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:

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:

Update: BitTorrent link is now up! Instructions here.

Not one, but two new books to add to your library this month.  Earlier in September we were pleased to see How Wikipedia Works (published by No Starch Press), authored by prominent Wikipedians Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates.

Today another title has hit shelves, with significant contributions from our own CTO (and MediaWiki wunderkind) Brion Vibber, O’Reilly’s MediaWiki, authored by Daniel J. Barrett.

Congratulations to all the authors!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Please join me in welcoming two of our new tech folks who started this week in our San Francisco office, Trevor Parscal and Ariel Glenn.

Trevor has done various web development as well as being involved in the D development community (neat!), and will be poking around at MediaWiki stuff and misc scripting development.

Ariel is a longtime Wikipedian and Wiktionarian, and has been working on bot tools and some experimental MediaWiki extensions in the past. Ariel will be doing general MediaWiki/extension development as well as local IT support in our San Francisco office.

Trevor and Ariel will both be helping us to tidy up a lot of backlog in miscellaneous bug fixes and feature requests, as well as pitching in on development for ongoing strategic goals.

Brion Vibber,
CTO

Hi all,

I wanted to give our New York City Wikimedians a heads up for the following event, Wikis Take Manhattan, a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and StreetsWiki articles covering sites and street features in Manhattan and across the five boroughs of New York City. The event is based on last year’s hugely successful Wikipedia Takes Manhattan, and the event organizers have evolved it to include StreetsWiki this year.

Participants begin the hunt from one of two locations: Columbia University (at the sundial on college walk) and one at The Open Planning Project’s West Village office:

349 W. 12th St. #3
Between Greenwich & Washington Streets
By the 14th St./8th Ave. ACE/L stop

Cary Bass,
Volunteer Coordinator

Update!: Interested parties can join the Wikimedia NYC email list at Wikimedia NYC.