Yes, it's a hit piece, but that doesn't mean that the author doesn't raise some good questions.
What's the purpose of Wikipedia, anyway? Is it an online, open, encyclopedia? Or is it becoming some kind of quasi-political organization with tendrils everywhere?
There's one thing we are learning about the net: everybody wants to own the entire net. Whether it's Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or Wiki, once you get so large you start thinking of the internet and your service as being the same.
Wikipedia has the money it needs to operate, yet still it grows. If anything, the bigger they get, the more demanding they are getting with asking for contributions. Why? I believe that's an excellent question, and investigating the answer is also fascinating. (As is watching the story continue to develop over the next 5-10 years)
I definitely feel misled. The appeal gives you the distinct impression that without your donation they might not be able to keep the lights on. It talks about how many servers they have (and other costs, etc.) and implores you to "take one minute and keep it online another year." It definitely erodes my trust in them to know that they have plenty of money to operate.
As I've seen with every public broadcast channel in my local market, there appears to be a race to the bottom toward constant pledge-driving that may be endemic to the business model. That Wikipedia falls prey to it is not so much a structural flaw as a choice not to innovate on the funding front, and I believe a fact remains that people generally will not contribute to a perpetuation of the commons spontaneously.
I agree. Indeed, it's a very good question whether Wikipedia shouldn't just operate.
However, as I said in the other comment I made, this growth seems to be needed in order to maintain, "just operate", the achieved purpose of Wikipedia - online, open encyclopedia. The growth is needed because online, open encyclopedia is itself a moving target. The main problem, it seems (as pointed in the Annual Plan[1]), is the trend of fewer contributors with each year. If you read the comments at theregister article, all of them talk about the bad experience of editing a wiki and engaging with the contributor community. Now, I have no idea how true this is and how often this happens but the fact that there are fewer contributors each year remains. Wiki edits and the contributor community are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. If these and their quality are waning, then this will have a large impact on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia. Furthermore, to be a true encyclopedia, the quality of the articles needs to be as accurate as possible which certainly is a moving target. Investing into additional tools to better assess articles' quality certainly works towards this target.
Next, there is open and online. Part of the money goes towards broadening the reach of Wikipedia. Like making it available in the Global South via mobile for free, with no data charges (Wikipedia Zero). Or consider lobbying - if the foundation itself does not defend itself from acts like SOPA and thus remain online, who else should step in to WMF's interest? I think it's fair and very empowering to have people with very limited Internet access to at least Wikipedia.
With that said, the question changes. It is not about whether Wikipedia needs more money - it does - but it is about how much it needs, i.e is the foundation efficient enough while maintaining the target of an online open encyclopedia. revelation's comment[2] about hiring as a startup is quite a interesting comparison
Yes. I think that some commenters thought I meant that whatever they are becoming is necessarily bad, when the point is that it's different. Might deliver a bunch of cool new stuff.
This is a story about mission creep, and growth, and what happens to internet locations that become extremely popular. Would it even be possible to stick to one simple mission? I kind of doubt it. If not, are they being "forced" into growth simply to stay alive (as you mention)? Do they morph into a more traditional charitable NGO? Do they end up as a political party, or a multinational coproration? Or something completely different? Why aren't they moving to more of a PBS model where they operate entirely off of investment returns?
It's going to be a fascinating story. We make a mistake by assuming that they are in complete control over how this thing plays out. In my mind this has much more to do with the internet and technology in general than Wikipedia in particular.
1. They put up a temporary site notice asking for donations. They don't advertise on the project, and their sole source of funding is though donations. Very demanding.
2. What questions, specifically, does the article raise in your mind? Note - I say "questions", and not vague and ill formulated doubts.
The question it raises in my mind is how much of my donation is going to fund the servers and bandwidth and what they are always asking for money for, and how much is going to other things that I would not agree are worthy of my charity dollars.
Last time I looked at their finances it was about 50% went to fund servers, bandwidth and engineering in general. Now I'm sure that they do need to spend more than that, but I found that proportion different to what I had expected and it discouraged me from donating.
It's just plain obnoxious IMHO - also, what for have cookies been invented?
If i click the ad/begging/whatever away, you're not increasing your chances for me to donate when it pops up again whenever i come back to WP - you're achieving the exact opposite..
Just something about point 1, i donated last year and this, yet ive still received 2 emails this year (after this years donation) asking for another donation, plus you still get the massive banner on the wiki site.
Yeah, it's not like I really care if the banner ad is for wikipedia itself or for an advertiser. It's still an intrusive banner ad. Plus since it's for themselves, they probably go a bit further on the intrusiveness scale.
Wikipedia seems to do a good job (even if not precisely specified), but I wonder why no competition has emerged at all (or has there)? Why is there no Wikipedia that allows everything?
A "Wikipedia that allows everything". Try it. It'd turn to shit really quickly.
People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. Deleting it is a service to the reader in the same way anti-spam filters are to email users.
Articles need to be maintained. To be useful for readers, they have to be reasonably accurate, and in Wikipedia-land, we base accuracy on external sources. And if there aren't any external sources, how the hell can we even try and be accurate?
Fortunately, there is a solution: the rest of the web. Wikipedia has a constrained mission, namely the production of an encyclopedia. Outside Wikipedia, there is a big wide web where you can do whatever you like. Wikis that have explicit points of view, that are focussed on specific topics... all that kind of stuff.
> People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk.
The most common complaint I've heard was rather different: nobody questioned that some pruning is necessary but complained that the standards were incredibly arbitrary and niche interests like anime characters or minor porn stars frequently made the cut while e.g. academics were deleted because they didn't have a mainstream book, New Yorker article, etc. and the deletionist cadre wasn't interested in widely-cited papers, broad recognition within a particular field, etc.
Jason Scott also highlighted a similar problem in http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826 noting that the question again has never been quality but a very small number of people deciding a topic wasn't of interest to anyone else despite demonstrated activity.
Attempting to portray this as a question of spam control or lack of external sources is either uninformed or whitewashing.
I'm not going to say there isn't a problem at all. But I spend more than enough time in the trenches dealing with deletion to know that the vast majority of the time, the stuff that gets deleted probably ought to have been.
The standards aren't that arbitrary: for an article to exist, there needs to be significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.
False positive in wiki editing is much, much worse than false negative. Just as with spam - if your spam filter deletes one email from your CEO, it is much worse than letting in 20 spam emails. Here, also, letting one uninformed, but active Wikipedia bureaucrat to prevail over a more informed scientist is much worse than letting 10 crappy articles to stay on the site and quietly rot while nobody visits them. The latter just wastes tiny bit of resources, the former actually has high potential to spread false information. And given lazy journalists frequently limit their research to looking up stuff in wikipedia, soon the falsity becomes "common knowledge" and then becomes its own source as publications quote Wikipedia which quotes publications.
DRV is completely worthless; it is purely for procedural issues, not a second AfD where the merits might be debated by a different group. Undeletion is about as common as hen's teeth: stuff deleted stays deleted.
That hasn't been my experience. I usually cite printed sources in articles when I write them, and most articles I edit that were written by others seem to also be based primarily on books.
Some statistics would be interesting, though. I would imagine online sources are more common in articles on recent events, and in articles on popular culture. In the area I mainly edit in (pre-20th-century history) it's almost entirely books and journal articles.
A good citation to a printed published work grants you demigod-like powers when editing an article - if the work itself is notable. If it's self-published or has no information demonstrating it is a reliable source, not so much.
Yeah, I've found it really reduces any hassles over "notability" if you're citing solid published sources. If I'm writing an article on a Greek archaeological site, and my article cites The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, case is pretty much closed.
Why oh why is this argument always framed like this?
"If Deltionists can't cull at their whim, WP will simply end up as a pile of rubbish!"
Junk is typically not that hard to find and cull, it's the actual content that gets removed, and the absurd politics behind it, that will probably bring about the end of WP.
By 'end of WP', do you mean 'one of the top 5 websites by traffic' and 'now generally considered the default canonical source of knowledge in the English-speaking world'?
> People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. Deleting it is a service to the reader in the same way anti-spam filters are to email users.
Working with Quora admins is just as bad. There are legitimate questions that are deleted/locked because some admin feels like it has to. Putting in requests to undelete/unlock requires incredible amount of effort and knowledge of the system which is weird because there are so many easy to use functionality for everything else. Same goes for actually getting something to be deleted, locked or marked for abuse. If you know a moderator and have experience with their boards, it's a piece of cake for you - else, you just wait in line for a long time.
I don't understand why the developers resort to an irritating method for getting things reviewed - find the right community, know the right people, go to their court and appeal to their higher order with wonderful pitches about what should be done. There has to be a better way of dealing with things.
There are alternatives that are more or less restrictive than Wikipedia; or that have more or less input from "experts" in the fields.
Wikipedia hit a sweetspot of lots of people entering lots of information which caused it to grow rapidly.
Early deletionism and care about what could be added meant that "Random Article" was a useful link - you'd learn interesting and useful stuff from clicking it. Now, not so much. There's just so much in Wikipedia that 'Random Article" will take you to some malformed stub about a teeny tiny little thing.
Today there's a weird mix of deletionism and inclusionism. It's luck and politics if the subject you're interested in is targetted by deletionists / inclusionists. (Note that I take no sides here. Inclusionism can be just as harmful for a good Wikipedia project as deletionism.
One thing I'd like to see Wikipedia try to do better is "A lead paragraph that anyone can understand". (Perhaps linked with better efforts for Simple English Wikipedia.) Unfortunately lead paragraphs are hotly contested and thus often pretty poor.
> the bigger they get, the more demanding they are getting
Is it not a common pattern for any company? They start small and innocent, with high moral values, impatient to take down the big nasty corporation. And soon enough, if successful, they fall pray to the fate of their past nemesis.
I think it is inevitable to turn evil at a certain threshold of growth. This is when moral values shift towards maximization of profit. And as company grows further and gains more social importance, it is a matter of time when it faces politics.
And if one's really lucky, it can grow to a point when it's too big to fail :)
I'm wondering about a class-action lawsuit to stop those ads claiming your donation is needed to keep it on the air. That's just a bald-faced lie. Is that permitted under fundraising laws?
Just one short detail to show how ridiculous and picking on details this article is:
How is covering Festivalsommer 2013 "highly questionable"? Thats a clever way do things!
Getting rights for pictures of artists is a long and messy process, so you best take them yourself and make sure that you are an accredited journalist, so you are actually allowed to publish them. For many german artists, there are no pictures at all. The project has already been tried on one festival last year (Wacken 2012) and they try to cover 30 festivals. Expecting 50 Bands per festival, this potentially yields 1500 pictures (more or less). For that, 18000 is a _steal_, especially expecting that volunteers provide their own equipment.
So, tl;dr: Wikipedia is more than a website, it is also a foundation[1] that tries to improve all aspects of the service in clever ways. This costs money as well.
[1] Actually, more then one, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is something completely different. Another thing the Article misses: Wikimedia Deutschland has its own budget.
The issue is that wikipedia has necessary expenses (keeping the servers running) and optional ones (paying people to take photos of German music festivals). Yet all their guilt-tripping asking for money is focused on the necessary expenses. I'm sure that is more effective, but that doesn't mean I don't feel misled.
That could have been conveyed in a much shorter article that doesn't discredit honest projects of community members. Also, I don't feel guilt-tripped. What do you expect? A multi-paragraph article on top of each page?
If you click through, for example in Germany, you get a pretty detailed explanation of where your money goes:
That's the heart of the issue, right? Is the Wikimedia Foundation just supposed to run a website that is edited by volunteers, or is it supposed to also do other things that further the same goals as the actual Wikipedia? The foundation itself has the latter viewpoint, while I expect most people donating are just donating to pay for the former.
Ok, fine. Neither side has numbers. But based on the pervasive banners, I thought wikipedia was still in dire straits and needed my money urgently just to keep the servers and bandwidth running. Now that I know they are doing just fine, I doubt I will contribute again. I'd rather put my charity donations to more worthy causes.
Thats exactly the point why people are reluctant to donate. The budget for running Wikipedia the website is rapidly approaching single digit percentages while the foundation is hiring at startup rate.
A lot of those people are doing things like working on software and doing DevOps, which seems like "running Wikipedia the website to me". People complain that MediaWiki needs a visual editor that's easier for people to use, so Wikimedia hired developers who are working on that. That's pretty directly related to operational expenses, no?
People also want more frequent and better database dumps, scaling to account for more traffic and improve reliability, worldwide mirroring of the database servers to reduce latency across the world, a replacement of the increasingly crufty template language, etc., etc. All reasonable requests, but they require a staff of developers and sysadmins to implement.
I agree that the foundation could do a better job at actually propagating that the running costs of wikipedia are not the server costs, but also the cost of governance and evolution and that alot of the results of that make wikipedia better in the end.
So the angle of advertisement may be improvable, but I still think that it is worthwile to fund all their other projects through donations.
Sorry, but €12 per amateur picture is not a steal.
Then there is a whole different issue of prioritizing resources while you get into projects like that. Why rock festivals? Why not illustrating Polka performers, or wurst wrappings, or carriages of subway park in Nuremberg? (Rhetorical, we all know rock festivals are fun)
Who says that the pictures are amateurish and that amateurs are taking the pictures? Also, I don't expect them to take 1500 pictures, but 1500 usable pictures (one per act).
Please read through the linked statement in the article, there is actually a long text attached.
And yes, you have to prioritize. One of the factors is actual volunteers. There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? Because Polka should be covered as well?
The article calls this "highly questionable". No, its a thought out decision that went through multiple levels of review.
>There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? //
Isn't the point - in part at least - that you aren't letting them do stuff they volunteer for but are paying someone else to do it. And that the payments to some editors or content providers automatically adds a political/social bias by favouring rock concerts over other performing arts (say).
These are volunteers who are taking the pictures, I doubt they all are professional photographers. Which is fine, photography isn't that hard, these days you can't really swing a dead cat without hitting a decent photographer.
My point was that amateur photography doesn't cost on €12 a pop today, if only due to sheer abundance of imagery.
> There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? Because Polka should be covered as well?
This is not someone's private project we're talking about, but resources contributed by people. These are not their money, they don't get to decide. I clearly don't give a damn about Polka either, but I'm sure there are tons of places in Wikipedia where investment would make more sense.
> This is not someone's private project we're talking about, but resources contributed by people. These are not their money, they don't get to decide.
Thats where you have it wrong. Once you donated the money, it is theirs and they can use it at their discretion, as long as you haven't stated what the money is specifically for and the use isn't fraudulent. Yes, they can even spend it on beer to improve employee morale and they certainly do from time to time.
Well, the other thing is that Wikimedia Deutschland do not necessarily get all of their funding from the Wikipedia fundraiser. Chapters often raise money themselves and sometimes get money from third parties specifically for particular projects and partnerships.
In Britain, for instance, most of the Wikimedia partnerships I've been involved in have had no cost to the chapter beyond a low-cost train fare and a few sandwiches. A lot of the cost is shared with the organisations we are partnering with. There are hundreds of organisations that want to work with Wikimedia, and it's usually of the "spend a few quid on sandwiches" variety.
The idea that people are getting rich off Wikimedia chapter outreach type work is ludicrous. If I want to get rich, well, my consulting day rate is a hell of a lot more than the cost of a sandwich and a train fare.
It's not 1 photo, it's the best photo out however many they took + publishing rights. And Publishing rights for a single high quality photo can easily cost you thousands of dollars.
This has been one of my biggest complaints about wikipedia and I'm glad they're addressing it - media rights. The more pictures, video, and audio they own the better. When I was a kid I read the encyclopedia for fun and a big part of what drew me in was the images in them. I feel like that would really help the site.
A clever way of doing it would be to ask people who are already attending the concerts to submit their photos. Or, you know, asking the bands themselves.
Hiring somebody, buying them a camera, sending them to the concert to take photos is what I would classify as the least cleaver way of solving the problem.
They are _not_ hiring someone. They are sponsoring community members doing the legwork.
The problem is that if you are not accredited to concerts, picture rights are very messy. Most of the time, concert entry with proper camera equipment is not allowed or - by buying a ticket - you waive rights to the picture. The easiest way to get usable pictures at concerts is to get accredited as a photographer. Also, bands of note and their labels usually don't provide pictures with open licensing as requested by wikimedia commons. The same goes for accredited photographers already present at the concert.
Please click through to the discussion of the project, all this was discussed before the grant was given. The inability to gather usable media is the core of the funding request.
Please click through to the discussion of the project, all this was discussed before the grant was given.
This is what irritates me about Orlowski. The community debated (extensively) what they want to do, and some "journalist" from the peanut gallery comes in sniping at the good work of others. Orlowski is a disgrace.
Ah, Andrew Orlowski. When I was administrator, at around the time that I started the Admin's Noticeboard and maintained the Wikipedia In the News section of the site (thank you Google News!), I noticed that he attacked Wikipedia on an almost weekly basis.
The man has an axe to grind. Not sure why, but just bear that in mind when you read his articles.
Orlowski is the reason I stopped reading El Reg. He's constantly negative on absolutely everything, from Google to Linux to Wikipedia to anyone-with-any-money-whatsoever, especially if based in California.
He's like one of those unmarried aunts who won't stop gossiping on other people's relationships because they don't have a life of their own.
What's wrong with that? As long as he's got arguments, there's nothing wrong with him focusing on an issue that he deems significant and educating people about the issue.
LOL. Read some more of his stuff, he's really, really good at rubbing people up the wrong way, and quite deliberately. His unwavering support for tougher IP laws would probably be funny if it didn't just wind me up sooooo much.
He's a British Drudge for the technology world. He's an inaccurate, rumour-mongering, slanderous/libelous troll. He's not someone with a pet issue offering useful critique, he's a vicious little ankle-biter who wants everyone else to hate what he hates because it drives traffic to his site.
Case in point: he flamed Charity: water for having the temerity to promote an event around twitter. The horror! This actually got a write up from Paul Carr in The Guardian.
So, in other 2005 news, The Register still hates Wikipedia. Honestly, I just don't get it. Sure, the culture can be off-putting. Sure, the donation drives can get annoying. But it's still a massive, eminently useful site run on a shoestring budget. The constant intimation that editors should be paid, a rather ridiculous assertion given the realities of open source communities, gives this piece the air of someone's personal gripe. It really does seem like someone set out to write a hit piece, then decided after what details to cherry pick in order to make it as hitty as possible.
One of these days, I'd be interested in finding out just what it is that makes The Register hate Wikipedia so much. The kind of vitriol you see from them is usually only matched by the Wikipedia Review, which leads me to believe that there's a jilted ex-editor somewhere on their staff whose mission is to expose the nasty, evil, free and open source encyclopedia to the world.
"That article is typical of The Register - typical nonsense. The number of falsehoods in it is substantial, so in the interests of time, I will cover just a few of the highlights.
1. "The vast potential for advertising attracted venture capital firm Elevation Partners (whose investors include Bono from U2) to court Wikipedia" - at no point in our conversations with Elevation was there ever a suggestion that Wikipedia should take advertising. Indeed, Roger McNamee was quite adamant that Wikipedia should not do that.
2. "Bono also urged Wales to drop the volunteers and hire professionals instead." This is absolutely and utterly false. Bono has never suggested any such thing nor anything even remotely resembling it. He's always been in awe of the community and how it all works.
The Wikimedia Foundation (and associated chapters) are incredibly transparent about our spending, hiring policies and practices, etc. The idea that the Foundation should restrict itself to the tiniest possible budget just to keep the site running is frankly idiotic.
And the idea that the Foundation has steadily increased our reserve position is bad is also idiotic. There can be such a thing as having too large a reserve, but we aren't close to that level yet. One think we know our donors are interested in (because of their response to banner messaging) is that we keep Wikipedia safe - and that means, in part, being fiscally responsible and building up a cushion for the future."
They hired a lobbyist? That means they are evil, right? What would they need a lobbyist for, it's not as if freedom of information on the internet is under any threats at all? Nothing to see here, move along.
And they sent some people on a vacation with a work background, and printed business cards? Is it not allowed to throw parties for staff of charities? So why not work related vacations?
Dear smart people, stop upvoting sensationalist articles like this. I know that you can read through it and understand it lacks real arguements. Dumb people are not actually reading it, they're just reading the headline and first paragraph and thinking 'IT MUST BE TRUE'.
Yes wikipedia is becoming more than just an online encyclopedia, because it NEEDS to.
The article reads as if it was published in a tabloid, to put it mildly. Flashy headline, then looses the focus of the headline and glues together separate paragraphs some of which seem far from the topic because there's no point being made with them, like the paragraphs about WMF not listing all its donations anymore and the decision not to show ads.
In fact, there are very little assertions made. Instead, the author seems to hope that by throwing some statements, references and numbers, the readers would be impressed enough and draw conclusions.
Statements like the ones below are all stated without ANY conclusion or are a conclusion on it's own but with no arguments preceding it:
A) "Earlier this year Wikipedia attracted criticism for its new-found enthusiasm for political campaigning - not a traditional activity for encyclopedias, where fairness and objectivity is part of the "brand"." ,
B) "All this has been met with dismay by the loyal enthusiasts who do all the hard work of keeping the project afloat by editing and contributing words - and who still aren't paid. For the first time, Wikipedians are beginning to examine the cash awards - and are making some interesting discoveries." + subsequently quoting the salary of the WMF's director (again, with no point made),
C) "The Wikimedia Foundation hired a convicted felon as its chief operating officer to look after its books while on she was on parole. The executive's convictions included cheque fraud and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gunshot to the chest.",
D) "The substantial contributions from Google leave the foundation open to the charge that it's lobbying for the agenda of large corporations by proxy."
A) forgets to mention the implications SOPA had on Wikipedia.org
B) Does the author confuse how the product (wiki) works - volunteers contribute for free- and the fact people employed by a charitable organization still get paid?
C) The author "forgets" to mention that person worked at WMF only for 6 months instead of making it sound that person still works there. And what's the entire point of this? WMF is corrupt and hence money disappears? I'll get back to this later.
D) "open to the charge" ? Ridiculous, anything can be left open to any charge; the question whether there's a substantial reasoning and/or proof for such charge(which are >completely< lacking here) is a whole another matter.
Now, let's look at the main (and only) statement of the article - WMF is awash with money and does not need donations to operate. "operate" is key. If the idea is to keep paying electricity, servers and maintenance, then yes, the author is right. This can be inferred from the stat he gives about WMF having only 3 employees in 2007 and operating with $3m. (Of course, ignoring growth in usage and costs)
But why should that be the goal of the fundraiser? Should it not aim to make Wikipedia.org the product we need it to be? Hence all the money spent on improving editing tools (yes, even if that means paying a research grant, what's wrong with that?), improving the community and especially reversing the trend of less and less people contributing to the wiki? These essentially are maintenance costs of the main product, even if the bits themselves are new development. Look at the projected staff growth for next year in [1]. Almost all of the jobs are software/system engineer jobs.
And the bit about the lobbyist is hilarious! I'm actually surprised they didn't have one until this year (or maybe I'm misreading).
The facts in the article about how some of the raised money has been spent indeed raises questions about the WMF's efficiency (and as Argorak points out[2], even those aren't definitive). But that's about it. Claiming that the foundation is "awash" with money and no donations are needed is a very large leap. It currently has $27.7m in reserve. According to WMF's strategic plan [1], this can last the foundation for less than a year. In other words, every year the money raised are extending the life of the foundation by 1 year. I find this very close to what the fund raising message on Wikipedia.org conveys.
So, one thing that always gets brought up is "yeah, but what about those reserves?"
WMF have in the past said that they keep about six months of cash in reserve. And have for a few years now. Orlowski and some of the troll brigade get very antsy about this. I think it is... sound financial planning.
I don't know about you, but having a cash reserve is kind of a useful selling point if you are trying to hire programmers and engineers. "We're not suddenly going to go bankrupt overnight and leave you in the lurch" is something you actually need to be able to tell prospective employees if they've got families and mortgages and so on.
As a Wikipedia admin and volunteer, I'm actually mostly okay with how the Foundation operates. Some of the local chapters are probably a bit too bloated but the Foundation itself, I'm broadly okay with.
As someone who has worked in the non-profit sector for several years, having a cash reserve is a best practice. Six months is on the smaller end. If you don't have cash reserves and fund raising falls short, you have to start laying people off, cutting programs, turning off servers, etc. Or if the global economy tanks and people stop donating, your whole non-profit may be in trouble.
Six months of cash to cover all expenses is a selling point of Wikipedia, not a detraction. I want to donate to and work for financially prudent non-profits. If anything, I'd like to see their cash reserves upped to more like a year or so.
Six months was the last time I attended a fundraising discussion meeting. I think that there may be long-term plans to try and keep a bigger cash reserve. It's what happens when non-profits grow up.
Plus, donations are not flat through the year. In the US, at least, donations spike in December because it's the last chance to qualify as a tax deduction for the current tax year.
It's a very interesting point, and i guess the issue is if you have to start laying fundraisers off, you have no fund raiser to raise funds. Kind of a vicious circle situation!
It's The Register, and The Register has Things They Hateses, e.g., Google, and apparently, Wikipedia.
On neutral topics The Register can be fun and even informative, but when it comes to Things They Hateses, no rumor is too unsubstantiated, no conclusion too tenuous, and no argument too bizarre to be crammed together haphazardly into a nasty little ball of hate and called "an article."
They Hateses It, and It They Hateses, and that's good enough for them.
Apparently The Register think that because people don't get paid (and in fact are specifically not allowed to get paid), that the editors of Wikipedia are somehow being hard done by.
Seems ridiculous - very much a biased piece against Wikipedia, not well researched, and not particularly cogent.
So far as I can tell, it's not so much "The Register thinks" as "Orlowski thinks" - much though I tend to enjoy reading his articles, a small dump truck full of salt is pretty much always required.
The improvement from one star to four on the efficiency-as-a-charity thing and the innovative things they're doing with the money led me to have a more positive impression of wikipedia at the end of the article than I did beforehand; hopefully a decent percentage of readers will feel the same way.
Andrew Orlowski is a well known troll. Also on a personal level he's a complete cunt. I used to argue with him back and the day but there is no point.
His previous main argument against wikipedia was that anyone who uses it and supports it is advocating pedophilia.
Indeed when i , as eloquently could, disagreed with him in an email, he decided to publish snippets from my mail, with my name and email address on the reg. I had to contact the editor to get him to remove it and apologise for misrepresenting my remarks.
The best example of feeding the troll was when Pan released version 0.10.0.92 as "Andrew Orlowski Can Kiss My Ass". [1] This was in response to him flaming Gnome 2.0. [2]
Does anyone know why he's got such a bee in his bonnet about anything that works against the continued expansion of copyright?
I realise he's a journalist and so sells the copyright to his own work, but he's so aggressive about it I always assume there's something else going on, like some weird religious or political affiliation? Anyone?
He seems close to Dominic Young, previously News International’s director of strategy and product development, who now runs http://copyrightblog.co.uk/ (intellectual platform or industry mouthpiece - you decide).
Dominic was a source for his piece railing against the "Don't break the internet" slogan [1].
I wouldn't really consider any of these Orlowski pieces journalism. He's clearly very close to certain industries (Content and Nuclear for instance) and seems to just write hit pieces for the industries he favours, relying on some intellectual sleight-of-hand and snark to woo readers to an industry point of view.
I suppose The Register is a channel to a particular educated, technical demographic and Orlowski uses his influece to try to shape the opinions of that demographic.
I've no idea whether he gets paid via other channels for his strident advocacy, and would actually prefer that it was a situation where Hanlon's razor is in play, because most of what he writes is ridiculous.
I'd rather they use my money to buy themselves more hard drive so they wouldn't have to delete as many articles.
I feel there are enough music and politician articles already on Wikipedia. The fringe articles are what would drive more participants to WP, were they not deleted.
I'd consider donating when they get serious about the deletionist problem and stop pretending that the drop off in new contributions has anything to do with the absurd notion that wikipedia is exhausting the depth and breadth of human knowledge.
Wikipedia gives me so much value US$50/year is cheap. I wouldn't mind if people there where getting rich building it. Although Corporate/Organizational transparency is always a good thing, and should be demanded.
That's my top pet peeve. Pay and still see ads? Removes a major incentive. I rememer long ago RealAudio introduced a constantly-rotating ad in their player. Paid for it -the ads remained! Had to ask for my money back, deinstall, never used it again.
So, there's a reason for it. Namely, the way to implement that would require setting a cookie to say you've donated. And it'd be a cross-site cookie (because the payment is done on the Foundation site, not on Wikipedia).
The Privacy Policy is pretty strong on things like that: we don't set cookies unless there's a need to. Fortunately, you just click the 'X' button in the top-right hand corner and the banner will go away for the rest of the fundraiser... whether you've donated or not.
Can the donations be tied to a user account? What prevents checking 'user donated within 6 months'? (Assuming people can and do provide the information and remain logged in)
I really think they should have taken the advertising route. A couple of google ads would have been enough to fund the site, and they would be less of a nuisance than they're fundraising ads.
In fact, I think if they had become a for-profit, they could have innovated more than they do as a non-profit. Quora and StackExchange show you can use user-contributed content in a balanced, but for-profit way. Imagine if Google had become a non-profit dedicated to an open search. We wouldn't have Gmail, Android or self-driving cars...
They sure are good at crafting that advertising message to make it sound like they are in dire straits to even pay the hosting bills.
Make it sound like a small org: "we have only 150 staff" ...
Lead with the necessary hosting costs, even if stuff like "programs" is where the money is being spent: "have costs like any other top site: servers, power, rent, programs, staff, and legal help"
Imply the whole project is on shaky ground: "take one minute to keep it online another year"
Wikipedia should allow per project/task funding, so you could dedicate your money to infrastructure, lobbying, single research projects or any combination of those.
Charities hate this. Ringfencing costs them a ton of money to track, exposes them to legal liabilities, does little good, is often entirely meaningless given the fungibility of money, and reduces flexibility. The way I put it would be this: if you don't trust them to spend your money well, why do you trust them to spend a restricted donation? Shouldn't you find a charity you do trust? There's so many out there, after all.
If they ask for donations, it seems fair to know what their operating costs are as others have pointed out. As a point of reference, all of the non profits I donate to have annual reports that specify exactly where the monies go, and are audited. People will indeed donate if they believe the money is going to a good cause and there's adequate transparency. See Kiva.org and the job they've done in that area.
"You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villan" -- given the contribution wikipedia has made to the world, personally I am ok paying $100/yr to fund their beer.
As for the people editing wikipedia - its similar to facebook users adding their "data" and Mark profiting from it all. Why should this be an exception?
That was a talk from 7 years ago. Wikipedia experienced explosive growth at around that time, and the WMF (the organisation you donate to) have expanded their remit since then.
Jimmy Wales is very active on Quora and answers pretty much any question with his name in it (and it's "free" to ask him to answer) if anybody cares to post this. I was going to, but since the comments here seem to say the article is without merit, I wont.
I'm curious as to what questions it actually raises? There was, a long time ago, someone who has now left as COO. The WMF (which the article consistently calls "Wikipedia") runs quite an open operation. Sue Gardener put in excellent processes into place and the organization is quite a tight ship by all accounts.
Probably there are some stuff ups. It's a non-profit. The business cards issue sounds like one of those. That's something that can happen with any organization, so not sure if that's enough to see some sort of nefarious scheme conning people out of their money...
Of all the issues that Orlowski could nit-pick on, he chose the most ridiculous. There's nothing to see here, just a bunch of assertions with no evidence or even earth shattering revelations.
Frankly, the article is a hatchet job. Bravo El Reg, a quality publication!
I hate the Register and I haven't read the article.
So, ignoring that article: You have some knowledge of Wikimedia, and Wikipedia, and the foundation. What problems do you think those projects have, and how could they overcome those problems?
To be honest, it's been a very long time since I was an active participant on Wikipedia. The issues I had we're always with Wikipedia, and almost never the regulars (except Giano, who I notice has now left the project). I never had an issue with anyone from the WMF, they were always very professional.
The few issues I did have were based on unsubstantiated rumour, so I'm not about to repeat them here, suffice to say that those perceived or real issues were cleaned up a long time ago.
That article is typical of The Register - typical nonsense. The number of falsehoods in it is substantial, so in the interests of time, I will cover just a few of the highlights.
1. "The vast potential for advertising attracted venture capital firm Elevation Partners (whose investors include Bono from U2) to court Wikipedia" - at no point in our conversations with Elevation was there ever a suggestion that Wikipedia should take advertising. Indeed, Roger McNamee was quite adamant that Wikipedia should not do that.
2. "Bono also urged Wales to drop the volunteers and hire professionals instead." This is absolutely and utterly false. Bono has never suggested any such thing nor anything even remotely resembling it. He's always been in awe of the community and how it all works.
The Wikimedia Foundation (and associated chapters) are incredibly transparent about our spending, hiring policies and practices, etc. The idea that the Foundation should restrict itself to the tiniest possible budget just to keep the site running is frankly idiotic.
And the idea that the Foundation has steadily increased our reserve position is bad is also idiotic. There can be such a thing as having too large a reserve, but we aren't close to that level yet. One think we know our donors are interested in (because of their response to banner messaging) is that we keep Wikipedia safe - and that means, in part, being fiscally responsible and building up a cushion for the future.
It was just an example. It's easy to say "I don't care about what they spend their money on if I'm getting value" if they are reasonable about spending the money. But it's very easy for foundations to start spending a lot of money in ways that aren't very key to their mission.
Speaking as a long-time WP editor, if the Foundation decided to fly Wales around First Class, that sure wouldn't bother me at all. The man has devoted himself to a widely-recognized and ever-more-succesful project ... I think he deserves some perks. (A helluva lot more savory than W's frequent flights to 'cut brush' on his 'ranch'.) He's the man who's got to answer the world's questions, after all (and who was, I'll add, right about a LOT of stuff).
Do you have any sort of proof to support that claim? I've never heard anything like that, and previously "flying jimmy out to do talks" was listed as one of the things we needed to donate for.
"I take no salary or expenses from the Wikimedia Foundation because as the main "face" of the fundraiser, it's important that people understand that donor money is not for me."
Considering that former wikimedia executives have stated that Jimmy didn't just expense things, but abused the privilege to make wikimedia pay for personal stuff, I am not inclined to simply take Jimmy at his word. Is there anyone else vouching for him?
External auditors, other board members, chapter boards, the IRS... there's plenty of oversight if Jimmy were to do something stupid expenses-wise from now on.
And there are so many unhappy-family moments with chapter politics, that if there were any good reason to think Jimmy wasn't keeping his word, that would get leaked.
>External auditors, other board members, chapter boards, the IRS... there's plenty of oversight if Jimmy were to do something stupid expenses-wise from now on.
All of that existed when he was doing this in the first place. I didn't say he was still abusing expenses, I am asking if there is any evidence to support his claim that he no longer has any expenses paid for at all. I can not find any auditors or board members supporting that claim.
Like I said in the very post you replied to, I am not suggesting he is abusing it now. I am suggesting he draws a salary and expenses normal business expenses, but is saying otherwise.
Right, which is why claiming auditors, etc support the claim is farcical. Wikimedia financials only say "salaries" and "expenses", it isn't broken down per person.
>But can you see any auditors or board members denying the claim?
I don't know that they are even aware of the claim.
Confirming: I have served on the Board with Jimmy for three years. He takes no salary or expenses from the Foundation.
For instance, while most of our 10-person Board (who all volunteer our time) have travel and lodging for Board meetings reimbursed, he arranges his own.
To the contrary, he promotes WMF fundraising, and encourages groups to which he speaks to donate or provide in-kind support to the WMF.
For example, on pp. 54-58, we see that their 2012-2013 plan expects to spend around $42 million, of which about $17.5 million goes to "Engineering". The largest area within engineering, about $6 million, is "Core Site Ops". The plan is for staffing to rise from 119 to 174 people over the year of the plan.
An easy way to monetize would be to capitalize on the black market for admin/sysop accounts. I bet politicians and corporate executives would pay for a properly leveled-up account.
I have an admin account. It really isn't that big of a deal. It just means there's a few extra things I can do that non-admins can't. And when I fuck up, people shout at me more.
Really, that's all you get from it: more work and more drama.
Everyone else sees Wikipedia administrators as supreme overlords when in fact they are basically janitors.
I got downvoted to hell for saying this is another ycombinator thread two days ago... I guess I jumped out in front of the bandwagon instead of on to it.
What's the purpose of Wikipedia, anyway? Is it an online, open, encyclopedia? Or is it becoming some kind of quasi-political organization with tendrils everywhere?
There's one thing we are learning about the net: everybody wants to own the entire net. Whether it's Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or Wiki, once you get so large you start thinking of the internet and your service as being the same.
Wikipedia has the money it needs to operate, yet still it grows. If anything, the bigger they get, the more demanding they are getting with asking for contributions. Why? I believe that's an excellent question, and investigating the answer is also fascinating. (As is watching the story continue to develop over the next 5-10 years)