FAQ
Communication: What is "Answers"?
Answers is a potential new system of the Wikimedia Foundation to put Wikimedia volunteer communities in touch with staff. It is intended to provide a central point where community members who need assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation or who have questions about the Foundation or its activities can reach out and find answers. This system is being unrolled on a trial basis to test its efficiency and usefulness to communities.
You can help determine the usefulness of the system by using it!
In brief, if you have questions for or about the Wikimedia Foundation, you can address them to answers. Many of the questions we receive are expected to be answered on this page, as most questions will be of general interest. These Answers will form a growing bank of easily accessible information. By submitting a question, you agree to release your submission into the public domain and therefore allow us to use, transfer, and post your submission freely and without further permission. Questions generally will not be attributed; they may be published here in whole or in part and will often likely be combined with other questions on the same subject. If you request, we will try not to reveal your username and contact information on this Answers page.
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Please note, however, that we treat Answers as a Foundation hosted email list and therefore cannot guarantee privacy under the Privacy policy. For example, some letters will be sent directly to staff. If the questions are more appropriately handled by volunteers, you will either be referred to the appropriate point of contact or your letter will be forwarded to the volunteer response team. Accordingly, your correspondence may be seen by staff as well as select volunteers and third parties, including independent contractors of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Please review Answers/Process for specific terms and more information.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Foundation: What does the Wikimedia Foundation do?
What is the purpose of the Wikimedia Foundation? How does it support the Wikimedia projects?
Founded in June 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation has from the start been dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. It coordinates with a Board of Trustees in developing strategies for advancing the educational missions of the projects: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons,Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikiquote, and Wikispecies. It operates several hundred servers in three locations to maintain smoothly functioning websites for the 500 million + people who visit the projects every month. In conjunction with Template:CHAPTER-COUNT independent, local Wikimedia Chapters, it coordinates public and corporate fundraising to sustain the projects, and, in coordination with a large body of volunteers, it helps to develop and maintain the MediaWiki software used by all of the projects.
One of the areas the Wikimedia Foundation focuses on in furthering its goals is outreach. Outreach opportunities include aiding in new user recruitment (such as, for instance, in educational institutions) and in expanding markets (as with mobile and offline). Analyzing trends and developments, it is constantly looking for new ways to sustain and nurture the projects, as, for instance, with the provision of training videos or new tools for experienced and new users. --Mdennis 17:16, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
Foundation: How many employees does the WMF have, and what do they do?
- How many people work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and what kind of jobs do they do?
There's a short answer to that and a long answer. The short answer is the easy one:
- The Wikimedia Foundation has a staff of Template:STAFF-COUNT and a number of independent contractors. Three distinct departments hold the bulk of staff: community, global development, and technology. The technology department is by far the largest. Staff not falling into those departments work in management, finance, and administration, which includes legal protection of our work.
- Among the responsibilities of the technology department are website operations and software development. The community department focuses on things like reader relations, community programs, and fundraising. The global development department supports the global education project, chapter programs, and helps grow Wikimedia worldwide, among other things.
This is, of course, a very incomplete picture. There's a considerably longer answer inside the collapsed box below, but it, too, is incomplete. The duties of the staff members of the Wikimedia Foundation are flexible, constantly evolving to meet the Foundation's goals, which makes any efforts to answer this succinctly doomed. In fact, some of the job titles are intentionally vague, to reflect that responsibilities may flex a bit with demand.
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While spotlighting several departments below, I do not in any way wish to minimize the work of staff members who do not fall into these departments. The legal team, for instance, have their hands full dealing with the challenges of supporting an international network of projects and volunteers. Human resources and the finance departments both play key roles in keeping the Wikimedia Foundation operational. I'm trying to keep this answer brief, while at the same time focusing on those staff activities that inspire the most questions in our communities. The executive staff and strategy teamAmong the executive staff, Executive Director Sue Gardner oversees the operations of the Foundation and frequently interacts with the public on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation. She works directly with the Board of Trustees to help craft strategic vision and to ensure that the Foundation makes available the resources to fulfill it. Among other duties, she also creates and manages the budget and oversees and coordinates fundraising and donor management activities, as well as developing other revenue sources. Sue frequently makes herself available to discuss community concerns over IRC at office hours. Deputy Director and VP of Technology Erik Möller assists Sue in meeting her goals, including acting on her behalf during her absence. Erik interacts with the public, with business partners and with staff, working closely with senior and technical staff. The interim head of the technology department, Erik also leads the strategy team (including Senior Product Manager Howie Fung and Senior Research Analyst Dario Taraborelli), who guide the efforts of the whole Foundation based on the priorities that emerged from the strategic planning process. The strategy team has put together an overview of Wikimedia's five year plan. (If you want to know more about that, you may also be interested in perusing the Wikimedia strategy wiki.) The global development departmentChief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead probably described the global development department best himself in July 2011:
The global development department works to stimulate growth, increasing the availability and usability of Wikimedia Foundation Projects to those who have not traditionally had access (for example, with mobile or offline outreach) and in those areas of the world which have been underrepresented. They connect globally with business partners and coordinate with Wikimedia Chapters. (Wikimedia Chapters are local independent organizations that organize local events and projects and spread the word about Wikimedia and the free culture movement, while also providing a point of contact for volunteers, potential partners and supporters.) They develop mobile and offline products and services and oversee Foundation grants as well as managing Wikimedia's brand, communications, and merchandise. The global development department also works with other Wikimedia departments on projects and research intended to help improve the Wikimedia Foundation's efforts with its communities, for instance conducting quantitative research into editors and readers and working with the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. To look at one specific activity, the global department has recently launched the Global Education Program. This program reaches out to instructors at institutions of higher learning, encouraging them to assign article-writing as classwork using the model developed in the previous Public Policy Initiative. The department assists them by providing lesson plans and helping them coordinate with ambassadors from the volunteer community. You can look into this and other activities of the global department by reading the Wikimedia Global blog. The technology departmentManaging the technological operations of the Wikimedia Foundation requires a tight collaboration amongst staff, contractors, and volunteers. The Technology department (also referred to as "Engineering") organizes staff and contractors, while also supporting volunteer efforts. Volunteers are a crucial component in the technological operations of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. Although the Wikimedia Foundation includes software developers and engineers to assist volunteer efforts, particularly with issues that require more resources than volunteers may have access to, it recognizes and appreciates how important volunteers are in the process. For that reason, it maintains a "Technical liaison; developer relations" subgroup focused on facilitating work between staff and volunteers. Practically speaking, the technology department supports and develops the MediaWiki software and develops and implements technical strategies and programs to increase reach, quality and volunteer participation. In conjunction with contractors and volunteers, the technology department manages maintenance, upgrades, backups, disaster recovery and technical support for the websites. Engineers each belong to one of four groups, reporting to an engineering program manager or director. The four groups in the technology department are:
Operations ("ops") runs such infrastructure as hardware, network, datacenters, infraustructure, backups, and system administration, matters related to the daily operations of Foundation projects. The features team develops new features for MediaWiki, such as LiquidThreads, a visual editor, and the Article feedback tool. These new features are developed and implemented in response to the needs of the volunteer communities and research conducted by staff and volunteers. Mobile features and platforms have a dedicated group, which is managed alongside Special projects (technical aspects of fundraising, and offline features & platforms). For instance, they work on CentralNotice for messaging and the platform for organizing donors. They make sure mobile devices are properly recognized and that reading and editing experiences for users who utilize them is good quality. They also work to develop offline applications such as the Kiwix offline app. General engineering deals with MediaWiki core, development tools (e.g. bug tracker, software repository), and general services to the other groups (Quality assurance, code review, communications). The technology department issues updates about their activities at the Wikimedia Tech blog. The community departmentThe community department's job is to work with the communities involved in the Wikimedia Foundation's many projects. In addition to the community of readers, each project has the broad community of volunteers who edit it, with smaller focused interest groups among those. There are communities that cross projects, such as the communities of volunteers that handle e-mails directed to the Foundation about the projects. And, of course, there are the donors and the final community: members of the public who have not yet begun to use the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. The community department handles fundraising. Towards the latter goal, it organizes an annual fundraiser, coordinating with local chapters. It also collects donations throughout the year, ensuring that donors are appropriately thanked, and coordinates major gifts and foundation grants. Just as the body of text and images that are hosted on the projects are built by the contributions of many individuals, so are the funds that sustain them. Our community of donors are sometimes less visible but certainly invaluable contributors in meeting our goals. It also addresses reader relations and community programs. It works with the projects on questions and concerns ranging from "where do we send this guy who's threatening to sue us" to "we've got a user who says he's going to commit suicide" to "How do I localize the Wikipedia logo for our new language version?" (A small sampling of actual questions received in the same week!) It crafts multimedia presentations for readers and donors to help them understand the goals of the Foundation and the work being done by the community of volunteers. The community department also conducts and leads research intended to help the Foundation and the communities reach our shared goals. For example, in 2011 the community department hosted a "Summer of Research", with research fellows focusing heavily on how to attract and retain new contributors so that the projects continue to grow. (You can read the results of their studies at meta:Research:Wikimedia Summer of Research 2011/Summary of Findings.) It also conducted a review of the volunteer response systems whereby communications about article issues or copyright permissions are handled. Updates are published on the Wikimedia Community blog. |
This long answer was composed with kind assistance of staff members Philippe Beaudette, Guillaume Paumier and Jessie Wild. None of them are responsible for any errors I might have made.
The staff page offers listings of many staff members organized by department. It's a good idea to keep an eye on that page if you're interested in who is doing what at the Wikimedia Foundation. Job openings will keep you up to date on emerging roles, and Category:Job Descriptions includes more in-depth descriptions of some of the jobs already filled. --Mdennis 17:16, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
Do you have a question for the Wikimedia Foundation or about the Foundation? Do you need the Foundation's help?
You need Answers!
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See Answers/Process for information and terms.