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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/News and notes

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News and notes

Largest ever donation to WMF, final findings of editor survey released, 'Terms of use' heavily revised

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By Tom Morris, Skomorokh

Stanton Foundation give $3.6 million grant

The Stanton Foundation is the philanthropic legacy of the late Frank Stanton, president of CBS from 1946 to 1971 and who organised the first televised presidential debate in the United States.

The Wikimedia Foundation announced this week that they have received a $3.6 million grant from the Stanton Foundation. According to the press release from the Foundation, the funding will go to support development of the long-awaited visual editor and other technical improvements including the addition of editing facilities to the new Wikimedia mobile site. The grant can also be put towards any project that "make[s] Wikimedia a friendlier and more understandable environment for new editors".


The $1.2 million grant in 2010 from the Stanton Foundation helped fund the Public Policy Initiative and a 2008 grant of $890,000 helped fund usability improvements. This week's $3.6 million donation is the largest ever to have been received by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Brief notes

  • WMF Chair speaks out on controversial content: Chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees Ting Chen issued a letter to the community on foundation-l in response to the image filter referendum. Thanking participants for their input, he acknowledged "significant division inside the Wikimedia community about the potential value and impact of an image hiding feature", noting a "significant minority" in opposition to the measure. Nevertheless, the statement expressed dissatisfaction with the status quo, arguing that "when material on the projects causes grave offence, those offended don't benefit from our work" and "exercising editorial judgment to mitigate that offence is not censorship". He declined to withdraw or alter the Board's previous resolution on the topic, instead charging Foundation staff with continuing community consultation and coming to a solution.
  • Final findings of editor survey released: The WMF's Head of Global Development Research Mani Pande has announced the release of the fifth and final report on the findings of the 2011 Editor Survey. Raw data from the survey findings is also available for download. Issues addressed include editing activities, demographics, women editors, the editing community, the location and languages of editors, technology and networking, and the institutions of the Wikimedia Foundation itself.
  • WMF to launch Arabic initiative: In the last month, WMF has been working on plans to support the growth of the Arabic Wikipedia, and will be holding a working session with the Qatar Foundation's computing research institute (QCRI) in Doha on 20 and 21 October. In a blog post, it announced that it will also conduct an IRC hour on Thursday, October 13 2011 at 20:00 UTC in #wikipedia-ar, to listen to community suggestions and respond to any inquiries around the initiative.
Screenshot of the winning entry of WikiViz 2011.
  • Wikipedia’s global reach visualized: The author of the winning entry of WikiViz 2011, Jen Lowe, presented her work, titled “A Thousand Fibers Connect Us – Wikipedia’s Global Reach” at the annual WikiSym conference last week. Launched in July, WikiViz 2011 is a data challenge calling for submissions to visualize the impact of Wikipedia beyond the scope of its own community, using open data.
  • Milestones: Wikipedia passes Blogger to rank sixth globally on Alexa. The Portuguese Wikipedia reached 700,000 articles, while its Sorani counterpart celebrated its 10,000th page. In other news, the Russian Wiktionary marked its 300,000th entry, a great degree more than the comparatively small Spanish version (60,000 entries) and the Welsh language version (10,000) which reached its important milestone with a definition page for carreg filltir (literally "milestone").
  • Terms of use in revision: The Wikimedia-wide Terms of use document has undergone heavy editing by WMF General Counsel Geoff Brigham. Robust discussion between the drafter and interested community members continues on the talkpage. In addition to discussion over specific terms used in the document, editors have also commented on the timing of the terms of use change, which comes just weeks after two other controversial initiatives (a new chapters agreement and the image filter referendum) ran into problems.
  • Steve Jobs' death leads to enormous page views: the article on Steve Jobs in English Wikipedia had 7.4 million page views on October 6, the day after the Apple founder's death. As a point of comparison, the article about Michael Jackson got 5.9 million views two days after he died.
  • New administrators: No new editors were granted administrator privileges this week, although at the time of writing, Redrose64's request remained open with favourable margins.
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  • "[Ting] declined to withdraw or alter the Board's previous resolution on the topic, instead charging Foundation staff with continuing community consultation and coming to a solution." Translated: "We are not getting the answer we want, so keep trying until we get the one we do." Resolute 13:14, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikimedia, spend that donation on upgrading your servers and making your website more user-friendly. HurricaneFan25 13:38, 11 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The grant can also be put towards any project that "make[s] Wikimedia a friendlier and more understandable environment for new editors"." Translation: We are going to throw away countless tons of money to make it easier for people who can't be bothered to learn how things work to add the kind of content that people who can't be bothered to learn about things in general would contribute. The more we dumb down the editing interface the more we will dumb down the content. Large donations ought to go toward keeping experienced editors and making their jobs easier instead of more difficult by having to clean up after all the nine year olds who want to edit. DreamGuy (talk) 18:36, 15 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • Sure, but you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even if making editing easier and more welcoming attracts new forms of casual vandalism, that's not a reason not to make it easier for academics to edit. - Jarry1250 [Weasel? Discuss.] 12:23, 16 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The encyclopedia anyone can edit.[asterisk?]" Bobnorwal (talk) 02:57, 16 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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