Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-02-22/News and notes

$2 Million donation, cybersquatting, comScore statistics and more

The Wikimedia Foundation officially announced a $2 million grant from Google. The grant will be used to help pay for core operating costs and to support the initiative to make Wikipedia more accessible to the general public. According to Sue Gardner on Foundation-l, the grant is completely unrestricted.

The donation comes via the Tides Foundation, a donor advised fund that managed the donation for the Google Charitable Giving Fund. The Wikimedia press release for the donation noted past collaborations between Google and Wikimedia, such as the feature in the Google Translation Toolkit to help translate Wikipedia articles, and the Google-led Swahili Wikipedia editing contest (see previous articles: Swahili contest, translate toolkit). However, this is the first financial gift from the search engine giant to Wikimedia.

Several news outlets commented on the grant. BusinessWeek commented on the mutually beneficial relationship between Wikimedia and Google that this grant would help to foster. Among many sources, CNET was one to comment on the fact that the announcement was made publicly by Jimmy Wales in a tweet (first re-tweeting advisory board member Mitch Kapor who posted the news after an internal announcement was made). And the Wall Street Journal, along with other sources, quoted a statement in the press release from Sergey Brin who said Wikipedia was "one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet."

International commentary on the donation included commentary in Chinese from 163.com.

After filing a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in December, the Wikimedia Foundation was granted the domain name "softwarewikipedia.com", which had been registered by a Chinese company. The February 9 decision by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center found that the domain name was "confusingly similar" to the Foundation's "Wikipedia" trademark and that it had been used to run a website which "incorporated many of the look-and-feel elements of [Wikipedia] (including colour scheme, layout, typeface, section names and sizes, menu items, and spherical logo)". The Foundation was represented by The Gigalaw Firm, as in last year's UDRP cases, where it had secured "visualwikipedia.com" and two typosquatting domains (see previous story).

Stu West, a member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, has posted the latest comScore data on Meta. The data is donated by comScore, which measures traffic to websites and analyzes the demographics of site visitors.

ComScore estimates that in January 2010, 365 million unique visitors visited Wikimedia projects (all projects combined). This makes the Wikimedia Foundation the 5th most-visited Web content provider worldwide, behind Google (including YouTube), Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Facebook. Of those visitors, an estimated 189.9 million visited the English Wikipedia.

Other estimates provided by comScore include the age and geographical demographics of visitors, along with the projects visited: Wikipedia gets 362.2 million estimated visitors, with Wiktionary receiving 10.5 million and the other projects trailing behind. Finally, 60.1% of the visitors to Wikimedia projects are estimated to come via Google searches.

West put the comScore data together with Erik Zachte's editor statistics for December, to estimate what percentage of visitors are active editors. If both data sources are correct, only 0.025% of visitors to Wikimedia projects made more than 5 edits in that month. For the English Wikipedia, only 0.021% of visitors have more than 5 edits. The number is higher if you count visitors with any edits; according to West, "If you include all users who made at least one edit, it's about fifteen times higher at one-third of one percent." Of the languages compared by West, the proportion of active editors is lower for the Japanese, Spanish, and French Wikipedias, but slightly higher for the German and Russian Wikipedias.

West also created a map visualizing where traffic to the Wikimedia projects comes from, using data from Erik Zachte (see previous story).

• The RFC on BLP guidelines is ongoing, with input requested on the many proposals; there is a current motion to close the RFC by March 1st (see previous story).
• Wikimedia UK is looking for proposals for projects for the chapter to undertake in the coming year. Proposals are due March 1st.
• The November 2009 report to the Board of Trustees was posted on Foundation-l.
• An Australian researcher is looking for Wikibooks contributors to be interviewed for a research project.
• User:Smallman12q has proposed on NASA's open government forum that the U.S. space agency work with Wikimedia; the proposal can be commented and voted on.
• As part of the renaming of the naming conventions guideline, the guideline Wikipedia:Naming conventions (categories) has been moved to Wikipedia:Category names.
• The usability initiative has internationalized its beta toolbar by adding icons for bold, italics, etc corresponding to many languages. Help is still needed creating these icons for some languages.

• 2005: a vote is started to resolve the naming dispute over the article on Gdańsk (also known as Danzig); a media flurry continues over a possible relationship between Google and Wikipedia
• 2006: Wikimedia UK (the original incarnation) is founded
• 2007: report shows half of Wikipedia's traffic comes from Google
• 2008: Michael Snow and Domas Mituzas appointed to the board
• 2009: Usability.wikimedia.org launched

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ed. note: including two items for 2005's "this week in history" is intentional. Although I couldn't pass by the historic Gdansk/Danzig dispute, the historical coincidence of February 2005's discussion of whether Google would be supporting Wikimedia's servers with this week's announcement of Google's $2M grant was too striking not to include.

And in 2007, the Signpost covered a story about where traffic to the projects originates from, quoting data that seems similar to this week's story on the comScore analysis of traffic to the projects; if anything, the proportion of hits to Wikimedia that originate in Google searches has increased in the past three years. The relationship of the search engine to the health of Wikimedia's projects and their continued stunning growth has indeed been a topic of discussion and analysis for many years now, and with this week's announcement will no doubt continue to be. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 07:10, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

RFC for BLP

The author is assuming that everyone knows what RFC and BLP mean. Many people reading this article may not Racklever (talk) 13:18, 24 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• clicking on the link spells it out, and there's also an explanation in past signpost stories; it's a request for comments on biographies of living persons. However, actually explaining what that means and what's going on would take far longer :) I wish I had time to write up everything with context. N&N needs more authors. -- phoebe / (talk to me) 18:15, 24 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• This week in history - Thanks for adding this section to Signpost. It provides an interesting glimpse into Wikipedia's past. —mattisse (Talk) 16:35, 24 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Editor statistics

If I am reading those editor statistics correctly, they indicate that the total number of editors has been rising over the past several months, and we are up near the historic total high. Ha! The reports of our impending demise are greatly exaggerated. -- Ssilvers (talk) 01:32, 25 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]