Wikimedia Foundation Report, May 2012

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of May (June 7, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for April:

473.38 million (-3.27% compared with March; +24.34% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release May data later in June)

Page requests for May:

18.0 billion (3.9% compared with April; 19.0% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for April 2012 (>= 5 edits/month):

78,519 (-1.71% compared with March / -1.60% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for April 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

Financials

(Financial information is only available for April 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 - April 30, 2012.

Revenue	$34,904,252
Expenses:
Engineering Group	$9,295,397
Community/Fundraiser Group	$3,429,034
Global Development Group	$3,342,651
Governance Group	$809,714
Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group	$5,225,408
Total Expenses	$22,102,204
Total surplus/(loss)	$12,802.047

Revenue for the month is $2.8MM vs plan of $ 272K, approximately $2.6MM or 947% over plan.
Year-to-date revenue is $34.9MM vs plan of $ 28.8MM, approximately $6.1MM or 21% over plan.
Expenses for the month is $2.8MM vs plan of $2.4MM, approximately $374K or 15% higher than plan.
Year-to-date expense is $22.1MM vs plan of $23.5MM, approximately $1.4MM or 6% lower than plan.
Cash position is $31.6MM as of April 30, 2012 – approximately 13.6 months of expenses.

Highlights

New Wikimedia fellows working on dispute resolution and small language wikis

The Wikimedia Fellows Program added two Community Fellows: Steven Zhang (a Wikipedian since 2008) is analyzing dispute resolution on the English Wikipedia. Tanvir Rahman (active on the Bengali Wikipedia since 2009, and elected as a steward by the global community in 2011) is experimenting with on-wiki strategies for growing the number of editors on small-language wikis, with an initial focus on the Bengali Wikipedia. Another Fellowship project, the Teahouse (where experienced Wikipedians are helping new editors), concluded its 3 month pilot phase on the English Wikipedia and was preparing a full analysis. Initial results indicated that it had a positive impact on new editors. The Teahouse concept is already being adapted to Arabic and Indic language projects.

1 million media files uploaded using Upload Wizard

One year after it was announced, the Upload Wizard has been used to upload more than 1 million freely licensed media files to Wikimedia Commons, and has contributed to an acceleration of its community's growth. Developers are working on a more reliable upload of large files (up to 500MB), on a mobile upload application to support the Wiki Loves Monuments contest in September, and on improving Flickr integration and geolocation support in the Upload Wizard.

Wikipedia Zero launches in Asia

Wikipedia Zero, the Foundation's initiative to enable free mobile access to Wikipedia, became available in Asia for the first time on May 21: Malaysian mobile operator Digi started offering the lightweight, text-only version of Wikipedia free of data charges to its 10 million customers. The program is already live in Tunisia and Uganda, and will launch in many other countries in the coming months.

Technology

A detailed report of the Tech Department's activities for May 2012 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/May
Department Highlights

Major news in May include:

the publication of the Architecture of Open-Source Applications book, which contains a chapter on MediaWiki;
initial designs for a universal language selector;
a new and easier way to view a wiki's interwiki map;
1 million files uploaded with our UploadWizard;
the Wikidata/RENDER summit in Berlin, followed by the hackathon.

Operations

Data Centers

May has been a busy month for racking, stacking and provisioning of newly purchased servers. Recently, we purchased new hardware for server refresh, adding capacity and redundancy, and for new projects, including servers for Search, Analytics, Fundraising, OpenStreetMap, databases, Varnish, Memcached and backups. Much effort was put into OS installation and servers network; they are now ready for the various system and application deployments. With Ubuntu 12.4 (Precise Pangolin) available, we have packaged and started using it selectively in some of our systems, including Search at Tampa and half of the LVS servers. Next, we will be setting up the Apache servers at Ashburn data center using Precise as well.

Wikimedia Labs

The Labs infrastructure had a couple outages, due to excess load and the GlusterFS system. Long-term mitigation plans include investigating Ceph and possibly writing a new filesystem mode in OpenStack to use DRBD in a way similar to Ganeti. We implemented a new way of managing puppet that allows users to test all of their changes locally before pushing them in for review.

Data Dumps

We've been creating bundles of media in use per project and the first set of files is almost complete. For each wiki, there is now one or more files containing all media uploaded locally to the wiki, and one or more files containing all media used by the wiki but uploaded to Commons.

Features Engineering

Article feedback

This month, the team deployed a new look and feel for the article feedback page as well as a central feedback page, where editors can monitor posts from all articles on Wikipedia. We also developed a final feedback form, which gradually engages users to contribute to the encyclopedia. We collected and analyzed data on how posting feedback impacts both conversion and newcomer quality. Based on this analysis, we now project over 2 million feedback posts per month on the English encyclopedia when the tool is widely deployed later this year (on par with the total number of edits per month). Our research suggests that posting feedback encourages a substantial number of users to productively edit articles on Wikipedia, which is expected to help reverse the recent decline in both new and existing editors.

Page Triage

We deployed the first prototype of a list view for Page Triage on the English Wikipedia, called New Pages Feed. It provides an enhanced list of pages for review by community patrollers. The team started work on a new curation toolbar to appear on article pages, enabling patrollers to get more article info, mark pages as reviewed, tag them or nominate them for deletion.

Internationalization and Editor Engagement Experiments

Internationalization and localization tools

The team continued integrating the first round of UI design for the Universal Language Selector (ULS) for desktop and mobile browsers. The prototype to showcase the first version of ULS was completed and demonstrated. The team completed development and deployed enhancements to the Translate extension with notification support, added more language support to the Narayam extension, fixed bugs, reviewed code for i18n support in Mediawiki, and completed a first draft for language impact metrics.

Mobile Engineering

Wiki Loves Monuments mobile application

We spent the month defining specifications, prototyping, and implementing the first version of the Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) app. In particular, we worked with various members of the WLM community to better understand the requirements of the contest.

Wikimedia Apps

The mobile team spent the month of May converting the Wikipedia app to use the API, increasing the amount of supported platforms, and porting it to the latest PhoneGap codebase. We used the new mobile API to fully decouple the Wikipedia app and started beta testing. By using the new mobile API, the Wikipedia app no longer has to screen-scrape the site, allowing us to make design changes that don't break the app experience. We also released the Windows 8 version of the Wikipedia app. This new Wikipedia app is built following the Windows 8 Metro Style guidelines and only uses CSS, HTML5, and Javascript.

Mobile support in MediaWiki core

We worked on the very ambitious project of moving MobileFrontend to MediaWiki core. We now have a dedicated set of tasks for the project and have started to process them. We added modular device detection support to core, and migrated HTMLForm.

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki 1.20

In May, MediaWiki 1.20wmf2 and 1.20wmf3 were rolled out to all Wikimedia wikis. MediaWiki 1.20wmf4 has been deployed to mediawiki.org, as well as the test wikis (test.wikipedia.org and test2.wikipedia.org).

SwiftMedia

We deployed a new version of the thumbnail handler to Commons, test, test2, and mediawiki.org, that uses our Swift FileBackend code. It should provide us with useful production testing prior to using Swift FileBackend for handling original files. Cleanup of corrupted thumbnails is now finished.

Report card

The team updated the datasets to include April's data, and improved the graphs' appearance. We've also been working behind the scenes to make the framework behind the Reportcard, named "Limn", a best-of-breed project for general use. While not ready for public consumption, we implemented a GUI for selecting and manipulating datasets, and began work to support multiple visualization types.

Fundraising

Major Gifts and Foundations

Secured a $100,000 grant from the Qatar Foundation for our work in MENA.
Worked to renew past mid-range donors.

Fundraiser

New Payment Service Providers were recommended and Tech, Legal and Finance departments did their due diligence. One of them got vetoed by Tech and one of them is currently in the process of negotiation.
Coordinated with the German chapter to perform donor research in early June.
Weekly testing continued in May. Please see the meta page for more information: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2012/We_Need_A_Breakthrough

Global Development

Global Development Highlights

Global Development Team week in May focused on program reviews and planning for India, Brazil, Arabic Language Initiative, Education and new Editor Growth and Contribution program.
Global Development welcomes Tilman Bayer to the team and introduces two new Community Fellows - Tanvir Rahman and Steven Zhang.
Offical launch of Wikipedia Zero in Malaysia
The Funds Dissemination Advisory Group met for the first time in early May.
Members of the U.S./Canada Education Program working group are announced.

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) design

Work on the FDC design process accelerated with the development of draft recommendations (which are to be finalized by the end of June) and vibrant discussion of open issues by the FDC Advisory Group, interested community members and WMF staff.

Grants Program Updates

Participation Support Program name change implemented and announced: this name change will better reflect the nature of this program as a travel reimbursement program rather than a grants program
Efforts to localize information about Grants Program and Participation Support Program are underway: we are calling for translation of key pages on Meta, including the instructions for applying for grants or support through both of these programs in order to make them more accessible

Grants Awarded and Executed

Grant to Wikimedia Austria to fund the German-speaking Wikimedians' conference WikiCon 2012
Grant to Wikimedia New York City to supplement program costs until an annual grant is awarded
Grant to Wikimedia Philippines to support Philippine WikiCon 2012
Grant to Wikimedia Finland to fund printing outreach materials in Finnish
Grant to Patricio Molina to lay the groundwork for the development of a Bolivian chapter by translating some key documents

Global South Relationships

Asaf visited Turkey to keynote a two-day Wikipedia outreach event at Bilkent University, organized by Turkish Wikipedian Nazif İlbek and the Bilkent IT club, with help from the Turkish Wikipedia community.
Asaf and Turkish Wikipedian Nazif İlbek gave outreach talks at three other universities (Galatasaray, Atılım, and Işık), and met with members of the Turkish editing community in Istanbul and in Ankara.

Fellowships

New Fellowships - Tanvir Rahman and Steven Zhang were announced and started work as Wikimedia Community Fellows, bringing the fellows count to 6. Steven is analyzing and sharing learnings from Dispute Resolution on English Wikipedia, and Tanvir is experimenting with online engagement strategies for growing the number of editors on small-language wikis, with an initial focus on Bangla Wikipedia. (See also "Highlights" section)

Teahouse Project - As we come to the end of the 3 month pilot phase of the Teahouse, the team is analyzing pilot outcomes. The full pilot report and recommendations for the project’s future is in progress, meanwhile some relevant metrics from May’s report include:
- On May 24th, the Teahouse Q&A board celebrated its 500th question.
- In a survey of over 120 Teahouse visitors, 70% of both new and experienced Wikipedians report being "Satisfied" or "Very satisfied" with their Teahouse experience, versus only 5% who said they were "Dissatisfied" or "Very dissatisfied".
- A new analytics report confirms earlier findings on retention and impact. Compared to other new editors, Teahouse guests go on to edit more articles, edit more frequently and contribute more content, and have less of their contributions reverted or deleted.

Help Project - Peter Coombe visited WMF to engage with WMF staff and fellows about the Help page redesign project. Research is complete on Help page stats and a content analysis of questions asked at Teahouse and Help Desk to help prioritize topics and pages to focus on. A survey is in progress to determine how new and experienced editors find and use current help documentation.

Translations Project - Jon Harald Soby updated the Meta translation portal with simplified pages for coordinating translations and requesting a new translation. Fundraiser Translators are being encouraged to move over to the new notification system for translators.

Editor Growth and Contribution Program

In ongoing discussion with the Arabic community, we’re laying plans for a contribution portal to experiment with ways to recruit and get new editors started on Arabic Wikipedia. Phase one of these experiments is under construction: The Teahouse is being localized for Arabic and a basic portal layout and registration page is under development.

Brazil Catalyst

May was a month with lots of travel focused on planning and on the Education Program.
Jessie and Oona analyzed history of debates on Brazil Catalyst Program and revised and created data and structured the content for opening the debate.
Engaged with community through online meetings on IRC, face to face meetings, telephone calls and talk pages.
Finalized and published page with draft of the Revitalization/Catalyst Program for open debate with the community and published it on Meta: the debate started more actively in June.
Meeting in the Brazilian National Library with 3 departments: digital library, international relations and Book and Readership Program staff.
Oona and Jessie worked on planning, management and institutional relations.

Brazil Media coverage

UOL (Brazil's largest news website):

Veja Website (Veja is the largest weekly magazine in Brazil. Its website had 7.3 million unique visitors in May):

http://veja.abril.com.br/noticia/vida-digital/com-parceria-academica-wikipedia-quer-mais-brasileiros

Arabic Language Initiative

Shared draft of our strategic plan and getting ready to announce it for public discussion with the Wikipedia community, for a call for partnerships and initiative vacancies .
Planning further online-based work with Taghreedat initiative after Dubai workshop.
Working with regional NGOs on finalizing their plans for grant requests to support the Arabic Language Initiative strategy.
Planning the second pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program, with expansion in Egypt and regionally.

US Cultural Partnerships

Presented at the Association of Museums conference April 29 - May 2. Networked with museum professionals and followed up with interested parties. Contributed to blog coverage for Wikimedia and the New Media Consortium.
Ongoing coordination with US cultural organizations and support and advisement for early stages of planning processes, including support for GLAM OTRS queue and other email inquiries.
Assistance with Monmouthpedia coverage and other GLAM-Wiki social media promotion.
Coordinated New Mexico Museum Association proposal for US GLAM-Wiki presentation.
Prepared for and presented at the MuseumNext conference in Barcelona, which included a Wikipedia Lounge and a QRpedia presentation. Promoted GLAM-Wiki US network and followed up with interested parties.

Mobile and Business Development

Officially Launched Wikipedia Zero in Malaysia with Digi: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/26/wikipedia-zero-launches-in-malaysia-with-digi/
Continued monitoring and bug fixes on soft launches in Uganda and Tunisa on Orange's networks.
Began testing in five new African countries for Orange: Kenya, Congo, Niger, Ivory Coast and Cameroon.
Building out the Wikipedia Zero project page on mediawiki.org

Wikipedia Education Program

Czech Republic program reflects after one year: Volunteers from Wikimedia Czech Republic kicked off their Wikipedia Ambassador program one year ago, with great success. Students have created hundreds of articles on the Czech Wikipedia as part of their coursework, assisted by volunteer Ambassadors, and the Czech team is gearing up for more articles in the future. Read more about the progress of the Wikipedia Ambassadors in the Czech Republic. <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/22/the-czech-ambassador-program-at-one-year/>

Cairo outreach event encourages students to edit: Campus Ambassadors in Cairo, Egypt, led an outreach event on May 2 to encourage students to edit the Arabic Wikipedia. Ambassadors and students from the British Engineering Institution in Egypt taught Cairo University engineering students to contribute to engineering-related articles. Students who are participating in the Cairo Pilot joined the event as well. <https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A7:%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%A1_%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%A9_2_%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%8A%D9%88_2012>

Cairo Pilot nears end of academic term: The first term of the Cairo Pilot has gone extraordinarily well. Students are making final edits to Wikipedia now as they finish their last month of courses, but already the students have had a noticeable impact on the content on the Arabic Wikipedia. Students have enhanced articles related to the 2012 French presidential elections, events that happened in Egypt in 2011, and more. In some classes, students are translating articles, whereas in others they are writing original content. <http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/25/cairo-pilot-update/>

U.S./Canada Education Program: Members of the Working Group that will prepare the spin-out of the U.S. and Canada branch of the Wikipedia Education Program have been announced. The Working Group comprises of seven Wikipedia editors and Ambassadors, seven members of higher education institutions, and two Wikimedia Foundation staff members. It will meet for the first time right after Wikimania in Washington D.C. to discuss the future picture of what the new structure will look like that will be in charge of running the program from May 2013 on. After this meeting, Working Group members will work in task forces to come up with an action plan for how to get to that future picture. Mike Cline — a Wikipedia editor, Campus Ambassador, and professional strategy consultant —agreed to act as a facilitator for the group. Wikimedia Foundation staff member Annie Lin will support the group in an advisory role. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Working_Group_Members>

Upcoming end-of-term conference in Egypt: Wikipedians, students, instructors and volunteer Ambassadors are getting ready for the first end-of-term conference in Cairo. Participants of the two-day conference will celebrate the successes of the Cairo pilot and talk about best practices and lessons learned. It is the first event of its kind in the Arabic-speaking world and will largely follow the example set by the "Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit" held in Boston last year. We expect more than 60 participants to join the conference.

India

Conducting one-on-one discussions with Indian community members to hear their opinions on how we should implement the program in the next semster
Going through various talk and program pages associated with the Pune pilot to collate the suggestions and ideas of community members.

Brazil

Details on the 2 partial reports below:

A general report on the WEP in Brazil is underway and will be the result of all learning points of the pilot:

We are going to improve the professors selection who will join the program, which is going to be done through an open call before next semester starts
Discussions on institutionalizationare under way in an important university.
Outreach in two important universities we are working with (one with great support of ambassadors).
Lots of learning from students editing and their interaction with the community:
- How to improve online and campus ambassadors interaction among themselves
- Some deletion cases when students haven't used a draft page or even in the draft
Gathering feedback from professors and ambassadors who joined the program, planning for the coming semester (still under construction), discussing a workshop about the WEP with ambassadors and professors at the beginning of next semester (August)

India Programs

Indic Languages

Discussing the education program in Indic languages with IT @ School, prepared proposal for Indic GLAM and education projects
Malayalam conference and community meetings, met with the Hindi Wikipedians in Delhi
Supported 10th anniversary celebrations in the Kannada, Assamese, Nepali communities
Getting the Bengali and Telegu Wikisource ready for proofread extension and other required support
Initiated discussions for Assamese Wikisource
Blog post on the numeral issue of Hindi Wikipedia: India Program/Indic Languages/Numerals in Indic Languages & Indic language Wikipedias#The Debate in Hindi

India Outreach

Capacity building or 'train the trainer' pilot to train community members on how to conduct effective outreach session and increase the number of community members currently helping.
Partnered with British Council to incorporate Wikipedia editing as a part of their regular activity for their library group members: first in-class session planned for 23rd June.
Supporting translation of documents for outreach translated into various languages with other Indic Wikipedians : India Program/Outreach Programs/Handbook#Repository of Documents in Indic languages

India Communications

Social media pilot: Created social media mentor note/guidelines with comprehensive learnings and insights from the first month experiences on two groups (en and or), Skype calls with mentors - spoke to 6 en mentors and 3 or mentors, explained, guided and redesigned messaging for groups.
Successfully published third issue of Wikipatrika in May.
Press: Medianama story on Wikisource
Supported Odia press story, Times of India story on Internet freedom, media contacts to support Assamese, Kannada, Nepali Wikipedia 10th anniversary celebrations

India Community Support

Buddy system: Worked on a new offline program called "Buddy system" which will function to support new editors offline by the local experienced editors as mentors
Teahouse/Chatasabha: An onwiki new editor support system called "Chatasabha" was initiated on the Odia Wikipedia, taking the lessons from the Teahouse project on the English Wikipedia. Based on lessons from the English Teahouse and Chatasabha, similar systems will be implemented on other Indic Wikipedias with the help of community members.
Planning support of Delhi-Hindi community
Meta updates: Updated FAQ (in PDF), translated Outreach letter, press release and translated Prezi
Sugar customization: A CRM Package called SugarCRM is being customized for the use of India Program for several works related to reaching out to existing wikipedians, managing contacts, etc.
India project tracker: Worked on preparing an analysis of Indic Wikipedia projects, their current community progress, growth in the number of active editors, new editors, content growth, and readership
Supported engagement of more than 30 new editors (https://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediasupport/ ) and 12 new editors in the Odia group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki/ )
Media support: Supported a press release and a newspaper story on the Odia Wikipedia

Communications

In May Global Development officially welcomed Tilman Bayer, who will be helping out with research analytics and also bringing his considerable background in blogging and reporting to help the communications team. In May we also watched our communications colleagues in the UK draw considerable attention to the first-ever Wikipedia town with the Monmouthpedia initiative.

Communications has also been working closely with Wikimedia DC on preparations for Wikimania 2012 in July.

The blog team made strides in opening up the blog for more community involvement, moving the calendar of planned blog posts from the internal Office wiki to the public Meta wiki, starting to experiment with drafting posts in public and holding its first ever IRC office hour.

The Shop took part in the 2012 MakerFaire, gaining valuable feedback and helping to boost monthly sales to a new high as we prepare for a more public launch.

Major announcements

Announcing Wikimania 2012 (May 30, 2012)

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimania_comes_to_Washington_DC

Our only major announcement in May was an updated media advisory highlighting speakers and sessions for this year's Wikimania in DC. The advisory is primarily an effort to draw media attention and increase media registration for the event.

Major Storylines through March

Google knowledge graph increases Wikipedia viz in search (May 16, 2012)

Global press were generally supportive of Google's major announcement of the 'knowledge graph' in May. The new search function automatically loads relevant info, data, or images as part of search results. Wikipedia is one of several key information sources, and was most widely cited in coverage of the new feature.

http://gigaom.com/2012/05/16/google-shakes-up-search-with-new-wikipedia-like-feature/

http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-knowledge-graph-121585

http://techland.time.com/2012/05/16/the-knowledge-graph-googles-next-frontier-for-search/

Monmouthpedia and the world's first wiki-town kicks off (May 18, 2012)

Monmouth, Wales, is now covered in a sea of QR codes linking noteworthy landmarks and civic locales to Wikipedia, making it one of the world's first 'wiki towns.' Wikipedians and townsfolk collaborated in the massive project, which also includes free wifi access across the town. The story resulted in hundreds of global news stories, mostly praising the unique initiative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/MonmouthpediA

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/05/17/worlds-first-wikipedia-town-launches/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/9274591/Monmouth-to-be-worlds-first-Wikipedia-town.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/monmouthpedia-monmouth-wikipedia-town-wales_n_1524961.html

Wikipedia Signpost

WMF Blog posts

A total of 40 individual blog posts on WMF blog through May, 2012.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/

Media Contact

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#May_2012

Human Resources

Supported work on staffing plans for the 2012-13 Annual Plan

Staff Changes

New Hires

Vibha Bamba, Interaction Designer (Engineering)
James Forrester, Technical Product Analyst (Engineering)
Stephen LaPorte, Legal Counsel (Legal and Community Advocacy)
Ori Livneh, Software Developer Frontend (Engineering)
Praveena Maharaj, Executive Assistant (Administration)
Subbu Sastry, Senior Software Developer Javascript (Engineering)
Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst - Movement Communications (Global Development)

New Contractors

Danielle Benoit (Engineering)
Claude Boulingui (Office IT)
Tanvir Rahman, Community Fellow (Global Development)
Kristie Robinson (Fundraiser)
Sage Ross (Global Development)
Steven Zhang, Community Fellow (Global Development)

Contract Extended

Andrew Bogott (Engineering)
Karen Chelini (Human Resources)
Aaron Halfaker (Engineering)
Mark Holmquist (Engineering)
Angela Robeson (Human Resources)

Exit

Mark Hershberger

Contract Ended

Michelle Collins
Rayne MacGeorge

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled:

Actual: 111

May Plan: 115, May Filled: 6, May Attrition: 1,

YTD Filled: 54, YTD Attrition: 17

Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end: 11

Department Updates

Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

Projects we are working on:

The WMF Annual Plan
Reducing the cost and risk of foreign exchange transactions
Providing support for the FDC advisory committee

Legal and Community Advocacy

Hired Stephen LaPorte as junior counsel on the team. Stephen is an experienced Wikimedian and represents a great addition to the team!
Posted blog post on the subject of ad injectors: "If you’re seeing ads on Wikipedia, your computer is probably infected with malware"
Updated terms of use became effective May 25, 2012.
Reviewing proposed fundraising agreement with qualified chapters.
New interns started. We are posting their short biographies here.
Strong FDC legal support
Large workload, including about twice as many contracts than normal (32)
Preparing for corporate governance review
Working on drafting a policy on when WMF should affiliate with certain legislative or regulatory issues, such as this one.
Wikilaw posting:
Copyright status of MIDI files, William Hahn
Stats:
- 32 contracts submitted
- 16 trademark requests submitted
  - Approved - 4
  - Pending - 8
  - Approval not needed - 1
  - Misc. - 3

Visitors and Guests

Visitors to the WMF office in May 2012

Jocelyn Berl (NexGenEdu)
Faidon Laimbotis (visiting contractor)
Laura Lanzerotti (Bridgespan Group)
Libbie Landles-Dowling (Bridgespan Group)
Meera Chary (Bridgespan Group)
Kathy S.Prestigiacomo (Morgan Stanley Smith Barney)
Richard Triolo (Morgan Stanley Smith Barney)
Danielle Benoit (visiting contractor)
Juan Negrillo (futura networks)
Polkan Garcia (futura networks)
Sam Reed (remote staff)
Chris McMahon (remote staff)
Antoine Musso (remote staff)
Rufus Pollock (co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation)
Krisztina Radosavljevic-Szilagyi (Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs - Google)
Liam Wyatt (Creative Commons Australia)
Randall Benson (consultant for culture study)
Kim Dodson (consultant for culture study)
Peter Coombe (visiting staff)
Joy Mihara Meer (FBI)
Christine Moellenberndt (Wikimedian)
Sebastian Jacobs (Cornerstone)
Moushira Elamrawy (visiting contractor)
Hisham Mundol (visiting contractor)
Oona Castro (visiting contractor)
Haitham Shamma (visiting contractor)
Nitika Tandon (visiting contractor)
Matthias Mullie (visiting staff)
Diederik van Liere (visiting staff)
Mike Schwartz (Senior VP Engineering, Wikia) and 18 other Wikia employees
Asheeshn Laroia (OpenHatch)
Joe Arnold (swiftstack)
John Dove (Credo Online Library)
Daniel Phifer (Social Imprints)
Deborah Bezona (D. Bezona & Company)
Jonathan Morgan (visiting research fellow)
Ted Nelson (brownbag presenter/guest)
Roger Gregory (brownbag presenter/guest)
Jeremy Thurgood (Global Development contractor)
Mike Cline (Wikipedian)
Pete Forsyth (Wikipedian)
Sumana Harihareswara (remote staff)
Peter Youngmeister (remote staff)
Stu West (Treasurer - Board of Trustees)
Phoebe Ayers (Executive Secretary - Board of Trustees)
David Peters (Exbrook)
John Jefferson (ATT)
Reza Musavi (Cushman & Wakefield)
Georgia Collins (DEGW)
Sweta Vohra (Al-Jazeera English)
Sebastian Walker (Al-Jazeera English)
Peter Caparso (Adyen)
Roeland Prins (Adyen)
Lisa Groover (Accounting Principals)
Steve DeVetter (KPMG)
Sizhe Liu (KPMG)
Valerie Ball (KPMG)
Liz Williams (Collaboration Zone)
Brad Rissley (Digital River)