The Signpost

News and notes

Foundation reports on research, Kenya trip, Mumbai Wikiconference; Canada, Hungary and Estonia; English Wikinews forked

Foundation report for August published

The Wikimedia Foundation's report covering its activities during the month of August has been published on the Wikimedia blog. Among those items not to have received coverage in earlier editions of The Signpost is the publication of a final list of projects completed as part of the Wikimedia Summer of Research (WSoR) scheme, which ended in August (a Summary of Findings has since been compiled). In similar news, an update was given about the Kaggle Data competition, where teams were asked to "predict the number of edits a Wikipedia editor will make, based on a training dataset" in order to share in a cash prize (see previous Signpost coverage). According to the report, the competition, which is drawing to a close, has attracted "79 teams, 167 participants and 743 submissions".

Asaf Bartov at the 2011 Wikimania

The Foundation was also active in its pursuit of a more global editor base during August. For example, the report describes how the Head of Global South Relationships, Asaf Bartov, visited Kenya for four days. During the trip he delivered "five public talks on university campuses in Nairobi and Mombasa as well as a tech outreach talk at the Nairobi iHub". He also led a workshop for local Wikimedians and scouted out potential local partners for a more substantial expansion into Kenya. In addition, the WMF Engineering department investigated the possibilities of the USSD protocol in facilitating mobile browsing (an issue also covered in this week's "Technology report"). Meanwhile, the report announced the start of an Education Program in Canada, to which 1700 students are signed up, and a $40,000+ support package for a WikiConference in Mumbai in November (further information is available via foundation-l).

The monthly report also gives publicity to the activities of departments who do not otherwise receive it. For example, the human resources department noted that although it was still behind its target for hiring new staff, it has been able to close the gap, whilst it was also reported that the legal department would be receiving four legal interns, and it was "happy to have their support" in the next few months. According to the report, it has also recently engaged with two external firms: MarkMonitor, to help it track registration of trademark-infringing domain names (for example, cases of typosquatting; see previous Signpost coverage) and Californian law firm Hiaring Smith, to help it manage its existing portfolio of trademarks both in the United States and abroad. The legal teams also finalised the Foundation's internal legal policies during August.

In brief

Milestones

In addition to the Hungarian Wikipedia's 200,000 articles, mentioned above, the following projects also reached major milestones:


















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