The previous high was set in May of 2012, when Wikimedia Foundation sites saw 492 million uniques. In March, the family of sites saw an astounding 517 million unique vistors. The data comes courtesy of the latest comScore Media Matrix.

“In the Wikimedia movement, we have a vision statement that inspires many contributions to our endeavor: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment,” says Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner.

“The idea of enabling every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge is still as audacious as ever – but it’s also starting to look like an achievable goal, if we come together to make it happen.”

The increase in uniques has also had an impact on how long readers stay and how much content they consume. Gardner says that people are staying longer and reading more.

“Over the past 12 months, Wikipedia monthly page requests increased from 17.1 billion to 21.3 billion, with the mobile share increasing to roughly 15 percent of the total, or more than 3 billion monthly views. We’re also gratified to see growth in significant target areas: in India, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent; in Brazil it increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent.”

Speaking of Sue Gardner – she’s not long for the position of Wikimedia director. A couple of weeks ago, she announced that she would be stepping down from the job – not right away, as she expects to take 6 months or so to find a replacement.

This week, Wikimedia announced that an asteroid has officially been named “274301 Wikipedia” after the open-source internet encyclopedia. The object is estimated to be 1 to 2 km (1 mile) wide and orbits the sun as part of the main asteroid belt.

The name was proposed by Andriy Makukha, a Wikimedia Ukraine board member. It was then submitted to the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature by Yuri Ivashchenko, the head astronomer at the Andrushivka Astronomical Observatory in Ukraine. The official naming was published last week in the the journal Minor Planet Circular, coincidentally the ninth anniversary of the first Ukrainian language Wikipedia article.

The asteroid itself was discovered on August 25, 2008 at the Andrushivka observatory. The object orbits the Sun once every 3.68 Earth days at 2.4 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

“Wikimedia sites have been hosted in our main data center in Tampa, Florida, since 2004; before that, the couple of servers powering Wikipedia were in San Diego, California. Ashburn is the third and newest primary data center to host Wikimedia sites,” says Technical Communications Manager Guillaume Paumier. “A major reason for choosing Tampa, Florida as the location of the primary data center in 2004 was its proximity to founder Jimmy Wales’ home, at a time when he was much more involved in the technical operations of the site. In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technical Operations team started to look for other locations with better network connectivity and more clement weather. Located in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, Ashburn offers faster and more reliable connectivity than Tampa, and usually fewer hurricanes.”

“The Operations team started to plan and prepare for the Virginia data center in Summer 2010,” Paumier adds. “The actual build-out and racking of servers at the colocation facility started in February 2011, and was followed by a long period of hardware, system and software configuration.”

Some traffic has been served to users from the Ashburn data center since November 2011.

Along with the transition will come a disruption in service, though the foundation says its engineering teams have been working on trying to minimize inconvenience for users. Sites will be in read-only mode for part of the time, and may be “intermittently inaccessible”. The target windows for migration are: January 22nd, 23rd and 24th, 2013, from 17:00 to 01:00 UTC.

Last week, the foundation unveiled WikiVoyage, which transitioned to a Wikimedia Foundation project after seven of existence under the Wikivoyage Association.

The last such milestone the foundation announced was 10 million media files, back in April of 2011.

“Credit is due to the Wikimedia Commons community, who is largely involved in a variety of projects, processes and negotiations that are intended to improve the availability of public domain and freely-licensed educational media content to the public,” says Peter Weis on the Wikimedia blog.

“The last two years have seen an increasing number of cultural institutions (GLAM) and other organisations providing content that would have otherwise not been freely accessible,” he adds. “Two Wiki Loves Monuments contests have also been responsible for more than 500,000 uploaded images. Moreover, constant technical improvements, such as the UploadWizard introduced in May 2011, and the new HTML5 video player, facilitate the contributions of current and future participants and encourage them to expand niches like audio and video.”

Wikimedia projects attract 480 million unique visitors per month, according to the foundation.

In a press release this afternoon, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, announced that they will be partnering with Orange, of France Telecom, in order to make Wikipedia more easily available to Orange mobile customers throughout Africa and the Middle East. Hailed as the “first partnership of its kind” – that being the world’s first mobile and Internet partnership – the two companies will provide more than 70 million Orange customers with mobile access to Wikipedia without incurring any data usage charges.

This new partnership will be gradually launched throughout 2012 across 20 African and Middle Eastern countries where Orange operates, with the first markets launching early in the year. The initiative is part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s mobile strategy that aims to reach the billions of people around the world who access the internet solely through mobile devices.

Any customer with an Orange SIM and mobile internet enabled phone will be able to access the Wikipedia site either through their browser or an Orange widget. They can access the Wikipedia encyclopedia services for as many times as they like at no extra charge as long as they stay within Wikipedia’s pages.

Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said, “”Wikipedia is an important service, a public good – and so we want people to be able to access it for free, regardless of what device they’re using.” She continued, “This partnership with Orange will enable millions of people to read Wikipedia, who previously couldn’t. We’re thrilled to be Orange’s partner in this important endeavor.”

Orange posted a video on their website extolling the value of a freely accessibly Wikipedia to their customers that is now viewable on their website.

Marc Rennard, Group Executive Vice President, Africa, Middle-East and Asia at Orange, commented, “In countries where access to information is not always readily available, we are making it simple and easy for our customers to use the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia. It is the first partnership of this kind in the world where we are enabling customers to access Wikipedia without incurring any data charges; and shows Orange’s ability, once again, to innovate in Africa and the Middle East, and bring more value to our customers.”

The timing to announce the merger one day ahead of the the one-year anniversary of Egypt’s January 25th Revolution (although it continues to go on even today), which could be considered the first domino to fall in the Arab Spring’s chain of protests throughout the past year, is peculiar. It may be unintentional, but I’d like to think that this reaffirms Wikimedia and Wales’ commitment to providing a worldwide network of free information whenever someone needs it.

It appears those big banners at the top of Wikipedia, which have been ridiculed a few times, have been a success.

The ridicule was mostly over the layout, where a user could look at a page for something like “bitch” or “rapist” and see the word appear right under a big photo of co-founder Jimmy Wales or various volunteers. It became something of a meme, though some were much more light-hearted.

“Our model is working fantastically well,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Ordinary people use Wikipedia and they like it, so they chip in some cash so it will continue to thrive. That maintains our independence and lets us focus solely on providing a useful public service. I am so grateful to our donors for making that possible. I promise them we will use their money carefully and well.”

The campaign has indeed been Wikimedia’s most successful ever. On top of that, it’s part of a streak that has seen donations rise every year since campaigns began in 2003. Since 2008, the number of donors has increased ten-fold, and the total dollar amount raised in the campaign has risen to over $20 million from $4.5 million.

Wikimedia’s sites attract over 470 million people each month, and is the only major site supported by donations rather than ads, the foundation says.

The money from this campaign will go to servers and other hardware, development of new site functionality, expansion of mobile services, legal defense, and support for volunteers (there aree over 100,000 of them).

The foundation’s total 2011-12 planned spending is $28.3 million.

Wikipedia itself has over 20 million articles in 282 languages. It will celebrate its 11th anniversary on January 15.

The post in questions, titled, “How SOPA will hurt the free web and Wikipedia” goes way beyond the reactive, blanking of Wikipedia measures discussed by Wales. Like a good law firm, the media arm of Wikipedia laid down their position in detailed fashion, explaining why the idea of SOPA goes against the open principles on which the Internet was founded. An example:

We cannot battle, however, one wrong while inflicting another. SOPA represents the flawed proposition that censorship is an acceptable tool to protect rights owners’ private interests in particular media. That is, SOPA would block entire foreign websites in the United States as a response to remove from sight select infringing material. This is so even when other programs like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have found better balances without the use of such a bludgeon. For this reason, we applaud the excellent work of a number of like-minded organizations that are leading the charge against this legislation…

It continues on for some length, comprehensively laying out their ideas opposing SOPA. There’s also a section that deals with the legal ramifications of such a bill passing, and these, too, are addressed in the post. In fact, Lamar Smith’s amendments are also addressed, showing just how up to date Wikimedia’s reaction is.

I’ve been asked for a legal opinion. And, I will tell you, in my view, the new version of SOPA remains a serious threat to freedom of expression on the Internet.

• The new version continues to undermine the DMCA and federal jurisprudence that have promoted the Internet as well as cooperation between copyright holders and service providers. In doing so, SOPA creates a regime where the first step is federal litigation to block an entire site wholesale: it is a far cry from a less costly legal notice under the DMCA protocol to selectively take down specified infringing material. The crime is the link, not the copyright violation. The cost is litigation, not a simple notice.
• The expenses of such litigation could well force non-profit or low-budget sites, such as those in our free knowledge movement, to simply give up on contesting orders to remove their links. (Secs. 102(c)(3); 103(c)(2)) The international sites under attack may not have the resources to challenge extra-territorial judicial proceedings in the United States, even if the charges are false.
  The new version of SOPA reflects a regime where rights owners may seek to terminate advertising and payment services, such as PayPal, for an alleged “Internet site dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” (Sec. 103(c)(2)) A rights owner must seek a court order (unlike the previous version) (Sec. 103(b)(5)). Most rights owners are well intentioned, but many are not.[2] We cannot assume that litigious actions to block small sites abroad will always be motivated in good faith, especially when the ability to defend is difficult.

Read more at Wikimedia’s post. As for the inclusion of Smith’s amendments, the feeling is, while an improvement, they don’t adequately fix what SOPA potentially breaks:

In short, though there have been some improvements with the new version, SOPA remains far from acceptable. Its definitions remain too loose, and its structural approach is flawed to the core. It hurts the Internet, taking a wholesale approach to block entire international sites, and this is most troubling for sites in the open knowledge movement who probably have the least ability to defend themselves overseas.

Aside from the Protect Innovation consortium, there aren’t many publications that so thoroughly discuss the implications of SOPA with such a level head. Not only is the discussion an important one, there’s also emotion involved. Thankfully, the Wikimedia post purposely eschews emotion for a factual, level-headed approach.

Lead image courtesy.

The grant came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was appropriately appreciative.  In a statement, she said, "The Hewlett Foundation’s support comes at a critical time."

Gardner then continued, "We’ve just begun the planning that will help us identify how to maximize our impact around the world.  This support will help us to execute our priorities for the current year, and enable us to plan for the future."

So some interesting sort of overhaul or expansion might go forward as a result of the grant.  That would help explain why the Hewlett Foundation was interested in Wikimedia the first place, since the Foundation’s supposed to "solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world."

Meanwhile, Google Knol, which might be viewed as a better-funded-but-less-popular competitor, is still putting along, having received a sort of nod from the chairman and cofounder of the Public Library of Science just yesterday.

The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has proposed that the copyright licensing terms on the wikis operated by the WMF — including Wikipedia — be changed to include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This will affect all text and rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) currently licensed under "GFDL 1.2 or later versions".

Jolie O’Dell at ReadWriteWeb notes, "The change in licensing was made possible in November 2008 when the Free Software Foundation updated its most recent of the GFDL, adding language specifically to accommodate the WMF’s desire to switch to Creative Commons licensing."

Of those who voted on the change, over 13,000 voted in favor, while only under 2,000 voted against it, and just over 2,000 voted to not have an opinion on the matter. If "no opinion" votes had not been included, the Yes/No percentage becomes 87.9%/12.1%.

The licensing update poll took place over a period of three weeks. Anybody who had a registered account on a WMF project with at least 25 edits prior to March 15th was eligible to participate (apart from those who had been blocked or flagged).

Claims that the domain violated Wikimedia’s trademark and the ensuing legal back and forth have renewed the debate over fair use and free speech, and to an extent, what constitutes art. There’s even a bit of a debate over what constitutes “a threat.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales characterizes the project as “an alleged bit of performance art,” and the project creators, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, as “trolls” “dedicated to vandalizing Wikipedia as a publicity stunt.” [His full statement is available as an update to an earlier article, linked below.]

The project originally took place on the Wikipedia site itself, but was quickly deleted by Wikipedia editors. Though there was some debate over whether a collaborative art project had a place in an online encyclopedia, the final agreement was that the project—also thought to be critical of Wikipedia itself—was a form of vandalism.

After the entry was deleted, Kildal and Stern registered wikipediaart.org and moved the project there. For more background on the project itself, and a discussion of art and fair use, please read “Wikipedia Art Pushes the Elastic Boundaries of Fair Use,” from earlier in the week.

On March 23, Douglas Isenberg, representing Wikimedia, sent a letter to Kildall explaining Wikimedia’s ownership of the trademark WIKIPEDIA, the company’s obligation “to enforce its legal rights” and the company’s concern there may be some confusion about Kildall’s website’s affiliation with Wikipedia itself.

Isenberg says in the letter Wikimedia asked him to investigate whether Kildall was in violation of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA), the US Federal Trademark Dilution Act, state and common law trademark and unfair competition statutes, and the Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).

Afterward, Isenberg asks Kildall to transfer wikipediaart.org to Wikimedia, “cease using the Wikipedia trademark,” and that Wikimedia “reserves all rights and remedies of any kind or nature in connection with this matter.”

Wikipediaart.org has posted that letter, along with others, at the site, except for a series of correspondences from Mike Godwin, Wikimedia’s general counsel.

Although Isenberg’s letter sounded enough like a threat to Kildall to seek legal counsel, and his counsel seems to have agreed it sounded like a threat, and a lawyers from PublicCitizen and the EFF thought it sounded like a threat, both Isenberg in a later letter, and Wales himself, in a statement to WebProNews, say it was not actually a threat.

“The reporting on the situation was widely in error, mostly due to the EFF’s erroneous blog posting,” said Wales. “There was never a legal threat, no action of any kind, and there is no intention to take action of any kind.  We asked them politely to put up a legal notice distinguishing themselves from Wikipedia, and they did. 
 
”A group of trolls managed to manufacture for the media a publicity stunt. It’s disappointing how easy it was for them to pull it off.”

A disclaimer distancing the project from Wikipedia is mentioned as already in existence in the letter posted at Wikipedia Art by James Martin, original counsel for Kildall, in his original response to Isenberg on April 3, along with expressed willingness to agree on a new one.

Though Godwin’s correspondences are not posted, Public Citizen’s Paul Levy’s letters are, the final one indicating Wikipedia Art would go to court first for declaratory judgment that use of the domain constitutes fair use. This, it appears, the last correspondence.