Firefox OS Wikipedia app, and prepared alpha functionality for the integration of Wikipedia Zero with the rebooted Android Wikipedia app. The team also met with the business development team to plan for partners and Wikipedia Zero-related work at large, and conducted tech facilitation to enable partner launches and align approaches with current and future partners.

The Mobile web projects team has been directing much of their attention over the last month at delivering a tablet-friendly mobile experience. We’ve added support for tables of contents, made some design improvements, and have worked towards making VisualEditor work on tablets (in alpha for now). We have also released our overlay UI improvements as well as an improved inline diff view for MobileFrontend into stable. Finally, we have also been working to expand our coverage of browser tests to facilitate quality assurance and help prevent the introduction of bugs and regressions.

Fundraising

Department highlights

• Anne Gomez joined as the new Product Manager for the Online Fundraising team.
• As of 12/31/13, the fundraising team has raised a total of $36,689,093.29 this Fiscal Year. Some of these funds may be accounted for in January’s totals.

Major Gifts and Foundations

• Finalized December Numbers: 2.8 million
• Sending out Annual reports to Benefactors

Online Fundraising

• The online fundraising team prepared international banner campaigns to run in February. Messages were translated into multiple languages in preparation for the international campaigns. If you would like to help with the translation process, please get involved.
• For the latest updates and a brief recap from the December English campaign, please see the updates page on Meta

Grantmaking

Department highlights

• Welcome, Alex Wang, new Project and Event Grants Program Officer.
• Wikimania Scholarships applications opened in January and are still being accepted until February 17. Thanks to the Wikimedia Scholarship committee for getting these up and running. These scholarships will support community members to come to London this upcoming August.
• The new Grants homepage consolidates resources under one umbrella, as well as a better articulation of the grantmaking work in which our community engages.
• IEG Round 1 Impact report is posted. Highlights include a 37x return on investment for The Wikipedia Library, and some potential areas for further study. See overall blog post.
• Overall for grantmaking, 6 requests were funded, 1 grant was renewed, and 16 reports were accepted or reviewed in January 2014.
• An improved FDC proposal form for 2013-2014 Round 2 was launched in January 2014 and is available to organizations that submitted Letters of intent for that round.
• Happy 10th anniversary to the Odia Wikipedia! We are excited to support the growth of the Odia language online through our grant to the CIS India Access To Knowledge program, and proud of our active community in India.

Annual Plan Grants (Funds Dissemination Committee)

• The FDC Advisory Group is planning its review of the FDC process, scheduled for May 2014 in Germany. The FDC Advisory Group is tasked with providing a recommendation to the WMF Executive Director about improvements to the FDC process, based on assessments and learning.
• The proposal form has been improved between rounds and was launched for 2013-2014 Round 2 applicants in January, in preparation for the 2013-2014 Round 2 proposal deadline on 1 April 2014. To create a proposal form, organizations that have already submitted Letters of Intent for this round should go to the “proposal form hub page” that was created when their Letters of intent were submitted, and use the proposal creation tool to create a proposal form. Please contact FDCSupportwikimedia.org with any questions.
• Annual Plan Grantees receiving grants in 2012-2013 Round 2 submitted progress reports for Q2 (1 October – 31 December 2013) on 30 January 2014. Read Wikimedia Norge’s Q2 progress report or Wikimédia France’s Q2 progress report. We thank WMNO and WMFR for submitting these reports on time and sharing their learning with the larger movement.
• Eligibility for 2013-2014 Round 2 is underway: all organizations that submitted Letters of Intent for the 2013-2014 Round 2 Annual Plan Grants cycle have until 15 March 2014 to fill any eligibility gaps. Please reach out to FDCsupportwikimedia.org with questions about eligibility, or the eligibility gaps and potential eligibility gaps outlined in this table.
• First installments for grants awarded in 2013-2014 Round 1 are being sent, and three grantees have confirmed receipt of the first installments of grant funds in January 2014.
• Site visits from FDC staff and FDC members to WMDE, WMHU, and WMIN are planned for February.

Project and Event Grants

• 4 requests were funded and 11 reports were accepted in January 2014.
• We hired Alex Wang as the new Program Officer for Project and Event Grants. You can read more about her here.

Grants awarded in January 2014

• Wikimedia DC projects 2014
• Wikimedia NYC: WikiConference USA 2014
• Rahmanuddin – Telugu Wikimedians: Telugu Wikipedia ten years celebrations
• Olaf Kosinsky: Wikipedians in European Parliament

Reports accepted in January 2014

• Wikimedia South Africa: Joburgpedia 2013
• Wikimedia Czech Republic: Mediagrant (final report)
• Wikimedia DC: Bootstrapping grant
• Wikimedia Serbia: Annual plan 2012-2013 (Report/Q4)
• Amical: GLAM outreach (II)
• Wiki Loves Monuments 2013, Macedonia Organizing Team
• Wikimedia Philippines: Philippine WikiCon 2013
• User:Keilana: Loyola Women in Science and Math Workshop
• Alexandre Hannud_Abdo – Grupo de Trabalho em Ciência Aberta: Encontro de Acadêmicos pelo Conhecimento Livre
• Wikimedia NYC: Internship Program 3
• Wikimedia Czech Republic: Presentation & Outreach (report 2013-2)

Travel & Participation Support

• 2 new requests were funded and 2 reports were accepted in January 2014.
• We’re working with WMF’s Communications Design Manager to recruit a design contractor to help with the TPS redesign
• A pilot is being planned to experiment with microgrants to contributors on Arabic Wikipedia. This pilot aims to test some assumptions and grantmaking systems at WMF for making small grants to individuals in the Global South, which may feed into TPS or other grants programs.

Requests awarded in January 2014

• Grants:TPS/Noopur28/Libreplanet_2014
• Grants:TPS/Harsh4101991/FOSDEM

Reports accepted in January 2014

• Grants:TPS/Ragesoss/History_of_Science_Society_2013/Report
• Grants:TPS/Oarabile_Mudongo/Youth_Engagement_Summit_Africa/Report

Siko Bouterse presenting about the impact of round 1 IEGs (slides)

Individual Engagement Grants

• Round 2 grantees are getting setup and beginning their projects. The following projects began in January:
  • Women Scientists Workshop Development
  • Visual editor- gadgets compatibility
  • What is about – C’est quoi. A series of communication tools about Wikipedia. Cameroon pilot project
  • Mbazzi Village writes Wikipedia
• A process for renewing IEGrants is being piloted on round 1 grants. Grants that demonstrate potential for impact and sufficient need for further investment are considered for a 6-month renewal IEG.
  • The Wikipedia Library is the first grant to be renewed – key focuses of the next 6 months include expanding to non-English pilots, and exploring tools for scalability.
  • A Wikisource Strategic Vision renewal request is being drafted for consideration.
• As IEG completes its first year, we launched 3 surveys to gather perspectives on the IEG process from round 1 grantees and round 2 proposers and committee members. A 2013 IEG process report details what’s working and where we can improve this program in the future.
• The Learning & Evaluation team completed an Impact assessment of round 1 grant projects (see also general “Highlights” section). Highlights of the report and what we’ve learned from the first year of IEG are available in a blog post.

Reports accepted in January 2014

3 final reports were accepted in January 2014

• • The Wikipedia Library
  • The Wikipedia Adventure
  • Replay Edits

Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation

• Meta-wiki cleanup month, including:
  • Updated all pages to reflect new grants program names
  • Moved all grants program pages to the “Grants:” namespace
  • Created a shiny new Grants homepage
  • The “Grants:” namespace is now part of default search option on meta
• Completed an impact assessment of IEG Round 1 grant projects (see IEG section).
• Revamped and deployed suite of surveys for grants programs to better understand their nascent work (see IEG section for those results; FDC results to come in February)
• Launched work with consultants to look into:
  • Tool for internal grants management (Fluxx)
  • Org effectiveness measures of other movements (TCC)
  • Overall impact of historic Project and Event Grants (Inspire)

Programs

Department highlights

• Program Evaluation and Design released four additional beta evaluation reports on Meta this month, covering On-wiki writing contests, GLAM Content Release Partnerships, Wiki Loves Monuments, and other photo upload initiatives. This brings our total number of released beta reports to six.
• Wikipedia Zero launched in Tajikistan. In January, we served 50 million free page views across 22 countries.
• Wikipedia Education Program developed a new online training for education program leaders that walks new program leaders through the process for creating a program plan, and offers suggestions of best practices based on nearly four years of experience running programs in several countries.

Presentation slides about Wikipedia Zero

Wikipedia Zero

• Wikipedia Text, our USSD/SMS service currently being piloted with Airtel Kenya and the Praekelt Foundation, was shortlisted for the Best Mobile Education Product or Service in the GSMA’s Global Mobile Awards. The winner will be announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 25. Wikipedia Text allows users to search Wikipedia and read articles via a series of text messages. For the first time ever, we are bringing Wikipedia’s vast knowledge base to the billions of people who do not yet use mobile internet.
• Launched our 25th Wikipedia Zero partner: Babilon Mobile in Tajikistan. In January we served 50 million free page views across 22 countries.
• Adele Vrana was promoted to Partner Manager for Wikipedia Zero in Africa and the Middle East.
• The Wikipedia Zero team held a two-day offsite to clarify short term priorities and set the context for annual planning.
• The partner engineering team kicked off development of the Wikipedia Zero partner portal, which will provide centralized resources and self-service implementation features, so we can support more carrier partners.
• We posted the third Partner Manager position, to head up Asia and Eastern Europe.

LiAnna Davis presenting about the new “Editing Wikipedia” brochure (slides)

Wikipedia Education Program

Global programs

• We enhanced the learning experience for student editors on English Wikipedia by adding new GuidedTours interactive tutorials to our online student training, and began investigating the possibility of completely converting the trainings into extended GuidedTours.
• We introduced new features to the Education Program extension to make it easier for users to manage courses and keep track of student editors.
• Rod Dunican, Director of Global Education, spoke at Saint Mary’s College to a group of professors and librarians about the education program and the benefits of using Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool.

Arab World program

• Tighe Flanagan, Arab World education program manager, worked with program leaders in Egypt and Jordan to make sure course pages are up to date and that student usernames are valid in preparation for collecting quantitative measurements of student contributions. While the terms concluded in January, student contributions will be monitored through the end of February as most student contributions have historically occured after the final exam period.

Communications

• A new online training for education program leaders is now available on the Outreach wiki. The training walks new program leaders through the process for creating a program plan, and offers suggestions of best practices based on nearly four years of experience running programs in several countries.
• One blog post:
  • Editing Wikipedia, a print guide for new contributors (14 January)
• Two newsletters:
  • 7 January 2014
  • 21 January 2014

Edward Galvez presenting about the beta evaluation reports (slides)

Program Evaluation and Design

• In January, the team:
  • continued releasing its beta evaluation reports, publishing four additional report pages on meta covering On-wiki writing contests, GLAM Content Release Partnerships, Wiki Loves Monuments, and other photo upload initiatives
  • initiated support for four survey pilot projects with a handful of program leaders wishing to pilot survey strategies in their programs. These survey pilots will help the team as they begin to build out survey tools and item inventories for, as well as to pilot different surveying strategies with, program leaders needs for technical advice or supports. (Note: This included discussion about and/or technical supports for surveys for a hybrid course/edit-a-thon series program, a chapters Wikimedian in Residence program, a conference evaluation, and a Wikipedia Education Program survey of participating instructors.)
  • hosted a hang-out to overview and highlight results from the first four reports and engage program leaders in dialogue about the reporting process, strategy, findings, and next steps
  • scheduled the next four evaluation hangouts for February and March, and developed and/or coordinated evaluation tools and resources to be released in conjunction with each of these content-specific hangouts
  • prepared a brief update for the February Metrics meeting
• The team is currently in the process of identifying a contractor to fill the community coordinator vacancy and has begun collecting community input for pre-conference workshop participation and program evaluation content for the upcoming Wikimedia Conference in Berlin.

HR presentation slides

Human Resources

HR is supporting Wikimedia Foundation staffing planning as part of the annual planning process, as well as continuing to support executive searches and a number of staff and organizational transition plans. We conducted a 1-day HR staff retreat to determine priorities for the upcoming year. We have brought on Anna Stillwell in a senior learning and organizational development contractor role, and Monica Breton as an intern. We have identified two Applicant Tracking System vendors that we are testing and are in process of selecting a potential Payroll vendor. We also rolled out a new parental leave program, and are assisting with reporting data to the FDC. W2s (United States tax documents) were distributed to US staff, and we continue to process greencards and H1Bs on the immigration front. We’ve shared initial employee engagement survey data to staff and managers.

Staff Changes

New Requisitions Filled

• Gilles Dubuc, Senior Software Engineer (Engineering)
• Shahyar Ghobadpour, Software Engineer – Features (Engineering)
• Charles Salvia, Senior Software Engineer (Engineering)
• Sam Smith, Software Engineer (Engineering)
• Alex Wang, Grants Program Officer (Grantmaking)

New Interns

• Monica Breton (Human Resources)
• Ambrosia Lobo (Administration)
• Shaila Nathu (Legal)

New Contractors

• Melanie Brown (Human Resources)
• Leslie Carr (Engineering)
• Prateek Saxena (Engineering)
• Anna Stillwell (Human Resources)

Contracts Extended

• Arlo Breault (Engineering)
• Edward Galvez (Programs)
• Sucheta Ghoshal (Engineering)
• Andrew Green (Engineering)
• Michael Guss (Administration)
• Limayli Huguet (Administration)
• Kunal Mehta (Engineering)
• Janet Renteria (Administration)
• Yuan Li (Programs)

Departures

• Melanie Brown
• Leslie Carr
• Matthew Roth
• Sarah Stierch

Contracts Ended

• Rita Chang
• Akshata Metha
• Naoko Sakurai-Chang

Department Change

• Adele Vrana – moved from Finance and Administration to join Programs

New Postings

• Test Infrastructure Engineer
• Software Engineer (Mobile) (Android Apps)

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled

January Actual: 183

January Total Plan: 162

January Filled: 5, January Attrition: 4

YTD Filled: 34, YTD Attrition: 17

Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end

33

Department Updates

Real-time feed for HR updates

https://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or https://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

no updates for January 2014

Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department

LCA Report, January 2014

• The legal team launched a community consultation regarding the Foundation’s first draft of its new Data Retention Guidelines. The consultation is scheduled to close on 14 February 2014. However, the guidelines are intended to be a living document that will be updated and expanded over time to reflect the Foundation’s retention practices. We greatly appreciate the input we received from the community, which has already helped improve the guidelines.
• The legal team (supported by Community Advocacy) has successfully concluded a seven-month long community consultation on the new trademark policy (see also general “Highlights” section). The community discussion, which had more words than The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, resulted in a policy that is unconventional in how it provides liberal use of the Wikimedia marks while maintaining legal protection. The final policy was approved by the Board of Trustees on February 1, effective immediately.
• The Board has also approved the legal team’s recommendation to withdraw trademark registration for the Community Logo, based on a 75 day community consultation.
• The community consultation on the new Privacy Policy draft continued into its 5th month. The community raised many new and interesting points in late December and early January, leading to an extension of the consultation period to ensure that substantive issues were properly addressed. The original close date was scheduled for 15 January 2014 and the current close date is scheduled for 14 February 2014.
• The community consultation on the new Access to Nonpublic Information Policy draft also continued into its 5th month. We have received a great deal of feedback from the community regarding this complicated and sensitive issue and intend on making a bold recommendation to the Board of Trustees based on this feedback, which would remove the identification requirement from the draft policy.
• The WMF legal team joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations in a Copyright Week, writing about how Wikipedia shows the value of a vibrant public domain in a guest blog post. This post was later translated and posted by Wikimedia France (“Wikipédia illustre la valeur d’un domaine public vivant“) and Wikimedia Israel (“ויקיפדיה ממחישה לשם מה נחוצה נחלת הכלל“).
• The legal team continues to participate in discussions about how the Wikimedia community should respond to a request for consultation from the European Commission on potential areas of copyright reform. The EC extended the deadline from February to March, so you now have more time to join in and help us out, if you are interested.
• Community Advocacy continued its ongoing support of the Trademark and Privacy policy consultations, as well as providing leadership and support (and staff hours) to the community liaison team detailed to work on VisualEditor.
• Community Advocacy is focusing on using tools to streamline our incredibly diverse workflows, and introduced the beta version of LCA tools, which will streamline the process of executing DMCA takedowns and reporting suspect files to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) as legally mandated.
• Community Advocacy assisted with the processing and review of applicants for the inter-project Ombudsman commission, with the 2014 team taking seat for their one-year term on February 1st.

Contract Metrics

• Submitted : 23
• Completed : 28

Trademark Metrics

• Submitted : 14
• Approved: 7
• Pending : 2
• Approval not needed : 5

Domains Obtained

vikipedia.com.tr, vikipedi.com.tr, wikibooks.ee, wikidata.ee, wikinews.ee, wikipedia.nu, wikiquote.ee, wikiquotes.com, wikiquotes.org, wikisource.ee, wikiversity.ee, wiktionary.ee

Coming & Going

We are happy to welcome Shaila Nathu, our first new legal intern for the spring semester – Shaila joins us as a second year law student at U.C. Hastings College of the Law.

Other Activities

The minutes and resolutions from the WMF Board of Trustees’ November meeting were published.

Communications Report, January 2014

Cover illustration for the 2012–2013 Annual Report

A very busy first month of the year for Communications. We bid farewell to global comms manager Matthew Roth as he moved on to a new job. The 2012-13 Foundation Annual Report’ was launched, and the team worked through a handful of media stories, including paid editing. Media covered a number of new community initiatives, including the Wiki voice intro project and a wide range of Wikipedia general interest stories.

Major announcements

No major announcements in January.

Major Storylines through December

Checkpoint MediaWiki vulnerability (January 29)

In late January, website security firm Checkpoint.com notified WMF of a vulnerability in the MediaWiki software. WMF engineering quickly addressed the vulnerability and issued a patch to all MediaWiki users. Media were alerted to the discovery once the patch was deployed by Checkpoint, and several mostly neutral stories emerged covering the situation.

Marketwatch (news alert from Checkpoint) [1]

Network World [2]

Linux Today [3]

Threat Post [4]

Wikipedia voice intro project (January 28)

UK Wikipedian Andy Mabbett’s (User:Pigsonthewing) Wikipedia voice intro project (WikiVIP) got major coverage through late January following a blog post by the Wikimedia UK chapter. Predominantly positive coverage largely centered on the high profile participation of comedian/performer Stephen Fry, but also mentioned a list of other celebrities who would lend their voice to the initiative.

Wikimedia UK blog post [5]

Fast Company [6]

Engadget [7]

Telegraph [8]

Google Knowledge graph and WP pageview drop (January 8)

In early to mid January, media took great interest in stories circulating that suggested Google’s Knowledge Graph search results were having a significant impact on Wikipedia’s page views, based on publicly posted PV data from the Foundation. Coverage was largely speculative about the connection of the factors, although the Foundation did point to internal research which suggested Knowledge Graph was not responsible for the observed pageview decline.

Times of India [9]

Daily Dot [10]

Other worthwhile reads

Wikipedia party to expand Sudbury’s presence on the web

CBC Morning, North [11]

Mick Jagger on his memoirs ‘Look it up on Wikipedia’

The Guardian [12]

Wikimedia considers supporting H.264 to boost accessibility, content

Ars Technica [13]

Wikipedia is top source of medical information for doctors

United Press International [14]

Copyright week, using and losing the public domain

Boing Boing [15] &EFF [16]

Wikipedia’s 13th Birthday

Mashable [17]

Wikipedia, What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page?

New York Times, original story [18], and follow up [19]

WMF Blog posts

Blog.wikimedia.org published 21 posts in January 2014. Four posts were multilingual, including versions in Odia, French, Ukrainian, and Portuguese.

Some highlights from the blog:

Happy 13th Birthday, Wikipedia! (January 15, 2014)

Wikimedia Ukraine opposes new copyright and telecommunication law’s amendments in Ukraine (January 16, 2014)

Wikipedia Shows the Value of a Vibrant Public Domain (January 14, 2014)

Introduction to the Board of Trustees (January 13, 2014)

Media Contact

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

Wikipedia Signpost

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

• Volume 10, Issue 1, 1 January 2014
• Volume 10, Issue 2, 8 January 2014
• Volume 10, Issue 3, 15 January 2014
• Volume 10, Issue 4, 22 January 2014
• Volume 10, Issue 5, 29 January 2014

Visitors and Guests

Visitors and guests to the WMF office in January 2014:

1. Matthew Caldwell (Mozilla)
2. Charles A. Lim (SMART)
3. Melissa Limcoaco (SMART)
4. Earl S. Valencia (SMART)
5. Arash Ghassemi (Union Bank)
6. Saten Singh (Union Bank)
7. Rafe Furst (Crowdfunder/Unreasonable Institute)
8. Bob Kraynak (Cushman Wakefield)
9. Richard Dimaio (Paywithmybank.com)
10. Jordan Johnson (Wabash College)
11. Stephen Fenton Jr (Wabash College)
12. James Kennedy IV (Wabash College)
13. Michael Haffner (Wabash College)
14. Tyler Andrews (Wabash College)
15. Tyler Trepton (Wabash College)
16. Ben Bradshaw (Wabash College)
17. Daniel Craig (Wabash College)
18. Patrick Kroll (Wabash College)
19. Patrick Bryant (Wabash College)
20. Garrett Lynette (Wabash College)
21. Justin Taylor (Wabash College)
22. Adam Miller (Wabash College)
23. Scott Crawford (Wabash College)
24. James Jeffries (Wabash College)
25. Tom Hehir (CCS Consulting)
26. Isabela Bagueros (Twitter)
27. Sumit Shah (Twitter)
28. Brendan Corrigan (JP Morgan)
29. Sebastian Violette (Gemalto)
30. Jeremie Acemyoun (Gemalto)
31. Bertrand LeRoux (Gemalto)
32. Nico Pitney (Huffington Post)
33. Tim Nichols (Hub)
34. Ante Ukalovik (Infobip)

My op-ed piece on the proposal to modify the Wikimedia Terms of Use was published in the Wikipedia Signpost:

An effort is underway for Wikimedia to codify a principle that has been a cornerstone of my Wikipedia training and consulting practice, Wiki Strategies, since our launch in 2009: essentially, that certain conflicts of interest must be publicly disclosed.

Focused community consideration of this principle is long overdue, and I applaud this effort. Undisclosed conflicts of interest pose a significant threat to Wikipedia. Action is needed. Why? Because of things like this:

Last month, a company offering Wikipedia services proposed establishing a business relationship with me. The founder spoke at length about the importance of dealing with Wikipedia ethically; he proudly contrasted his approach with his less scrupulous competitors, like Wiki-PR, who use sock puppets. But then he described his international network of Wikipedia editors: 20% disclose their role.

80% do not disclose that they are under contract.

While he may sincerely wish to treat Wikipedia ethically, this person is dead wrong to believe his approach is ethical. He fails to see the dissonance. Adopting a new policy would highlight that problem in an unambiguous way, supporting the Wikipedia community’s efforts to confront and fend off unethical approaches. So the proposal, at its core, reflects a good idea.

But a TOU amendment is not the way to accomplish those goals. While it may be a good fit for Wikipedia, it may not fit other projects, like Commons or Wikisource, as well. If a museum were to pay someone, for instance, to upload their CC-licensed files to Commons, does a lack of disclosure constitute a real problem? Perhaps; but I’m inclined to say it doesn’t. I’m skeptical about a provision that would define worthwhile contributions to our shared vision as violations. We should avoid outlawing good behavior.

The better path is to establish local policies on projects that need them, such as English Wikipedia. A Board-passed amendment is an unnecessarily top-down approach. If the problem mainly pertains to Wikipedia, why wouldn’t the Legal department simply propose to Wikipedia (in various languages) that it adopt local policies? The discussion would be healthy; I believe policies would pass. Why ask users to go straight to the Board of Trustees? The proposed action is out of step with Wikimedia’s system of governance; I don’t see any compelling reason for it to be done this way.

Regardless of how a policy is established, the way we announce it is important and delicate. We owe much of our success to our broad invitation to participate in the Wikimedia vision. Our concerns about conflict of interest are justified, of course; but we should keep in mind that we frequently benefit from alignments of interest. For instance, museums sometimes upload thousands of public domain images. Companies sometimes draw attention to articles about themselves that have become badly outdated. Such efforts bring us closer to fulfilling our vision. Any announcement of a transparency amendment must be worded in a way that respects the good faith and the contributions of many independent organizations.

Finally, although it is stated that disclosure is a minimum requirement – that is, a necessary condition for ethical engagement with Wikipedia – some readers will incorrectly conclude that disclosing a financial interest is sufficient, putting too much stock in this minimal step. We must not take too much satisfaction in a policy change like the one proposed, but remain attentive to the need to articulate Wikimedia’s ethical needs in a wide variety of scenarios.

Regardless of whether this amendment passes, undisclosed conflicts of interest are toxic to the Wikipedia community, and make it difficult for us to fulfill our vision. What can we do to address the problem?

What should the Wikimedia Foundation do?

• The Board of Trustees should refer the proposal to project communities like English Wikipedia, with a recommendation to pass local policies. Any TOU change should happen after, and in support of, local policy changes.

• The WMF should redouble efforts to keep its own house in order. It has the ability to influence its staff, contractors, service providers, funders, and business partners. There is much room for improvement. To wit:

Staff members have been hired into positions that require engagement on Wikipedia, with minimal ethical or practical guidance on how to go about it. This includes me (in 2009), and the problem remains: in 2014 a WMF employee prominently left her position after a dispute over her Wikipedia editing. While many facts of that dispute are (properly) invisible to public review, surely the organization must bear final responsibility for such a substantial misunderstanding.

In addition, WMF has at times given bad advice to other organizations about how to engage ethically with Wikipedia. That should never happen, given the wealth of resources and expertise available to them in our community.

Maintaining an ethical approach to Wikipedia engagement demands constant vigilance and diligent self-inquiry, going far beyond mere disclosure. WMF has great influence over the thought and behavior of its staff, contractors, funders, service providers, and business partners. That influence should be consistently put to good use.

What should the English Wikipedia community do?

• Whether or not the TOU amendment passes, Wikipedia should create a local policy requiring this kind of disclosure.
• Wikipedia should document best practices, and implement processes that allow non-disclosed paid editors to progress smoothly toward compliance.
• Wikipedia should ban editors who do not engage with that process in good faith.

What should people paying or earning money around Wikipedia do?

Many of us are passionate about Wikipedia’s success, and also spend or earn money relating to Wikipedia. We should be proactively building a shared understanding of Wikipedia ethics.

• We should create and publish our own statements of ethics. Mine is here: http://wikistrategies.net/statement-of-ethics/
• We should read each other’s statements, share reflections, and look for patterns. As of today, I am turning on the “comment” feature on my statement; I welcome commentary, public or private.
• In the long run, we should establish ethical codes that can be voluntarily adopted by those working in the Wikipedia sphere — similar to the way we adopt a free license when we choose to edit Wikipedia.

This post is available in 5 languages:

English • Deutsch • Español  • Português • Bahasa Indonesia

English

Alice Wiegand

For all the differences among the 40 regional organizations (chapters) and one thematic organization in the Wikimedia movement, there is one feature that is found at all the registered Wikimedia organizations: a volunteer-based supervision and control committee. For the Wikimedia Foundation, it is the Board of Trustees, at Wikimedia France, it is the Conseil d’administration, with Wikimedia Germany, it is the Präsidium, and of course there are a number of other different names. For simplicity, here I use the term “board” for all these bodies.

Enable the board to do its job

We often take for granted that a committee composed of individuals with different expectations, experiences and knowledge can find its way into its tasks just by itself. That it manages them well and effectively, always acting and communicating openly and professionally. But can that really always be assumed? Is it not in fact extremely difficult to come together as a group to figure out individual strengths and weaknesses, and build up trust? Two things that I think are essential for functional boards: a) the ability and willingness to delegate and b) the ability and willingness to accept and promote different positions and constructive confrontation within the board. Both are only possible if the committee has agreed on basic internal rules and procedures and if it accepts that it needs to evolve constantly as a body.

A board needs to keep pace with the organization’s development, to fulfill its oversight obligations at each stage of development of the organization, and at the same time support the organization, promote its development and frame its strategic direction. If the entire board deals with the question of how to become or how to remain able to work, it is running in circles, and tasks are not carried out. What could be more appropriate than to entrust a smaller group with these issues, thereby relieving the entire body immensely?

BGC – a committee in the background

Since 2010 there is such a group in the board of the Wikimedia Foundation: the Board Governance Committee (BGC), whose chairman I have been since joining the Board in 2012. Why am I doing this kind of work? I actually find it fun to deal with policies and the development of processes. I believe that it is generally helpful to have a resource for looking things up, a resource that is understandable for everyone, and I know that the Board of Trustees has not yet reached its own ideal conception of a board. And to this, I can and I want to make a contribution. Even though we publish our annual agenda and the minutes of our meetings on Meta, our work is naturally more in the background and is only known to few people.

The BGC’s purpose is to ensure that the Board fulfills its legal and fiduciary obligations, and that it improves its control function, efficiency and effectiveness. Sounds good, but what does that mean? Traditionally, a BGC takes care of the composition of the board, finding suitable candidates and preparing the appointments. Since the Foundation’s Board only partly consists of appointed board members, and we consider additional areas such as policies and our own evaluation to be as important as the composition of the board, our BGC has an extended scope of tasks. In essence, the Wikimedia Foundation’s BGC takes care of three areas: 1. policies and processes, 2. composition of the board, 3. training and evaluation of the board.

Specifically, this includes – for example – the Board Handbook, the search for new board members like most recently Ana Toni, the support of the community and Wikimedia organizations in the respective selection processes for board members by the Board liaisons or an Elections Committee, the 360-degree feedback for board members and the evaluation of the entire body. The latter is currently taking place in close collaboration with the HR Committee. In the board’s daily business, the BGC is positioned especially well to regularly question processes and threads. From time to time, this includes reminding the Board to concentrate on tasks that nobody else can do. Depending on the size and structure of the organization, this can mean different things. For example, the board of the Wikimedia Foundation does not itself create the annual plan, that’s the job of the ED, in person of Sue Gardner (see the process summary). Our responsibility as the Board is to provide directive input for the annual planning. In contrast, at organizations without full-time employees, the annual plan is created by the board itself. It is important to identify this explicit area of responsibility for each board. Because that is the challenge to face, which should be any Board’s main focus.

Development is not an end in itself

A Board must not only take care of itself – but it may not lose sight of its own development, either. Under the assumption that a Board’s constellation in the wikiverse changes relatively quickly, it must ensure to become able to work effectively within a short time (and continue to be so). The board must develop as the organization does, because only then can it ensure a trusting and fruitful cooperation in the board and – if applicable – between the board and the management. Regularly questioning its own working methods and self-conception is part of this. The trick is to implement the necessary legal or rational procedures and processes, without losing yourself in a cage of rules. A working group, whether it is called BGC or completely different, can provide valuable support – in every board.

I’m looking forward to the Boards Training Workshop in early March in London. We all can learn from each other, we only haven’t yet found the right ways to share our ideas and experiences in this matter.

Alice Wiegand (User:Lyzzy) has been serving on the WMF Board of Trustees since 2012 as a Chapter selected trustee. She has been involved with chapter and movement issues for many years and served on the Board of Wikimedia Deutschland from 2008 to 2011.

Deutsch

Alice Wiegand

Board-Service – Ein wenig Pflege braucht jedes Board

Bei allen Unterschieden zwischen den 40 regionalen Organisationen (Chapter) und einer thematischen Organisation (Thematic Organization) im Wikiversum gibt es ein Merkmal, dass sich bei allen eingetragenen Wikimedia-Organisationen wiederfindet: ein ehrenamtlich tätiges Aufsichts- und Kontrollgremium. Bei der Wikimedia Foundation ist es das Board of Trustees, bei Wikimedia France das Conseil d’administration, bei Wikimedia Deutschland ist es das Präsidium und natürlich gibt es noch eine Reihe weiterer unterschiedlicher Bezeichnungen. Der Einfachheit halber nutze ich hier den kurzen Begriff “Board” für all diese Gremien.

Das Board arbeitsfähig machen

Wir nehmen es so oft als gegeben hin, dass ein Gremium, zusammengesetzt aus Individuen mit unterschiedlichen Erwartungen, Erfahrungen und Kenntnissen, von alleine in seine Aufgaben findet, diese gut und effektiv bewältigt und dabei immer offen und professionell agiert und kommuniziert. Aber kann das wirklich vorausgesetzt werden? Ist es in Wirklichkeit nicht ungemein schwer, als Gruppe zueinander zu finden, individuelle Stärken und Schwächen herauszufinden und Vertrauen aufzubauen? Zwei Dinge sind meiner Meinung nach unabdingbar für funktionsfähige Boards: a) die Fähigkeit und die Bereitschaft zur Delegation und b) die Fähigkeit und Bereitschaft, unterschiedliche Positionen und konstruktive Konfrontation innerhalb des Boards zu ermöglichen und zu fördern. Beides ist nur möglich, wenn das Gremium sich auf grundlegende interne Regeln und Abläufe geeinigt hat und es akzeptiert, dass es sich als Gremium ständig weiterentwickeln muss.

Ein Board muss mit der Entwicklung der Organisation Schritt halten, um seine Aufsichtspflichten in jedem Entwicklungsstadium der Organisation erfüllen zu können und diese gleichzeitig zu stützen, ihre Entwicklung zu fördern und ihre strategische Ausrichtung zu gestalten. Wenn sich das gesamte Board damit beschäftigt, wie es arbeitsfähig wird oder bleibt, beißt sich die Katze in den Schwanz und die eigentlichen Aufgaben bleiben liegen. Was liegt näher, als mit diesen Fragen eine kleinere Gruppe zu beauftragen und so das gesamte Gremium immens zu entlasten?

BGC – ein Komitee im Hintergrund

Seit 2010 gibt es eine solche Gruppe im Board der Wikimedia Foundation, es ist das Board Governance Committees (kurz BGC), dessen Vorsitzende ich seit meiner Aufnahme in das Board 2012 bin. Warum ich gerade das mache? Ich habe tatsächlich Spaß an der Beschäftigung mit Richtlinien und der Entwicklung von Prozessen. Ich glaube, dass es grundsätzlich hilfreich ist, etwas zum Nachschlagen zu haben, was jeder nachvollziehen kann und ich weiß, dass auch das Board der Foundation seine Ideal-Vorstellung eines Boards noch nicht erreicht hat. Und hierbei kann und möchte ich einen Beitrag leisten. Auch wenn wir unsere jährliche Agenda und die Protokolle unserer Treffen auf Meta veröffentlichen, bleibt unsere Arbeit naturgemäß eher im Hintergrund und ist nur wenigen bekannt.

Zweck des BGC ist es sicherzustellen, dass das Board seine rechtlichen und treuhänderischen Verpflichtungen erfüllt, und dass es seine Steuerungsfunktion, Effizienz und Effektivität verbessert. Klingt gut, aber was bedeutet das? Traditionell kümmert sich ein BGC darum, die Zusammensetzung des Boards zu prüfen, geeignete Kandidaten zu finden und die Ernennungen vorzubereiten. Da das Board der Wikimedia Foundation nur zum Teil aus ernannten Board-Mitgliedern besteht und wir weitere Arbeitsfelder wie Richtlinien und unsere eigene Evaluation für ebenso wichtig wie die Zusammensetzung des Boards erachten, ist das Aufgabenspektrum unseres BGCs erweitert. Im Wesentlichen kümmert sich das BGC der Foundation um drei Bereiche: 1. Richtlinien und Prozesse, 2. Zusammensetzung des Boards, 3. Ausbildung und Bewertung des Boards.

Konkret zählen dazu zum Beispiel das Board-Handbuch, die Suche nach neuen Boardmitgliedern wie zuletzt Ana Toni, die Unterstützung von Community und Wikimedia-Organisationen bei den jeweiligen Auswahlprozessen für Board-Mitglieder durch Board-Kontaktpersonen oder eine Arbeitsgruppe Wahlen, das 360-Grad-Feedback für Board-Mitglieder und die Evaluation des gesamten Gremiums. Letztere erfolgt derzeit in enger Zusammenarbeit mit dem HR-Komitee. Im Tagesgeschäft ist es funktionsbedingt vor allem das BGC, das regelmäßig Abläufe und Diskussionsfäden in Frage stellen kann. Dazu zählt von Zeit zu Zeit auch, das Board daran zu erinnern, sich auf das zu konzentrieren, was niemand sonst machen kann. Abhängig von Größe und Struktur der Organisation kann das unterschiedlich sein. So erstellt das Board der Wikimedia Foundation den Jahresplan nicht selbst, das ist Aufgabe der Geschäftsführung, in Person von Sue Gardner (siehe den Überblick über den Planungsprozess). Unsere Aufgabe als Board ist es aber, richtungsweisenden Input für die Jahresplanung zu geben. Bei regionalen Organisationen ohne hauptamtliche Mitarbeiter wird ein Jahresplan im Gegensatz dazu von dessen Board selbst erstellt. Wichtig ist, diesen expliziten Aufgabenbereich eines jeden Boards zu identifizieren. Denn dem muss es sich stellen, und der sollte auch Arbeitsschwerpunkt eines jeden Boards sein.

Weiterentwicklung ist kein Selbstzweck

Ein Board darf sich nicht nur um sich selbst kümmern – es darf aber seine eigene Weiterentwicklung auch nicht aus den Augen verlieren. Unter der Voraussetzung, dass sich die Konstellation eines Boards im Wikiversum relativ schnell ändert, muss es dafür sorgen, in kurzer Zeit arbeitsfähig und effektiv zu werden (und zu bleiben). Das Board muss sich wie die Organisation weiterentwickeln, denn nur so kann es sicherstellen, dass eine vertrauensvolle und befruchtende Zusammenarbeit im Board und – wenn gegeben – zwischen Board und Geschäftsführung stattfindet. Das regelmäßige Hinterfragen der eigenen Arbeitsweisen und des Selbstverständnisses gehört dazu. Die Kunst dabei ist es, die juristisch notwendigen oder vernünftigen Verfahren und Abläufe einzuführen, ohne sich dabei selbst in einem Käfig aus Vorschriften zu verlieren. Eine Arbeitsgruppe, egal ob sie BGC oder ganz anders heißt, kann hierbei wertvolle Unterstützung leisten – in jedem Board.

Ich freue mich auf den Boards Training Workshop Anfang März in London. Wir alle können voneinander lernen, auch wenn wir noch nicht die richtigen Wege gefunden haben, um uns in diesem Sinne auszutauschen.

Alice Wiegand (User:Lyzzy) ist seit 2012 ein von den regionalen Organisationen ausgewähltes Mitglied im Kuratorium der Wikimedia Foundation. Sie beschäftigt sich seit vielen Jahren mit Belangen der regionalen Organisationen und der Bewegung und war Mitglied des Vorstands von Wikimedia Deutschland von 2008 bis 2011.

Español

Alice Wiegand

Servicio de la Junta: cada junta necesita algo de mantenimiento

Debido a todas las diferencias entre las cuarenta organizaciones regionales (capítulos) y una organización temática en el movimiento Wikimedia, existe una característica que se encuentra en todas las organizaciones Wikimedia registradas: un comité de supervisión y control integrado por voluntarios. Para la Fundación Wikimedia, esta se trata de la Junta Directiva; en Wikimedia Francia, se trata del Conseil d’administration; en Wikimedia Alemania, es el Präsidium; y por supuesto que hay una serie de otros nombres diferentes. Para simplificar, aquí utilizo el breve término «Junta» para todos esos órganos.

Permitir que la junta pueda hacer su trabajo

A menudo damos por sentado que un comité integrado por individuos con diferentes expectativas, experiencias y conocimientos, puede encontrar su camino en sus tareas por sí mismo. Eso es lo que gestionan bien y efectivamente, siempre actuando y comunicándose abiertamente y profesionalmente. ¿Pero en verdad puede asumirse que siempre es así? ¿No es en los hechos extremadamente difícil reunirse como grupo para descubrir las fortalezas y debilidades individuales, y construir confianza? Creo que son esenciales dos cosas para las juntas funcionales: a) la aptitud y disposición para delegar y b) la aptitud y disposición para aceptar y promover diferentes posiciones y confrontaciones constructivas dentro de la Junta. Ambas son posibles sólo si el comité acordó reglas internas básicas y procedimientos, y si acepta que necesita evolucionar constantemente como órgano.

Una junta tiene que seguir el ritmo de desarrollo de la organización, para cumplir con sus obligaciones de vigilancia en cada etapa del desarrollo de la organización, y al mismo tiempo apoyar a la organización, promover su desarrollo y el marco de su dirección estratégica. Si toda la junta se ocupa de la cuestión de cómo ser o cómo seguir siendo capaz de trabajar, se está ejecutando en círculos, y las tareas no se llevan a cabo. ¿Qué podría ser más apropiado que que confiara a un grupo más pequeño estos temas, aliviando así el cuerpo entero inmensamente?

BGC – un comité en segundo plano

Desde 2010 existe un grupo como esté en la Junta Directiva de la Fundación Wikimedia Comite de Gobernanza de la Junta(Governance Committee o BGC, en inglés), del cual soy presidente desde que me uní a la Junta en 2012. ¿Porqué hago este tipo de trabajo en particular? Actualmente encuentro divertido lidiar con políticas y desarrollo de procesos. Creo que por lo general es útil contar con un recurso para onservar las cosas, un recurso que sea entendible para todos, y sé que la Junta Directiva todavía no ha alcanzado su propia concepción ideal de una Junta; y para ello, Yo puedo y quiero hacer una contribución. A pesar de que publicamos nuestra agenda anual y las actas de nuestras reuniones en Meta, nuestro trabajo es naturalmente mayor en segundo plano y es conocido por pocas personas.

El propósito del BGC es asegurarse de que la Junta cumpla sus obligaciones legales y fiduciarias, y que mejore su función de control, eficiencia y efectividad. Suena bien, pero ¿qué significa esto? Tradicionalmente, un BGC se encarga de la composición de la Junta, buscando candidatos adecuados y preparando los nombramientos. Ya que la Junta Directiva de la Fundación se compone sólo en parte por miembros designados, consideramos otras áreas como políticas y nuestra propia evaluación tan importantes como la composición de la Junta, nuestro BGC tiene un amplio espectro de tareas. En esencia, El comité de Gobernanza de Junta de la Fundación Wikimedia se ocupa de tres áreas: 1. Políticas y procesos, 2. Composición de la Junta, 3. Capacitación y evaluación de la Junta.

Específicamente, esto incluye – por ejemplo – la Guía de la Junta, la búsqueda de miembros nuevos de la Junta como Ana Toni, la más reciente, el apoyo a la comunidad y a las organizaciones de Wikimedia en sus respectivos procesos de selección de miembros de sus Juntas por los coordinadores de la Junta Directiva o un Comité Electoral, la retroalimentación de 360-grados para miembros de la Junta una evaluación completa. Esta última se está llevando a cabo en colaboración con el Comite de Recursos Humanos. En los asuntos cotidianos de la Junta, el BGC está especialmente bien posicionado para cuestionar procesos y subprocesos. Cada cierto tiempo, esto incluye recordar a la Junta concentrarse en tareas específicas que nadie más puede realizar. Dependiente del tamaño y estructura de la organización, esto puede significar diferentes cosas; por ejemplo, la Junta de la Fundación Wikimedia no crea por si misma el plan anual, que es el trabajo del Director Ejecutivo, Sue Gardner (ver el Resumen del proceso). Nuestra responsabilidad como Junta es proporcionar de información directiva par ala planificación anual. En contraste, en las organizaciones que no tienen empleados a tiempo completo, el plan anual lo realiza la Junta en sí misma. Es importante identificar esta área específica de responsabilidad de cada Junta; debido a que este es el desafío a encarar, que debe ser el foco principal de cualquier Junta.

El desarrollo no es un fin en sí mismo

Una Junta no sólo debe ocuparse de si misma – pero tampoco debe perder e vista su propio desarrollo. Asumiendo que la constelación de una Junta cambia relativamente rápido en el wikiuniverso, debe asegurarse de ser capaz de trabajar de manera efectiva en un lapso corto de tiempo (y continuar siéndolo). La Junta debe desarrollarse como lo hace la organización, porque sólo entonces puede asegurarse un cooperación en confianza y fructífera en la junta – y en su caso – entre la junta y la gerencia. Cuestionar regularmente sus propios métodos de trabajo y su concepción de sí mismo es parte de esto. El truco es poner en práctica los procedimientos y procesos legales o racionales necesarios, sin perderse en una jaula de reglas. Un grupo de trabajo, ya sea que se llame Comite de Gobernanza o tenga un nombre completamente diferente, puede proporcionar un valioso apoyo – en cada junta.

Con miras al próximo Taller de capacitación de juntas a principios de marzo en Londres; todos nosotros podemos aprender de cada uno, aún no hemos encontrado la manera correcta de compartir nuestras ideas y experiencias al respecto.

Alice Wiegand (User:Lyzzy) es parte de la Junta directiva de WMF desde 2012 miembro elegido de un Capítulo. Ella ha estado involucrada en aspectos realacionados con el capítulo y el movimiento por varios años y fue parte de la Junta de Wikimedia Alemania desde el 2008 al 2011.

Português

Alice Wiegand

Conselho de Serviços: Cada conselho precisa de um pouco de manutenção

Para todas as diferenças entre as 40 organizações regionais (capítulos) e um organização temática no movimento Wikimedia, há uma característica que é encontrada em todas as organizações registadas Wikimedia: baseado em um trabalho voluntário supervisão e controle comitê. Para a Fundação Wikimedia, que é o Conselho de Curadores, a Wikimedia França, é o Conseil d’administration com Wikimedia Alemanha, é o Präsidium, e, claro, há uma série de outros nomes diferentes. Para simplificar, aqui eu uso a curto prazo “conselho” para todos esses órgãos.

Ativar o Conselho para fazer o seu trabalho

Nós, muitas vezes, somos um dado adquirido que um comité composto por indivíduos com diferentes expectativas, experiências e conhecimentos, pode encontrar seu caminho em suas tarefas apenas por si mesmo. Isso consegue-se bem e de forma eficaz, agindo sempre e se comunicando abertamente e profissionalmente. Mas isso pode realmente ser sempre assumido? Não, de fato, é extremamente difícil de se unir como um grupo para descobrir os pontos fortes e fracos, e construir a confiança? Duas coisas que eu acho que são essenciais para quadros funcionais: a) a capacidade e a vontade de delegar e b) a capacidade e a vontade de aceitar e promover posições diferentes e confronto construtivo dentro do conselho. Ambos só são possíveis se o comitê concordou com as normas e procedimentos internos básicos, e se ele aceita que ele precisa evoluir constantemente como um corpo.

Um conselho precisa manter o ritmo com o desenvolvimento da organização, para cumprir as suas obrigações de supervisão em cada fase do desenvolvimento da organização, e ao mesmo tempo apoiar a organização, promover o seu desenvolvimento e enquadrar a sua direção estratégica. Se toda a diretoria lida com a questão de como tornar-se ou manter-se como capaz de trabalhar, ele está sendo executado em círculos, e as tarefas não são realizadas. O que poderia ser mais apropriado do que confiar a um grupo menor com estas questões, aliviando, assim, todo o corpo imensamente?

BGC – um comitê em segundo plano

Desde 2010 existe um grupo no conselho da Wikimedia Foundation: o Comitê Gestor da Diretoria (BGC), cujo presidente eu tenho sido desde que ingressei na Câmara em 2012. Por que estou fazendo esse tipo de trabalho, em particular? Eu realmente acho que seja divertido para lidar com políticas e desenvolvimento de processos. Eu acredito que é geralmente útil ter um recurso para olhar as coisas, um recurso que é compreensível para todos, e eu sei que o Conselho de Diretores ainda não atingiu a sua própria concepção ideal de um conselho. E para isso, eu posso e eu quero fazer uma contribuição. Mesmo que nós publiquemos o nosso agenda anual e as minutas de nossas reuniões em Meta, o nosso trabalho é, naturalmente, mais a fundo e só do conhecimento de algumas pessoas.

O propósito da BGC é garantir que o Conselho cumpra suas obrigações legais e fiduciários, e que melhore a sua função de controle, eficiência e eficácia. Parece bom, mas o que isso significa? Tradicionalmente, a BGC cuida da composição do conselho, encontrar candidatos adequados e preparar os compromissos. Desde o Conselho de Administração da Fundação só em parte é composta por membros do conselho nomeados, e consideramos áreas adicionais, tais como as políticas e nossa própria avaliação será tão importante quanto a composição do conselho, a nossa BGC tem um âmbito âmplo de tarefas. Em essência, o BGC da Wikimedia Foundation cuida de três áreas: 1. políticas e processos, 2. composição do conselho, 3. formação e avaliação do conselho.

Especificamente , isso inclui – por exemplo – o Handbook Board, a busca de novos membros do conselho, como mais recentemente Ana Toni, o apoio da comunidade e Wikimedia organizações nos respectivos processos de seleção de conselheiros pelas ligações do Conselho ou uma Comissão de Eleições, o feedback de 360 ​​graus para os membros da diretoria e da avaliação de todo o corpo. Este último está ocorrendo atualmente em estreita colaboração com o HR Comitê. Nos negócios dos conselheiros, o BGC está posicionado especialmente bem para questionar regularmente os processos e threads. De tempos em tempos , isso inclui lembrar o Conselho de se concentrar em tarefas que ninguém mais pode fazer. Dependendo do tamanho e estrutura da organização, isso pode significar coisas diferentes. Por exemplo, o conselho da Wikimedia Foundation em si mesma não criar o plano anual, que é o trabalho da ED, na pessoa de Sue Gardner (veja o resumo do processo). Nossa responsabilidade como o Conselho é fornecer dados diretos para o planejamento anual. Em contraste, as organizações sem empregados em tempo integral, o plano anual é criado pelo próprio conselho. É importante identificar esta área explícita de responsabilidade de cada conselheiro. Porque esse é o desafio a enfrentar, o que deve ser o principal foco de qualquer Conselho.

O desenvolvimento não é um fim em si mesmo

A Diretoria não deve apenas cuidar de si mesmo – mas não pode perder de vista o seu próprio desenvolvimento, tampouco. Sob a hipótese de que a constelação do Conselho de Administração no wikiverse muda de forma relativamente rápida, deve garantir a tornar-se capaz de trabalhar de forma eficaz dentro de um curto espaço de tempo (e continuam a sê-lo). O conselho deve se desenvolver organizadamente, porque só então ele pode garantir uma cooperação confiante e frutuosa no quadro e – se for o caso – entre o conselho e a gestão. Regularmente questionar seus próprios métodos de trabalho e auto-concepção é parte disso. O truque consiste em implementar os procedimentos e processos legais ou racionais necessárias, sem perder-se em uma gaiola de regras. Um grupo de trabalho, se ele é chamado BGC ou completamente diferente, pode dar uma ajuda preciosa – em cada conselho.

Eu estou ansioso para a oficina de capacitação Conselhos Oficina de Treinamento no início de março, em Londres. Todos nós poderemos aprender uns com os outros, só ainda não encontramos o caminho certo para compartilhar nossas idéias e experiências nesta matéria.

“Alice Wiegand (User:Lyzzy) tem vindo a servir no Conselho de Curadores WMF desde 2012 como um capítulo administrador selecionado. Ela esteve envolvida com questões de capítulos e movimento por muitos anos e serviu no Conselho de Wikimedia Deutschland em 2008-2011.”

‎Bahasa Indonesia

Alice Wiegand

Layanan Dewan: Setiap dewan membutuhkan sedikit pemeliharaan

Untuk semua perbedaan diantara 40 organisasi regional (majelis) dan satu organisasi tematik di gerakan Wikimedia, salah satu fiturnya dapat ditemukan di semua organisasi terdaftar Wikimedia: yaitu berdasarkan kesukarelaan komite pengawasan dan pengendalian. Untuk Yayasan Wikimedia, ada Dewan Pengawas, di Wikimedia Perancis, ada Conseil d’administration, di wikimedia Jerman, ada Präsidium, dan tentunya masih banyak lagi dengan nama lain. Untuk kemudahan, kami disini memberikan nama pendek “dewan” untuk semua badan organisasi.

Memudahkan dewan melakukan pekerjaan mereka

Kami juga sering mengetahui bahwa komite terdiri dari individual-individual dengan harapan, pengalaman, dan pengetahuan yang dapat menemukan cara untuk menyelesaikan tugasnya dengan sendirinya. Komite tersebut dapat mengatur diri mereka dengan baik dan efektif, selalu bekerja dan berkomunikasi secara terbuka dan profesional. Namun dapatkah itu selalu dapat diasumsikan? Bukankah pada kenyataannya sangat sulit untuk bekerja bersama-sama dalam tim untuk memahami kekuatan dan kelemahan setiap individual, dan membangun kepercayaan? Dua hal saya pikir sangat penting untuk dewan fungsional; kemampuan dan kerelaan untuk menerima dan mempromosikan setiap posisi dan konfrontasi yang konstruktif secara berbeda di dalam dewan. Keduanya hanya akan terjadi jika komite telah menyetujui peraturan dan prosedur internal yang dasar, dan jika diterima maka akan berevolusi secara konstan sebagai sebuah lembaga.

Dewan perlu menjaga langkah dengan pengembangan organisasi, untuk memenuhi kewajiban pengawasan pada setiap tahap pengembangan organisasi, dan pada waktu yang sama mendukung organisasi, mempromosikan pengembangannya dan kerangangka arah strateginya. Jika seluruh dewan setuju dengan pertanyaan bagaimana untuk menjadi atau bagaimana untuk tetap dapat bekerja, bekerja di dalam lingkaran serta tugas yang tidak dilakukan. Apa yang dapat lebih tepat dari mempercayai kelompok kecil dengan masalah ini, sehingga meringkankan tugas lembaga secara keseluruhan?

BGC – komite yang melatar belakangi

Sejak 2010 terdapat kelompok di lembaga dari Wikimedia Foundation: Board Governance Committee (BGC), di mana saya sebagai ketua telah bergabung dengan dewan sejak 2012. Mengapa saya melakukan pekerjaan ini secara khusus? Saya benar-benar menemukan minat untuk bertransaksi dengan kebijaksanaan dan pengembangan dari proses. Saya percaya bahwa secara umum sangat membantu untuk menemukan sumber daya untuk mencari apapun, sumber daya yang dimengerti oleh semua orang, dan saya tahu bahwa Dewan Pengawas belum mencapai konsep yang ideal untuk dewan. Dan untuk ini, saya dapat dan saya ingin untuk memberikan kontribusi. Walaupun kami telah menerbitkan agenda tahunan dan pertemuan di Meta, pekerjaan kami tentu saja berada di belakang layar dan hanya diketahui oleh beberapa orang saja.

Tujuan BCG ialah untuk menyakinkan bahwa Dewan memenuhi kewajiban pergadaian dan keabsahan, dan meningkatkan fungsi kontrol, efisiensi dan efektivitasnya. Kedengarannya bagus, namun apa artinya? Secara tradisional, BGC mengurus komposisi dari dewan, menemukan kandidat yang tepat dan mempersiapkan pertemuan. Sejak Dewan Foundation hanya sebagian yang terdiri dari anggota dewan tertunjuk, dan kami mempertimbangkan area tambahan seperti kebijakan dan evaluasi kami sendiri menjadi sepenting susunan dewan, BGC kami telah memperluas cakupan tugas. Secara esensial, BGC Wikimedia Foundation mengurusi tiga area: 1. Kebijakan dan proses, 2. Susunan dewan, 3. Pelatiahan dan evaluasi dewan.

Khususnya, hal ini termasuk -contohnya- Buku pegangan anggota Dewan, perekrutan anggota dewan paling terbaru Ana Toni, dukungan komunitas dan organisasi Wikimedia di bagian prosed tertentu untuk anggota dewan perwakilan atau komite pemilihan, 360-degree feedback untuk anggota dewan dan evaluasi seluruh badan organisasi. Yang terakhir saat ini sedang berlangsung kerjasama erat dengan Komite Humas. Dalam tugas dewan sehari-hari, ikut diingatkan bahwa Dewan harus berkonsentrasi pada tugas yang dimana orang lain tak dapat lakukan. Tergantung dari ukuran dan struktur organisasi, ini bisa berarti banyak. Contohnya, Dewan Yayasan Wikimedia sendiri tidak menentukan jadwal tahunan, dikarenakan penentuan tersebut adalah tugas ED, orangnya adalah Sue Gardner (lihat ringkasan proses). Tugas kami sebagai Dewan adalah untuk menyediakan masukan langsung untuk perencanaan tahunan. Sebaliknya, dalam organisasi dengan pegawai tetap, rencana tahunan dilakukan oleh dewan itu sendiri. Sangatlah penting untuk menentukan area tugas untuk tiap dewan. Dikarenakan banyak halangan yang akan dihadapi, yang tentu harus menjadi fokus utama Dewan.

Pengembangan bukanlah tujuan akhir

Dewan tidak boleh hanya mengurus hal ini – tetapi juga tidak hilang sasaran pada pengembangannya sendiri. Dengan asumsi konstelasi Dewan di dunia wiki yang secara relatif terus berganti, diharuskan mampu bekerja secara efektif dalam waktu yang pendek (dan berterusan). Dewan harus berkembang dan bergerak seperti organisasi, dikarenakan hanya dengan ini dapat dipastikan kepercayaan dan hasil dari kerja sama dalam dewan dan -mungkin saja- di antara dewan dan manajemen. Secara reguler mengevaluasi metode pekerjaan sendiri dan pembuatan konsep sendiri adalah bagian dari ini. Triknya adalah untuk menerapkan prosedur dan proses yang legal dan rasional, tanpa kehilangan arah di kungkungan peraturan. Kelompok kerja, terserah apakah itu BGC atau sesuatu yang berbeda sama sekali, dapat memberikan dukungan yang berharga – di setiap kedewanan.

Saya menantikan untuk ikut serta di Lokakarya Pelatihan Dewan diawal maret nanti di London. Kami dapat mempelajari satu sama lainnya, kami hanya belum menemukan jalan yang tepat untuk membagi ide dan pengalaman tentang hal ini.

Alice Wiegand (User:Lyzzy) telah melayani Dewan Pengawas WMF sejak tahun 2012 sebagai anggota Majelis yang dipercaya. Dia telah terlibat dengan majelis dan isu isu organisasi untuk beberapa tahun dan melayani Dewan Wikimedia Jerman dari tahun 2008 sampai pada tahun 2011.

IEG barnstar

Do you have an idea for a project that could improve Wikipedia or another Wikimedia community?

The Wikimedia Foundation and the Individual Engagement Grants Committee are seeking proposals for community-led experiments to have online impact in the Wikimedia movement. Individual Engagement Grants support individuals and small teams of Wikimedians to lead projects for 6 months. You can get funding to turn your idea into action with a grant for online community organizing, outreach and partnerships, tool-building, or research. Proposals are due by 31 March 2014.

Past grantees have been testing new ways to encourage women to edit Wikipedia, improve workflows for Wikimedia’s cartographers, raise awareness of Wikipedia in China and Africa, coordinate a global Wikisource strategy, increase free access to reliable sources for Wikipedians, and more. Proposals for up to $30,000 are considered; most grantees are awarded between $300 and $15,000 to support a wide range of activities and expenses, including project management, consultants, materials, and travel.

Grantees say that participating in the program has helped them build confidence and expertise in experimental setup and execution of community projects. As a grantee from the first round put it, “IEG gave me the opportunity to work in a more professional way on projects I really like, and in the end it gave me more expertise and experience and hope that issues can be solved. It offered solutions, and it taught me that solutions can be built, if you work on them.”

What’s new for 2014

The Individual Engagement Grants program is now available in more languages thanks to the efforts of volunteer translators! To celebrate this broader global reach, and in honor of WikiWomen’s history month, we hope you’ll share even more ideas for projects aimed at increasing diversity in the movement.

Ideas for all new projects are always welcome in the IdeaLab, and throughout the month of March, we’ll be hosting proposal clinic Hangouts to help you turn your idea into a grant proposal in real time. Please stop by to say hello, ask a question, or share some advice during these IdeaLab Hangout hours. We look forward to seeing your proposal by March 31st.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants

Hello there. Apologies for a delayed blogpost. I had a lot on my hands. 

We’ve come to the final phase of the internship. There’s been lots and lots to learn and I’m taking back a lot more than what I could possibly give. I’ve faith in my abilities and the confidence to go forth and apply for intimidating looking projects on GSoC. As a side note, I am deeply sad not to be able to apply for Mediawiki for GSoC, but I really admire it’s policy of picking only first-timers. :) 

So this is what the final product looks like:

The languages here are customized according to my location and preferences, that is India. It’d appear differently depending on where you belong.

We’re waiting for the security review on the feature after which we hope to get in deployed in Beta as fast as possible. 

Also, we have a list of optional, add-on features I would be working on in the following months. :) 

After 41 patch-sets, I can say I can’t stand badly indented code anymore. Nor the misplaced commas, trailing spaces, improperly named variables. 

I loved being a part of the MediaWiki family and hope to continue working as a volunteer. 

Thanks!

It looks like the accreditation for the Ukrainian Wikinewsies has arrived in Kiev.  Despite paying €48 for expedited mail, it arrived two weeks after it was sent.  (This doesn’t mean the Ukrainians have the accreditation, merely that the accreditation got off the plane.) The accreditation arrived today. The Ukrainians got a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to cover their Sochi expenses.  They have their travel arranged.

I’ve got my transportation booked.  I should have a “lovely” train ride across Russia, (30 hours, third class seat) but the experience should still be awesome.  I’ve got a hotel booked.  I’m seriously thinking about packing.  I’m working on a todo list and remember this fact list.

Remember:

1. Before getting on the train, I will need to go to the ticket desk and exchange my internet ticket for a paper ticket for the train.
2.  Meals on the train cost about €15.
3. Train bathrooms apparently get dirty quickly after leaving the station.
4. The fare on the express train on the route Domodedovo – Paveletskiy station, Vnukovo is about 640 rubles round trip.

To do list:
1. Print out basic Russian phrases for pointing at to get service.
2. Figure out where my seats on the train actually are.
3. Buy bottled water before getting on the train.  Bring snacks for the train.  Food options are limited.
4. Pack some baby-tissues, toothpaste and toothbrush.

Outside of that, I’ve updated Wikinews:Sochi Paralympic Games, and posted on the watercooler for Wikinews to let potential reviewers know what is going on.  I’m also trying to work on a copyright notice for all my pictures for Wikinews.  I am having some problems with the template.  Any assistance in fixing this would be appreciated.

This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador

To influence education institutions, we need to speak their language and we need to put information in the places where they are looking for it.

The Jisc infoKits are online booklets for management, technologists and other staff in Higher and Further Education. This is where such people come for advice about Programme Management, Learning Spaces, Cloud Computing and many other topics. Today there is a new infoKit that I’ve written as part of the Jisc/Wikimedia UK partnership. “Crowdsourcing: the wiki way of working” shows how professionals and volunteers can collaborate to produce reference materials for education and research.

Like all infoKits, “Crowdsourcing” can be read from beginning to end or dipped into for short, self-contained examples and case studies. It culminates in a discussion of how collections of photographs and other digital media can benefit from sharing on Wikimedia Commons. Each section ends with a succinct summary of the lesson learned.

At around ten thousand words’ length, it is still only a skim over an enormous topic. No one has a sure recipe for success in crowdsourcing, but there are general and specific lessons to be learned from the most visibly successful crowdsourced projects: Wikipedia its sister sites.

The title of the infoKit reflects that managers have to get used to working in an unfamiliar way: accepting risk, accepting openness, working without a plan, and empowering and motivating volunteer contributors. The free and open nature of Wikipedia and is explained not as a gimmick but as crucial to the success of the project. The infoKit warns managers against taking too much control of their educational or scholarly content and thereby suffocating innovative uses and improvements.

Organising and motivating an online community is hard: the infoKit is clear about this. It will often be less effort to move digital content into an existing community than to build a community around a collection of content.

I am going to take my own advice: the infoKit will be updated in future and I will crowdsource improvements by sharing the infoKit on a public wiki. Like all the outputs of my project, the infoKit is freely reusable under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. I’d like to thank Andrew Stewart and David Cornforth of Jisc infoNet for their feedback as reviewers and for their work making my text look so good.

Link: Crowdsourcing: the wiki way of working.