Talk:Reports

Old discussion

A wiki template for small langs, with a few line breaks between subjects, might be a good idea. +sj+ 23:11, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Ironically, this page appears to be abandoned. --Cromwellt|talk 00:51, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Activity

Active reporting has been happening elsewhere. I've transcluded and included much of it here as a jumping off point. More work like what the Signpost did in 2006 is needed to help synthesize and summarize the changing tenor of different projects. -- sj | translate | + 22:31, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Lots of copies?

I'm not sure what the point is of copying content here from the Wikimedia Foundation wiki, rather than just linking to these pages:

foundation:Meetings

foundation:Reports to the Board

foundation:Annual Report

foundation:Financial reports

On the negative side, it significantly increases the risk of bit-rot. For example, there's a newer Annual Report, and a newer 990, than are listed on this page. Nor am I seeing any significant translation activity (a process which surely could be improved irrespective of where the translated documents are hosted).--Eloquence 18:16, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Excuse me, what content is copied here? You mean the links to various reports on wmf:? (Uh, and also reports to the board. But these are not in the wiki, only in foundation-l.) Well, I agree that this is not the optimal way to do it, but I imagine that the point of this page is to have a central list of all reports. $wgEnableScaryTranscluding would allow to avoid that.

I don't think that translation would be a good reason, because translations can be added also to wmf:. --Nemo 19:27, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

The ideal is to have a central page with deep-links to all of the above. It should also link more prominently to the canonical subpages you mention. (Bitrot cuts both ways -- since fewer people have access to the foundationwiki (a policy that we could improve upon dramatically -- everyone should be able to post to talk pages there), it is also sometimes out of date, and only includes WMF information.)

I would expect translations to end up on whichever wiki hosts the original, and links to various languages would appear on a translated version of this summary page (currently, here on meta). –SJ · talk | translate 03:14, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm referring to the index and to the copies of the Reports to the Board. Yes, scary transclusion might be nice to have for this kind of application, but in the absence of that, I'm not convinced that the added value of "everything on one page" justifies maintaining separate copies that may go stale and confuse readers. I would rather point people to the official, maintained version.--Eloquence 20:54, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Are you worried about the wiki used, or the existence of a list of lists? Absent a way to transclude just the TOC from a bunch of subpages, someone has to take the time to update a page like this to make it available in this format. As Nemo says, there's no duplicatoin here, just a centralized list of links. –SJ · talk | translate 03:14, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm OK with duplication of indexes and such if there are people who want to keep them up to date. That doesn't seem to be the case so far for the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report / Financial Report index, so I've replaced it with a summary for now.

Of course, ultimately, this points to the confusing and arguably unnecessary division between wikimediafoundation.org and meta.wikimedia.org. Perhaps it's time to think about the technical requirements and information architecture for a single wikimedia.org wiki that meta.wikimedia.org and wikimediafoundation.org could be gradually merged into. :) --Eloquence 17:02, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

+1, I think one of the best benefits of having things like this here is that we can have more open discussion on talk pages etc (that we can't on wmfWiki). Trying to find a nice way to merge the two could be very nice (and maybe even show off the community infrastructure more to people which I think could be a very good thing).James (T C) 08:43, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

New table of Latest reports

SJ and I have been kicking around a new table format to quickly summarize the latest reports from each of the different parts in our movement (basically a more comprehensive and usable version of http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports#Overview). I haven't filled it entirely in yet, but have started. I think this one will be a lot more useful as a guide than the extensive lists we've got now. Once we get the table updated, I suggest we archive everything else on this page and just link to relevant Chapters reports pages (which I can't really follow; it's some kind of template maybe??). We might need to move the summary of Foundation Reports to its own page or category.Stu 21:17, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

We had a good discussion in Berlin about effective transparency. One thing that has bothered me is how hard it is to find the latest reports from all the different parts of our movement. So, I just revised this page to begin with a table that highlights the latest reports from the Foundation, the Chapters, and other parts of the movement. I'm hoping this will give all of us a good quick reference to see the latest activity and financial reports. It would also be great if its tabular format helps highlight when a particular team is overdue to create reporting and link to it. I tried to add all the different reports I've seen on internal-l, wikimediaannounce-l, foundation-l, and even the presentations from the Chapters conference. Apologies for those I left out. I think this could be really useful. If you agree, pls go add a link or otherwise improve!Stu 01:28, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

By the way, my general design principle was to have Latest Reports be comprehensive across all different groups, including Foundation, Chapters, and others. Then we could have more detail (or links to other pages) for each of those groups.Stu 02:10, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Hi Stu, thanks for the steps taken. I am not sure if the presentations on the chapters meeting can be unified with the financial reports - some chapters might have included some numbers in it, but also quite some didn't because after all it is only three minutes, and then financials are not the most interesting to talk about. I would rather suggest to create an extra column for that. Effeietsanders 06:44, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Looks like the column headings got messed up.... Good catch. I've fixed so the presentations are now back under "Other."69.106.255.65 06:59, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Ah, makes much more sense, thanks :) Effeietsanders 07:23, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

I just moved the Foundation reports back to their own page -- Foundation reports. This now matches the way Chapters reports are handled. It was bothering me that this page seemed too Foundation-focused. It's a lot cleaner now and this page ends up as a summary and pointer to other more detailed collections. I'm still thinking about ways to simplify the table a bit more; the idea is to a) give the latest snapshot and b) highlight those organizations that haven't given updates recently to try and gently encourage them to share the latest news.Stu 17:11, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I probably just made it worse then :P I tried to seperate different types of information (reports vs continuous streams of info). I think the best encouragement is btw to ask questions - but that is of course a whole other matter, this might help you find the answers. There are several other categories of reports/information chapters might share (overview press mentions etc) which we might or might not find interesting. Effeietsanders 21:28, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Composite calendar for updates?

I was chatting with Asaf and Bence about how the various reports are updated or linked to from Meta. [Answer: some ad-hoc by whoever notices, some by chapter members and staff, some by WMF staff]. Are there some existing calendars that could be combined into a movement-wide calendar of news, reports, and other updates?

I'm not sure we have one for the WMF. For that set of work alone, we have

• A set of predictable annual summaries. Planning: long-form monthly reports, minutes from quarterly Board meetings, and an Annual Report (both forward-looking and reviewing outcomes of the past year). Financials: quarterly/semiannual/annual financials, an audit report, and a charity report (990). Other: State of the X updates at Wikimania each year (projects, technology).
• Annual events: the fundraiser (becoming more spread out over the whole year), Wikimania, elections for Trustees and FDC members, recruitment of Committee members (Ombudsmen, AffCom, AuditCom). And reports on/from the same.
• Periodic updates: project updates, and outcomes for each of a dozen major projects, and a multitude of logged office hours.
• Periodic roadmaps: sporadic strategy updates (like the FDC and narrowing focus updates), and technical roadmaps. A few a year.
• Periodic news: blog posts, both technical and other. And announcements sent to the announce mailing list.

Then for chapters there are

• Annual summaries. Planning: an Annual report, a state of the Chapter talks at the Chapters conference. Financial: many have a separate financial report; those with a fundraising agreement with the WMF have an annual fundraiser/financial report, and interim data-sharing.
• Annual events: the Chapters conference; sometimes a finance meeting (as in 2012).
• Periodic roadmaps: overall strategy (Vision 2020 / chapter-specific N-year plans), specific large projects have their own.
• Periodic reports and news: some chapters have monthly or quarterly updates [some for members only]; blog and website updates

For the communities, there are

• Community-wide newspapers and 'zines (Signpost, Kurier)
• Project-specific newsletters (POTY, WikiCup, WikiProject FOO)
• Smaller opt-in updates (sign up for sporadic announcements about... topical/regional events)
• Research projects (summaries reported out on wikimedia-l or wikiresearch-l; some surveys taken and reports published on a meta page)
• Periodic reports and news: most blog posts and planet / twitter updates

Some of the above have clear schedules that could be fit onto a calendar. Others have dates associated with them but are only known a few days before publication. Others are continuous or aggregations of lots of small things that wouldn't fit on a [forward-looking] calendar but could show up on a historical timeline. If we can find a reasonable way to lay this out or visualize this, it would be useful to any summarizers and synthesizers of the work going on. And might make the process of generating things like "State of the X" reports easier and more automatic. –SJ talk  04:36, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Good topic. A couple things to consider:

• If using a wiki for this purpose, I think it makes the most sense to leverage the Category system somehow. I did a lot of work on getting things on Meta into categories by year a while back, and User:Another Believer has been doing similar things more recently. Maybe this could be built upon.
• If considering non-wiki software for this purpose, I'd suggest taking a look at Calagator as a possible base on which to build. It's a Portland-based calendar for tech and community events, and it's free software. I know the developers originally intended to expand it for use for other purposes, but I'm not sure how far they got. http://calagator.org

-Pete F (talk) 23:30, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation

Is the Wikimedia Foundation no longer producing any report? Nemo 16:10, 15 April 2016 (UTC)