Logging in to Wikipedia was originally implemented uniquely with separate accounts and passwords for each individual project. As a result, the person behind a certain username on one project was not necessarily the same person who had registered the username in another. This technical complication, though unimportant at the time, has proved troublesome as the project has grown past the initial handful of small wikis to today's global Wikimedia community. The first proposal for what came to be known as single-user login was drafted in June 2005, and technical maestro Brion Vibber presented the first working plans for its implementation at Wikimania 2006 (Signpost coverage). However, work on the project was placed on hold to avoid technical complications in the 2006 Foundation board election, and so the requisite extension, Extension:CentralAuth, was not ready for testing until early 2008. After testing by administrators, single-user login (SUL) was finally made publicly available on an opt-in basis to all users in May 2008.

This system worked and solved the issues at the time, but was far from perfect: username conflicts that could not be resolved on a first-claimant basis persisted. In 2009, the default SUL configuration was changed so that newly registered usernames detected to be conflict-free were automatically globally unified after creation. However, this change left accounts already created untouched (your author, for instance, registered in late 2008, and remembers having to unify his account manually). In 2012, this issue re-emerged in a discussion on the meta-wiki (Signpost coverage) as something that needed to be improved on, but technical feasibility emerged as a thorny issue in the ensuing discussions. Nonetheless, as the project matrix has continued to grow, the need to unify accounts for cross-wiki compatibility in the various toolsets under development has become more urgent. Since early 2013, when an SUL audit was conducted, the Foundation and members of the community have been working hard on what should be the final step in SUL development—SUL centralization (referred to in the 2013 SUL audit as the "Grand Unification").

This process is now entering its long-awaited final phase with the upcoming SUL finalization, scheduled for April 15, less than a month away. Finalization has been in the works for a long time—the first proposed deadline was May 2013, but after highly controversial setbacks in the July 2013 VisualEditor rollout (Signpost coverage), product manager James Forrester moved to the VisualEditor project full-time. In January 2014, Dan Garry was brought in and given the job as part of his portfolio, but in the time it took Garry to acclimatize to the job, his focus was moved to the mobile project; though much of the necessary engineering work was done that summer the requisite resources for finalization elusive. The current initiative, headed since October 2014 by Community Liaison Keegan Peterzell, has been underway since then, and is on the cusp of completion.

The current plan is as follows: editors with conflicting accounts will be measured in terms of precedence, and the lower-precedence editors will have their accounts renamed and globally unified to another, unique, username. An announcement, which will be placed on the talkpages of the renamed users, has been drafted and a localized special page, Special:UsersWhoWillBeRenamed, has been created to assist in the process. In the event of a clash between an existing global account and an existing local account with the same name, the global account will be unified and the clashing local account will be locally renamed by appending text identifying the local wiki, for instance, Oldusername~enwiki. In the event of a clash between multiple local accounts where no global account exists, a software script will globalize the highest-precedence account chosen from the list. The precise terms of the precedence measurement algorithm are still in draft form, but will take editing "age", edit count, and, in some high-level cases, user rights, into account. R

Outgoing CTCO Gayle Karen Young's staff photo.

Incoming COO Terence Gilbey's staff photo.

Wikimedia Foundation chief talent and culture officer Gayle Karen Young announced her departure from the Foundation this week. The CTCO is the executive staff member at the Wikimedia Foundation responsible for maintaining best "people-practices", overseeing activities including recruitment, on-board training, organizational management, skills development, and performance assessment. Young was hired for the position in December 2011, replacing outgoing first-time CTCO Cyn Skyberg in a position first advertised as "chief human resources officer", and since expanded in scope. Young was hired after an extensive search involving hundreds of candidates and six finalists, and including, as is customary for some Foundation hirings, the completion of a strategy project under the purview of the Foundation before final hiring. In her notification to the community on the foundation-l mailing list then-executive director Sue Gardner stated that Young is "a seasoned HR consultant and organizational psychologist with expertise in leadership development, change management, facilitation, group dynamics, and Agile team effectiveness training. ... she's an iconoclastic geek who goes to Comic Con, but unlike most geeks she is warm and people-centred: when she was a kid, she wanted to grow up to be Deanna Troi from Star Trek."

In a staff biography published on the Foundation blog in 2013 Young elicited that the social implications of access-to-knowledge disparity are what drove her interest in and work at the Foundation, stating that "Knowledge is a prerequisite for social change ... access to knowledge has to be a foundation of that. When you look at places in the world where conditions are not there for people to thrive, it usually has to do and starts with a lack of access to information and ideas by a given group or party." As the post—and Young's March 18 farewell message, which prominently features "dancing with Wikipedians on the beach in Hong Kong, singing 'I Will Revise' off-key at the top of my lungs"—indicate, Young was most surprised and excited by the passion that the members of the Wikimedia movement demonstrated, stating that "intellectual rigor and generosity are fundamentally based on the best parts of us as human beings."

Young will be replaced in that role by interim chief operating officer Terry Gilbey. Executive director Lila Tretikov introduced Gilbey to the wikimedia-l mailing list by stating that "Terry Gilbey will be joining us as interim Chief Operating Officer, responsible for building rigor and discipline around our operational processes. Terry’s role will help WMF stabilize our core operations so we will be ready and able to adapt and innovate in our changing environment." According to the Foundation's job description for the title as it was applied in the past, Gilbey will be in charge of "overall administration and business operations of the Wikimedia Foundation." However this new executive position has been dormant for some time, and so the hiring represents a change in strategic focus within the Foundation, with Tretikov stating that "one of our top priorities for the WMF in 2015 is improving organizational effectiveness ... this means we need to strengthen WMF's ability to set and deliver on commitments, improve organizational discipline around decision making, and mature internal processes and systems." Chief financial officer Garfield Byrd will now report to and work with Gilbey within the WMF's organizational hierarchy, and so as both new COO and interim CTCO Gibley will be responsible for oversight of both the Finance and HR teams. More details on the precise nature of Gilbey's position and on what the hiring means for the Foundation's organizational upper management will come in the metrics and activities monthly meeting in April. Tretikov briefly described his background as "an early adopter of Tor ... [who] believes strongly in the right to privacy and the free and open access to knowledge as an equalizer." R

From the Signpost 21 March 2005 issue, "Wikipedia reaches milestone with half-million English articles":

Wikipedia added its 500,000th article in English last Thursday, with Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union being designated as the milestone article.

In the half-million pool to guess when Wikipedia would cross this threshold, the winner was Llywrch. Nobody managed to pick the correct date, however; Llywrch was the closest, coming within one day by guessing March 18. The pool was held last June, and another pool for the millionth article was set to close once the half-million mark was reached.

Sj started a press release to send to media outlets publicizing this event. Some even got in on the news without any prodding. In anticipation of the milestone, The Inquirer published an article Thursday entitled "Wikipedia nears half million article mark", coming barely a few hours before it was actually reached (The Inquirer also happened to be the first media organization to break the news of Wikipedia's one-millionth article overall last September).

A number of people were busy watching events as Wikipedia's article count approached this milestone, but it was still difficult to pin down the actual 500,000th article. In the end, technical limitations and some miscommunication made it impossible to be completely certain of its identity. [...] Although realistically a number of candidates might be considered tied for the honor, commenting on the designation of Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union, Alterego said, "I like the sound of that so we can move on."

Moving on certainly could describe the transformation of Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union, which grew considerably after being designated as the 500,000th article. As started by Mikkalai, the article had a couple of paragraphs and a few placeholder sections, along with two links to Wikisource documents. Mikkalai commented, "I didn't expect to get myself in the limelight", and warned not to expect a fully-developed article anytime soon."

However, the article attracted a number of editors and by Sunday had already received nearly 100 edits. As a result, one of the sections in particular, dealing with "Exile settlements", had been significantly expanded. The article also had at least one reference to support the content. Meanwhile, an active discussion had already begun on the talk page over what the sources said about particular ethnic groups.

— 21 March 2005 edition: Wikipedia reaches milestone with half-million English articles

The Signpost has written about numerous project milestones in our decade-long history covering the Wikimedia movement—just this week we are covering the 25th million upload on Commons—and this one, covered just two months into the Signpost's existence, was our very first. The community went on to celebrate its millionth article just one year later, in March 2006, at the cusp of the highest growth rate in the project's history. R

• 25 million photos on Commons: According to Commons user Multichill, this week saw the uploading of the 25 millionth image on Wikimedia Commons, a photograph of the main courtyard of the Mevlid-i Halil Mosque in Şanlıurfa, Turkey. For a visual history of the number of files on Commons, see this graph of the total number of uploads over time. In January 2012, as the Signpost reported, the Commons upload total hit 12 million uploads, meaning that in the ensuing three years, the Commons project has more than doubled in size. R, G
• From ticks to clicks: Wikimedia UK has announced that it is working alongside the Open Coalition, a loose association of open space organizations, and Demos, a UK think tank, on developing a newly announced project called "From ticks to clicks – understanding and building digital democracy". The proposal is a submission to the Knight News Challenge, organized by the journalism non-profit John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, seeking to "produce the research, outreach, collaborations and advocacies that are needed to aid politicians, academics, community organisers, civil society and Web innovators in making British democracy fit for the digital age." If successful, the Wikimedia UK hopes to introduce a three-step digital democracy plan with hopes to develop a long-term training and capacity-building program in collaboration with the UK government. Wikimedians are encouraged to leave feedback on the entry's page in the challenge. R
• IAmA: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Lila Tretikov, and the American Civil Liberties Union's legal director Jameel Jaffer participated in a Reddit "ask me anything" on 20 March starting at 16:00 UTC. This comes on the heels of the Foundation's announcement of participation in the ACLU's lawsuit against the NSA last week; see last week's special report for more detail. E, R

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-18/Serendipity

2015-03-18

Does the Wikimedia fundraising survey address community concerns?

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By Andreas Kolbe

The publication of the Wikimedia survey findings on fundraising questions, compiled by Lake Research Partners (see last week's special report in the Signpost), came three months after significant concerns were voiced on the Wikimedia mailing list and on meta:Talk:Fundraising_principles about the design and wording of the December 2014 fundraising banners and e-mails. The fundraising team promised to post feedback analysis on March 1. To the extent that this survey may be viewed as a response to community concerns, does it address them?

Let us revisit the debate that took place three months ago. I will focus here on concerns expressed about the banner and e-mail wordings, rather than complaints about the size and design of the banners.

Fundraising banner wording

Slide 16 of the survey findings document displays a sample fundraising banner. For reference, it reads as follows:

DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS, We'll get right to it: This week we ask our readers to help us. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We survive on donations averaging about $15. Only a tiny portion of our readers give. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. That's right, the price of a cup of coffee is all we need. We're a small non-profit with costs of a top website: servers, staff and programs. Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park where we can all go to learn. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free. Thank you.

This is one of several, all very similar wordings that were used. For a longer example, see the image above right.

Community concerns

A number of longstanding community members felt that the messages on the fundraising banners were misleading, given the Wikimedia Foundation's unprecedented wealth. Below are excerpts from posts made by community members on the public Wikimedia-l mailing list. Emphases are mine.

Wittylama wrote on November 27, 2014:

“

I am however negatively-struck by the finishing statement, a return to the old motto of "keep us online without advertising for one more year". I thought that we had collectively agreed that banners that directly threaten advertising next year were not going to happen any more. Remember when we used to get lots of mainstream media reports saying "Wikipedia will soon have ads!" as a result of those campaigns in the past? (This is different from simply saying "we don't have ads and we're proud of it", etc.)

”

Wikimedia developer Ori Livneh wrote on November 30, 2014:

“

I agree that the urgency and alarm of the copy is not commensurate with my (admittedly limited) understanding of our financial situation. Could we run a survey that places the banner copy alongside a concise statement of the Foundation's financials, and which asks the respondent to indicate whether they regard the copy as misleading. Quantitative assessments of fundraising strategy ought to consider impact on all assets, tangible or not. This includes the Foundation's goodwill and reputation, which are (by common wisdom) easy to squander and hard to repair. It is critical that we be maximally deliberate on this matter. In addition to the survey suggested above, I want to also propose that we: (a) solicit input from a neutral reputation management consultancy, and (b) create a forum for staffers to talk openly about this matter, without fear of reprisal.

”

Ryan Lane, the creator of Wikimedia Labs, wrote on December 2, 2014:

“

Today I had a coworker private message me, worried that Wikipedia was in financial trouble. He asked me if the worst happened, would the content still be available so that it could be resurrected? I assured him that Wikimedia is healthy, has reserves, and successfully reaches the budget every year. Basically I said there wasn't much to worry about, because there isn't. The messaging being used is actively scaring people. This isn't the first person that's asked me about this. When they find out there's not a real problem, their reaction quickly changes. They become angry. They feel manipulated.

”

Administrator Martijn Hoekstra wrote on December 3, 2014:

“

I'm alarmed about the content. That should come to no surprise to the fundraising team, because I can't imagine this content hasn't been written to evoke the maximum amount of alarm. But it crosses the line towards dishonesty.

”

Former Arbitration Committee member John Vandenberg wrote on December 4, 2014, in response to Lila Tretikov:

“

Lila, the concern is not that the fundraiser is working, which your soundbite confirms, but that it is deceiving people, or at least manipulating them 'too much' to be consistent with our values. One way to test that would be to organise a survey for donors, informing them of the current financials, the current strategy document and current status on achieving that strategy, a breakdown on where the money is currently going and ask them whether they are happy with the amount and tone of the information they were given before being asked to donote. [sic] WMF donors may already being [sic] surveyed like this (ideally done by academics in the discipline rather than WMF staff/contractors); if so, hopefully that data can be shared.

”

MZMcBride wrote on December 18, 2014:

“

The fundraising rules also need to make explicit that lying is flatly unacceptable. Having the first rule be "don't lie" might be the easiest solution here, though it's shocking that this needs to be written down. The fundraising teams, past and present, regularly lie to our readers in an effort to extract donations. Specific examples of lying include [...] repeatedly making manipulative and misleading suggestions that continued donations keep the projects online. The Wikimedia Foundation recently raised $20 million. Assuming a generous $3 million to keep the projects online per year, that's over six years that the projects could continue operating before needing to ask for money again. Contrast with e-mails and in-site donation advertising that suggest that the lights will go off soon if readers don't donate today.

”

David Gerard, another former Arbitrator, replied to MZMcBride minutes later:

“

And we're not talking about semantic arguments, we're seeing blatant falsehoods.

”

Does the survey address or invalidate these concerns?

Survey findings

Some of the main findings of the survey are:

1. Ignorance and misconceptions about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia are common. For example, slide 3 states that "Although a majority of Wikipedia users correctly identify the organization that supports it as a non-profit, many are misinformed or uncertain."
2. The most common reason for donating is, "I use Wikipedia often and want to support it", refined after additional questions to "I use Wikipedia and would like to see it remain a source of information" (slides 9–10).
3. Most users find the fundraising messages "convincing" (slide 23).

In aggregate, these findings—that people are generally not well informed about even the most basic organisational aspects of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, that they would like Wikipedia to remain available to them, and that they find a banner message calling for donations so that Wikipedia can stay "online and ad-free for another year" convincing—are not particularly surprising. This is precisely what the criticism on the mailing list was based on.

Most importantly, I found no evidence in the Lake Research Partners document that what John Vandenberg and Ori Livneh asked for in the posts quoted above—i.e. that survey respondents be given detailed information about current financials, strategies and cost breakdowns, and then asked to re-assess the fundraising messages—was done as part of this survey.

Receiving such information is certainly capable of drastically changing some donors' minds, as illustrated by the following comments posted on Twitter:

“

@Wikipedia can you explain this please. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e3/FINAL_13_14From_KPMG.pdf#page=4 #keepitfree #charity #donations #scam #BalanceSheets #wantthetruth #wtf i can assure you, @Wikipedia WILL NOT see another penny from me. I know plenty of charities that r much more in need I am astonished about their deceiving and unethical be[haviours] in regards to their #keepitfree #donation campaign

”

That the survey findings remain silent on this topic is unfortunate.

Fundraiser performance

The Wikimedia Foundation's revenue has increased every year of its existence, and by about 1,000% over the past six years or so. (See Wikimedia Foundation#Finances.) In addition, the Foundation has tended to overachieve its revenue targets and underspend in recent years, leading to substantial increases in its reserve.

The December 2014 fundraiser apparently was the most successful ever. According to WMF fundraising data, more than $30 million was raised from December 2 through December 31—over $10 million more than the fundraising target mentioned in the January 2015 Wikimedia Foundation blog post, "Thank you for keeping knowledge free and accessible". The combined total for November and December 2014 was close to $40 million, around two-thirds of the planned total for the 2014/2015 financial year.

The automated thank-you e-mail for donors reportedly read (my emphasis),

“

My name is Lila Tretikov, and I’m the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. Over the past year, gifts like yours powered our efforts to expand the encyclopedia in 287 languages and to make it more accessible all over the world. [...] Our mission is lofty and presents great challenges. Most people who use Wikipedia are surprised to hear it is run by a non-profit organization and funded by your donations. Each year, just enough people donate to keep the sum of all human knowledge available for everyone. Thank you for making this mission possible. On behalf of nearly half a billion people who read Wikipedia, thousands of volunteer editors, and staff at the Foundation, I thank you for keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free this year.

”

Is it true that each year, "just enough" people donate to keep the sum of all human knowledge online and available for everyone? No. Looking at the figures, each year just enough people have donated for the Wikimedia Foundation to have been able to

• accumulate close to $28 million in cash or cash equivalents and over $23 million in investments as of 30 June 2014 (i.e. before the December 2014 fundraiser),
• increase their annual spending by more than 1,000% since 2008,
• increase the number of paid Wikimedia Foundation staff positions from 11 in 2007 to around 250 today, with dozens more paid staff in various Wikimedia chapters.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation's most recent financial statement, less than 5 cents of each revenue dollar (a little over $2.5 million) went to Internet hosting.

The single biggest expense item was Wikimedia Foundation salaries and wages (nearly $20 million). Most of that goes to the software engineering department, whose work in recent years has often been controversial in the community; witness recent debates about VisualEditor, the Media Viewer, Superprotect and mobile user profiles.

Times have changed

From a historical perspective, it's interesting to contrast the current state of affairs with what Jimmy Wales told a TED audience in 2005 (time code 4:35, emphasis mine):

“

So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars, and that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee ... We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.

”

A fundraising message focused on keeping Wikipedia "online and ad-free" was entirely appropriate at a time when that was indeed the project's main cost. But those times are long past.

The influx of hundreds of millions of dollars—a reflection of the goodwill Wikipedia's volunteer-created content generates around the world—is bringing about a major structural change in the Wikimedia movement, creating hundreds of paid jobs at the Wikimedia Foundation and in Wikimedia chapters around the world, in particular to move software engineering tasks from volunteers to paid staff (with mixed results to date). It's where the lion's share of donors' money is going.

The survey leaves me with little confidence that readers and donors are aware of these facts, and it tells us nothing about how they would feel if they learnt them.

Future fundraising

If the uppermost value involved in Wikimedia fundraising is to generate as much money as possible, then the findings of this survey can be used to argue that there is no problem. According to the survey results, people don't mind the fundraising banners all that much; they find them compelling—and donate money as a result. The most recent campaign was outstandingly successful in financial terms. This is what fundraising campaigns are for, right?

Critics like those quoted above might counter that the Wikimedia movement's aspirations are about providing full and accurate information to the public, and that transparency and honesty should take precedence over self-interest.

In a little over eight months' time, there will be another December fundraiser. I look forward to seeing which of these arguments will prevail, and whether the 2015 banners will once more ask people to donate tens of millions of dollars in order to keep Wikipedia "online and ad-free".

Andreas Kolbe has been a Wikipedia contributor since 2006 and is a longstanding contributor to the Signpost's "In the media" section. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-18/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-18/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-03-18/Humour

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