This weekend has seen quite a bit of coverage of an unfortunate situation for Wikipedia users in the United Kingdom.  The Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based self-regulatory body, has taken action to block access to specific Wikipedia content in the UK, and in turn has caused a major issue for the UK Wikipedia community.  The censoring has dramatically affected the way UK traffic is handled by Wikipedia, and in short, about 95% of the UK is barred from editing Wikipedia.

This is particularly bad news for the entire Wikipedia project and the millions of users from around the world who visit Wikipedia every day.  On the English Wikipedia alone edits and contributions from the UK account for at least 25% of overall editing activity.

The Wikimedia Foundation has distributed this statement to the press and internally among its global community of volunteers to explain the situation and the reasons behind the blocks in the UK.  We’ve also prepared a series of Questions and Answers.

We are hopeful that discussions with the IWF will continue, and that all actions and measures against Wikipedia in the UK will be suspended.  Please share your support for Wikipedia and let others know how you feel about this situation.

Thanks,

Jay Walsh, Communications

Do people read site notices?

Yes.  Absolutely.  Our users respond to different messages… and we continue to test what messages resonate and drive donations.   Reflect back to my previous post and you’ll see that site notices with the thermometer had much higher click through rates than those without.

We decided that we wanted to test the impact of the meters over a few days (generating several million page views) to see how different notices performed with and without thermometers.  Phase 1a, below, we went down to 3 notices in random cycling.  One had a meter, the other two did not.

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In Phase 1b, we completely reversed the placements of the thermometer from our initial run.  As expected, those with meters had significantly higher clicks and donations.

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Now, over the last few days, we’ve gone with all meters on all notices.  Not only has there been a nice spike in donations, but it seems that people are reading the messages.  In particular, the educational notice, “Wikipedia is a non-profit project” has done significantly better from our initial run.

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We’re now going to focus on improving our conversion rate:  fewer and fewer people are donating after a click-through.  It’s expected as the fundraiser goes on, but we need to find a better way to get people to donate once they’ve shown interest.

Our next steps include testing a new “Learn More” link on all the notices (maybe people need more information before they give) and other Phase 2 notices.   We’re also going to test some different looks and images in an attempt to draw in new and different donors.

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Earlier today we announced a wonderful grant from the Stanton Foundation - $890K that will help us fund a team of developers and a project manager to examine and ultimately improve usability for the wiki editing interface for Wikipedia and all of Wikimedia’s projects.  Further - the improvements are going to be available to anyone running the MediaWiki software, which means all wikis can share in the changes.

This is great news for those who may have approached Wikipedia with some trepidation in the past, uncomfortable with the technical demands that basic editing may present.  It’s our hope that with these improvements we’ll be able to attract new people with new information, perspectives, and knowledge into Wikipedia and other collaborative projects.

The first steps will start through the new year, as the team is formed and current usage barriers are examined.  Expect to see changes to the editing interface over the coming months. We’ll be happy to spread the news about the improvements as they become available.

We’ve also put together a basic Q&A for the project.  Please take a look and feel free to add any of your questions or comments below.

Thanks!

Jay Walsh

Admittedly, this is a year of growth and testing for the Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising team. We have 4 new members and the Annual Fundraiser is a new experience for all of us. In fact, I’m not sure how many fundraising projects have had this kind of reach (250+ million unique viewers in November).  This provides us with an amazing opportunity to test different pitches through our site notices. With the fundraiser reaching a huge audience, we knew we had a great chance to test different messages and see what works and what doesn’t.

We started the Annual Fundraiser on November 3rd with 4 site notices (the big banners across the top of every Wiki article). Our tech team worked to track each notice and each notice had a randomized 25% chance of displaying on any given article (on every Wikipedia, in localized languages, and in other other Wikimedia projects). In theory, every notice had the same number of views. You can see the 4 site notices here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2008/design_drafts.

Now, which notices do you think did the best? The results are surprising:

People love to click on the links with the thermometer…but less than 10% donated after clicking-though. However, it’s interesting to see the strength of the “Wikipedia is there when you need it — now it needs you” message. While it had significantly less clicks, nearly 17% of people donated after clicking on it.

What do you make of that? What other conclusions would you draw?

And what do you think our next test should be?

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Today, we are 11 days into the 2008 Annual Giving Campaign…it’s been quite an exciting experience. You’ve probably seen the site notices up on just about every Wiki-project page and almost every language. Our volunteers and tech team have worked overtime to get everything working. We’ve had an amazing response from the community (This page still stuns me and I spend far too much time refreshing it).

After 11 days last year, we had 10,599 donors who gave $289,091.08 in total.

After 11 days this year, we have 22,736 donors who have given $629,825.92 in total.

Those are some nice numbers and we’ll be working to make sure that they continue. But to see that type of progress reminds me of one of the things I’ve heard more often than anything else related to my work at Wikimedia was/is: “What? Wikipedia is a non-profit?”

People don’t seem to know yet how dependent the Wikimedia Foundation is on the goodwill of our community. This year, community gifts (donations of less than $10,000) are expected to make up nearly half of our $6 million budget. Part of our strategy this year is to emphasize our charitable status and make a case to our users that they can help us maintain and promote the free knowledge movement.

And, to date, they have. And that’s pretty exciting.

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

Today we are very pleased to announce the kick-off for the 2008 Annual Giving Campaign for the Wikimedia Foundation. For most Wikipedia users that means you’re now seeing a shiny banner at the top of every Wikipedia page - likewise for the other Wikimedia Foundation projects.

The campaign will run through January 15, 2009 - which will mark the eight birthday of Wikipedia. We’ve increased our goal this year to $6million USD - it’s ambitious, but with more resources to spread the word and help bring in donations, we’re confident we’ll get there and beyond.

To make things run smoothly we’ve rebuilt the entire front-end of the donation system at donate.wikimedia.org, and we’ve streamlined the Wikipedia donation banners. Live comments from donors return, and we’ve also added a series of standard ‘Support Wikipedia’ buttons. We’re also encouraging fans and users to remix the Wikipedia puzzle mark to show support in their own way.

For the podcasters or internet/traditional radio folks out there we’ve also produced a series of audio public service announcements in varying lengths, and in broadcast quality formats.

Last (but not least) we’ve created a form so anyone can share their stories about how Wikipedia has made their lives easier. This is the perfect time to reflect on the impact Wikipedia has had on your life - and you’ll help us build our understanding of how Wikipedia is being used by people every day. We’ll be sharing your stories here on the blog.

A huge thank-you to our ongoing and new donors - your donation will support global access to free knowledge, and a long, healthy future for Wikipedia.

Here’s to a successful campaign!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

In December 2007, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation formally decided to ask the Free Software Foundation, which administers the GNU Free Documentation License under which Wikipedia is distributed, to release a new version of the license which will allow Wikimedia to switch its content to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA). The underlying motivation of this change is that CC-BY-SA is an easier-to-use license granting the same essential freedoms as the GFDL. It is also more widely used by other educational projects, and switching the license would allow Wikimedia wikis to freely share content with those projects.

We’re very pleased that the Free Software Foundation has today released version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License which implements this requested change. Next, the Wikimedia Foundation will organize a community wide referendum to decide whether existing GFDL wikis should be made availabe under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license.

We are deeply grateful to the Free Software Foundation for making this change. I’ve posted a more in-depth summary of what it means on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, and an energetic discussion on the topic has already begun. We will post more details on this topic soon.

See also:

• Free Software Foundation FAQ on the FDL 1.3 release
• Creative Commons blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by CC VP Mike Linksvayer
• Blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig

Erik Möller
Deputy Director

We’re very pleased to announce the release of our first Annual Report.  This report, which covers the 2007/2008 fiscal year, represents a big leap forward in helping our stakeholders, donors, and volunteers better understand the Foundation’s goals and objectives.

As you might expect, all photos and content (with the exception of trademarked logos) are CCBYSA, public domain (PD), or under the GFDL.  We worked with a local designer, Dustin York, to develop a report built on the Foundation’s current objectives: reach, participation, and quality.

We welcome your comments or suggestions.  It’s our first of many reports - and we look forward to building future versions with input from our volunteer and user community.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

In collaboration with the the Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-MERIT (www.merit.unu.edu), we want to invite you to take the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors. For the
first time, this survey will provide an overview of the Wikipedia community and how the content of Wikipedia is created, used, and perceived. We therefore encourage everyone to participate in this
survey and to fill in an online questionnaire that will be made accessible to you in the coming two weeks. We have prepared survey versions in more than 20 languages. In order to keep the traffic
manageable we have chosen a staggered approach for the surveys.

The survey is currently running in Dutch, Vietnamese, and Tamil, and we have received more than 2500 complete responses already. (We can track the responses by language, so we can choose to examine any subset we want.)

The following language versions will be launched in the coming days: Russian, Arabic, Polish, Portuguese, Greek, Esperanto, Czech, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Afrikaans, Indonesian, French, Thai,
Spanish, German, English, Chinese-simplified and Chinese-traditional.

The survey will be featured in the site-wide announcement banners of those languages.

I want to extend a BIG thank you to all the volunteers who have worked on this survey, especially all the translators. We will compile translation credits for the press release when the survey is
completed.  Thanks also to the UNU-Merit team (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Rüdiger Glott, Herman Pijpers, Jan Philipp Schmidt), and to Naoko Komura, who has been project managing the survey since September. And, thanks to all colleagues who have given feedback along the way.

We’ve tried to design questions that make sense. Please feel free to send any and all feedback to info(at)wikipediastudy(dot)org.

Earlier today the Wikimedia Foundation, along with the UK charitable organization SOS Children’s Villages announced the 2008 edition of Wikipedia Selection for schools.  Our own Wikinews has also covered the announcement and offers a great interview with Wikipedian and SOS Children’s CEO, Andrew Cates.

David Gerard, a UK-based Wiki(m/p)edian shared the following on Slashdot later in the afternoon:

“SOS Children’s Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 14,000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date.”

Update: BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.