Advancement department to be created at the Foundation, milestone fixes: March saw a number of high-level hirings and executive reorganizations in the Wikimedia Foundation.
March saw a number of high-level hirings and executive reorganizations in the Wikimedia Foundation. First there was the departure of chief talent and technology officer Gayle Karen Young and simultaneous onboarding of chief operating officer and interim CTCO Terry Gilbey. Gilbey, serving in a newly created executive position, is now in charge of the combined Finance, Administration, and Human Resources, formerly three separate entities. A week later there was the onboarding of technology evangelist and author Guy Kawasaki as the latest member of the Board of Trustees. Then, on March 27, the WMF announced the hiring of Kourosh Karimkhany in another newly created role, as VP of strategic partnerships, and another newly restructured Advancement department. In a post on the WM blog, Lisa Gruwell, currently chief revenue officer, stated that Karimkhany "will initiate, maintain, and grow strategic relationships and partnerships that advance the Wikimedia mission, support the community, and increase access to knowledge globally ... Kourosh joins us in this senior leadership role to craft a partnership strategy and create long-term value for Wikimedia projects through partnerships, projects, and relationships."
Before joining the WMF, Karimkhany was head of corporate development at Conde Nast; in that role he served a leadership role in the team behind the company's acquisitions of Wired.com, Ars Technica, and Reddit. Prior to serving as a "digital media executive", first as a senior producer at Yahoo! News, Karimkhany had functioned as a Silicon Valley–based technology journalist reporting for Bloomberg, Reuters, and Wired.com. Speaking of the role he will play in his capacity of managing Advancement, Gruwell states that "Kourosh will oversee the Wikimedia Foundation’s partnership strategy ... the partnerships group will help us identify the strategic initiatives we must take on at the WMF and increase our ability to support the movement and mission." A new organizational scheme remains to be drafted: according to a complimentary just-released WMF partnerships FAQ (whose existence reflects the scale of the change), Karimkhany will "work with Lisa [Gruwell] and the executive team to build a partnerships plan [that] will inform planning for the 2015–16 fiscal year, and will be the basis for Kourosh’s team building." The Fundraising team will be joined under the new "partnerships" team under Gruwell's purview, and Karimkhany will report directly to her in her newly retitled position as chief advancement officer. The combined team will be retitled the "Advancement department"; the Wikipedia Zero team will now report to Karimkhany. Though he started on March 30, as of the time of writing Karimkhany has not yet joined the Foundation's staff and contractors page—nor has outgoing Gayle Karen Young left it.
In the context of last week's release of the State of the WMF 2015 report, covered by the Signpost, Karimkhany will occupy an important position at the head of two pressing concerns for the WMF. In his capacity as the new lead of the Wikipedia Zero team he is tasked with addressing the Zero program's penetration concerns: the team admitted in last week's report that "our own data on pageviews by language version show roughly 90% usage in English throughout South Asia, indicating the program is actually reaching more privileged segments of society ... making Wikipedia free of data charges is not driving usage in underserved segments." This challenge is significant enough that in executive director Lila Tretikov's mailing list hiring announcement, the customary welcome from the community was eventually buried by a drawn-out and conscientious discussion on the existential merits of the program.
One of the questions asked in the FAQ is whether or not Karimkhany, working closely with the fundraising team, will be "focused primarily on revenue". The FAQ answers that "the new role is focused on creating value for the Wikimedia movement ... value can be understood in many different ways. We believe that it can be about relationships with people, relationships with organizations, or in some cases, additional financial resources." Asked about the role that the re-organization will play, in this month's metrics meeting, Gruwell stated that the reorganization will be an "expansion of scope" for her, but that the work of the fundraising team will remain as its own initiative. In being tasked with "creating value", Karimkhany and his new team plan to increase the WMF's initiative and organizational prominence in a time when the WMF sees itself as being in an "identity crisis"—and hopefully, by doing so, to help address ongoing concerns from Fundraising as to how structural changes in readership will affect the Foundation's ability to raise adequate funding. R
Major changes in the article counts for the Wikimedia projects were observed last week after a maintenance script was run to recount the articles on most Wikimedia content-wikis (all language editions of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and so forth, but excluding Wikibooks). Sixty-five wikis have fallen below milestones tracked at the Wikimedia News Meta page, and three increased to new milestones. Among these wikis, the largest absolute changes were a decrease of 281,624 articles in the English Wikisource (a 27% drop) and an increase of 4421 entries in the Persian Wiktionary (an 8% rise). The most extreme relative changes were a 98% decrease in Sindhi Wikinews articles (749 to 13), and a 23% increase in Bengali Wiktionary entries (920 to 1134). These changes are not the result of any particular recent bug fix; rather, they are reflective of many bugs related to article counting that have existed over the years, as well as other changes made to the MediaWiki software, which collectively have caused the "live" article counts to get out of sync with their true values. Periodic running of the same maintenance script on the 29th day of each month should ensure that the counts are more accurate from now on.
The fix calls into question many of the milestones the Signpost itself has reported over the past few years, most of which were sourced from this list. Though the most pervasive such change in recent memory, it is not the first time that recounting has significantly shifted the measured size of a Wikimedia project: for instance, when the Spanish Wikipedia became the seventh project to pass the million-article milestone in 2013, the precise "millionth article" could not be determined; this was because the milestone arose from a change in the way pages were counted, causing the project to immediately jump from approximately 990,000 to 1.017 million articles. More details on the recent changes will be forthcoming in a future report. D, R
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