Like hammering a square peg into a round hole, the Wikimedia Foundation has submitted a draft annual plan for 2014–15 to its own Funds Dissemination Committee. Unlike the WMF's submission to the FDC's inaugural round in October 2012, the "proposal" does not seek funding. However, according to the FDC's governing "Framework", it is "an advisory committee of the Board of Trustees and will provide recommendations on requests for funding by eligible entities ... / The purpose of the FDC process is to make allocations to FDC-eligible Wikimedia entities, ...".
However, there appears to be no Framework-supported role for the FDC in processing submissions from "non-fund-seeking" entities, a category into which the Foundation clearly falls in this round. Nor has it been clear why the Foundation was written into the process in the first place as both a potential "fund-seeking entity" as well as having "involvement and oversight".
The FDC is supported by WMF staff whose role, among other things, is "to prepare for the FDC an assessment of the likely impact of fund-seeking entities' plans against the mission goals of the Wikimedia movement, and an assessment of the ability of eligible entities to execute those plans responsibly and well". The Signpost asked the chair of the Board of Trustees, Jan-Bart de Vreede, who is also one of the FDC's two non-voting Board representatives, if he believes that WMF proposals to the FDC—whether for funding or not—place the FDC and/or its staff in a position of potential conflict of interest. He responded:
| “ | The WMF staff do not receive any personal benefit from the WMF's assessment in the FDC, and the Board of Trustees has an opportunity to independently review the FDC's recommendations. I believe that the transparency and community involvement in the FDC enables the full process to be conducted in a fair and reasonable fashion. The WMF already has an intensively transparent process for preparing and evaluating its annual plan, and I am interested to see whether the FDC process will facilitate more helpful feedback. | ” |
The WMF's submission of its annual plan draft as an FDC proposal appears to meet the approval of FDC chair Dariusz Jemielniak, who told the Signpost a month ago: "I believe there is a lot of value in the WMF applying to the FDC. It is important to try to be as equal in the movement, as possible, I think. In my personal view the best approach was "core" vs. "non-core" budget division (where they applied for non-core activities), but the idea was dropped."
The submission opens with a statement that it has been "published now as part of the FDC process so that the WMF can get community and FDC member input to inform the plan as it's revised and refined". In her introductory remarks on the talkpage, executive director Sue Gardner wrote: "Last year the WMF submitted material after it had been approved by the WMF Board and after the fiscal year had begun. That was an okay first step to getting input from community members, but obviously the input will have more impact if we get it before the plan's locked down." She explained that this is why the draft has been synchronised to run as an FDC submission.
The experiment does not appear to have been entirely successful. As Dariusz Jemielniak told the Signpost: "I understand that perhaps at some level it may be difficult to adjust to the FDC process." And in Sue Gardner's words: "The drawback is it means you'll be reviewing material that is still a work-in-progress, and so you may find mistakes. The plan may also be a little confusing, which is partly because it's still in-progress, and also partly because we are merging this year the original WMF-Board-only format with the FDC proposal requirements. It'll be a little clunky: we ask you to bear with us as we work out the kinks."
The proposal, which comprises more than 22,000 words, does look like an odd fit. Despite the fact that no FDC funds are sought in the proposal, a table at the top lists "Currency requested: $60,064,000". A succession of questions designed for chapters yields underwhelming responses:
A: The Wikimedia Foundation is not a membership organization. ...
A: 81,821 volunteer contributors made five or more edits on Wikimedia’s projects, including 76,273 who made five or more edits on Wikipedia. ...".
A: ... We support all Wikimedia movement projects and all language versions."
A: The Wikimedia Foundation's biggest external opportunity is the goodwill of the hundreds of millions of people who use the Wikimedia projects, act as their advocates and supporters, and fund them."
A large amount of information laid out in the draft is readily available elsewhere in the Foundation's on-wiki documentation, including its substantial monthly reports. Added to this difficult situation is that FDC submissions cannot normally be updated or altered in response to comments on the talkpage without explicit permission from FDC staff—draft or no draft. It is little wonder that despite banners on Wikipedia watchlist pages for at least the past week, only two community members, Pine and Nemo, have ventured onto the talk page to review the proposal and pose questions. Both have spent considerable time and effort on the talk page, sometimes in forensic detail with incisive follow-ups.
Pine told the Signpost by phone that on the good side, he believes the document reveals plans for "very appropriate investments in mobile and engineering, and other directions in staffing that make sense". However, he is not satisfied with the standards of transparency in relation to financial and quantitative performance data, especially the budget tables, which should have been "a lot more readable". While he is "not particularly upset that the plan has been put to the FDC," he said, "it does bother me how little engagement there was by FDC members."
An appendix to the plan adds another 14,000 words, including a table of contents that by itself numbers 1200 words: "what is this thing?", asked Nemo. The appendix was subsequently approved by FDC staff as a legitimate part of the proposal ("The FDC will be reviewing this supplementary document along with WMF's proposal," wrote one of the grants administrators).
Dariusz Jemielniak foreshadowed to the Signpost a month ago that there might be problems in having WMF/FDC staff reviewing the plans for other departments: "I think that there are ways to avoid involving WMF staff in WMF evaluation—if some large entities of the movement offer to do some of the work." On 24 April, he and FDC member Mike Peel announced on behalf of the FDC that "the WMF/FDC staff have a potential bias here, since their work is included in the WMF's proposal. / As a result, we have asked Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE), the second largest entity in our movement, to do the staff assessment of the WMF's proposal, and they have agreed to do this. WMDE will be adapting the framework of the standard staff assessment as they see fit in order to appropriately assess the WMF's proposal; the main expectation we have is that they will help identify the key strengths and weaknesses of the proposal in their assessment."
This sparked a furore on the Wikimedia mailing list over whether it was an appropriate course of action. Risker wrote: "I think this is a horrible idea. WMDE is a direct beneficiary of both the WMF and the FDC decisions, and cannot be considered impartial in assessing the WMF proposals. / I also question whether or not WMDE has the skill-set necessary to make the equivalent of a 'staff assessment' of the proposals, particularly in view of the FDC's comments about their goal-setting and assessment of outcomes for their own proposal."
In a further message, Risker continued:
| “ | Quite bluntly, the WMF shouldn't be asking the FDC to review a plan that does not include a request for funds: it is outside of the FDC mandate, which is to recommend the disbursement of a specific funding envelope using specific criteria. I would have hoped that the FDC would have the courage to say "no, sorry, this is outside our scope", but I understand that it's hard to step away from such a juicy-looking opportunity. / However, having accepted the validity of the "proposal", the FDC does not have the authority to delegate its role." | ” |
Among the responses was Jemielniak's: "WMDE staff has a lot of experience in using different metrics, and understands our movement. The FDC can request any the movement stakeholders specifically for comments, and so it did."
Nicole Ebber, Wikimedia Germany's manager of international affairs, wrote to the mailing list: "Given the short time frame, we are only able to assess the Infrastructure and Mobile part of the proposal. We will focus on the plan's comprehensibility and its consistency with the strategy. / Please note that we will only be able to determine the detailed scope of the assessment in the course of the analysis."
This raises the issue of who will conduct the staff review of the rest of the annual plan.
The Signpost asked Ebber whether she believes there a potential conflict of interest in having a staff assessment conducted by a large recipient of FDC funding, even given the limited scope the chapter had defined for itself. We put it to her that WMDE has recently published complaints about the FDC's processes; that FDC staff were highly critical of the chapter's bid last November, and slashed their quantitative scoring of the chapter over the previous year's; and that WMDE's own auditors had complained about vagueness and a lack of detail in its own budget draft last year. Ebber responded:
| “ | The FDC has assigned the assessment task to a certain group, in this case WMF staff. As they cannot assess themselves, we found their consequence to approach WMDE staff, which is body with a similar structure, logical. Let’s not discuss this matter theoretically right down to the last detail before we see where it leads us. I’d rather wait what comes out of it in the end, whether this is helpful, brings the expected results or can be expanded in a next FDC round before making any further assumptions. | ” |
We also asked the chair of the WMF Board, Jan-Bart de Vreede, whether the decision to involve Wikimedia Germany was taken with the knowledge and agreement of the two Board representatives on the FDC: "Both board liaisons and I were aware of the proposal to have WMDE do (part of) the assessment that is normally done by the Foundation. I don’t think we have a place to agree or not to agree. ... the nature of the assessment and the characteristics of the WMF proposal makes it hard to see how useful this assessment will be." Is there a potential conflict of interest in the conduct of such a "staff assessment" by a large recipient of FDC funding?
| “ | I don’t think this is a question of conflict of interest—the FDC believes that a "staff assessment" from WMDE will help them make a fair recommendation to the Board. Remember that this is all done in a public fashion and that “the movement” is watching (rightly so). I highly value the work of the FDC and am looking forward to their comments on the WMF annual plan, and these could very well also contain some criticism. In my perspective, this is not an issue of conflict of interest. / With regards to the FDC inviting other entities to help, I am very interested to find out how useful the end results will be and am grateful to WMDE for taking part in this experiment. | ” |
gmail.com or the group's Facebook page.
c: has been added to the available interwiki link prefixes as a shortcut for linking to Wikimedia Commons. The feature was originally proposed in 2006 at Bugzilla T6676 by Korrigan from the French Wikipedia, and then again in 2011 on Meta by Hazard-SJ as an RfC, but didn't draw enough attention at the time to see any action taken. As the change would add titles beginning with "c:" to the list of those prevented by technical restrictions, two dozen wikis in a number of languages where clashes would occur were notified of the proposal. The resulting RfC, and a parallel discussion at the reopened bug report, saw the participation of well over a hundred editors from a variety of projects and attracted broad support for the idea. Following the completion of a cross-project cleanup effort to rename affected articles, c: was added to the interwiki map by PiRSquared17 on 17 April 2014, and is now functioning (for example, c:Commons:Village Pump). With this long journey from concept to reality now complete, Commons joins the roster of major Wikimedia sites with single-letter shortcuts, alongside Meta (m:), Wikibooks (b:), Wikidata (d:), Wikinews (n:), Wikipedia (w:), Wikiquote (q:), Wikisource (s:), and Wikiversity (v:). Other project codes include mw: for MediaWiki, voy: for Wikivoyage, and wikt: for Wiktionary, and the far longer species: for Wikispecies.
Not much to report this week. The same post-Easter celebrations (4/20, Earth Day) were popular again this year, except last year we were still reeling from the Boston Marathon bombing.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 20 to 26 April, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Snoop Dogg | 
|
752,512 |  |
This year Easter Sunday coincided with 4/20, the potheads' celebration, and ubertoker Snoop Dogg marked the date both with a sell-out concert at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre and a video of a "real Easter bunny" posted on Instagram. Those two together, may be enough to explain his massive one-day surge a day later, or may not, but I'm not about to diss Snoop Dogg. |
| 2 | Game of Thrones |
|
586,972 |  |
New seasons of this immensely popular show always draw people to Wikipedia. |
| 3 | Easter |
|
501,976 |  |
It's hard to remember these days, under the onslaught of bunnies, chocolate eggs and marshmallow peeps, that Easter, not Christmas, is the most sacred date of the Christian calendar. Doubtless a lot of people learned that this week, along with some fairly eye-raising information about the events it actually celebrates. |
| 4 | Amazon.com |
|
419,848 |  |
This article has been veering wildly (and suspiciously) around the view graph for several weeks, but at least now its presence on the list has a reason: Amazon Fire TV is a digital streaming device to watch online content on a HDTV. How it distinguishes itself from the three or four other such devices currently on the market is a matter of some dispute. |
| 5 | 420 (cannabis culture) | 
|
647,578 |  |
This curious "holiday", which falls on April 20 (for obvious reasons) refers to the mysterious number 420 and its long link to marijuana usage. While it may not quite be to cannabis what Oktoberfest is to beer, it no doubt aspires to be. |
| 6 | Deaths in 2014 | 
|
402,005 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. |
| 7 | Game of Thrones (season 4) |
|
384,436 | |
As usual, people will be using this page to look up air dates. |
| 8 | The Amazing Spider-Man 2 | 
|
379,966 |  |
It's not surprising that this was released in foreign markets before its home territory; the original Spider-Man made $822 million worldwide, with the domestic and international grosses split roughly 50/50. The rebooted Amazing Spider-Man (this film's predecessor) made $752 million worldwide, but with international grosses now comprising 2/3 the total. This radical shift in Hollywood's biosphere has taken place in just a decade, and it is already altering hunting strategies, for good or ill; even after just two weeks overseas, this movie has already made $132 million. |
| 9 | List of Game of Thrones episodes |
|
364,019 | |
Most likely air dates again. |
| 10 | Earth Day |
|
347,924 |  |
The annual eco-celebration got roughly the same views as last year. |
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After a lengthy search, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced the selection of a new executive director. Lila Tretikov comes from SugarCRM, a software company dealing in customer relationship management (CRM), where she was the chief product officer, based in Cupertino, California. It produces the web application Sugar, also known as SugarCRM, which is a customer relationship management system that is available in both open-source and commercial open-source applications. Since the start of this year, she has been a board adviser for Zamurai Corporation in the San Francisco Bay area. Her skill-base emphasizes the hiring and developing of people, technical management, and product design. Tretikov was named as a 2012 finalist in the Female Executive of the Year – Business Services category.
Jan-Bart de Vreede, the chair of the Board of Trustees and the chair of the Executive Director Transition Team that selected Tretikov, stated in an email that Tretikov "will be an excellent leader in the Wikimedia movement. She strikes us all as smart, brave and unpretentious, and ... she has the skills the Foundation needs":
| “ | As many of you know, about a year ago Sue Gardner announced she planned to step down as our ED. As we launched the search for her successor, we spent some time working through the most critical requirements for the role. We decided the new ED should be someone with a product/engineering background, ideally in an open-source or other online community context. We wanted someone experienced with organisations that were growing, who'd managed staff and budgets comparable to ours, and who had experience creating continuous delivery of technology improvements in an agile context. We wanted a person who is oriented towards collaboration, transparency and openness, with some experience with complex stakeholder environments, and with an international orientation. We knew we needed someone with courage and strong personal integrity, who wouldn't be intimidated by attempts to censor the projects.
|
” |
For her part, Tretikov wrote a lengthy email to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, telling the movement that "I'm excited to bring my passion for building products that people love and growing innovative, high-performing organizations to the Foundation. ... I've been warned that joining the Wikimedia movement is a bit like drinking from a firehose, and so I'd consider myself, right now, to be excited, curious, optimistic, and just a tiny little bit daunted."
Sue Gardner announced at the May metrics meeting that shipping the final version of the annual plan end of May will probably be her last duty for the Foundation. Tretikov will officially start on 1 June 2014, and will spend the next few weeks meeting staff.
This week, we unraveled the mysteries of WikiProject Genetics. Started in May 2008, the project has grown to include six Featured Articles, including the project's primary article. We interviewed WeijiBaikeBianji.
Until next week, check out our previous reports in the archive.
Reader comments
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I've been a user of Wikipedia since it first arrived on the scene. I only really took the plunge to get involved with the project last March when I went to the first US OpenGLAM workshop at U.C. Berkeley. That event, coupled with my starting my current position at the Peabody Essex Museum, was what started me down my current road as a GLAM ambassador. As a GLAM professional representing an institution with a huge repository of assets and an ambition to inform a global audience, working with Wikipedia to deliver on both organizations' missions is what I'm all about these days.
My ambition is to dip into historical and local history subjects when time allows since my background is in Historical archaeology. At the moment, I'm working on a biographical article on a World War II war correspondent and author named Virginia Cowles.
PEM possesses rich collections from around the world and a desire to connect those collections to anybody on Earth who wants to find out about them. Working with Wikipedia is a logical part of the museum's larger engagement strategy, where we will continue to seek out partners who can help us spread knowledge. Getting a Wikipedia collaboration going was one of my primary goals after attending the US OpenGLAM workshop. It's taken awhile to get going, but I'm confident it will be the first of a series of collaborations that is ongoing.
The main participants for this first edit-a-thon are many, but I'd call out three; my intern Cathy Sigmond, who's been instrumental in gathering resources, sitting down with curators and staff, planning and looking after all the zillion details that make up a successful effort. The other two would be our curators of Native American art, Karen Kramer, and our Curator Chinese and East Asian art, Daisy Wang. Their expertise and enthusiasm for the project have been crucial.
One of things I'm most excited about is pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable practice for GLAM professionals who are Wikipedians as well. When I first started at PEM, one of the first things that was brought to my attention was how minimal PEM's article was. I couldn't touch it, given the Conflict of Interest issue, but finding other areas of Wikipedia that could be enriched with PEM resources has been one of my primary goals. I also see museum staff as natural candidates for new Wikipedians, and am hopeful we'll get a good turnout at our first edit-a-thon.
Reader comments
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Four featured articles were promoted this week.
Three featured lists were promoted this week.
Sixteen featured pictures were promoted this week.
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School have tested the possibility of predicting the number of seasonal influenza-like illness (ILI) in the U.S. using data about the traffic to a selected number of Wikipedia entries related to influenza.[1]
They compared their models against the prediction of Google Flu Trends (GFT), one of the earliest and most famous web-based tools for predicting the evolution of seasonal influenza disease patterns. Gold standard for comparison were the public data released by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The accuracy of GFT is increasingly under question by several authors, culminating in a recent Science commentary piece about the promises and perils of Big Data for prediction of real-world phenomena. The authors start from this observation and submit that Wikipedia searches may be less subject to the biases that affected GFT, and test this hypothesis in the present work. They find that their model is more accurate than GFT, and was able to predict the peak week of the influenza season more often. Another undoubted advantage of Wikipedia compared to GFT, the authors argue, is its public availability, which makes the present model open to public scrutiny.
A study titled "Academic opinions of Wikipedia and open-access publishing"[2] examined academics’ awareness of and attitudes towards Wikipedia and open-access journals for academic publishing through a survey of 120 academics carried out in late 2011 and early 2012. The study comes from the same authors who published a similar paper in 2012, reviewed here, which suffered from a major basic fallacy: Wikipedia is not the place to publish original research academic work. The authors, unfortunately, seem to ignore no original research policy when they write: "There are in general three models in the current movement towards open-access academic publishing: pushing traditional journals towards open access by changing policies; creating open-access journals; and using existing online open-access venue Wikipedia" and "we surveyed academics to understand their perspectives on using Wikipedia for academic publishing in comparison with open-access journals". In the final discussion segment, the authors do acknowledge the existence of the OR policy, where they suggest that certain types or academic papers (reviews) are similar enough to Wikipedia articles that integration of such articles into Wikipedia could be feasible. The authors do provide a valuable literature review noting prior works which analyze the peer-review system in Wikipedia, perceptions of Wikipedia in academia, and related issues (through said review is partially split between the introduction and discussion section).
The study provides some interesting findings regarding academics' view of the benefits of Wikipedia-style peer review and publishing. Most respondents (77 percent) reported reading Wikipedia, and a rather high number (43 percent) reported having made at least one edit, with 15 percent having written an article. Interestingly, as many as four respondents stated that they were "credited for time spent reviewing Wikipedia articles related to their academic careers" in their professional workplaces. The more experience one had with Wikipedia, the more likely one would see advantages in the wiki publishing model. Most common advantages listed were cost reductions (40 percent), timely review (19 percent), post-publication corrections (52 percent), making articles available before validation (27 percent) and reaching a wider audience (8 percent). Disadvantages included questionable stability (86 percent), absence of integration with libraries and scholarly search engines (55 percent), lower quality (43 percent), less credibility (57 percent), less academic acceptance (78 percent) and less impact on academia (56 percent).
54 percent of respondents were aware that Wikipedia had a peer-review process and about third of these considered it to be less rigorous than that of scholarly journals; none of the respondents demonstrated any significant experience with the specifics of how Wikipedia articles are reviewed, suggesting that their involvement with the Wikipedia is rather limited. 75% of the survey respondents did not feel comfortable having others edit their papers-in-progress, and over 25% expressed concern about the lack of control over changes made post-publications. Majority of respondents did not also feel comfortable with their work being reviewed by Wikipedians, with the most common concern being unknown qualifications of Wikipedia editors and reviewers.
Perhaps of most value to the Wikipedia community is the analysis of suggestions made by the respondents with regards to making Wikipedia more accepted at the universities. Here, the most common suggestion was “making the promoted peer-reviewed articles searchable from university libraries” and in general, making it more easy to find and identify high quality articles (some functionality as displaying the quality assessment of an article in mainspace already exists in MediaWiki but is implemented as opt-in feature only).
The authors conclude that the academic researchers’ increased familiarity with either open access publishing or wiki publishing is associated with increased comfort with these models; and the academic researchers’ attitudes towards these models are associated with their familiarity, academic environment and professional status. Overall, this study seems like a major improvement over the authors' 2012 paper, and a valuable paper addressing the topics of the place of Wikipedia in the open publishing movement and the relationship between Wikipedia and academia.
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue - contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
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