The Wikimedia Foundation's 2010–11 annual plan has been approved by the Board and was publicly posted on June 29. The plan draws from the year-long strategic planning project that ran from July 2009 to July 2010, and "is markedly more ambitious than in previous years, [as] justified by the quality of data and analysis and discussion that underpin the new strategy."
This year, the Foundation is aiming to spend as much money as it raises (projected to be $20.4 million), in contrast with previous years, when it has always run a surplus. The graph shows both the secure financial position of the organization, and the significant rise in its expenditure, which has virtually doubled annually over the past two years.
As detailed in the plan, the Foundation plans to add 44 new positions to its staff within the next year (currently, it employs around 40 people). These new positions are discussed at length, among other topics, in the "Questions and answers" for the plan.
The votes on the Board resolution approving the plan mirrored those of the Board's approval of a preliminary version of the 2010–15 plan back in April (see last week's "News and notes"): All trustees voted in favor except two of the three community-elected members – Mindspillage abstained, and Sj opposed, arguing "that we should define crisply why a larger Foundation is important to the Projects, grow smoothly rather than surge and taper off, and prepare specifically for the internal and cultural stresses that can accompany rapid change, before doubling in a year".
In a discussion on Phoebe Ayer's blog involving several staff and Board members, Board member Jan-Bart demonstrated awareness for such concerns: "both Sue and the board share the understanding that we have a very ambitious annual plan for 2010–2011, but that we should continue to monitor all the aspects that influence this plan (questions such as: are we able to hire the right people?, are we not growing too fast?, are we not losing touch within the office with some of our roots?, are we able to raise enough funds? etc.)."
As The Signpost reported last month, the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department has been formed to combine Fundraising, Reader relations, Public outreach and volunteer coordination under the incoming Chief Community Officer Zack Exley. The Department has now announced that it "will be hiring for a series of key positions". Specific job descriptions are not yet available, but informal applications are already invited from:
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Authored by Exley, the invitation seems to aim at recruiting for analytical work: candidates should be "creative non-linear thinkers" who "have their own opinions and theories on various problems and opportunities facing Wikimedia and other online communities" and are "equally strong dealing with qualitative and quantitative knowledge".
Apparently as a test of candidates' familiarity with Wikimedia projects (or their ability to gain it quickly), the form asks applicants to "describe the process in which users are approved to become administrators on [the] English Wikipedia".
Also last week, it was announced that two members of the fundraising team (which is part of the Community Department) will be leaving the Foundation: Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving since July 2008, will leave on September 30 ([1]), and Anya Shyrokova, Stewardship Associate, will leave at the end of July to take up graduate studies ([2]).
At the USENIX association's recent Annual Technical Conference in Boston, USA, the MediaWiki software and the Wikimedia Foundation were the recipients of the STUG (Software Tools User Group) award. The announcement said:
| “ | [We] know that this wonderful piece of code did not just appear. The ideas behind them were not new, but a few people had to come forward to implement a wiki that could underlie a real scalable, worldwide service. That service was MediaWiki. It took a community to collaborate, putting in many many hours of work to make the idea great and make it lasting. We recognize Magnus Manske, Lee Crocker, Brion Vibber, and Tim Starling as the major contributors to MediaWiki, but we all realize that their work has been refined and improved by many others. MediaWiki is a wonderful example of a software tool that changed our world. | ” |
Discussions about a possible mandatory recall process for administrators have been going on for some time – one possibility that received majority support in a November 2009 poll was made into a policy proposal that then failed to gain consensus in a March 2010 RfC.
A focal point for the debate was recently provided when an administrator, Herostratus, voluntarily submitted to a recall process in the form of an RFA. The result of the RFA was unsuccessful, and led to Herostratus's resignation from adminship. The recall process was initiated when he posted a survey on his talk page soliciting input with respect to users' complaints. Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Herostratus 2 was opened by the candidate once his criteria for initiating recall (mostly taken from this sample process) were satisfied. This RFA was a significant event, with discussion ranging over many noticeboards ([1], [2]), including "Some philosophical thoughts" from Jimbo. At one point, the recall RFA was closed as "out of process"; however, the closure was reverted three hours later with the comment "if this is to be closed, dubious reasons should not be used" ([3]).
Opposition to Herostratus centered around what were perceived as disparaging comments about living people on an AFD debate and for inappropriate humor. Supporters pointed out that his use of the admin tools themselves was exemplary; but the idea that administrators should follow a higher level of decorum carried the RFA through and the final tally was 78/48/21, a ratio at which a standard RFA would have probably failed. Herostratus then requested removal of his admin rights at meta "under a cloud". In his final statement on the matter, Herostratus stated: "The system worked and worked fine, notwithstanding that I don't agree with the result."
Last week a Digg.com submission showing a screenshot of the recent fundraiser's donation log gained prominence. It appeared to show a million-dollar donation coming from an anonymous source; Paul McNamara of Network World, however, investigated thinking that "a million smackaroos from a benefactor too shy to even accept a public thank-you" ([4]) seemed unlikely. It has now transpired that the donation was actually the third installment of the three million dollars over the three-year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation (see previous Signpost coverage). The mistake in attribution has since been fixed (see log: [5]).
Wikipedia featured in an article written by Ben Wildavsky for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which asked the question, "Is globally democratized learning always a good thing?". In introducing the topic, Wildavsky said "At the Wilson Center discussion, former University of Michigan president James Duderstadt ticked off a long list of transformative technologies and modes of learning that seem destined to reshape postsecondary instruction globally ... Along with open courseware initiatives, ranging from iTunes University to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, he cited Google’s Library Project; Wikipedia; Facebook [and others.] The upshot, he declared, will be 'a new form of collective human intelligence, as billions of world citizens interact together, unconstrained by today's monopolies of knowledge or learning opportunities.' ... the things Wikipedia gets wrong are far less striking than how much it gets right."
Wildavsky went on to discuss some of the concerns with "democratized" learning: "Peer learning has its place, but the wisdom of crowds isn't always, well, wise."
This year's Wikimania, the sixth annual conference on Wikimedia projects, will take place from July 9–11 in the Baltic Philharmonic in Gdańsk, Poland.
Below are a few highlights from the schedule, with an emphasis on topics that Signpost readers might recognize from earlier issues. There is a separate overview Wikimania 2010 for Developers in our "Technology Report" this week.
Among the novelties this year will be a 15-minute Wikimania Madness session at the beginning of each day, where speakers can give a 30-second preview of their presentation. Also different from previous Wikimanias was the open Call for Participation process, where interested attendees could comment on submissions while they were being selected for the program, and also sign up for a talk to indicate they are interested in attending it. A byproduct of this is the list of submissions sorted by number of interested attendees. While the numbers are not necessarily precise, the list provides some insight into what might be the most popular topics:
Currently, the presentation Conflicts between chapters and communities (Saturday) is at the top of that list; the speaker, Harel – a bureaucrat on the Hebrew Wikipedia – will examine the relationship of that project to Wikimedia Israel, as well as examples from other countries such as Germany. Also, many users have signed up as interested attendees for From Russia with love and squalor, an overview of the Russian Wikipedia, and for the panel Allow, invite, encourage: growing Wikimedia in the world (both on Saturday).
Several Foundation employees will talk about the usability initiative on Friday, in a presentation and a panel which might also touch some questions about the relationship between the community and staff developers that were raised last month in the debate about the display of Interwiki links (see Signpost coverage).
In Saturday's presentation Google translation, a Google employee will talk about the company's effort to use its machine translation software to increase Wikipedia content in languages such as Swahili, where it held a contest among university students (see Signpost coverage: February 2010 and November 2009).
Saturday will see two invited talks, by Felipe Ortega and Erik Möller: first, Ortega's talk Flagged revisions study results will present findings from an ongoing study commissioned by Wikimedia Germany (see Signpost coverage: Research group to evaluate impact of flagged revisions on German Wikipedia). Ortega is a Wikipedia researcher whose statistical research prompted media coverage and community discussions about the sustainability of Wikipedia communities last year (see Signpost coverage). Second, Möller's presentation Beyond the Encyclopedia: The frontiers of free knowledge will be a follow-up on Ten things that will be free, Jimmy Wales' keynote speech at Wikimania 2005.
The three hour Video Workshop on Saturday joins Michael Dale, who has been working on MediaWiki's video capabilities since 2008 (sponsored by Kaltura), with a representative of the "Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia" campaign launched in March by the Open Video Alliance (see Signpost coverage) and several others.
On Saturday evening, there will be a screening of Truth in numbers, a documentary about Wikipedia whose completion has long been awaited (at Wikimania 2007, a trailer and some clips were shown, and the New York Times reported that the filmmaker had already spent a "year filming Mr. Wales as he traveled around the world" by then. A Wikipedia article about the film had existed for years and was finally deleted in December 2009 after several deletion discussions).
The Outreach session on Sunday will feature a presentation about the Foundation's Public Policy initiative, which also introduced itself in last week's Signpost.
Also on Sunday, Benjamin Mako Hill (a Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member), Ortega and Mayo Fuster Morell will present The State of Wikimedia Scholarship 2009-2010, "a quick tour of scholarship and academic research over the last year that has focused on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects" (intending it to become an annual Wikimania tradition). Ortega will focus on published results from WikiSym, the academic conference on wikis (held in Gdansk just before Wikimania), where he is Program Chair.
The program will also feature poster sessions and an "Unconference", which will include lightning talks.
This year, the Wikimania-l mailing list saw more than the usual share of complaints about delays and other organizational issues (even the Wikimedia Foundation's executive director observed that "Wikimania in Gdansk this year has had some problems", in the context of a recent discussion of establishing a permanent Wikimania oversight committee on the Foundation-l mailing list). However, several volunteers have worked hard in recent weeks to fix these issues, and all major problems seem to have been resolved at this stage.
Reader comments
This week we chatted with WikiProject Children's literature, which includes literature written for children and young adults. The project has 22 FAs, 41 GAs, and maintain a Portal. The project's members are working on reducing the number of unreferenced BLPs. We asked Plad2, Strdst grl, Rock drum, Awadewit and Sillybillypiggy about the inner workings of this project which covers over 11,000 articles.
Awadewit joined WikiProject Children's literature in 2007, while Plad2 and Strdst grl joined in 2008; Sillybillypiggy and Rock drum joined this year. Rock drum noted that the main challenge that the project has met was a lack of active members. Plad2 mentioned a career in book publishing as the motivation for contributing, and Strdst grl stumbled upon the project while working on Daughter of the Lioness, finding that she "often prefers to make project[-related] edits, like [working at] the Assessment Department." Rock drum added "most of my contributions had been to do with Children's literature-related topics", and even starting a task force. Awadewit, a graduate student writing a dissertation on 18th-century British children's literature, reveals that Children's literature-related topics are the area of her expertise.
The Signpost asked the project about their most pressing needs: Rock drum told us about the large backlog of unassessed articles, and the need for stub-expansion. Plad2 added that a larger group of active editors would be helpful, and reminded potential members to introduce themselves and focus on a topic, whether a category (Awadewit suggests working on articles about book illustrators) or a specific author. We also queried the project on their short and long-term goals, and Strdst grl would like to see a more active membership and the completion of the assessment backlog over the next few months." In addition, Strdst grl pointed out, "A recent proposal for a job centre to formalise and expand the project tasks is still under discussion, and I think it could lead to some interesting developments."
WikiProject Children's literature covers about 12,000 articles. Out of those, the project has 21 FA-class articles, 2 FL-class articles, 1 A-class article, and 42 GA-class articles. Awadewit has written 8 of the FAs, 4 of the GAs, and has helped with many of the others, stating "For me, writing FAs or GAs is almost second-nature, since I am an academic (see this interview about featured article writing); I am lucky that my "real job" overlaps so much with what is required for an FA/GA." Awadewit also commented on how "wonderfully collaborative" children's literature editors on Wikipedia are, adding "I recently created an article on an obscure 18th-century publisher of children's literature, John Marshall. No substantive information was easily available about him on the internet and I wanted to rectify this by creating his Wikipedia entry. So, I created this start-class article. A few days later, the article was already greatly expanded to its present, much-improved state by Das48. Now, there is a fully-referenced, well-written article on this publisher freely available to the world."
The project has about 1,000 unassessed articles, and we wondered whether the project had any plans to clear the backlog. Strdst grl put this in perspective: "the backlog originated from a one-off bot tagging in early March. After the tagging, there were nearly 4000 unassessed articles in the backlog. Three months later, the backlog is less than half that – 1700 as I write this, and decreasing every day. Patience and hard work is all it takes." Plad2 adds that there's "a steady (though small) number added every week by AlexNewArtBot" but "generally the backlog is dropping." Awadewit decided "to play devil's advocate", stating "I do not feel that assessing articles is important. The bulk of Wikipedia users do not understand our assessment system, so it is really for ourselves. If we think of an assessment system that is for ourselves rather than for the public, I think something simpler and automated could be devised, a system that simply differentiated first between stubs and everything else and then between referenced and unreferenced articles and then, finally, between reviewed and unreviewed. These are the most important things we want to know about an article."
The new rules on unreferenced BLPs have sent some projects into "a state of nervous excitement or confusion", so we asked the project about their efforts. Plad2 gave a "similar answer" to Strdst's on the backlog of unassessed articles, pointing out that "[we] just plugged away at the list of UBLPs until they were done. The principles are straightforward and reasonable. We have a regular report which currently lists only 4 UBLPs." Plad2 added, "I dismayed by the mass deletions at the beginning of the year, especially when I spotted a couple of totally non-controversial classic children's author biographies on the lists."
Conclusively, Awadewit think[s] "that articles on children's literature provide a wonderful opportunity for teaching with Wikipedia. Our articles could use a lot of improvement and many students, at all levels, could use lessons in how to write clear prose and do careful research. I never tire of telling English professors how excited Wikipedians of all ages were to read literary criticism about Harry Potter." Strdst grl finished the interview with "children's literature is really a topic which everyone has some basis in, and we are always looking for more people to help out."
Join us next week when we'll "keep the doctor away" with style. Until then, feel free to touch on some of our previous interviews in the archive.
Reader comments
Thirteen articles were promoted to featured status:
Choice of the week: The Signpost asked reviewer/nominator Casliber for his number-one choice among these FA promotions. He picked Royal Gold Cup: "It came together very nicely, and is such an interesting one to read. This is the first nomination to qualify for the Wikipedia:GLAM/British Museum's joint Featured Article Prize, and we look forward to seeing more of these." (See Signpost coverage of the British Museum collaboration).
Four featured articles were demoted:
Eight lists were promoted to featured status:
Choice of the week: We asked Dabomb87, a director of the featured list process, for his personal choices. "My favorite was 2009 College Football All-America Team – I'm a fan of American football, and the extended lead makes this article interesting; as well, the references make it a valuable resource. Second for me was List of number-one singles from the 1970s (UK) – I had nostalgic memories of old cassette tapes in my parents' house reading through this list and seeing some of my favorite songs (ABBA, especially). Good supplementary text and images, and good use of color in the main table."
One list was demoted: List of popes (graphical)
Choice of the week: Raeky, a regular reviewer at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost, "My favorite was the panoramic view of the Great Court of Baalbek temple complex in Lebanon. Panoramas of this size, I believe, are a prime example of how photography makes an article come to life. This one allows the viewer to delve into an area in a way that a simple snapshot can't do." The image appears at the bottom of this page. Raeky has a helpful hint, too: "Readers might be interested in a feature that lets you easily navigate through these large images on almost any connection: interactive flash viewer."
Three topics were promoted:
This week, among the highlights on the Main Page were those on the best, the biggest, and the greatest:
Aside from the image above, the pictures of the day included:
No editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process.
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.
On the Wikimedia Techblog, Mark Bergsma explained the root of problems users encountered the morning of Monday, July 5:
| “ | Starting at 0:10 UTC on July 5th, the Wikimedia Foundation suffered from intermittent, partial power failures in the internal power network of one of its main data centers in Tampa, Florida. Due to the temporary unavailability of several critical systems and the large impact on the available systems capacity, all Wikimedia projects went down. The power situation stabilized at 1:12 UTC, and systems and services recovery has been taking place since. | ” |
Fortunately, the technicians managed to get everything back up and running shortly afterwards.
Following a blog post by Phoebe about Wikimedia's future strategies, Brion Vibber left a detailed comment giving his thoughts. As a former Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and all-round maintainer of Wikimedia projects and the software behind them for a number of years – not to mention the namesake of this report – his thoughts provided a useful insight into the past, present and future of the Wikimedia Foundation's "tech" department:
| “ | Tech of course is the area I know best, and I can assure you that there will be plenty of work for [the projected] ~75 tech folks to do in 2015; even with the major expansion over the last couple years there’s still wayyy more stuff to do than time to do it. Purely on that end, there are a few rough tasks that need to get taken care of all the time:
... A strong “MediaWiki Labs” [as a parallel to Mozilla Labs] research program would be *extremely* awesome, and well worth the money spent, once the resources and organization are all in there to get all the basics past "we keep the site up" and "we’re fixing things we’ve known suck" into really future-focused areas too. From what I see and hear, Danese [Cooper, current CTO] is doing a smashing job at getting tech organized for its big-enough-to-need-real-management present and future, so as long as the rest of the system is working I feel pretty good about the next few years of Wikimedia tech. |
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The full comment is available here. Regular Signpost readers will be pleased to know that an interview with Danese Cooper – to whom Brion referred – should be available shortly.
Wikimania 2010, in Gdansk, Poland, opens on July 9. It is scheduled to include a number of talks, workshops and tutorials useful to developers. One session From WMF with love, expressly aimed at the technically minded, is scheduled for Sunday. Its programme comprises:
The session For developers: free software, batch uploading, mobiles is set to include:
These are in addition to a wide range of other talks arranged for the long weekend, which is expected to be attended by hundreds of Wikimedians from around the globe.
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks. Wikimedia sites now have their own "branch", meaning that it is no longer possible to say that they are running revision X; rather, they are running a mix of different revisions prioritised by importance.
