| Fundraiser 2005 21 February 2005 |
| Fundraiser 2006 18 December 2006 |
| Fundraiser 2007 22 October 2007 |
| Fundraiser 2008 10 November 2008 |
| Fundraiser 2009 10 November 2008 |
Last week, Philippe Beaudette (User:Philippe (WMF)), the Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Reader Relations and leader of the upcoming annual fundraising campaign, posted a "memo to Wikimedia community, friends, staff, and other stakeholders", detailing its schedule and giving an overview of the preparations that have been ongoing since August. The campaign will kick off on Monday, November 15 (one week later than was planned in September), and will run for two months, ending around the time of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary. Explaining that the campaign had an "entirely achievable goal", but that the projected amount was "still a stretch", Beaudette said:
| “ | This year, we have to raise $16,000,000. That’s our biggest target yet, but it’s still only a tiny fraction of what the other top-ten websites spend on their operations. It’s critical that we reach our goal to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep Wikipedia and its sister sites running smoothly. | ” |
The fundraiser is expected to contribute most of the $20 million projected spending in the fiscal year 2010–11 (see also last week's News and notes: "Foundation's financial statements released and July's Signpost coverage of the Foundation's 2010–11 financial plan: "Plans for major expansions of the WMF".)
As in every fundraising drive since they started in 2004, the primary means for soliciting donations will be notices displayed on Wikimedia sites. The 2009–10 fundraiser – although reaching its goal in the end – had a rocky start due to concerns about its "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" banner that was developed with a communications firm. As the Foundation's Deputy Director Erik Möller acknowledged at the time, this "was too in-your-face for many Wikipedians". There were also technical problems with some browsers that led to a disabling of the banners for several days. (See Signpost coverage: "'Wikipedia Forever' fundraiser arouses controversy", "'Wikipedia Forever' fundraiser begins")
The approach taken in this year's fundraiser preparation clearly reflects lessons learnt from last year's issues, with an emphasis on community involvement ("the fundraiser you can edit"). Volunteers were invited to submit a banner proposal (adding to those by consultants), for example in last month's "Beat Jimmy" challenge (see Signpost coverage) that sought a message which would perform better than Jimmy Wales' personal appeal. However, (as in previous years) "Jimmy" continued to outscore the alternatives in the tests, with a 3% clickthrough rate. According to Beaudette, "almost 900 people were involved in the creation and discussion of potential banner messages".
As reported earlier in the Signpost, the Foundation's Chief Community Officer, Zack Exley, has been advocating an integrated view of donors, readers, and Wikipedians as part of the same community (reflected in the creation of a single "Community Department" headed by Exley, instead of separate departments responsible for fundraising and relations with volunteers/readers). This year's fundraiser introduces a novel concept of using part of the advertising space "to ask people to contribute – not financially, but with their knowledge. We will target readers, and encourage them to become editors" (after the financial goal has been met).
The Community Department's temporary staff employed for the fundraiser includes several "Community Associates", hired from the volunteer community through the "Community hiring" process started in July (Signpost coverage). These staff members are tasked with "making sure that people know about the fundraiser, trying to convince various language wikis to participate in the creation of new banners, working on our social media plan, and a few other things." Last month's hiring of another Community Associate, Christine Moellenberndt, who will act as the first point of contact for Wikimedia's Reader Relations in coming months, is indirectly related to the fundraiser, as it is intended to take workload off Beaudette during that time. He explained that she "has been a Wikimedia reader for some time, which positions her nicely as someone who can speak for the needs of our readers", and that this increase in capacity was also necessary because of the impending departure of Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass at the end of the year (see Signpost coverage).
Some banners will be appearing before the launch, from Friday, November 12, for "full-scale functional testing". Occasional testing had already been ongoing during recent weeks, with the team focused on optimizing three major points in the donation process. The first is "banner messaging" (the message displayed in the ad, such as the already-mentioned high click-through rate for "Please read: a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales"). Secondly, regarding "banner design", the team found that graphical banners perform twice as well as text-based banners, and will therefore use them more heavily than in previous years. The third point concerns the design of the landing pages (that are reached after clicking through the banner) where the actual donation is initiated. Chicago-based research firm Webitects optimized the donation form, and has blogged about their findings – for example, that "with radio buttons of equal size for PayPal and Credit Card logos, presented on one line, users were most likely to donate". The extensive research conducted in preparation also included a focus group and a survey of past donors, carried out by contractors.
Beaudette emphasized that the fundraising team is "committed early to radical and full disclosure of all the data we had".
The Foundation's technical department is also involved in the fundraiser, and three staff members are working on several tasks, including the CentralNotice software extension to display the banners. The necessary changes have not come without minor disruptions, causing a very brief failure of the entire site at the end of September, and a distortion of the pageview statistics on Wikimedia sites (see Signpost coverage) that was remedied last week, as announced by Erik Zachte, the Foundation's data analyst.
A separate server has been set up at http://geoiplookup.wikimedia.org/, allowing the easier geotargeting of countries, and the involvement of a chapter's donation system if a chapter exists in that country. In that case, donations are split evenly between the Foundation and the chapter, a requirement that has recently caused headaches for some chapters (see Signpost coverage: "German chapter creates new body to meet Foundation's fundraising requirements").
See also the log of the November 5 IRC office hour with Philippe Beaudette and the fundraising team.
Reader comments
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (said to be the largest of its kind in the world) recently invited Wikimedians for a "backstage pass" tour, as described by Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama) on his blog. It is currently hosting Lori Phillips (User:HstryQT) as a Wikipedian in Residence (see Wikipedia:GLAM/TCMI and Wyatt's guest post on the museum's blog), making it the second institution to use this concept, after the British Museum's pilot project earlier this year (see Signpost coverage).
Lori Phillips intends to "mine the museum" to discover good illustrations and material that could be used for Wikiprojects; they have already started photographing their collection for Commons along with compatible copyrights for Wikimedia's use. The Children's Museum is dedicated to the concept of "Family learning" and currently has no online catalog of their collection, but plans to have one soon. Lori Phillips is also helping the Museum Studies course run by IMA conservator Richard McCoy (User:RichardMcCoy) to write Wikipedia articles about notable artworks in the Indiana Statehouse.
Wyatt and Phillips talked with the staff about their concerns in working with Wikipedia. When asked by a staff member about Wikipedia's responsibility to minors, Liam Wyatt explained that Wikipedia is not censored for age-appropriateness, and there is ongoing work being done with issues related to controversial content. He also noted that there is "nowhere else on the unrestricted internet that is dedicated to making NSFW information as un-titillating as possible." In a staff-only presentation he pulled a Google result for "Sex" and chose Wikipedia's entry from the top results, he proceeded to show the article and the accompanying images - from human conception to an illustration of Sexual Dimorphism in a Pheasant. He mentioned that the staff was impressed with the educational and yet direct approach of Wikipedia.
See also Phillips' summary of a November 2 talk by Wyatt and Adrianne Wadewitz at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, "Wikipedia & GLAMs" (an interactive Prezi presentation by Wyatt), and last week's Signpost coverage of Liam Wyatt, Katie Filbert, Lori Phillips and Richard McCoy attending the "Museum Computer Network conference".
The October 30 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, D.C. (a gathering of an estimated 215,000 people to protest extremes in US media and to promote reasoned political discourse) featured numerous demonstrators ([1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]) bearing signs adapted from Wikipedia's "citation needed" template, among them Wikipedian (and Wikimedia Board member) User:Mindspillage (Kat Walsh), whose website shows some amusing juxtapositions with other signs at the rally. References to the template in popular culture date back at least to the July 2007 "Wikipedian protester" cartoon by webcomic xkcd (tooltip comment: "SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION"), which has since been used in turn on Wikipedia:Citation needed to illustrate the concept, and had inspired earlier such demonstration signs. In 2008, Boing Boing reported on an artist who had printed little "citation needed" stickers for a "culture jamming" project, to mark dubious claims on public ads and signs.
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In her tech column for The New York Times Magazine ("What Wikipedia Is Best at Explaining"), Virginia Heffernan praised the "efficient and impassioned" prose in many of the WikiProject Video games' featured Articles, specifically Halo: Combat Evolved and Angry Birds. Interviewing one of the contributing Wikipedians, she learned about the policy against ownership of articles, calling it "revolutionary" and commenting:
| “ | My jaw dropped. The page is fascinating for anyone who has ever been part of a collaborative effort to create anything. ... The magazine business could have used some guidelines about this all-too-familiar kind of authorship jockeying decades ago. | ” |
She posited that in the digital age, the identity of an "object" is defined by its Wikipedia article, and compared the role of Wikipedians to that of taxonomists and explorers in earlier times:
| “ | Every new symbolic order requires a taxonomist to make sense of it. When Renaissance paintings and drawings first became fashionable in the art market in the early 20th century, the primary task of critics like Bernard Berenson was to attribute them, classify them and create a taste for them. ... Wikipedia has become the world’s master catalogue raisonnée for new clumps of data. Its legion nameless authors are the Audubons, the Magellans, the Berensons of our time. | ” |
Lastly, Heffernan called her readers to contribute to Wikipedia themselves.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative published a midterm update last week, reporting that the participating students were beginning to contribute articles to Wikipedia, a few of which had already been featured in the "Did You Know" (DYK) section on the main page. An Ambassador Steering Committee has been formed, "thinking through the big questions about the Ambassador program" (where experienced Wikipedians assist participating students). Five more courses have been added since the first announcement in August (Signpost coverage); two of them at the UC Berkeley, which announced in a press release that "UC Berkeley students help improve Wikipedia’s credibility".
The Public Policy Initiative was also covered in the NPR program All Things Considered ("Wikipedia Teams Up with Academia") and in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" blog ("Professors Shore Up Wikipedia Entries on Public Policy").
In related news, several comments on the use of Wikipedia in schools and universities were published recently.
The ZDNet Education blog asked "Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia".
The Cardinal Courier (a student newspaper at St. John Fisher College in Pittsford, New York) argued that "Wikipedia is a reliable source to use for assignments". While acknowledging that Wikipedia's General disclaimer contains "capitalized letters saying, 'Wikipedia makes no guarantee of validity'", it noted that several reputed news publishers and reference works, such as The New York Times Company or the Oxford English Dictionary, make similar statements about their own reliability (possibly drawing from the list at Wikipedia:Non-Wikipedia disclaimers). Wikipedia's list of errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia was also noted.
A "Reader's view" published in the Opinion section of the Duluth News Tribune found Wikipedia "more enlightening than unilateral spin", regarding it as "the best place to begin research if proper protocol is observed".
An article about the American Library Association's "Top 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning" list in the Chicago Tribune revealed that "Yes, students, there's a world beyond Wikipedia", observing that "for parents with fond memories of the Dewey Decimal System, library card catalogs and thumbing through their family's World Book Encyclopedia, it can come as a shock to discover that their own children's research habits often begin and end with a quick click on Wikipedia."
On her "The Daring Librarian" blog, US school librarian Gwyneth A. Jones said that "Wikipedia Is NOT Wicked!", defending Wikipedia against fellow educators who regard it "with suspicion, sometimes derision, and occasionally with fear". She named hashtags and QR code as topics where Wikipedia offered information superior to that in the research databases provided by her own library, and gave teachers some advice on how to teach Wikipedia in class – summarized in an "at a glance" cartoon (see illustration). Exemplifying her advice to "establish your web presence!" (and apparently unaware of Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline), User:Thedaringlibrarian started the article about her employer, the Murray Hill Middle School.
The documentary film Truth in Numbers? Everything, According to Wikipedia was reviewed by the AOL blog Urlesque, which also noted that it was "about to be deleted [from] Wikipedia itself" (the AfD message has since been removed). After its July premiere at Wikimania in Gdansk (see Signpost coverage), the film was released last month by a screening in New York City, and is set to be shown in more US theaters later this month. In some geographical regions, it has also been viewable online for free. Larry Sanger, who is featured in the movie, recently called it "not too bad, from what I saw", while Jimmy Wales recommended against featuring it as part of the upcoming 10 years of Wikipedia celebrations, because "the film was poorly received in Poland, and it is seriously out of date" (filming had started at the 2006 Wikimania; most of the footage seems to date from 2006 and 2007). Board member Samuel Klein (User:Sj), who had attended a panel discussion with the directors after the New York screening, said that he likes "the film a lot more after seeing it for the second time, in a very different audience (and seeing their live reactions)".
This week's interview almost didn't happen. When we aproached WikiProject California, a debate ensued among the project's members as to whether their project deserved to be featured in the Signpost. Concerns about the number of active members and how quickly the project produces featured content left many of the members second-guessing their efforts. Zzyzx11 commented that the Culture of California was limiting the success of WikiProject California and driving contributors to focus on other, more narrowly defined WikiProjects. Spongie555 considered the project's articles to be strong while the project itself remains messy, a description echoed by Killiondude. Optigan13 pointed to individual editors as the source of the project's many featured and good articles, noting that his contributions to California articles have focused on cleanup. To Amerique, the project's greatest attribute is offering a forum for editors to discuss articles and develop consensus. The Report learned firsthand just how well the project serves as a medium for discussion.
WikiProject California, started in June 2005, is home to 52 featured articles, 26 featured lists, 2 A-class articles, and 140 good articles. The project maintains portals for California, the Greater Los Angeles area, the San Francisco Bay area, and the Great Central Valley. Several task forces of varying activity cover the state's geographic areas. Collaborations with other projects include WikiProject California State Highways (with WikiProject U.S. Roads), WikiProject California Schools (with WikiProject Schools), and WikiProjects for the University of California and California State University (both with WikiProject Universities). Amerique and Killiondude took some time to introduce us to the project that covers the most populous state in the United States.
What motivated you to join WikiProject California?
Have you contributed to any of the project's 52 featured articles, 26 featured lists, 2 A-class articles, and 140 good articles? Are you currently working on promoting an article to FA or GA status?
In addition to cities, counties, and geographic features, what are some interesting articles covered by the project?
Nine of the project's ten most popular pages are about celebrities or technology companies (Proposition 19 makes the list at number ten). How does Hollywood and Silicon Valley affect the scope of your project? Does this help or hurt your efforts?
The project is home to many task forces and keeps an eye on several other California-related projects. How were most of these task forces and projects born? Are some more successful than others? Has there been an effort to consolidate?
WikiProject California maintains a cleanup list. Has there been a push to clear out this backlog?
As the most populous state in the United States, has it been easy to attract participants? If not, what do you feel is preventing more editors from contributing to the project?
How can a new member help today?
Next week, we'll munch on a tasty morsel. Until then, cure your cravings with old reports in the archive.
Reader comments
The Signpost welcomes TheCatalyst31 (nom) as our newest admin. TheCatalyst is a member of several WikiProjects, including Trains, US roads, and Cities, and has created many articles on small communities. TheCatalyst has a strong record of gnoming and page patrolling, has contributed to the AfD process, and has assisted the creation of three Good Articles.
Six articles were promoted to featured status:
Choice of the week. The Signpost asked FA nominator and reviewer Slim Virgin to select the best of the week.
| “ | It's daunting to have to choose a favourite from such an excellent list. Wehwalt's Liberty Head nickel stands out, as his always do, for the quality of the writing and research. Ucucha's Lavanify, the story of two very old teeth, is fascinating. J Milburn's Dustbin Baby (film) has made me want to see the film, and it's the kind of article people love Wikipedia for: you watch the film then want to know who's who, and who said what, and there it all is, courtesy of a kind Wikipedian. SpinningSpark's Mechanical filter is another example of an article people will be grateful for, as is Dank and Sturmvogel 66's article about HMS Indefatigable (1909), on which 1,015 men died in 1916 when she was blown up in the North Sea. But the one I enjoyed most, just at a personal level, was Susanne2009NYC's The Story of Miss Moppet. Susanne's done some great work for Wikipedia on Beatrix Potter's books, including several GAs. I love the writing, the illustrations, the background details—and especially the Aristotelian analysis! I look forward to seeing it on the front page. | ” |
Five lists were promoted:
Choice of the week. We asked H. Zell to judge what he believes is the best new featured picture, disregarding his own new featured picture.
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Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.
Reader comments
The community has spoken
13 December 2010
Voting in full swing
29 November 2010
Candidates still stepping forward
22 November 2010
The countdown begins
8 November 2010
So what is being an arbitrator actually like?
25 October 2010
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The community has spoken |
It's that time of year again: the annual Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections are almost upon us, and election fever is intensifying. ArbCom is the final stage of Wikipedia's dispute-resolution process, and the arbitrators are typically experienced and respected editors. The 2010 election will select as many as 11 new arbitrators, whose terms will start on 1 January 2011. Interested editors are welcome to join the team of volunteer coordinators; their responsibilities are set out here.
To become an arbitrator is to take on a high-profile role, and history shows that the personal stamina and confidence of the Committee's members are important if it is to serve the community well. Among other things, arbitrators require the ability to analyse written evidence in relation to the pillars, policies, and guidelines concerning editors' behaviour, and the ability to distinguish relevant from irrelevant evidence. Arbitrators need to be able to write clear, concise English, and to be familiar with the principles of conflict of interest and neutrality.
Many Wikipedians regard it desirable that the Committee have a range of skills and backgrounds among its members. Other skills that may be relevant, although by no means essential, are the ability to draft decisions, motions and injunctions, and to contribute to the organisation of the Committee's processes.
Editors who believe they have what it takes are urged to consider running for election. Nomination is open to any editor in good standing over the age of 18, who is of legal age in their place of residence, and who has made at least 1,000 mainspace edits before the opening of the nomination period. Candidates are not required to be administrators or to have any other special permissions.
A Request for Comment was opened by MuZemike on 24 October, to determine community attitudes to the voting procedures. The proposals that attracted most debate were:
The discussion featured several other proposals that gained negligible support.
The RFC was closed on 3 November by an uninvolved administrator, Llywrch, who concluded on the main point of contention that there was consensus to retain secret ballots and the SecurePoll interface (a proposal to this effect by Will Beback attracted the support of 85 editors). However, this judgement came with two qualifications. The closing admin noted that even if support for using the Schulze method had been overwhelming, it would not be feasible to implement it due to software limitations. Secondly, Llywrch found that "[t]he argument supporting open & transparent discussions about the different candidates are compelling", and recommended that such discussions be facilitated.
Llywrch noted that two other proposals "failed to gather anywhere near the support that the secret ballot proposal did", but that they nevertheless ought to be treated as "non-binding suggestions". While most statements in the RfC generated discussion on the talkpage, the debates on these two were particularly intense. The first, a proposal by Neutron supported by 35 editors, was that candidates ought not to be allowed to withdraw from the election once voting has begun, and that their results be "reported along with all other candidates." The second such proposal, by Risker with the support of 31 editors, stipulated that in order to be appointed to ArbCom, candidates must have self-nominated in the most recent election and received more support than opposition. The closing admin in recommending that Risker's proposal be non-binding, noted that this "gives Jimmy Wales carte blanche to appoint anyone he wants to this empty seat. Do we want him to appoint someone people voted for, or for anyone else who has an account who strikes his fancy?" Wales issued a response on the considerations that motivated the proposal.
The election talk page has seen considerable discussion, particularly over the past week, concerning several matters unaddressed in the RfC. These include:
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving none open.
Ohconfucius requested that an amendment be made to relax the restriction which prohibited him from using any automation in the article space.
At the time of writing, only arbitrators had commented on this request. Two arbitrators said they were "impressed with the quality of [Ohconfucius'] contributions since the Date delinking case, and with the tone and substance of [his] comments", and suggested terminating the automation restriction entirely. The Committee followed their suggestion and adopted a motion which terminates the restriction and permits Ohconfucius to use automation subject to community guidelines. Ohconfucius is still indefinitely limited to editing with a single account. Additionally, he is still topic-banned from style and editing guidelines relating to the linking or unlinking of dates, and related discussions.
Following the 30 March 2010 renewal of his ban on editing articles relating to medieval or ancient history for a period of one year imposed on 14 March 2008, User:Per Honor et Gloria filed an amendment on Tuesday for the topic ban to be lifted. It was decided by unanimous vote of six Arbitrators on 8 November 2010 that the ban be extended indefinitely. PHG's participation is limited to talk pages, subject to civil interaction with fellow editors. The discussion is here.
Arbitrator Mailer diablo was appointed by the Arbitration Committee on 7 November to fill the vacancy on the Ban Appeals Subcommittee at least until the end of this year. All subcommittee memberships will be reviewed after the December Arbcom elections.
Reader comments
The Foundation's November Engineering Update was this week published to the Wikimedia Techblog, and gives a brief overview of all technical operations in the last month. Developer Rob Lanphier (User:RobLa) gave an executive summary of the month:
| “ | October featured continued work on the Virginia data center migration, continued work on features such as ResourceLoader, Article Feedback and Upload Wizard, increased focus on code review, new testing infrastructure, many new job postings, and the Hack-A-Ton in Washington DC. | ” |
Additionally, a number of items had had their statuses updated since last month. For example, the Foundation noted that the establishment of the new Virginia data centre (originally planned to be online by January 1, 2011) had been delayed temporarily, but was happy with work done to the donation-handling infrastructure. In addition, the Foundation announced that it was "on track to deploy a new version of Pending Changes on November 16" and the release of the new Resource Loader was nearing, but that development of LiquidThreads had slowed due to lack of available personnel.
Likewise, regarding the new media upload wizard, the Tech team said that Neil Kandalgaonkar had finished development of a temporary storage system for media files that are missing required metadata like licensing or source information, and that Roan Kattouw has started the prep-work for deployment of this feature, scheduled for late November. Other developments included the news that developer Ryan Lane had started actively investigating OpenStack for open-source testing and that the Foundation were pleased with making some headway in code review (note the drop in unreviewed revisions of the MediaWiki software shown to the right of the chart), after allocating more resources to the task (see Signpost coverage: "More developers to review code"). In addition, the success of the Hack-a-Ton (cf. Signpost coverage) was noted, as was an intention to revamp Wikimedia's mobile sites.
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.
{{fullurl:Special:Mytalk|diff=cur}} now works as expected (bug #25829).
