Grants:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Foundation/Progress report form/Q1



Purpose of the report edit

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Global metrics overview - all programs edit

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Overall edit

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved
2. # of new editors
3. # of individuals involved
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects


Telling your program stories - all programs edit

Please tell the story of each of your programs included in your proposal. This is your chance to tell your story by using any additional metrics (beyond global metrics) that are relevant to your context, beyond the global metrics above. You should be reporting against the targets you set at the beginning of the year throughout the year. We have provided a template here below for you to report against your targets, but you are welcome to include this information in another way. Also, if you decided not to do a program that was included in your proposal or added a program not in the proposal, please explain this change. More resources for storytelling are at the end of this form. Here are some ways to tell your story.

  • We encourage you to share your successes and failures and what you are learning. Please also share why are these successes, failures, or learnings are important in your context. Reference learning patterns or other documentation.
  • Make clear connections between your offline activities and online results, as applicable. For example, explain how your education program activities is leading to quality content on Wikipedia.
  • We encourage you to tell your story in different ways by using videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g.), compelling quotes, and by linking directly to work you produce. You may highlight outcomes, learning, or metrics this way.
  • We encourage you to continue using dashboards, progress bars, and scorecards that you have used to illustrate your progress in the past, and to report consistently over time.
  • You are welcome to use the table below to report on any metrics or measures relevant to your program. These may or may not include the global metrics you put in the overview section above. You can also share your progress in another way if you do not find a table like this useful.
Target Last year (if applicable) Progress (at end of Q2) End of year (projected or actual) Comments
Example Example Example Example Example

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report) edit

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
A B C D E F G H I J K

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report) edit

Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
A B C D E F G H I J J2 K
TOTAL B C D E F G H I J J2 N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance edit

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement? edit

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

Signature edit

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources edit

Resources to plan for measurement edit

Resources for storytelling edit


Basic entity information edit

Table 1

Entity information Legal name of entity Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Entity's fiscal year (mm/dd–mm/dd) 07/01-06/30
12 month timeframe of funds awarded (mm/dd/yy-mm/dd/yy) 07/01/12-06/30/13
Contact information (primary) Primary contact name Sue Gardner
Primary contact position in entity Executive Director
Primary contact username User: Sue Gardner
Primary contact email sgardner@wikimedia.org
Contact information (secondary) Secondary contact name Lisa Seitz Gruwell
Secondary contact position in entity Deputy Chief Revenue Officer
Secondary contact username User: Lgruwell
Secondary contact email lgruwell@wikimedia.org


Overview of this quarter edit

The purpose of this section is to provide a brief overview of this report. Please use no more than 1-2 paragraphs to address the questions outlined below. You will have an opportunity to address these questions in detail elsewhere in this report.

CHANGES: Please describe how you changed your plans and budget based on the FDC allocation approved by the Board in December 2012, and your rationale for these changes. You can then use the changed plans and budget as the basis on which to report back on the first quarter.

  • Because of the FDC’s approval of our budget request, the Wikimedia Foundation moved ahead with full implementation of our annual plan. This plan, for the first time in the Wikimedia Foundation’s 10-year history, designated spending into “core” and “non-core” areas, with the latter category funded by the FDC. Non-core spending is devoted to time-based initiatives, like Editor Engagement Experiments, that extend our ability to better serve Wikimedia’s mission, while “core” spending is on initiatives like bandwidth costs and accounting that maintain our sites and organizational infrastructure for the long term. Please note that this FDC progress report is a cumulative report that incorporates this past quarter and also the previous two quarters. The Wikimedia Foundation operates on a fiscal year (July 1-June 30), versus a calendar year, so the past quarter was Quarter 3 of our fiscal year. Also note that, in the second quarter of our fiscal year, the Wikimedia Foundation implemented a “Narrowing Focus” realignment, which involved converting the catalyst projects into grants, so that other organizations funded by the Wikimedia Foundation -- not WMF itself -- are directly leading or commissioning activity on-the-ground. The realignment also meant that we ended our fellowships program, which had been a part of our “non-core” programs.

HIGHLIGHTS: What were 1–2 important highlights of the past quarter? (These may include successes, challenges, lessons learned.)

  • In the past quarter, the Wikimedia Foundation continued to oversee steady growth in the number of Wikipedia articles, an increase in the number of editors across Wikimedia projects, and an expansion of initiatives that drove global readership. We also made important advances in reader engagement, software development, mobile partnerships, and more -- areas that continued the progress made in the first two quarters of our fiscal year. Our funding application to the FDC emphasized four “non-core” areas of the Wikimedia Foundation’s ongoing work. The non-core initiatives in our application -- editor engagement experimentations; the Global Education Program; the catalyst projects (editor-recruitment activities in India, Brazil, and the Middle East and North Africa); and WMF fellowships and grant-making -- are intended to extend our mission of giving readers everywhere free, unimpeded access to educational content. From the past quarter, here are two important highlights in these non-core initiatives: 1) The Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Experiments team (E3) initiated a series of tests that bolstered new users’ engagement with Wikipedia. These tests -- typically 1-2 weeks -- are designed to identify effective ways to increase recruitment and retention of new editors. From February 28, 2013 to March 8, 2013, for example, the team oversaw an onboarding experiment that gave new registered users on English Wikipedia a list of suggested articles that need basic improvements, like correcting spelling and adding links to other Wikipedia articles. Before the introduction of this “Getting Started” page (first launched in mid-December of our second quarter), new editors weren’t given any direct encouragement to edit immediately after signing up; instead, they were given a landing page that invited them to update their preferences or return to what they were reading prior to signing up. The February-March experiment, the third run by the team for the quarter, involved more than 31,000 newly registered English Wikipedia users, and showed that those who got the “Getting Started” page plus a Guided Tour were 3.9% more likely to make an edit than those new editors who didn’t get the page -- a statistically significant difference. The team also released the Guided Tours part of this experience to a dozen Wikipedias, plus Wikimedia Commons; made significant progress toward releasing a permanent redesign of account creation and login across all wikis; and built infrastructure that -- supporting experiments, such as the EventLogging extension and User Metrics API -- replaced now-deprecated infrastructure, and expanded it to meet the needs of other Foundation teams across the organization. The February-March onboarding experiment followed an E3 experiment from July-September 2012 that improved our community portal page, offered clearer editing suggestions for new editors, and inspired more people to investigate editing Wikipedia articles. 2) Around the world, more than 75 schools and universities, in more than 30 countries, are now enrolled in the Wikipedia Education Program -- our highest level of engagement in the program’s three-year history. The program, which has students edit and write Wikipedia articles as a formal classroom assignment, had particular success in Arab countries. Between January and March 2013, the Wikipedia Education Program added 4 courses at universities in Jordan, 18 courses at high schools in Jordan, 2 university courses in Saudi Arabia, and 1 university course in Algeria. The program’s expansion in the Arab world paralleled an increase in the number of articles on Arabic Wikipedia, which in the quarter went from 201,000 articles to 220,000 -- a jump of almost 10 percent. The development paralleled a trend that started in the first two quarters of our fiscal year, when Arabic students in the Education Program added almost three million Arabic characters to Wikipedia, and the article count on Arabic Wikipedia increased by 25,000 articles, a spike of 15 percent.

WIKI-FOCUS: What Wikimedia projects was your entity focused on (e.g., Wiki Commons, French Wiktionary) this quarter?

  • Our core work is to serve as a global steward for Wikipedia and its sister sites. One of our primary focuses is to increase the number of Wikimedians -- the volunteers who write and edit the articles that appear on Wikipedia, and who contribute to Wikimedia Commons and our other web projects. The continued growth of Wikipedia and our sister projects depends on the stable pool of Wikimedians. And all initiatives funded by the Funds Dissemination Committee are ultimately designed to boost the number of volunteer contributors to the Wikimedia movement, and the number of articles.

GROWTH: How did your entity grow over the past quarter vs. the previous quarter (e.g., Number of active editors reached/involved/added, number of articles created, number of events held, number of partipants reached through workshops)?

  • Because of our central role in the Wikimedia movement, the Wikimedia Foundation is uniquely positioned to grow the number of active editors and articles, and to reach users through workshops, events, and other means, like Internet Relay Chats (IRC). In the past quarter, for example, the Wikimedia Foundation held 10 IRC chats, including two led by Executive Director Sue Gardner, after we held 35 IRC chats in the fiscal year’s first two quarters, including two more by Ms. Gardner. Overall, the Wikimedia Foundation made key progress in the quarter on our VisualEditor, which is scheduled to be the default editor on all Wikimedia sites this July. The past quarter also saw us begin two new Wikipedia Zero partnerships with mobile operators that will let 180 million more mobile readers access Wikipedia without data charges. Overall, contributors added 1.9 million new articles to Wikipedia in the quarter, after adding two million articles in the previous two quarters. In terms of the four non-core areas funded by the FDC, we made the following progress: Editor Engagement Experiments: Reaching more than 90,000 participants in the past quarter, Editor Engagement Experiments conducted three major feature tests, including the January 15-25 experiment with a new Getting Started page that encouraged a sizable portion of readers to begin editing Wikipedia. In the previous two quarters, the Editor Engagement Experiments team conducted a series of experiments that also prompted readers to take a more active role in engaging with Wikipedia. In July 2012, for instance, a Timestamp Position Modification experiment, which put a prominent timestamp on articles, prompted a significant number of readers to click on the articles’ history function -- making the readers much more conscious of the fact that Wikipedia articles are regularly updated, and much more conscious that the readers themselves could update the articles. In September, the team deployed a post-edit confirmation message to 16 Wikipedia sites that -- for the first time -- either notified editors that their article edits were made or thanked them for their edits. The messages led to an increase in the productivity of newcomers to Wikipedia. Global Education Program: In the past three quarters, the Global Education team spearheaded advances in student and professor participation, especially in Egypt. In the past quarter, students at Egypt’s Ain Shams University and Cairo University added 4.1 million bytes (or about 1,300 printed pages) to Arabic Wikipedia. In September, research data showed that Spring 2012 students in the U.S. and Canada courses of the Education Program improved the quality of their articles by an average of 6.5 points on a 26-point assessment scale, with 87.9 percent of articles showing noticeable improvement after student edits. Editor recruitment in Brazil, India and MENA: In the past quarter, we reached more than 750 people through ten workshops and talks conducted by WMF consultants or WMF grantees. The previous two quarters saw a similar level of public engagement, exemplified by a July 2012 Wikimedia meeting in Recife, Brazil, during Campus Party -- the world’s largest global technology festival. The workshop there prompted three developers to develop new apps for Wikipedia and two volunteers to work on editing Wikipedia. Wikimedia Grants Program and Individual Engagement Grants program (which replaced our Fellowship program): In the past quarter, the programs funded 14 projects that involve short-term projects, and we await the impact these projects have on boosting article and editor numbers. In the first two quarters of our fiscal year, the Wikimedia Grants Program funded 17 projects, among them an important November meeting of Wikimedians in Kenya; an October meeting in Brazil for 25 people -- including Oona Castro, our Catalyst Project consultant -- who brainstormed ideas to improve Portuguese Wikipedia and expand the Wikimedia movement in Brazil; and a series of fall Wiki Loves Monuments events in the U.S, organized by Wikimedia District of Columbia, that inspired people to submit 22,000 photographs to the contest. Meanwhile, in the first two quarters of our fiscal year, our fellowships program funded five fellows and their projects, which included the Wikipedia Teahouse -- an online meeting place for new editors that, in one year, served 1,670 guests, answered 2,000 questions, and prompted new editors to make nearly three times the number of edits to Wikipedia articles than a control group with similar early editing patterns.

Financial summary edit

The FDC requires information about how your entity received and spent money over the past year. The FDC distributes general funds, so your entity is not required to use funds exactly as outlined in the proposal. While line-item expenses will not be examined, the FDC and movement wants to understand why the entity spent money in the way it did. If variance in budgeted vs. actual is greater than 20%, please provide explanation in more detail. This helps the FDC understand the rationale behind any significant changes. Note that any changes from the Grant proposal, among other things, must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

Revenues for this quarter edit

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
Donation revenue Dollars $5,737,500 (Q3 fiscal year) $3,879,608 $26,592,263 $10,522,537 $40,994,408 $5,737,500 (Q3); $35,262,500 (Q1-Q3) $40,994,408 Higher cumulative than plan primarily due to another strong and successful online fundraiser campaign.
Other income Dollars $91,938 (Q3) $233,916 $210,878 $134,470 $579,264 $91,938 (Q3); $477,813 (Q1-Q3) $579,264 Higher than plan primarily due to the recognition of a prior period's transaction as required by U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ("GAAP") but has no cash impact.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this quarter edit

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
All Wikimedia Foundation expenses Dollars $12,197,988 (Q3) $7,395,987 $8,065,583 $9,595,830 $25,057,400 $12,197,988; $29,973,129 (Q1-Q3) $25,057,400 Lower spending than plan, primarily due to lower salary and benefits from delay in filling open positions that resulted from a competitive market for engineering staff and staff turnover, lower internet hosting from better-negotiated pricing than expected, and lower FDC grant expenses due to the timing of grant agreement execution.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Progress toward this year's goals/objectives edit

This section addresses the impact of the programs / initiatives* and objectives your entity has implemented over the past quarter and the progress your entity is making toward meeting this year's goals. We understand that some metrics may not be applicable in this quarterly report, so please add metrics here if they are applicable.

*In the last round, the FDC used the term 'initiative', but this round, we are using the term 'program.'

Program 1 edit

Editor Engagement Experiments
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.
  • This project’s objective is to attract and retain new Wikipedia editors through short-term experiments that give these editors inspiring new ways to engage with Wikipedia. These tests, which typically last 1-2 weeks, are designed to increase recruitment and retention of new editors.
Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?
  • In the past quarter, the Editors Engagement Experiments team conducted three-large scale experiments, which reached more than 90,000 participants. From February 28, 2013 to March 8, 2013, for example, the team oversaw an onboarding experiment that gave new registered users on English Wikipedia a list of suggested articles that need basic improvements, like correcting spelling and adding links to other Wikipedia articles. Before the introduction of this “Getting Started” page (first launched in mid­-December), new editors weren’t given any direct encouragement to edit immediately after signing up; instead, they were given a landing page that invited them to update their preferences or return to what they were reading prior to signing up. The February­-March experiment, the third run by the team for the quarter, involved more than 31,000 newly­ registered English Wikipedia users, and showed that those who got the “Getting Started” page plus a Guided Tour were 3.9% more likely to make an edit than those new editors who didn’t get the page ­­ a statistically significant difference. (More about this project on the Wikimedia blog.) On February 1, the Editor Engagement Experiments introduced Guided Tours ­-- small pop­up tours that introduce important features in a step­-by­-step fashion. Since then, the extension has been enabled on 11 Wikipedias (including English, French, German, and Dutch) and on Wikimedia Commons. Since their introduction on English Wikipedia, more than 1,700 editors have been delivered a guided tour. In the first two quarters of our fiscal year, the Editor Engagement Experiments team conducted a series of experiments that also prompted readers to take a more active role in engaging with Wikipedia. One example: In July 2012, the team instituted a Timestamp Position Modification experiment, which put a prominent timestamp on articles, and prompted a significant number of readers to click on the articles’ history function -- making the readers much more conscious of the fact that Wikipedia articles are regularly updated, and much more conscious that the readers themselves could update the articles. In September, the team deployed a post-edit confirmation message to 16 Wikipedia sites that -- for the first time -- either notified editors that their article edits were made or thanked them for their edits. The messages led to a significant increase in the productivity of newcomers to Wikipedia. Editors who received the thank-you notice or the confirmation message made 23.5 percent more edits than the group that didn’t get the messages. A total of 36,072 new registered users participated in this September experiment. Six WMF staff members support the E3 team.
Activities conducted.
  • Over the past three quarters, the Editors Engagement Experiments team conducted a series of large-scale experiments that reached more than 125,000 participants.
What worked and what did not?
  • While these experiments have increased the number of first­-time edits, the challenge for the Wikimedia Foundation and the E3 team is to increase the number of people who make their first edit and then go on to become active editors ­­ with five or more edits a month and beyond. The E3 team is focusing on this challenge for the next quarter. One way it will do that: Offering helpful landing pages for users that have created accounts but have chosen to dismiss the initial editing tasks. We know that approximately 70% of users who are motivated enough to create an account still do not edit, and the team will be offering other edit options to encourage this group to make specific edits.

Any additional details:


Program 2 edit

Wikipedia Education Program
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.
  • In the Wikipedia Education Program, students edit and write Wikipedia articles as a formal classroom assignment over the course of a term. Through written guides and online trainings, the Wikimedia Foundation preps the class instructors and Wikipedia Ambassador volunteers who help the students with editing questions during the semester. This project’s objective is to generate significant high-quality content from students each term. A small fraction of these students will continue to edit after the semester ends, but recruiting them to become long-term Wikipedians is not the program’s focus. Instead, we seek to recruit the professors to be long-term users of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. Each professor who’s recruited and retained brings 20-30 students to Wikipedia up to two times each year. The Wikipedia Education Program began in 2010 in the United States, and its expansion beyond North America -- to Egypt, Brazil and other countries where the primary language is not English -- coincides with our push to boost the number of articles and editors in non-English Wikipedias.
Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?
  • In the past quarter, we sustained the program's reach and ambition -- 1,400 students in 130 classes took part in the WIkipedia Education Program. And more than 75 schools and universities, in more than 30 countries, are now enrolled in the program. A particular success story is Egypt, where in the spring and the fall semester of 2012 (which lasted through late February 2013), 194 Egyptian students participated in the Wikipedia Education Program and added about 2,000 printed pages to Arabic Wikipedia. The Spring 2013 semester in Egypt began in late March. Between January and March, Egyptian students added the equivalent of 1,300 printed pages to Arabic Wikipedia. Also between January and March 2013, the Wikipedia Education Program added 4 course at universities in Jordan, 18 courses at high schools in Jordan, 2 university courses in Saudi Arabia, and 1 university course in Algeria. Like Egypt, Brazil has been a primary focus for the Wikipedia Education Program. And like Egypt’s universities, Brazil’s universities have produced an uptick in articles and active editors over the past three months, when six Brazilian universities participated in the program. In the fiscal year’s first two quarters, the Education Program reached more than 2,000 students -- 1,350 alone in the United States and Canada -- in more than 100 classes. In September, research data showed that Spring 2012 students in the U.S. and Canada course of the Education Program improved the quality of their articles by an average of 6.5 points on a 26-point assessment scale, with 87.9 percent of articles showing noticeable improvement after student edits. In the past quarter, the global program utilized two WMF staff members, three WMF consultants, and a WMF contractor.
Activities conducted.
  • Besides the Wikipedia Education Program courses outlined above, engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation fixed software bugs and otherwise refined the MediaWiki extension for the Education Program, which allows participating professors and ambassadors on English Wikipedia to better see how students are doing with edits -- and to better help these students. By giving a more precise picture of student contributions, the extension also makes it easier for the foundation to report on and analyze the program’s progress. Most of our ambassador trainings -- where Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians learn how to advise students in the Education Program classes -- now take place online, rather than through in-person trainings. The self-directed trainings are now available in English, Swedish, and Portuguese, and they are in the process of being translated fully into other languages, including Arabic. Text-based chats and Google Translate helped expedite communication between English-speaking Foundation staff in San Francisco and Arabic-speaking program participants in Cairo. And having an Arabic-speaking Cairo-based consultant facilitated active dialogue with participants during the term.
What worked and what did not?
  • The program is boosting the number of articles on Wikipedia, along with the quality of articles, and is boosting the number of female editors on Wikipedia. Of the 194 Egyptian students who participated in the Wikipedia Education Program in the spring and fall 2012 semesters, 169 (87 percent) were female. Overall on Wikipedia, about 10 percent of Wikipedia editors are female. Boosting the number of female editors, editors overall, and number of articles on Arabic Wikipedia is a high priority for the Wikimedia movement. In fact, in the first quarter of 2013, the Arabic Wikipedia promoted its first female administrator -- a student at Cairo University who was introduced to editing Wikipedia through the Education Program. In Egypt, we would have had four courses at Alexandria University participating in the Wikipedia Education Program, but a teachers strike in the fall prevented the classes from beginning. Similarly, a strike in Brazil also affected course totals.

Any additional details:

  • Over the next quarters, we are both scaling up the Wikipedia Education Program and transitioning it into a more self-sufficient project that can be easily adopted by any educational institution in the world. In the next quarter, we are transitioning the Brazil program -- which is now co-coordinated by a consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation -- into a thematically appropriate nonprofit entity. We are also transitioning the U.S. and Canada portion of the program so that it’s run by a separate nonprofit entity that’s guided by volunteer professors and other people with deep backgrounds in education and with Wikipedia. The number of participating students has gone up every year in the Wikipedia Education Program, and we expect that to continue in the year ahead, including in countries that were pilot projects in 2012. What began as a pilot project in Egypt, for example, has evolved into a region-wide initiative where schools and universities partner with the program -- and increasingly get everything they need online.


Program 3 edit

Catalyst Projects
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.
  • Since 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Catalyst projects focused on three geographic areas: India, Brazil and Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Each of these developing regions is a priority for growth as we expand Wikipedia’s reach to readers in the Global South. After we submitted our Funds Dissemination Committee request in September 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation changed the approach of our Catalyst projects, as part of our “Narrowing Focus” realignment. As a result, we’re moving to a model where we give grants to organizations already on the ground in India, Brazil and MENA (and other countries), and these organizations manage the work themselves with the active encouragement and funding of the Wikimedia Foundation. The objective of this outreach is to recruit new editors in India, Brazil, and the Middle East and North Africa.
Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?
  • Brazil: In the past three quarters, our team of consultants oversaw an average of 1-2 workshops a month in Brazil. And in February, the Wikimedia Foundation solidified our ability to analyze data from Brazil by hiring Henrique Andrade as a data and experiments consultant and Jonas Xavier as a data analysis consultant. These two hires joined our other consultants in Brazil: Oona Castro, our Catalyst Project consultant; and Everton Alvarenga, our Brazil Education Program consultant. These data analysts will help track the effectiveness of our workshops by doing such tasks as analyzing the edits of those who take our Brazilian workshops. Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa: During the most active months of the Cairo Education Program (spring 2012, fall 2012), contributions from the Education Program comprised 3-4% of total new article content added to Arabic Wikipedia, and the students made up around 10% of the active and very active editors on the Arabic Wikipedia. In the second term of the program, 140 students created accounts, contributing a total of 5.97 million bytes to the Arabic Wikipedia, or the equivalent of about 1,990 printed pages. Each student averaged about 14 pages of content — even more than the first term. In March 2013, after the end of the term, 23 students made edits, adding a total of 187,960 bytes to the Arabic Wikipedia. Between January and March, Egyptian students added the equivalent of 1,300 printed pages to Arabic Wikipedia. At the end of March, active editors on Arabic Wikipedia numbered 1,140 -- a slight decrease from the start of the quarter, when editors numbered 1,190. India: To bolster India’s ranks of Wikimedia editors and the number of Wikipedia articles in Indic languages, the Wikimedia Foundation continued to work with the Centre for Internet and Society in New Delhi. Through a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Centre is implementing Wikipedia outreach in India, and held five workshops in India that reached more than 150 people. Overall, for all three geographic areas, five Wikimedia consultants and two Wikimedia staff members oversee the project's work.
Activities conducted.
  • Brazil: On March 2 in Sao Paulo, Ms. Castro, our Catalyst Project consultant, led a workshop for 15 people that taught them how to edit Wikimedia projects. The event coincided with International Women’s Day, and at the end of the workshop, the group dedicated themselves to improving articles related to women and feminism. Articles on “Women’s Rights” and “Grace Hopper” (“Direitos da mulher” and “Grace Hopper” in Portuguese) were two examples of the participants’ contributions, and the Women’s Rights article has since received 1.4 million views (815,000 in one day alone), helped by a popular Tweet of the article. Other Brazil workshops included one on January 30 in Sao Paulo, where Mr. Alvarenga, our Brazil Education Program consultant, spoke at Campus Party, the annual technology festival in Brazil that draws hundreds of hackers, developers and gamers. Mr. Alvarenga spoke to about 150 people on the subject, “Wikipedia and the Future of the Internet.” On February 3-4 in Salvador, the Wikimedia Foundation’s consultants held an editing workshop at Digitalia, an important international conference in Brazil, which drew 20 participants, and Ms. Castro spoke at the conference’s opening session. Ms. Castro also gave a short talk to about 400 people at Digitalia, and a Wikipedia volunteer mentored about ten of those newcomers in the following months, but we don't yet have data on the participants’ retention. The previous two quarters saw a similar level of public engagement, exemplified by a July 2012 Wikimedia meeting in Recife, Brazil, during Campus Party -- the world’s largest global technology festival. The workshop there prompted three developers to develop new apps for Wikipedia and two volunteers to work on editing Wikipedia. The February hiring of Henrique Andrade and Jonas Xavier as data consultants coincided with the February release of our Portuguese Wikipedia data analysis, where we examined three years of statistics (2009 to 2012) on Edits, New Editors, Active Editors, and Very Active Editors and found that Portuguese Wikipedia is still seeing a decrease in editors, active editors and edits, but that the decrease in 2012 was lower than in 2011. Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa: In our FDC application, we laid out a single key milestone for the first quarter of 2013: To have built out, by January, a strong regional team of consultants to help coordinate program work in the Arab region. In March 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation hired Faris El-Gwely as Education Program Consultant for the Arab world, based in Cairo. In this position, Mr. El-Gwely who’s a long-term Arabic Wikipedian, helps coordinate and monitor on-the-ground and on-wiki activities in the Cairo education pilot program that started in early 2012. Mr. El-Gwely is working directly with professors, students, and Wikipedia Ambassadors to increase the quality and quantity of Arabic Wikipedia content. Besides his work in Egypt, in the first quarter of 2013, Mr. El-Gwely made two trips to Jordan, where pilots for a university program at Isra University in Amman and a high school program at rural schools have begun. Instead of a regional team of consultants, Mr. El-Gwely has been effective as the Wikimedia Foundation’s single continuing consultant in the region. Last year, between June and September, the Wikimedia Foundation worked with Taghreedat, a Qatar-based organization, on a successful pilot project that attracted and trained new Arabic-speaking editors on how to edit Wikipedia. Foundation staff, led by Frank Schulenburg, who’s Senior Director of Programs, also visited Cairo in 2012 to work with professors and students in Ain Shams University and Cairo University, the two Egyptian universities that are in the Wikipedia Education Program. Each class also has a team of Ambassadors who help students with questions about editing and technical issues, and this Ambassador oversight continued in the quarter. On February 27, students at Cairo University and Ain Shams University in Egypt celebrated the completion of the second term of the Wikipedia Education Program at a Cairo conference where Mr. El-Gwely spoke about the program’s inroads from the fall semester. In that semester, Egyptian students contributed the equivalent of 1,990 printed pages to Arabic Wikipedia. In September 2012, we released a report that analyzed the previous year of our Arabic Language Initiative, and it showed that our efforts have reversed the decline in Arabic editors, and it documented a 28 percent increase in the number of new Arabic-language editors and a 31 percent increase in active Arabic editors. India: On March 9, the Centre for Internet and Society in New Delhi held a Wikipedia workshop for 17 people at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in partnership with Vaani, the institute’s Hindi bloggers' club. The participant group, which ranged from grad students to doctoral students sciences, learned the basics of editing. On March 8 at the Nirmala Institute of Education, a Secondary Teacher Education College in Panaji, Goa, the Centre co-organized with our Wikimedia India Chapter a Wikipedia workshop. About 100 participants, 99 percent women, learned how to edit Wikipedia, learned about Wikipedia's pillars for good editing and writing, and learned about the different ways (including meet-ups) they can maintain their connection to Wikipedia and other contributors. Other workshops included one on March 7 for 30 students at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani – Goa; one on February 5 at Delhi University’s Department of Arts, for 30 students; and another on January 17 at Ahmednagar College, in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra. Our engineering work in India also served the foundation’s efforts to increase participation. In February, WMF’s Engineering team participated in two conferences in Pune, India: GNUnify 2013, a major open source conference, and the Second Open Source Language Summit, co-organized by the Foundation with Red Hat. The conferences prompted software engineers in India to volunteer their time to improve Wikipedia, and the conferences also helped promote Wikipedia across the country. At the end of the last quarter, active editors on Indic-language Wikipedias numbered 2,180 -- a slight increase from the start of the quarter, when editors numbered 2,140. Among notable activities from the previous two quarters: In August 2012, we supported the first Punjabi Wikipedia workshops in Patiala and Amritsar, cities that are located in the Indian state of Punjab; in July 2012, we supported Odia and Malayalam workshops in India’s capital, New Delhi; and we supported the first Punjabi Wikipedia workshop at Ludhiana, India. In September, our India team of Wikimedia Foundation consultants transitioned to the Centre for Internet and Society based in Bangalore, India, with support from a WMF grant. On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India, that was attended by more than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators. The Engineering DevCamp focused on language support, development for mobile devices, and user interaction and user experience design (UI/UX).
What worked and what did not?
  • Brazil: Talks and workshops reached more than 500 people, and prompted articles that have been read more than 1 million times. Also, encouraged by Wikimedia’s consultants in Brazil, the Brazilian community created two Facebook pages (see here and here) that publicize Portuguese Wikipedia, and where conversations are taking place about Wikipedia and Wikipedia articles -- and articles that the community believes should be created. On March 7, for example, a new Portuguese Wikipedian, Priscila Gonsales, created an article on Lea Fagundes, a Brazilian educator and psychologist who’s considered a pioneer in the use of computers in Brazil schools. Almost 14,000 people have “Liked” the Portuguese Wikipedia page -- an indication of how popular social media is in Brazil, and why it’s important for Wikipedia to have a presence there. In the quarter, Wikipedia went from being Brazil’s 12th-most popular web site to the country’s 11th-most popular, according to the web-traffic company Alexa. In Brazil, a challenge is to get readers who’ve “Liked” the Portuguese Wikipedia page on Facebook to actively read Portuguese Wikipedia, and then get a percentage of those readers to become editors and even active editors. Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa: In the past three quarters, students in the Education Program made vital contributions to Arabic Wikipedia, continuing the momentum that was generated in the program's first year. India: For now, the effectiveness of the Centre’s workshops appears to be negligible. For example, of the 22 students who participated in a December Wikipedia workshop at St. Xavier's College, Goa, only six added more than 100 characters – the equivalent of a short sentence – to Wikipedia's article space after the workshop (and these additions were on English Wikipedia, not the Indic-language Wikipedias), and none of the workshop participants is still contributing to Wikipedia. In the next quarter, our challenge is to continue growing the number of active users in India, Brazil, and the Middle East and North Africa, and to closely track the effectiveness of our work and that of our grantees.

Any additional details:

  • In the next quarter, we are looking for a Brazilian organization to partner with on our Brazil projects, and our challenge is to find one that aligns well with Wikimedia’s values and vision for free and open knowledge.


Program 4 edit

Grants & Fellowships
What are the objectives of this program? Please include metrics.
  • When the Wikimedia Foundation applied for funding from the Funds Dissemination Committee in September of 2012, one of our four key non-core initiatives was “Grants & Fellowships” -- an initiative that combined our Wikimedia Grants program and our Wikimedia Fellowships program. In January 2013, the foundation ended the fellowship program, replacing it with a program of Individual Engagement Grants that -- like the fellowships -- funds select people to work on short-term projects that help editor growth, editor satisfaction and retention, and the growth of Wikipedia’s articles and media. The Wikimedia Grants Program, meanwhile, continues in its previous form, where we give grants to groups (and occasionally to individuals) outside the foundation that are doing mission-aligned programs and activities focused on innovation. The objective for both programs is to encourage independent groups and individuals to pilot, experiment, research, or build something that forwards the movement in mission-critical areas.
Progress against these objectives (include metrics and # of volunteers/staff involved)?
  • After transitioning to a full-fledged program in January 2013, the Individual Engagement Grants program reviewed more than 50 ideas and application drafts, and funded eight projects. Between January and March 2013, the Wikimedia Grants program reviewed 11 grant requests, and funded six projects. In the previous two quarters, the program reviewed 19 grant requests and funded 14 projects. Two Wikimedia staff members run the programs.
Activities conducted.
  • In January 2013, Grantmaking and Programs -- the WMF department that oversees Individual Engagement Grants, the Wikimedia Grants Program, Funds Dissemination, and such other key programs as Wikipedia Zero -- transitioned Individual Engagement Grants into a full-fledged program. To streamline the application process, we created a new web portal that details all deadlines and directs applicants to take specific steps that we outline with examples. After the foundation requested applications, Wikimedians submitted more than 50 ideas and application drafts in February 2013. WMF grantmaking staff narrowed these initial submissions to 22 complete proposals. At the same time, 18 Wikimedians -- hailing from 12 countries and from Wikimedia projects in 14 languages -- formed a volunteer review committee. Committee members considered each proposal, and grant-making staff shared aggregated scores and comments with the community, with a mission to fund eight projects in total. In March of 2013, we funded the first round of Individual Engagement Grants. The eight projects: 1. China Publicity Project, funded at $350. Led by Chinese Wikipedian User:AddisWang, a small team of volunteers based in mainland China will be experimenting with social media campaigns to grow awareness of Wikipedia in China. 2. Replay Edits, funded at $500. User:Jeph paul is building a MediaWiki gadget that creates a visual playback of the edit history of a Wikipedia article, allowing users to see an article changing over time. 3 & 4. The Wikipedia Library, funded at $7,500, and The Wikipedia Adventure, funded at $10,000 -- both led by User:Ocaasi. For the Wikipedia Library, Ocaasi will be building and consolidating partnerships with reference providers donating access to reliable sources for Wikipedia editors, and improving the systems for managing these programs. The Wikipedia Adventure is an on-wiki game that will be piloted on English Wikipedia using the Guided Tours extension to determine whether this type of interactive learning is an effective engagement strategy for new editors. 5. Consolidate wikiArS to involve art schools, funded at 7,810 Euros. Led by Catalan Wikimedian User:Dvdgmz, the wikiArS outreach program builds partnerships with art and design schools to teach students to create images for donation to Wikimedia Commons and for use in Wikipedia articles. 6. Elaborate Wikisource strategic vision, funded at 10,000 Euros. Led by Catalan Wikisource User:Micru and Italian Wikisource User:Aubrey, this project brings together the global Wikisource community and other stakeholders to define a vision for the project’s future. 7. MediaWiki data browser, partially funded at $15,000 to pilot the initial concept. Led by User:Yaron K, the project will create a framework to allow any user to easily generate apps or websites to browse sets of structured data that exist on Wikipedia and other projects running on MediaWiki. 8. MediaWiki and Javanese script, funded at $3,000 — provided that a few dependencies can be met. Led by User:Bennylin, this project will provide technical support using a “train-the-trainers” model that teaches volunteers how to use Javanese script online, facilitating the transcription of Javanese texts to projects like Javanese Wikisource. The Wikimedia Grants program, meanwhile, reviewed 11 grant requests between January and March 2013, and funded six projects: 1. $1,225 to the community of Arabic Wikipedians, to fund a Producer Prize for content that’s contributed to Arabic Wikipedia. The prize incentivizes continuous, high-quality contributions to Arabic Wikipedia. The Producer Prize, which had been running in a trial period, will be awarded in three categories: First Prize, Second Prize, and Third Prize. The community of Arabic Wikipedians expects the prize to generate 1,000 new Arabic Wikipedia articles, 10 articles that reach “Featured” status, and 200 photos. 2. $3,400 to Wikimedia España, to fund a 10th-anniversary event around Galician Wikipedia designed to promote the Wikipedia and inspire more contributions. Galician Wikipedia began on March 8, 2003 and now has 101,170 articles. The event was held in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, which is an autonomous community in northwest Spain. 3. $120,000, to Wikimedia Italia, to fund the Wikimedia Conference in Milan, Italy, from April 18-21. The Wikimedia Conference is a vital annual event that brings together Wikimedians from around the world to collaborate in person. The funding is covering venue costs, travel scholarships, lodging, and other expenses for a conference that features a Chapters Meeting and a meeting of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. 4. $17,000 to the John Ernest Foundation, to run WikiSym + OpenSym 2013, the 2013 Joint International Symposium on Open Collaboration. The symposium will take place in Hong Kong from Aug 5-7, 2013. WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 is an important forum for researchers, practitioners, industry and entrepreneurs in open collaboration to share their ongoing works, interests and opportunities for cooperation. 5. $4,981, to Wikimedia India, to fund a series of outreach workshops and academies, and to support projects already initiated by the Wikimedia India community. The funding will also initiate a pilot outreach effectiveness measurement program, which will entail following up with attendees and assessing their feedback after events. 6. $579.39 to Jackson Scott Peebles, a Wikipedian who is leading a Video and Tutorials Project that’s employing screen-capture software to author video tutorials with potential interactivity. Mr. Peebles will create tutorials on STiki, Huggle, Twinkle, and various user permissions, as well as other tutorials based upon community input. Also in March, the foundation released a report, Grants: Retrospective 2009-2012, that analyzes the first three years of the Wikimedia Grants program, and explains how the program has increased the response time to applications, increased the reporting requirements, and increased the overall monitoring and effectiveness of grants. In the previous two quarters, the Wikimedia Grants Program funded 14 projects: 1. $6,335 to Wikimedia Norway, to continue the second year of formalized cooperation between Arts Council Norway and Wikimedia Norway. The first year resulted in 35 editing courses for museums and archives, encompassing more than 600 participants; 2. $477 to Wikipedia Malayalam Community in India, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of creating Malayalam Wikipedia, during which they do outreach through public events and introduce new readers, users and editors to Wikimedia projects; 3. $1,427 to Wikimedia Canada, to allow board members to meet in person for the first time, and to meet with other people interested in Wikimedia in the Vancouver area; 4. $917 to Wikimedia Mexico to promote Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) in Mexico, including drawing attention to the work of the volunteers behind Wikimedia, WLM and Wikimedia México; 5. $7,825 to Wikimedia Brazil to help fund WikiBrasil 2012 -- the first national meeting of the Brazilian community, held in São Paulo in October 2012, with the participation of volunteers from seven different cities; 6; $2,300 to Alex Gakuru, Regional Coordinator-Africa, Creative Commons, to kickstart the formation of a Creative Commons Kenya Team/Community; 7. $3,306 to Planning Wikimedia Ghana, so they can train Ghanaians to collect, refine and contribute Ghana-related content for free use on Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikimedia Commons and other Wikimedia sites, and to better introduce the Wikimedia Movement to Ghanaians; 8. $23,284 to Wikimedia Serbia, to organize a Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2012, which is the first conference of Wikimedians from the region of Central and Eastern Europe, where representatives from each of the region's 25 countries will gather to create a stronger Wikimedia Movement in the region; 9. $20,000 to the Flow Funding Pilot Project, which will test an innovative model of fund allocation called “Flow Funding," where individuals are entrusted with decision-making power to fund initiatives aligned with the organization’s strategic goals; 10. $2,793 to Wikimedia Serbia, to organize a Serbia campaign for Wiki Loves Monuments, that will add needed Serbia-related photographs to Wikimedia Commons; 11. $73,392 to Wikimedia Serbia, so it can open an office that, among other things, will lead to a more efficient and viable organization, and so it can support GLAM activities in Serbia; 12. $735 to Wikimedia Slovakia, to organize workshops for participants of of KAEST (Conference on the Application of Esperanto in Science and Technology); 13. $1,548 to Wikimedia Serbia, to expand a series of Wikipedia lectures at Serbian educational institutions; 14. $27,315 to Wikimedia ZA, so the South African chapter can organize a thorough outreach for Wiki Loves Monuments.
What worked and what did not?
  • We successfully introduced a new program, Individual Engagement Grants, while continuing to operate another program, Wikimedia Grants, that we established in 2009. Both programs are inspiring projects that, with as little as $350, are benefiting the wider Wikimedia movement. Our funding of Wiki Loves Monument projects in South Africa and Serbia and Mexico, for example, inspired thousands of new photographs to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, where they are being used for Wikipedia articles and are otherwise available for free use by anyone around the world. Our funding of conferences -- like April’s hWikimedia Conference in Milan, Italy,which Wikimedia Italia organized; and October’s Wikimedia CEE Meeting in Serbia, which Wikimedia Serbia organized -- have brought together hundreds of leaders in the Wikimedia movement for crucial strategizing and brainstorming. These conferences have both immediate benefits and long-term benefits. While not all projects funded by the Wikimedia Grants Program achieved all desired goals, organizers of each completed project detailed, on-wiki, their successes and failures -- and successes far outweighed failures.

Any additional details:


Lessons learned edit

Lessons from this quarter edit

A key objective of the funding is to enable the movement as a whole to understand how to achieve shared goals better and faster. An important way of doing this is to identify lessons learned from entities who receive funds, and to share these lessons across the movement. The purpose of this section is to elicit some of these insights, which will be shared throughout the movement. Please answer the following questions in 1–2 paragraphs each.

What were your major accomplishments in the past quarter, and how did you help to achieve movement goals?

  • In our core programs, the Wikimedia Foundation continued to innovate in key areas, with our VisualEditor closer to being introduced to a wide cross-section of Wikipedias, and our mobile site garnering 3.2 billion pageviews -- a new high, and an indication of how important mobile is to Wikimedia’s growth. In our non-core programs, innovation has also been our focus. With the Wikipedia Education Program, we solidified the program in Egypt and Brazil, where a total of 35 classes and 300 students participated in the past quarter. Both countries’ participation in the Global Education Program has grown significantly from the original pilots in 2012, and the program overall has expanded to more than 30 countries from its original 2010 pilot in the United States. In Spring 2013, the U.S. portion is operating in 64 classes with almost 1,200 students, and we will learn next quarter how much they’ve contributed to Wikipedia’s article space. In the fiscal year’s first two quarters, the Education Program reached more than 2,000 students -- 1,350 alone in Canada and the United States -- in more than 100 classes. In September, research data showed that Spring 2012 students in the U.S. and Canada course of the Education Program improved the quality of their articles by an average of 6.5 points on a 26-point assessment scale, with 87.9 percent of articles showing noticeable improvement after student edits. In the past quarter, our Editor Engagement Experiments team showed that small changes can make a big difference on Wikipedia. The team conducted three major tests with 90,000 participants, exemplified by a January 15-25 experiment with a new Getting Started page, which involved 35,526 new Wikipedia editors. The test encouraged a sizable portion of readers to begin editing Wikipedia, giving the readers a list of six randomly chosen articles that needed copy-editing. In the previous two quarters, the Editor Engagement Experiments team conducted a series of experiments that also prompted readers to take a more active role in engaging with Wikipedia. Our catalyst work in Brazil paralleled our work in the Education Program, ensuring that Wikipedia maintained an important presence in the country and reached people beyond colleges and universities. Our newly established Individual Engagement Grants program funded eight projects in the past quarter, and our Wikimedia Grants program funded 20 projects over the past three quarters. Through these grants to community members, the foundation is funding projects that reach thousands of people in the short-term. All of these achievements create momentum that is intended to garner new editors and new contributors to Wikipedia and our sister sites.

What were your major setbacks in the past quarter (e.g., programs that were not successful)?

  • We had no major setbacks in the past three quarters -- just disruptions and some program ineffectiveness. In Egypt, for example, we would have had four courses at Alexandria University participating in the Wikipedia Education Program, but a teachers strike in the fall prevented the classes from beginning. Similarly, a strike in Brazil also affected course totals. Also, in India, Wikipedia workshops organized by the Centre for Internet and Society had a negligible impact on increasing editor ranks. Based on workshops in 2012 that were analyzed in 2013, we found that very few workshop participants contributed to Wikipedia after the workshops were held. The quality of workshop contributions was also negligible.

What factors (organizational, environmental) enabled your success?

  • The Wikimedia Foundation has a key team of staff members -- from engineering to development -- who are among the top professionals in their field, and a Board of Trustees that is also acknowledged for its high acumen in decision-making and professional standard-bearing. As importantly, the Wikimedia web sites -- led by Wikipedia -- are built up by contributors from around the world. Seventy-eight thousand active editors -- those who make five or more edits a month -- contribute to Wikimedia’s success. They are the lifeblood of our projects, and many of the Wikimedia Foundation’s most important innovations, like the VisualEditor, are geared to increasing their ranks and inspiring new editors to add to Wikipedia’s knowledge base in every language that Wikipedia is in. Finally, there is our websites’ readership -- the people who are also inextricably linked to our success. This unique combination of community involvement -- at the readership level, the article-contribution level, and the funding level -- is what continues to drive the success of Wikipedia and our sister sites.

What unanticipated challenges did you encounter and how did this affect what you were able to accomplish?

  • As noted above, a professors strike at Alexandria University in Egypt curtailed that university’s involvement in the Wikipedia Education Program, eliminating four classes that would have added more than 30 students to the program. Still, the Egyptian students who participated in the program in the quarter added 4.1 million bytes to Arabic Wikipedia, or about 1,300 printed pages -- a significant achievement. On the editor engagement front, our main unanticipated challenge was in the realm of experimental design: In the past quarter, setbacks in the data collection for our A/B test of guided tours meant our experiment needed to be extended to around three weeks of testing, rather than the usual one-week duration.

What changes might you make in executing your initiatives into the next quarter?

  • Based on experiments by the E3 team, the Wikimedia Foundation is set to implement new changes in the way that users engage with Wikipedia, and will soon launch an inviting version of the landing page that offers users tasks to undertake. We expect these changes to bring more contributors to Wikipedia and our sisters sites, and while we work on introducing these changes in onboarding and creating accounts for new users, we are temporarily reducing the E3 team’s other testing. In July, our VisualEditor was scheduled to debut after a six-month period of important public testing. Since December 12, the VisualEditor has been available to all logged-in accounts on the English Wikipedia as a new preference, switched off by default. In July, it will be available to almost every Wikipedia language.

Additional information edit

Provide any other relevant information that may be helpful or relevant for the FDC (e.g., links to any media coverage, blog posts, more detailed reports, more detailed financial information).

  • All our financial reports, including our latest financial statements, are available here. Our blog, which has daily posts and is read by thousands of people, including journalists, can be seen here. The home page of our foundation summarizes the latest headlines of our blog, and has links to our more important documents, including our annual report. Every quarter, the media writes and reports hundreds of articles about the Wikimedia Foundation and our projects. In the Wikimedia Foundation’s monthly reports, as in this one for February, we summarize the most prominent media coverage. Our main analytics web pages list such key statistics as pageviews, number of active editors, and number of unique visitors, and other analytics pages detail such statistics as active editors in Global North and South and mobile traffic generated by our Wikipedia Zero partnerships.

Compliance edit

Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement? edit

As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Signature edit

Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.
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