2012 Wikimedia fundraiser/status

Last update on: 458022-2monthly

2012-02-29
Adding support for recurring GlobalCollect donations was the primary engineering focus in February, with work on this functionality carrying over into March. Several deployments were made to the payments cluster to better our form localization in several countries in Africa. A subset of those forms were used in a week-long banner and landing page test that also ran in February. A great deal of effort was expended in February in the name of building out the team by two more people; The search for new fundraising engineers is ongoing.

2012-03-31
The team continued to work on GlobalCollect recurring donations, with the code review remaining to be done. They also engaged in cleanup after an eventually successful upgrade of our production instance of CiviCRM from 3.4 to 4.1.1, the migration to git, and Mingle training. There was an issue with an imbalance of chargebacks, due to a spinning down of the Winter fundraising flagging fraud in GlobalCollect, that was resolved.

2012-04-monthly
The fundraising team deployed GlobalCollect recurring functionality, and started transition to using Git and Gerrit for its software development process. They wrote the burn up chart for the next fundraising round. The team is still working on adding staff.

2012-05-monthly
The fundraising team developed and deployed new filters to help identify and stop fraudulent transactions. In addition, the team made employment offers to two candidates that were accepted. The new staff will be integrated to the team, which will be fully staffed before Wikimania.

2012-06-monthly
Onboarded Adam Wight to the team. GlobalCollect recurring is now code complete (now in code review). Integrated with Yandex through GlobalCollect. Finished migration of payments deployment to Git.

2012-07-27
We onboarded Matt Walker to the team. Progress was made on enhancements to CiviCRM that enable Finance and other departments to get relevant metrics and reports more easily. Katie Horn traveled to Wikimania and gave a presentation about the fundraising infrastructure.

More details: 
 * Sprint 5 - A new fiscal year
 * Sprint 6 - Hello Matt, and Wikimania!
 * Sprint 7 - Auditing and Reconciliation

2012-07-monthly
We onboarded Matt Walker to the team. Progress was made on enhancements to CiviCRM that enable Finance and other departments to get relevant metrics and reports more easily. Katie Horn traveled to Wikimania and gave a presentation about the fundraising infrastructure.

2012-08-monthly
The fundraising team completed 3 very successful sprints, completing more work in each sprint than some of the previous sprints combined (Sprint 7: Auditing and Reconciliation; Sprint 8: Amazon, and a bunch of other random stuff; and Sprint 9: Adyen, Amazon wrap-up, and Listeners). During the sprints, the team integrated with Amazon Payments, added features to CiviCRM to enable the settlement of donations in multiple currencies, added features (including the beginning of an API) and made bugfixes to CentralNotice, discovered and dealt with an issue in the global credit card processing system, and began integration on a new payment processor that will give the fundraising team access to additional payment methods around the world. 

2012-09-monthly
<section begin="2012-09-monthly"/>Throughout September the team worked toward the October 1st fundraising code slush refactoring a few existing payment processors and integrating with Adyen. The Adyen integration will give the fundraiser credit processor redundancy as well as reduce the percentage of each donation lost to processing fees. In addition, the team worked to integrate the Translation extension during a sprint with the Internationalization team and made many other, smaller bug fixes and enhancements for the upcoming 2012 fundraiser. <section end="2012-09-monthly"/>

2012-10-monthly
<section begin="2012-10-monthly"/>Throughout October, the Fundraising Engineering team has been working on the final engineering push before the kickoff of the 2012 fundraiser in November. During testing, performance regressions were noticed across many wikis and geographies. The team, with support from many other groups, has identified and is attempting to resolve these issues to enhance not only fundraising, but the overall user experience on Wikimedia sites.<section end="2012-10-monthly"/>

2012-11-monthly
<section begin="2012-11-monthly"/>November has been a busy month for Fundraising as the team helped to kick-off the annual 2012 fundraiser on November 26th with heavy testing before then. So far the 2012 fundraiser has been a resounding success raising over $12M in the 5 full days and limited testing days since November 15th. For current information, see the live stats. Shortly before the full launch, it was announced that the annual fundraiser would be splitting into an English-language fundraiser in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and New Zealand during the traditional November/December period with other languages and all countries in April. For more details see the [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-November/122811.html announcement on wikimedia-l].<section end="2012-11-monthly"/>

2012-12-monthly
<section begin="2012-12-monthly"/>The 2012 annual fundraiser continued in December and was a resounding success. In addition to the ongoing maintenance required to operate the fundraiser, the team helped to execute the Thank You campaign and started to put into place new tools for auditing the fundraiser after its completion.<section end="2012-12-monthly"/>

2013-01-monthly
<section begin="2013-01-monthly"/>January marks the official end of the 2012 fundraiser. The team spent the entirety of the month cleaning up and recovering from the very successful months of November and December auditing the donations and writing tools that will help allow the team to run continuous auditing in the future.<section end="2013-01-monthly"/>

458022-2monthly
<section begin="458022-2monthly"/>In December, the team deployed to the English Wikipedia an alpha version of the VisualEditor for editors to use and give feedback on issues and priorities. The team's work focussed on ensuring that the integration was reliable, and providing a dedicated tool for editors to report problems with editing, and, after deployment, addressing the reports and ideas from editors. The early version of the VisualEditor on mediawiki.org was also updated to use the new developments (as part of 1.21-wmf6).

2013-01-02 (MW 1.21wmf7)
The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.21wmf7 branch deployment on Wednesday 2 January.

In the three-and-a-half weeks since 1.21wmf7, the team have mostly been on leave, and otherwise making some progress on cleaning up the codebase and fixing a number of bugs and issues highlighted by the community since the code was deployed more widely in December.

These bugs included no longer marking all edits as minor and adding the page to the user's watchlist regardless of setting (43040); ensuring that "phantoms" appearing correctly over the top of complicated template contents (43098); not showing that there is an edit notice when it is present but displays nothing to the user, as used on the English Wikipedia (43013); making sure that media items are loaded in a protocol-insensitive manner (43015); fixing the wikitext-corruption system to work for pages with '/'s in them (42988); and avoiding the undo/redo functions causing an error if used first before anything else is done (43033).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.21/wmf7 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.

2013-01-16 (MW 1.21wmf8)
The VisualEditor was updated as part of the wider MediaWiki 1.21wmf8 branch deployment on Wednesday 16 January.

In the two weeks since 1.21wmf7, the team have started the planning for the next segment of work in line with the strategic goals for the VisualEditor set out in the 2012/13 plan. A small number of changes have made it into the codebase for this release, mostly focussed on fixing bugs reported by the community and preparing for future developments.

Firstly, there was a large refactoring of the link inspector code so that it is now easier to extend, which amongst other things means that it will now not over-write other formatting on text like bold or italics (43841) and links now have a target exposed, so editors can where the link goes in their browser without needing to edit the link (37904). The way that the code is integrated now does not take over edit section links, which had been mistakenly left switched on (43036). There were some changes to how "alien" nodes were assigned, fixing a few irregularities in how they worked (42398, 43056, and 43076).

A complete list of individual code commits is available in the 1.21/wmf8 changelog, and all Bugzilla bugs closed in this period on Bugzilla's list.<section end="458022-2monthly"/>