Wikimedia Highlights, November 2012
Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for November 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement
Wikimedia Foundation highlights
New HTML5 video player
A new video player was enabled on Wikipedia and its sister sites, promising to bring free educational videos to more people, on more devices, in more languages. The player is the same HTML5 player used in the Kaltura open-source video platform. Its many new features include advanced support for subtitles, support for the royalty-free WebM video format, and server-side transcoding, i.e. the ability to convert from one video format to another, in order to deliver the appropriate video stream to the user depending on their bandwidth and the size of the player.
Developer meetup and language summit in India
On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India. The Engineering DevCamp focused on language support, development for mobile devices, and user interaction and user experience design (UI/UX). More than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators attended the event. It was preceded by an Open-Source language summit that the Foundation organized together with Red Hat in Pune, India.
Fundraiser launch
The Foundation's ninth annual online fundraiser officially launched on November 27, 2012 and raised a record breaking $2.3 million in a single day: a 59% increase over our biggest day in 2011. See the Fundraiser Statistics page for a view comparing this year to previous years. Banner design progressed from last year's "Jimmy appeal" ([1]) to variations on a new "Facts banner" ([2], [3], and [4]) which are more oriented towards informing users about the Wikimedia Foundation.
Due to the very successful start, it was decided to show banners only in the following five English-speaking countries through December 31: US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand (in addition to the banners for fundraising chapters). The fundraiser will be re-launched in all remaining countries in the spring of 2013, with improved translations.
Beta launch of Wikivoyage
Wikivoyage, the project to create a free world travel guide which anyone can edit, launched on Wikimedia Foundation servers on November 10, migrating text content and accounts from the old servers run by the Wikivoyage Association. The community is working on the review and transfer of media files, and the site remains in "beta" until this and other cleanup tasks are completed.
Data and Trends
Global unique visitors for October:
- 488.4 million (+2.84% compared with September; +2.46% compared with the previous year)
- (comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release November data later in December)
Page requests for November:
- 20.3 billion (+2.7% compared with October; +16.8% compared with the previous year)
- (Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)
Active Registered Editors for October 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):
- 79,964 (-2.73% compared with September / +0.59% compared with the previous year)
- (Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)
Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for October 2012:
Financials
 |
 |
(Financial information is only available for October 2012 at the time of this report.)
All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date October 31, 2012.
| Revenue | $5,358,084 |
|---|---|
| Expenses: | |
| Engineering Group | $4,258,755 |
| Fundraiser Group | $816,319 |
| Global Development Group | $1,804,417 |
| Governance Group | $278,363 |
| Legal/Community Advocacy/Communications Group | $976,506 |
| Finance/HR/Admin Group | $1,793,482 |
| Total Expenses | $9,927,842 |
| Total surplus/(loss) | ($4,569,758) |
* Revenue for the month of October is $1.24MM vs plan of $0.85MM, approximately $396K or 47% over plan.
- Year-to-date revenue is $5.36MM vs plan of $5.21MM, approximately $151K or 3% over plan.
- Expenses for the month of October is $2.53MM vs plan of $2.84MM, approximately $305K or 11% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, internet hosting expenses, travel expenses, capital expenses, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and operating grants.
- Year-to-date expenses is $9.93MM vs plan of $11.52MM, approximately $1.59MM or 14% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, capital expenses, grants and awards, and outside contract services partially offset by higher legal expenses and awards and grants.
- Cash position is $20.76MM as of October 31, 2012 which is approximately 5.92 months of expenses.
Other movement highlights
"Day of the Dead" photo contest
Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) is an annual celebration in Mexico, where people gather to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. Many aspects of this important holiday lack photographs on Wikimedia Common. The campus library of the ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México sponsored a month-long photography contest called "Day of the Dead, Wiki Style (Día de Muertos estilo Wiki)". Similar to Wiki Loves Monuments, there was an open submission period lasting one month (from 5 October to 5 November 2012), attracting over 400 photo uploads.
Bot connects 250,000 biographies to bibliographical records
VIAFbot is a bot on the English Wikipedia which links biography articles to the corresponding authority records in the "Virtual International Authority File" (VIAF, which is operated by OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center in the US). Authority records are used in library catalogues to distinguish authors with the same name, and to collect differing names for the same author. In November, VIAFbot completed its run for over 250,000 articles. It examined each page's title and, if present, existing "persondata" and the infobox to guess the corresponding VIAF ID. The bot also compared the existing "Normdaten" authority record links, which are frequent on the German Wikipedia, and recorded differences between the two Wikipedias.
"Semanticpedia" collaboration with French government and research institute
The French Wikimedia chapter signed a partnership with the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) launching the Semanticpedia project. The project evolved from the French version of DBpedia and concerns research and development about the extraction of structured (semantic) data from the French language Wikipedia and its sister projects.
A simultaneous editathon from two continents
Wikimedia Mexico and Wikimedia Spain organized the first editing marathon between two Spanish-speaking countries, where Wikipedians collaborated across the ocean on topics that are of importance to both Spain and Mexico.