Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-04/News and notes

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Wikimedia Foundation and OTRS team both publish reports, indicate operating changes

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By Resident Mario

Wikimedia Foundation quarterly report published, community consultation organized

Tilman Bayer, senior operations analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation (and, as HaeB, former editor-in-chief of the Signpost, 2010–11), is responsible for the publication of the report in its new format.

The Wikimedia Foundation released its Quarterly Report last week covering the three months from October to December of 2014. The Foundation has been releasing and making publicly available internal operational reports—originally presented directly to the Board of Trustees—since January 2008. What makes the publication of this particular report notable from an organizational perspective is that it is the first report published since the Foundation's decision to move to a quarterly instead of monthly structure late last fall. A key reason for the decision was to better align reporting with the Foundation's generally quarterly planning and goal-setting processes. Due to the larger time spans, the new quarterly reports attempt to highlight key priorities more so than to present detailed quarterly activities documentation. Highlights from Foundation goings-on continue to be posted as blog-aggregated Wikimedia Highlights; more detailed information is presented in team-separated WMF quarterly reviews.

Making good on the new format, the Foundation has presented a much more visually oriented and succinct report than it has in the past this reporting round. Readers interested in the Foundation's initiatives may find it a good resource to review. Some highlights:

  • Mobile readership is ascendant: while global pageviews are flat (and concurrently, desktop traffic is in decline), mobile pageviews are on the rise, and the Foundation succeeded in raising the mobile fundraising share in the end-of-year campaign from 1.7% in 2013 to 16.1% in 2014. The Foundation-funded mobile web-viewing and editing applications have seen significant improvements as well.
  • The deployment of the HHVM interpreter tool late last year has reduced average edit save-time by almost half.
  • After impact analysis, Foundation grant disbursement has increased its focus on smaller projects, finding more and smaller projects to have more impact than fewer, larger ones. However, the total amount disbursed in 2014 actually decreased by 14% year on year, in part because the Foundation sees that project organizations "want non-monetary support ... [and are] focusing on institutional partnerships".
  • The Foundation reached its annual (as always, very conservative) US$58 million funding goal six months ahead of schedule in 2014. Funds raised from non-English-speaking countries increased by 42%, but still compose a small fraction of overall funding.

In related news, last week the Foundation kicked off strategic planning consultation with the Wikimedia community. This will be the second of the Foundation's five-year plans: the first such plan, begun in 2009 and published in 2011 (Signpost coverage here, here, and elsewhere), proved at best flat-footed. It contained wildly optimistic editor growth projections—a particularly notable projection failure, as editor numbers have actually decreased since the report's publication. The Foundation released a supplement, "Narrowing Focus", in 2012, and is now proceeding with a 2015 iteration of the report in changed organizational format:

To participate in the consultation, follow the instructions; at the time of writing, the consultation had already drawn more than 200 responses.

Wikimedia OTRS team publishes annual report

Members of the French contingent of the Wikimedia OTRS team at a 2014 organizational gathering.

The Wikimedia OTRS team has released its annual report for the year 2014. The OTRS team handles the Wikimedia movement's instance of the Open-source Ticket Request System, and is generally responsible for all queries, complaints, and comments from the public directed at the movement via email since September 2004. The report, both visually striking and very informative, presents a detailed report on the activities and actions of the OTRS team over the past year. Some highlights:

  • The OTRS team fielded 72,714 tickets in 2014, of which more than half were information requests, and another fifth were requests from copyright holders. The other third of the tickets were split among queries about chapter, photos, and various miscellaneous queues.
  • The number of requests fielded has declined somewhat from a peak of 84,571 tickets in 2010.
  • The OTRS team consists of 660 open accounts on OTRS and 850 inactive (closed) ones, as of the end of 2014.
  • In many cases the workload for individual ticket queues was predominantly distributed among one or two editors, and even among busy queues—such as en-info, which fielded almost four times as many requests as the next busiest info queue, de-info—a handful of editors tend to handle over half of requests, per the long tail.
  • The English-language team responded to 77% of its tickets within 24 hours; for other sizable teams the percentage ranged from 33% (info-es) to 80% (info-pol).
  • Tickets remain overwhelmingly directed at the Wikipedia projects. The cumulative 2014 total for sister projects came to just 782 tickets.
  • There were 12,857 photo-permission verification tickets, from editors checking about the copyright status of particular images, and 616 photo-submission tickets, from photographers releasing their work for use on Wikimedia projects.

To better reflect the status of the project's backlogs, the OTRS team will be moving to a monthly instead of quarterly report structure this year. The OTRS team is currently exploring applying for grants from the Foundation to hire external developers to improve the movement's OTRS software, and efforts are underway to expand project documentation. Editors are invited to post their responses to the report on the report talk page.

Train the trainer program held in India

This week saw the 2015 iteration of the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge program's train the trainer community workshop (in shorthand, the CIS-ATK TTT). The event, first held in 2013, is a four-day intensive training workshop and program for a select group of Indic-language editors. As the title of the workshop implies, the event attempts to expose its attendees to and give them experience with the tools and skills they need to communicate with and encourage participation from prospective Wikimedian editors in their respective languages. After the event, participants are expected to begin implementing the "plans of action" they develop at the workshop, with support from the CIS-A2K team. Travel expenses to and from the event are covered by organizational stipends. There were 30 attendees overall this year, up from 17 in 2013.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a Bangalore-based Indian NGO concerned with technological advocacy and multidisciplinary research in Internet and society. It is integrally involved in the Wikimedia India movement via the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program, a long-standing project ongoing since 2011 organized and funded in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation (coincidentally, the quarterly report this week). This event, one of the most visible results of these efforts, included seminars on public presentation, copyright law, Internet research techniques, digitization techniques, media strategies, and community-building, as well as multiple panel and group discussions, a GLAM activity session at Janapada Loka, and capstone individual outreach planning presentations.

This article was retitled after publication to reflect that the OTRS report was annual, not quarterly.

Indiegogo campaign for prolific Wikipedian photographer underway

The common jezebel (Delias eucharis), one of Jee's many wildlife photographs in use on Wikipedia.

An Indiegogo campaign to fund a macro lens and other equipment purchases for Wikipedian Jeevan Jose launched last week. Jee's wildlife photographs illustrate over 500 Wikipedia articles, including nearly 300 on English Wikipedia alone. The campaign, coordinated on Commons, launched on 22 February; the modest initial target—funding the purchase of a new macro lens—has already been exceeded. Fund-raising for additional small-wildlife photography equipment—such as a macro flash, camera bag, a travel tripod, and improved digital darkroom (computer & software)—continues. The campaign runs until 24 March.

Brief notes

  • Death of a Wikimedian: The Malayalam Wikipedia lost one of its most prolific contributors on 4 March. G. Balachandran, also known as Babug, joined the site in 2008. By the time he made his final edit, he had single-handedly created almost 1% of the site's total articles, despite being partially paralyzed from a debilitating stroke and suffering from several subsequent health problems. He was 76 years old. ViswaPrabha, who notified the Wikimedia community through the Wikimedia-l mailing list, wrote:
  • Wikidata for research forges ahead: Wikidata volunteers this week officially submitted their EU grant proposal for review. The proposal, developed for the Horizon 2020 European research initiative, aims to construct a virtual research environment connecting open-source databases across disciplines and languages worldwide through the Wikidata framework. With €1.5m of funding on the line, this is by far the largest competitive external grant that a Wikimedia project has ever applied for, involving coordination between the community, the Museum für Naturkunde, and more than ten other associated institutions throughout Europe. This week also saw additional follow-up meetings in Berlin, where a general proposal information session was held, and Bern, which hosted a hackathon focusing on the proposal's impact for taxidermy. See previous Signpost coverage for more details on the effort and its potential impact both on and off-wiki.
  • Metrics and activities: The Wikimedia Foundation will hold their monthly metrics and activities meeting on March 5th this week. The theme for this month's iteration is "VisualEditor & Mobile". Editors are invited to participate via YouTube stream or via IRC. Remote video participation via Google Hangouts, limited to eight participants, is also available.

  • Foundation board composition: The Wikimedia Foundation Board has been debating the propriety and nature of policies which may be put in place to increase the diversity of viewpoints on the Board, and is asking movement editors to post their thoughts on the Board's topical talk page.

    The video feature released this week on Wikipedia Zero
  • Zero on video: The Wikimedia Foundation released a short video this week presenting an overview of the Wikipedia Zero initiative. The Zero initiative is a no-charge access mobile data access plan for movement Wikipedias that offers a beneficial reciprocal relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and service carriers in a number of countries worldwide; see previous Signpost coverage (or, indeed, the video, at right) for more details.
  • Around the world
  • English Wikipedia
  • Stewards elections: The 2015 Stewards elections officially closed this week. A live final tally is available here.
  • Art and Feminism challenge: The Art and Feminism Challenge, for content work related to female artists, is set to run on March 7–8.
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Wikipedia is not going to eventually discontinue desktop access or anything, are they? Because I am personally moving away from mobile device use for personal reasons, and would be devastated if they did so. Tharthandorf Aquanashi (talk) 21:01, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oh not at all, especially given the difficulty of editing via mobile (lots of code does not fit on small screens, and getting to watchlists/contributions/talk/history pages is difficult to impossible without directly typing them in). That said, the much cleaner look of the mobile site could presage changes to the desktop view... but that's been a possibility for a couple years now. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 21:17, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Of course not. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:19, 5 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Correction: "Wikimedia Foundation and OTRS team both publish quarterly reports..." OTRS published its annual report, not quarterly. The text of the article is correct. Keegan (talk) 01:51, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed, silly oversight on my part, and it'll still show up as "quarterly" in the talk-page messages unfortunately (the original text was "Foundation publishes quarterly report" and I failed to remove the modifier after adding the OTRS story). This is a really dumb error and I apologize for it—in the future I'll be more fastidious in my pre-publication checks. ResMar 04:47, 6 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]


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