We’ve recently started forming the 2010-2011 Audit Committee and as we did last year would like to call for volunteers from the community.  The time commitment is modest, as far as Wikimedia goes:  review the Foundation’s financial practices and financial statements/filings, and then participate in three or four conference calls during the year with the staff and our independent auditors at KPMG (see full duties).  The primary requirement for membership is “financial literacy”, some kind of professional experience with finance, accounting or audit.  As it is a governance and oversight role, Committee members cannot serve under a pseudonym, undergo the same basic background check as others in WMF financial oversight roles, and must make the same conflict of interest disclosures required of the Foundation’s Board.

If you’re interested in serving on the Committee, please email me at stu wikimedia.org with your resume/CV and your thoughts on how you think you could contribute.  Thanks.

See a description on their blog, their write-up in the New York Times, or play with the live Web Seer site.

First point for this blog post, I was looking for a way to visualize some the great analysis Erik Zachte did recently on the geographic source of traffic to Wikipedia. A trip through Commons pointed me to a slick online mapping tool and Erik was incredibly helpful at providing me with the data I needed. Here’s the map we came up with, which represents average monthly Wikipedia page views per internet user during July, August and September of 2009:

(click on map to zoom)

Green represents countries where the average internet user viewed at least 10 pages per month.  Red represents countries where the average internet user viewed less than one page per month.  Erik’s analysis is based on geolocation of entries from a preliminary sample of Wikipedia server logs and on the latest estimates of Internet users per country, which for some countries are outdated so will result in overstated usage estimates. That said, it’s interesting and gives insights at a more granular level than previously available due to the lack of scalable free and open source tools like Google Analytics. The underlying data is in this worksheet for anyone who wants to review/expand/improve.

The big question for me is, “What drives the red countries?” Three possibilities come to mind:

1. Less developed Wikipedias in local languages
2. Current or historical political issues (more on this in a later post)
3. Slower access to our sites due to distance from Amsterdam/Tampa

What do you think is driving lower Wikipedia usage among internet users in some countries? What can/should our community do about it? Post a comment with your thoughts.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

I did include a first cut of the percentage of visitors to the largest language Wikipedias who actively edit, using Erik Zachte’s editor counts from WikiStats.  A couple observations:

• On the English Wikipedia only about .02% of the unique visitors actively edit. Put another way, that’s one-fifth of one-tenth of one percent. If you include all users who made at least one edit, it’s about fifteen times higher at one-third of one percent.
• Participation rates vary widely by language version.  Russian and German have comparatively high participation rights at around 0.03%, Japanese and Spanish are less than half that level, and English and French are in between around 0.02%.
• I haven’t yet done the analysis on the other language Wikipedias comScore tracks, or of the ratio between total and active editors. I put together a summary of comScore’s trend data by project for the past few years (PDF on meta or Excel format) if anyone wants to run with it.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.

UPDATE: moved to archive page.