Press releases/February 2011 Wikimedia selects Watchmouse for monitoring services

Wikimedia Foundation selects Watchmouse monitoring service “Live Health” of Wikipedia and additional websites now posted and updated in real time

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – February 9, 2011 – WatchMouse, a globally recognized self-service website and application performance monitoring company, today announced that the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation will utilize the WatchMouse Public Status Pages to display the uptime and availability of their array of user-built projects. The Foundation operates Wikipedia and its sister projects, which are accessed by more than 395 million UVs (comScore Dec 2010) from around the world, and in over 250 languages. The Wikipedia Public Status Page can be found at http://status.wikimedia.org

“The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to be one of the most transparent non-profit organizations in the world,” said Danese Cooper, Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The Foundation is deeply concerned with growing our global user and editor base, which makes it critical for us to monitor and maintain the live status of all of our websites — and providing a public portal for our tens of thousands of volunteers to track uptime as well. WatchMouse understands and supports our global mission to spread free knowledge around the world, and with their help we're able to push our mission even further.”

The WatchMouse Public Status Page technology ( http://www.watchmouse.com/en/feature/public-status-page.html ) monitors performance and gathers availability data across a network of over 50 stations in more than 30 countries. The Public Status Pages are free to subscribers and trialists, and inform website visitors of the status of a specified selection of a company’s online services. This results in reduced customer service contacts and fosters goodwill with users by publishing the live health of a website. The actual Public Status Pages are hosted in the cloud using Amazon's S3 and EC2 products ensuring they are up even when a company’s website may not be. Additional WatchMouse customers utilizing Public Status Pages include Twitter, WordPress and Zappos.

“Non-profit organizations are transparent by nature and have a willingness to provide information about their business activities,” stated Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. “We’re pleased to partner with the Wikimedia Foundation and to support all non-profit organizations by offering a deep discount on our monitoring services.”

For more information about discounted monitoring services for non-profit organizations, please visit http://www.watchmouse.com/non_profit_offering.php.

About WatchMouse WatchMouse is a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring. WatchMouse products test the behavior and availability of websites, services and applications utilizing an infrastructure that includes over 50 worldwide monitoring stations, in 30+ countries. WatchMouse provides many of the world's leading companies including Twitter, WordPress, Wikimedia Foundation, Philips, ING and VeriSign with independent confirmation of both in-house and supplier performance. Subscribers and trialists also have the ability to publish the live health of their websites utilizing the WatchMouse Public Status Page technology. Supporting a broad, rapidly growing international customer base, Founded in 2002, WatchMouse is a privately held company headquartered in The Netherlands. Follow @watchmouse on Twitter or learn more at http://www.watchmouse.com.
 * http://www.watchmouse.com

About the Wikimedia Foundation
 * http://wikimediafoundation.org
 * http://blog.wikimedia.org

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 390 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property world-wide (Dec, 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 17 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.

Media Contacts:

Mindy M. Hull Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse Tel. +1 415 889 9977 (US) Tel. +31 62 504 7680 (NL) mindy@undefinedmercuryglobalpartners.com

Ginny Cain Mercury Global Partners for WatchMouse Tel. +1 925 426 0646 (US) ginny@undefinedmercuryglobalpartners.com

Jay Walsh Head of Communications Wikimedia Foundation Tel. +1 415 839 6885 x 6609 jwalsh@undefinedwikimedia.org