On this website, I use lots of acronyms and terms related to the Wikimedia Foundation. This is a listing of them, along with their descriptions and alternative names.

Some of these terms, their descriptions and alternative names may be specialized to this website.



BoT

Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation

Alternative names:

  • the Board
  • the Trustees


CEO

Chief Executive Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation

Alternative names:

  • ED
  • Executive Director


EIR tool

One of my projects as a data scientist at WMF was the development of a data visualization tool for monitoring the impact of grant-funded events on editing activity on Wikipedias. For simplicity, I’ll call that tool the EIR tool, which stands for Events Impact Reporting tool.

WMF’s grants support affiliate organizations, which hold events for editors. Our hope is that these events encourage more people to edit Wikipedias. One way we can try to estimate how effective those grant-funded events are at encouraging more people to edit is by looking at the editing volumes and new editor counts over time, before and after grants and events. While this would not establish causality, seeing a positive association between grant-funded events and editing activity would suggest (but not prove) a potential positive impact of grants on editing activity. The purpose of the EIR tool was to visualize and monitor that association. When taken together with other factors, both qualitative and quantitative, it can be used to inform decisions about WMF’s grants. Note that it definitely should not be used by itself for that, nor could it be used by itself as an explanation or justification for WMF’s grant-funding decisions to the public.

The majority of the data used in this tool is open to the Wikimedia movement community.

Alternative names:

  • In other documentation, I’ve called this tool ‘the dashboard’. It’s not a very accurate name for it, but in some contexts it was simpler to call it that.
  • EIR web tool


HR

Human Resources

Alternative names:

  • the People department
  • Talent & Culture department
  • T&C


HRBP

Human Resources Business Partner


IC

Individual Contributor: a non-management employee

Alternative names:

  • WMF staff
  • WMF worker


LDAP login accounts

LDAP login accounts are Wikimedia IDM accounts that have been added to WMF’s LDAP groups for the purpose of managing their access to WMF’s web tools, among other things. This is different from WMF’s production access management, which is needed for developers to do SRE work, and for some data practitioners to be able to access sensitive data.

While the documentation for LDAP groups talks about joining LDAP groups in the context of developer accounts, LDAP groups use cases are not limited to developers. LDAP groups can be used to manage access to WMF’s web tools for any WMF employees, including non-technical managers and leadership team members.

One potential such use case for WMF managers or leadership team members could be a version of the EIR tool that has the charts without sensitive data insights publicly available, and the charts with sensitive data insights accessible only to WMF’s internal stakeholders, like managers and leadership team members. This could be done if the WMF managers and leadership team members who need access to sensitive data insights in the EIR web tool would set up Wikimedia IDM accounts and request to join a specific LDAP group.

Alternative names:

  • LDAP login
  • CAS/LDAP login


PII

Personally identifiable information


ROI

Return on investment


Wikimedia movement community

The readers, editors, donors and anyone else who engages with the Wikipedias.

Alternative names:

  • Wikimedia movement
  • Wikimedia movement members
  • the community
  • WMC
  • Wikimedia movement communities


Wikipedias

I use this term as a shorthand to represent all Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.


WMF

The Wikimedia Foundation

Alternative names:

  • the Foundation