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Besides, what good does a computer do a starving child?

Maybe that's not the people they're trying to help. There are those who don't starve, but don't exactly have schools available.

Many nations chose inexpensive windows based alternatives because that's what the developed world is using. If you have a very limited budges, why would you waste it training your kids to use an OS that nobody else uses?

I don't think OLPC's objective was to train the kids to use the computer, those countries don't have exactly a large computer-related job market. I think the objective was to provide a tool to educate about *other* stuff.
For example, providing offline copies of Wikipedia.

It's like a whole 'nother country.

Texas WAS another, independent country at one time... I wonder if they'd ever like to take that back. Also, interesting to note that 4 of the last 11 POTUS have called themselves Texans. No I'm not a Texan or a wannbe, just saying there's more in the background than the scenery.

Apparently it has its own interweb as well; http://www.webmd.com/ ? http://www.medhelp.org/ ? http://various.others.etc/ ?

Where do I get a ".etc" domain? I'm interested in several .etc names but can't find a place to buy them. Also, who manages the other oddball TLD's like .aero, .cat, and .coop? I really want to know why nothing is at www.chicken.coop!
Did fox.com get to them already? And for god's sakes why is there no page at www.my.cat? You'd think that address would be spewing cuteness so hard it would wash up on the shores of porn sites...

Gotta love Wikipedia...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
Apparently gotta pay too...http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Appeal2/en

Ben,

Thanks for the clarification and your efforts in the free books arena.

I took some time to look through a bit of what CK12 has available on their website and it's clear who the real champion of these free textbook successes is... Jimmy Wales and the work of Millions of dedicated people who have contributed to the Wikipedia project.

Actually, Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and they appear to have about 30 people on their staff currently. Their based in San Francisco, not New York. But I do see your point. ICANN is just horribly, horribly incompetent and overstaffed.

Actually, I do realize that American and European copyright law is different. I just didn't bother to mention it because we're talking about an American who uploaded the pictures to a set of servers administered by an American organization and located in America. Therefore, only American copyright is relevant.

Wikipedia is of course exempt from Godwin's Law, for one very good reason.

Which is why they just completed a six million dollar fund raising campaign. With cheap disk space, and cheap bandwidth, and volunteers doing the work... where is the money going?

You can just read the various financial statements on the Wikimedia Foundation's website. For instance, you can look at the page 2008-2009 Annual Plan Questions and Answers:

What's the upshot here: how much bigger is this year's budget compared with last year's? Where are you spending more, and why?

Planned spending totals $5.9 million, which is an increase of $3 million over the 07-08 projected actuals. The single biggest increase is hardware purchases deferred from 07-08, that total $965K.

The second-largest increase is $510K for fundraising expenses: this includes three new positions (Head of Major Gifts, Head of Community Giving, and a Development Associate), as well as an allocation for fundraising expenses (technical help with the database, design support, usability and A/B testing money, fundraising related travel, an allocation for events, etc.).

Other significant increases include increased hosting costs (+$200K), funding for five new technical staff and contractors (+$375K), strengthening our "program" (mission-related) work by hiring staff for public outreach and partnerships roles, plus a Chief Programs Officer (+$221K), an increase in travel costs (+210K), and a new allocation for staff and volunteer development (+$113K).

I'm pretty sure there were links to explanations of why Wikimedia needed the money all throughout the fundraiser.

Which is why they just completed a six million dollar fund raising campaign. With cheap disk space, and cheap bandwidth, and volunteers doing the work... where is the money going?

You can just read the various financial statements on the Wikimedia Foundation's website. For instance, you can look at the page 2008-2009 Annual Plan Questions and Answers:

What's the upshot here: how much bigger is this year's budget compared with last year's? Where are you spending more, and why?

Planned spending totals $5.9 million, which is an increase of $3 million over the 07-08 projected actuals. The single biggest increase is hardware purchases deferred from 07-08, that total $965K.

The second-largest increase is $510K for fundraising expenses: this includes three new positions (Head of Major Gifts, Head of Community Giving, and a Development Associate), as well as an allocation for fundraising expenses (technical help with the database, design support, usability and A/B testing money, fundraising related travel, an allocation for events, etc.).

Other significant increases include increased hosting costs (+$200K), funding for five new technical staff and contractors (+$375K), strengthening our "program" (mission-related) work by hiring staff for public outreach and partnerships roles, plus a Chief Programs Officer (+$221K), an increase in travel costs (+210K), and a new allocation for staff and volunteer development (+$113K).

I'm pretty sure there were links to explanations of why Wikimedia needed the money all throughout the fundraiser.

If you want to see how they spend their money, go here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/Questions/en#How_is_the_revenue_spent.3F

There's even an PDF of their 07-08 financial there with projections for the 08-09 FY.

Yes, $6mill could provide alot of clean drinking water.. but did you ever think that maybe information provided to those same people might enable them to provide themselves with drinking water? Wikipedia won't make you an expert in a topic, but it can definitely get you thinking about it.. it's a decent tool for getting a feel for the problems/solutions/etc on a topic of which you are unfamiliar... now we just need to provide useful/accessibility to impoverished persons so they can enable themselves.

Actually, the Wikimedia Foundation's board just approved the Foundation's financial statement for the fiscal year ending on June 30 2008, as audited by KPMG.

If the IRS wants to investigate the Wikimedia Foundation, they're more than welcome to, I'd say - certainly the Foundation doesn't have anything to hide. Contrary to what you appear to think, there are no skeletons in their closets. :P

The IRS should also be taking a very, very close look at Wikipedia. For those reasons, and also the fact that there have been individuals in that organization that have shady financial histories.

You know, you actually forgot to specify what "those reasons" are - unless you are referring to the "most of [Mozilla]'s income comes fom a large highly successful company" tidbit, which doesn't apply to the Wikimedia Foundation at all.

And as for the "individuals with shady financial histories", there was precisely ONE; he's gone, too, and whatever he did in the past had nothing to with the Wikimedia Foundation, anyway. The IRS is still welcome to investigate if it wants to, but to insinuate that it should - i.e., that it would find anything illicit - is just FUD.

Not that FUD being spread about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation is unheard of, of course.

(Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia in any way at all whatsoever, other than reading Wikipedia and occasionally making small edits to correct typos and the like.)

The other issue is that no-one understands the GFDL. Not even the FSF. Really - you email licensing@fsf.org with a GFDL query, you will get back a response, three months later, saying "read the license text and consult with your attorney." Our attorney is Mike Godwin and it makes even his head hurt.

The FSF have given up making any sense of the license, so we can hardly be expected to.

The level of free-content zealotry that has infected the Wikimedia Foundation has done nothing but drive contributors away and remove useful content from their projects. They're a bunch of idiots shooting themselves in the foot.

How is "free-content zealotry" in an organization which exists solely for the purpose of developing free libraries of free content a bad thing?

I don't think so. The WikiMedia Foundation's benefactors show no sign of Google. Though Yahoo is listed as contributing hosting services in some unspecified amount.

The top benefactors give anywhere from $1M (for each of 3 years) to $100K (or some unspecified matching fund). I expect that if Google donated $50M, it would appear prominently on that page. Hell, if Google donated $100,000 it would be towards the top of that all too brief page.

I don't think so. The WikiMedia Foundation's benefactors show no sign of Google. Though Yahoo is listed as contributing hosting services in some unspecified amount.

The top benefactors give anywhere from $1M (for each of 3 years) to $100K (or some unspecified matching fund). I expect that if Google donated $50M, it would appear prominently on that page. Hell, if Google donated $100,000 it would be towards the top of that all too brief page.

I don't think so. The WikiMedia Foundation's benefactors show no sign of Google. Though Yahoo is listed as contributing hosting services in some unspecified amount.

The top benefactors give anywhere from $1M (for each of 3 years) to $100K (or some unspecified matching fund). I expect that if Google donated $50M, it would appear prominently on that page. Hell, if Google donated $100,000 it would be towards the top of that all too brief page.

For the record: Mitch Kapor is one of the members of the Wikimedia Advisory Board.

Given the independence of the editors (the volunteers) from the publishers (Wikimedia Foundation Inc.), I'm not too concerned about the content. Of course that independence only lasts until Wikimedia insists on seats on the Arbitration Committee or other editorial authority.

But they need a mechanism -- beyond 'trust us' -- to keep an eye on the money. That much money is just too tempting, not only for plain embezzlement but also for things like loans and investments for personal or friends' businesses, unreasonable expenses, etc.

Who controls the money? To whom are they responsible? Ultimately, the responsible party is the Wikimedia Foundation Board. While I don't believe fame and talent are highly correlated, and have no doubts about the board members, it would inspire more confidence if someone was putting a broader reputation on the line for Wikipedia. I want some on the board who have something serious to lose if things go wrong, like Mitch Kapor, Joi Ito, and others on the Mozilla Foundation board. In fact, I wonder why don't have people like already. Certainly it's prominent enough to attract them.

Finally, what mechanisms do similar organizations use to manage windfalls of cash?

The cake (or pie chart) is here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Planned_Spending_Distribution_2007-2008

Not sure what happened to the 2006 one.

The Wikipedia Foundation is a US corporation, which does not hold assets in Italy, so it can't be sued in an Italian court. Or, to be more accurate, it can be sued but the verdict would be meaningless.

However, Wikipedia does have an Italian chapter ( http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Local_chapters ). I assume that is the organization being sued.

A wiki admin- a real one, not one of the many bureaucrats who's only status symbol is a "This user is an ADMIN" userbox. You could also go to to the copyright phone number, at least you'd likely get an employee... than a redshirt... http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Designated_agent

They may do nothing, but a random person on the internet isn't going to be able to do much. An admin (as I noted, a real one) for the site where it's posted is normally the best person to handle it. If not, maybe they could at least tell you what to do.

Wikipedia is so concerned lately about deleting any material that is unworthy. It has greatly reduced the site's utility to me, and is the reason I use it less and less, and will refuse to contribute to its fund raisers until their deletion policy is substantially revised.

I completely agree with this. I have contributed to Wikipedia in the past, but will no longer do so until they stop being so delete happy. But if I want this to mean anything, I need to convey my thoughts to someone with the power to affect policies at wikipedia. Any idea on how to do this?

I found this list of the Board of Trustees, but can't figure out how to contact any of them:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_of_Trustees

Any ideas?

As Jimbo Wales once said, Wikipedia is - as an encyclopedia - only one book in our "wiki library", and one book is not a whole library. Of course mathematical proofs are important and should be freely available, but so is tons of other sort of information, too, and we can't just put everything in Wikipedia. Wikibooks offers a place for some book-like-stuff (and I think mathematical proofs belong there). There are also other projects for different kind of information, like learning materials and dictionaries. We should start to transfer Wikipedia's success to other free wikis and projects.

Oh, gimme a break. Name one thing worthwhile that comes at 'no cost'. Even Wikipedia comes at some cost. Somebody (probably Jimmy Wales/Wikimedia) has to pay for bandwidth and hosting. Whether Wikipedia hosts on its own servers or on someone else's, someone's paying for those hosts, the power and A/C to run them and the cost of an admin or two to keep them running. Therefore, you have to put up with cries for donations and such. Since there are no ads and no one gets paid to produce content, you have to put up with whatever is on there. The quality is wide and varied, just as in the open source community. Just as there are high-quality and poorly-written open source apps, there are high-quality or poorly-written Wikipedia articles. There's not much consistency, despite the best efforts of the Wikipedia community so far.

With an ad-supported site, and the possibility of Google even paying people for articles, the average level of quality will probably rise somewhat. With good editorial control, Google will probably be able to maintain a higher consistency of good quality articles than Wikipedia.

Flame me if you want, but look at it this way: Mac OS X is considered great because "it just works" and the quality of features is consistent throughout the OS. That's because Apple pays for its development and maintains tight control over its content.

Ubuntu works well, don't get me wrong, and it is my choice in desktop operating systems ... it's more polished than many other distros because even though it is a community effort, it's tightly managed by Canonical, with final say for everything tracking back to one man -- Mark Shuttleworth. It's a model not too different from the Linux kernel itself.

But my point is that openness is good, but at some point you've gotta have tight controls on what gets in and what doesn't it and that's what Google brings to the table.

If you dig a little more deeply to the statement by the Wikimedia Foundation, you'll see that they are planning to change licenses. GFDL 2.0 is just going to be intermediary revision, one which adds a clause allowing any massively multiauthor wiki to be relicensed under CC-By-SA.

I watched 28 Days Later a few days ago and then read its article on Wikipedia. I was intrigued by the virus in the movie and noticed that its article needed a little cleaning up, so I did so. Oh well. They decided that it's just fanfiction and now it's marked for deletion.

OK, so it's just an unimportant article about a fictional virus, but darn it, I found it interesting reading to the point that I wanted to add to it. I'm a Republican and not interested in the Democratic candidates next year; maybe I should delete their article. Baseball is just a game; delete. I'm not Catholic - gotta go. I like turtles all the way down, so dark matter can bite it.

My point is that everyone values and takes interest in different things. If it's not costing Wikipedia a lot to host minor pages on diverse subjects, then why not? Part of that huge diversity is what made Wikipedia popular. You'd think they'd heard of the network effect and the long tail.

At any rate, they can delete the article I like if they want, but if they're still going to ask for my money afterward, they can bite me. Incidentally, that last article is the plot summary of an episode of a non-mainstream TV show. Hope I didn't draw the attention of the delete-happy admins.

Um... you don't need *anything* to register a Wikipedia account. While the login form may ask you for a ton of fields, only your username and password are required; nothing else is (aside the CAPTCHA, but that goes without saying). In fact, being an unregistered editor exposes your IP address to the public, while registered editors are covered by the Wikimedia privacy policy.

~~~~

This is a troll, and is patently false, but I'll bite nonetheless: the Foundation's privacy policy (which governs the use of checkuser) strictly limits the conditions under which "personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature" may be released. The release of aggregated, anonomyized data, such as I did above, is perfectly acceptable under the privacy policy and is a common practice in web traffic analysis

Answering my own question, in case anyone's still reading:

The situation's not so dire; see this press statement and also this account of where the million bucks goes.

Answering my own question, in case anyone's still reading:

The situation's not so dire; see this press statement and also this account of where the million bucks goes.

Development of informational databases

Maintenance of informational databases

Distribution to the public free of restrictions

Distribution to the public free of charge

Enact user fees to cover "distribution to the public free of restrictions." Use donations to cover the other three. Everyone with an account is a potential contributor.

At current prices, providing everyone on Earth with as little as one gigabyte of content per year would require annual donations in excess of one billion US$. Current prices arise from current technology. The goal of free-as-in-beer distribution could possilby be addressed by improvements in distribution efficiency.

I'm confused. I know Wikipedia, and its popularity, are growing rapidly, but I'd love to know how they got through a year with $192,000 in expenses, and now it's "a million dollars will buy us three months!".

They hired a CEO, or should I say, they let Jimbo hire one. A move which, by the way, prompted the resignation of one of the board members.

Um.. if you read the pages you link, they give the answer, especially the What we need the money for page on the finances page. In short, it is because they are buying over $1,200,000 of new servers, increases in other expenses by around $200,000, and aim to increase their cash reserves by $300,000.

In the 2006 financial statement you link, they say they had $1,508,039 of revenue, they spent $791,907 on expenses (eg internet hosting) and spent another $428,309 on buying new servers. This, combined with the $137,237 they started with and $67,253 of other factors (inflation etc), leaves them with $512,313 in cash.

On the 'What we need the money for' page they say that in 2007 they plan to spend $1,670,000 on new servers (and also increase expenses by ~ $200,000). Compare this to the $428,309 spent in 2006 on servers. So, that seems to be where the money is going: new servers.

(disclaimer: I have no experience dealing with large amounts of money or accounting)

but it seems very unlikely that the current course of action is going to sustain Wikimedia for the duration.

Advertising is immoral because it raises demand and therefore raises everybody's prices, even for those people who don't benefit from Wikipedia. I prefer that only people who like Wikipedia pay for it.

Actually, the foundation that runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and the like does currently have six staff members. By "free", Wikipedia means that its content can be freely distributed, and nothing else really, although Wikipedia does lean towards free, open source software (it runs on MediaWiki). Having several paid encyclopedia-writers could be troubling, though, because it promotes inequality and even envy in the community, possibly driving away or discouraging those that put their free time into improving Wikipedia, or promoting elitism. Check out this page for a perspective on that; and think of the further problems that would result if this forced elitism applied to article writers!

Often, it's easier to write a featured article about something like this than something like this. As far as I am aware, there have been no repeat Featured Articles on the Main Page, so that means that featured articles keep on coming... but some are also being defeatured due to quality concerns. There was a net gain of four featured articles this week—gained nine, lost five. Often vandalism gets in the way of constructive article writing, and people have to spend more time on that, rather than on content-producing.

Finally, one of the goals of featured articles is to get an article to a place where it is incorruptible... but not unimprovable. (Motivation is another goal.) So if someone helped bring an article to featured status, they might notice any factual errors that were introduced. Wikipedia certainly has dynamic... but it's losing some of that. With a team of vandal-fighters and no content-writers, Wikipedia will only be able to preserve integrity -- not improve it.

According to the financial audit, in Summer 2006 they had $500,000 cash on hand and incoming donations of $30,000 per month. In January 2007 the last fundraiser finished with $1,000,000. In their own projection, they say they need $75,000 per month to keep the site running and to pay salaries. Assuming that that same cost was incurred already throughout the latter half of 2006, and that every month in 2006 they received $30,000 in donations but now after the fundraiser additional donations have completely dried up, Wikimedia has now enough cash on hand to operate through April 2009. Of course this assumes that they don't start hiring new people left and right (which unfortunately is in their plans).

I looked at their financial picture for the past three years. See the analysis, with links to the audited financial statements here.

As I initially compiled the review, I erred in supposing the Foundation president has specified the size of "major" donations needed. Otherwise, my analysis stands -- Foundation donations have slowed significantly in the past year, but are still on track to exceed projected revenues.

Also from this thread, we see the link to the foundation's summary of a monthly budget. Note that payroll comprises nearly half of monthly expense. All this talk about bandwidth is a red herring. There is now a cadre of full-time and part-time staff suckling at the Wikimedia Foundation tit.

And, note that the "What we need the money for" page presented on the members-only-can-edit Wikimedia Foundation site does not include links to recent budgets, or to recent financial statements.

Thanks for the link AC. According to that, bandwidth is 17% of the budget. Throw in hosting as well and you're up to 35%.

Their most recent budget is here. It costs around $75,000 per month to run the site, $12,000 for bandwidth.

Pardon me, but is Jimbo actually an employee of the Foundation? He isn't listed under their current staff. My impression has always been that he receives no money from the Foundation, except perhaps for travel expenses or the like (and many people receive money for travel expenses to go to Wikimania, for instance, plus I assume all Board members are repaid for travel costs for face-to-face meetings).

Even if he was an employee, when you spend a grand total of $107,122 on salaries and wages in a year (which must pay a full-time lawyer/CEO, two full-time developers, two part-time sysadmins, and four others), I can't imagine that Jimbo is making very much money off the WMF. Remember, he made a fair bit of money off Bomis, and probably is making a bit off Wikia too. He owns a Ferrari (although I hear it's broken). This doesn't seem like a big conflict of interest here.

He says Wikia has nothing to do with Wikipedia. That's correct, it doesn't, at least formally. They share the same software and their extensions to it often go in MediaWiki's repository, plus Jimbo is the president of one and the God-King of the other (and others have served on boards of both at times). Other than that, and similar vehicles (wikis) of achieving their rather different goals, they're unrelated.

Wales is, de facto, pretty much a supreme authority in Wikipedia's day-to-day operations, when he cares to involve himself. Nobody's said anything to the contrary, or if they did they misspoke (or were misinformed).

The Wikimedia Foundation is the legal owner of Wikipedia and cannot be overruled by Jimbo Wales, who is merely a lone board member and President Emeritus. If the Board resolved to overrule Jimbo, he would be overruled. Jimbo did overrule the community consensus, as he periodically does. All Wikipedia members are shareholders of the Wikimedia Foundation, but they do not have direct power: they elect a majority of the Board to two-year terms, that's it. See the Foundation bylaws.

The major objection to ads on Wikipedia takes two forms:

• Advertising is profane.
• Advertising would compromose Wikipedia's neutrality.

The second is completely unrealistic. How would third party text ads, e.g., via AdSense, compromise neutrality? There's simply no vector for an advertiser to demand changes and zero reason for Wikipedians to comply. Wikipedia is not a small town newspaper beholden to the local department store, not even close. It isn't even Slashdot, which as far as I can tell has not been compromised by years of running ads. To people with this objection: show me a community site that has gone astray due to advertiser influence.

Sponsors, "being managed by Wikipedia staff (like in newspaper ads, i.e. no uncontrolled 3rd party feeds)", as suggested by Kuba Ober, are far more dangerous than third party ads, because then there is a vector between advertiser and someone with power at Wikipedia.

There may be an opportunity for Wikipedia to completely rethink and remake advertising, or merely compete in some fashion with what some are calling Google's near monopoly, but now it would make tremendous sense to use AdSense or Yahoo! or both -- and I suspect Wikipedia could manage to keep a greater share of revenue than a normal web publisher. Rick Yorgason mocked up what AdSense would look like in the place of the current fundraiser's donation banner.

Slashdot commenter jklooserman summarizes objections from Wikiproject no ads:

1. Wikipedia's philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia's principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.

Much more money, hundreds of millions, would speed the arrival of that world and fulfillment of that commitment.

As above, there is no realistic scenario for ads undermining neutrality on Wikipedia.

The third objection strikes me as a non-sequitur. In any case, the point of obtaining more resources would be to increase the wealth of the community -- of all human beings.

jklooserman also pointed out that there's a category of Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising. Add it to your user page if you agree.

The point of an Encyclopedia is not be the repository of all knowledge, but to be a summary of all notable subjects.

And yet... notability as a criterion for inclusion is not and never has been an official policy of Wikipedia. It is, at most a disputed guideline, and the Wikimedia Foundation's own fundraising materials include the statement, "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Not "the sum of all notable human knowledge" or "the sum of the human knowledge we think is worthwhile", but the sum of all human knowledge.

Wikimedia Foundation **Press release** (rather than some random Wikipedia edit) is here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases /Wikimedia_Foundation_board_reorganised

`` Jimmy Wales said: "I nominated Florence to be the Chair of the Foundation in recognition of her outstanding service for the past few years and her unsurpassed passion for our goals. Having such a trusted community representative elected as our new chair demonstrates the growth and strength of our organization." ''

Oh give us a break, and get off your nationalistic high-horse.

Wikipedia and Slashdot originated in and are owned and run by people in the United States. Sure the Internet is a worldwide thing, but don't gripe if a majority of people on those sites appear to be American. If it's that big of a deal, go find different sites that better suit your needs.

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 20 most visited websites.

That'd seem to be going rather against the grain of Wikipedia's "mission statement" and goals

Wikipedia's, perhaps, but not Wikimedia Foundation's.

I thank Mr. Wales for defending the principles on which the Internet was founded and freedom depends, and I have donated to the Wikipedia Foundation in appreciation and support.

(and remember, their servers and bandwidth costs are covered by corporate donations, not yours and mine)

(and remember, their servers and bandwidth costs are covered by corporate donations, not yours and mine)

> Britannica should just buy Wikipedia and maintain both [...]

ARTICLE VII: DEDICATION OF ASSETS

The property of this corporation is irrevocably dedicated to charitable purposes and no part of the net income or assets of this corporation shall ever inure to the benefit of any director, officer or members thereof or to the benefit of any private individual.