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The only ones who really matter in the web consortium are the browser makers.

Such as a browser maker allied with Wikimedia: Mozilla.

(Source: "Wikimedia Foundation collaborates with two initiatives: Mozilla’s OSSN and TeachingOpenSource’s POSSE".)

Actually, we can look a bit closer at that.

WMF spends about 40% of its revenues on engineering. Hosting is just the small cost: I ran a video CDN for over 120 news stations, and the hosting cost was roughly $3,500/month. My salary was over 1.5 times that; and the whole thing was controlled by custom software developed and maintained at costs ranging around $300,000/year. That used a single, non-geographically-distributed database.

WMF has to engineer an enormous, high-availability network with hundreds of replicated caches, databases, and Web servers. It has to handle security, software upgrades, and basic administrative tasks across this infrastructure. Something as simple as keeping system patches up-to-date is an enormous undertaking in that kind of environment, largely due to the amount of risk carried. They don't have one guy running their databases; they have dozens of DBAs, hundreds of sysadmins in total. People who complain that they can't have a $144k salary because someone might hire an Indian for $85k to replace them.

Management and Governance is that whole "running a business" thing. It's the thing that lets you accomplish large tasks without expending enormous amounts of effort. Slashdot, Fark, Ubuntu, Debian, and the FSF all have governance; they don't all get paid for it, but they all invest time. For some organizations, like WMF and FSF, governance is a full-time job for several people, and so ... well, we pay them.

All of this means WMF has HR costs, management costs, and functional costs. It also sends 10% of its money to grants, so some millions are just going out to fund charitable efforts. WMF spends more on grants than on hosting; hell, they spend more on legal than on hosting, because they need to avoid enormous costs from frivolous lawsuits by people like Peter Thiel.

So it looks like it's actually kind of expensive to run WMF. They also need to float large amounts of cash holdings year-to-year in case of unstable donation-based revenue streams. As WMF grows in activities, that risk reserve needs to enlarge, so their bank accounts and cash holdings get bigger.

hasn't this "king-of-the-hill mentality" been an endemic so-called problem with wikipedia for the past ten-plus years, during which, of course, wikipedia has been functioning well enough for almost everyone (and certainly no worse than it has ever actually functioned; wikipedia is only bad when compared to what might possibly have been in a thought-experiment world)? as long as people like, presumably, you keep fighting, there's enough churn to keep the outskirts from totally locking up and the system will continue.

i don't know; is WMF even meant to deal with this supposed problem in the first place? maybe they actually do a lot of good work on issues of copyright and censorship, which could at least potentially be existential threats to wikipedia's existence, as opposed to an inevitable side-effect of using an anarchic egoist model to solicit content from people for free.

WMF declares their purpose (in a large textbox at the head of their front page) to be "... encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge," and further that they "operate... Wikipedia" toward this purpose. In short, their objective is much broader than just micro-managing the edit turf wars which, as much as you dislike them, are business-as-usual for wikipedia, if not its foundational principle. WMF may still be failing at their stated purpose; i don't know anywhere near enough to know whether this is the case, let alone to start assigning blame.

Instead of a grant, how about a federal investigation to determine where the money is actually going?

Or... you could read the audited financial statements which Wikimedia posts on its website. It's not that hard.

The financial statements paint a picture of a financially healthy organization. Very healthy. But having solid financials is not a crime. The thing that sticks out about these financials is that Wikimedia has a huge amount of cash on hand. Now it's normal for charities to keep more cash on hand than a for-profit business. If you're Proctor and Gamble, well, things would have to get pretty bad before people give up on buying soap. You can count on future cash inflows. If you're a charity those cash inflows are a lot more volatile, so you keep more on hand.

How much? Well, normally a well-run charity keeps enough current assets to run for six months; Wikimedia has about eighteen months. However you have to take into account that Wikimedia is growing rapidly. It was almost 25% larger in FY 2016 than it was in 2015. It's normal in this situation to have more cash reserves than one that is a stable size.

And note -- we're talking cash or cash equivalents held by the foundation, not Jimmy Wales personally. If you look at the foundation's IRS 990 form, Jimmy Wales gets $0 in compensation from the foundation either in salary, in-kind, or (important to check as this is a common dodge) compensation from related organizations. The highest compensated executive is Lisa Tretikov, at $308K. Fundraising expenses, overhead, and executive compensation are all quite low for a charity with $82 million in income, 70% of which is spent on program (also a very good metric).

Charity Navigator gives Wikimedia Foundation a 91/100 combined score for transparency, accountability, and financial management. This puts it in the top tier of charitable foundations, roughly on par with the American Heart Association. Kind of like the charity equivalent of a blue chip stock. Your local food bank is more like a growth stock; if things go as planned your donation will have a bigger impact, but if things go south your donation may just go to pay off the debts of the defunct organization.

So when Wikipedia asks you to chip in $5, should you? There's no simple answer. Wikipedia won't go away if you don't, but on the other hand it provides something you probably use every day. In general a healthy charity will manage without your donation, but it still can't manage without any donations.

Only a tiny portion of our readers give. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, we wouldn’t need to fundraise for years to come.

Odd, I seem to remember them promising the same thing last year, too. It seems the Washington Post remembers as well. I guess if the price hasn't changed, they either are woefully underfunded/overbudgeted (discussed in plenty of comments above but I'm assuming not), are drastically miscalculating for inflation, or it's just pure greed.

Given that their income was $82 million and their annual expenses were $66 million, I think don't think they're miscalculating by too much. That's a buffer of only a quarter-year's worth of expenses. And if they invest that excess money in endowments, they'll have a more stable budget and less need for fundraising.

Another way to look at it is that it's providing resources to grow. Now, I don't know what or how they might want to grow, but I do know that it's harder to grow when you've got no money for it.

Only a tiny portion of our readers give. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, we wouldn’t need to fundraise for years to come.

Odd, I seem to remember them promising the same thing last year, too. It seems the Washington Post remembers as well. I guess if the price hasn't changed, they either are woefully underfunded/overbudgeted (discussed in plenty of comments above but I'm assuming not), are drastically miscalculating for inflation, or it's just pure greed.

If you want to donate to Wikipedia just go there : https://wikimediafoundation.or... and select your preferred method. No "I would", just donate or don't donate.
Donating to the sites you visit most is the fairest, if you want to donate to others, just cash-in and redistribute as you want to. It is your money after all, the donation is just the default option in case you don't manifest yourself.

Several commenters here have suggested that building an alternative to Google, based on values like Wikimedia's, may be a good thing. This is a worthwhile point, and a worthwhile discussion; but it misses the point of what's problematic here.

The problem here, the thing that has many Wikimedians worried, is that Wikimedia trustee Jimmy Wales has apparently been telling outright lies about whether the organization has considered pursuing a search engine to rival Google et al. He has made a number of unequivocal statements in recent weeks -- he himself has accused ousted trustee James Heilman of lying on the subject (but Heilman's narrative is now verified by the published grant application).
https://wikimediafoundation.or...

The thing that has shaken Wikimedia up is not the idea of search, but the question of whether we can expect honest communication from those entrusted with the Wikimedia brand and organization. Beyond that, it's whether that organization in fact wishes for the input of Wikimedia's stakeholders in determining its strategic direction -- something it actively pursued five years ago, but is pursuing only minimally and reluctantly now, with the Knowledge Engine grant as merely the strongest indicator of how its activities fail to align with any strategic document with strong buy-in.

The short article in the link has this:

Wikimedia’s reluctance to detail the restricted grant, from the Knight Foundation, was a factor in the departure of community-elected WMF board member James Heilman in December.

Whether that's controversial depends on whatever's been going on between the Wikimedia Foundation and Mr Heilman and how you view their motives and attitudes towards openness and those of the Knight Foundation - "Volunteers feel WMF management has purposely kept them out of the loop”. Maybe the bit about embedding the Wikipedia Knowledge Engine “via carriers and Original Equipment Manufacturers” means they hope for a commercial product, which might be controversial.

Page 2 of the agreement asks "Would users go to Wikipedia if it were an open channel beyond an encyclopedia?"

I expect Google would say it's controversial but that's another matter. Wikimedia intend to create "a system for discovering reliable and trustworthy information on the Internet" which is not Google's main aim: doing a Google would be trying to monopolize search and make as much money as possible.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is an American private, non-profit foundation dedicated to supporting "transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts."

You might want to keep an eye on their page for favourable edits. Their money came from Knight Ridder publishers. Wikipedia helpfully adds "Not to be confused with Knight Rider (disambiguation) or Night Rider (disambiguation)."

BTW, do we know what his salary at that "non-profit" company is?

Just that the Wikimedia Foundation is swimming in more money than they can spend. Part of that is due to really stupid non-profit laws that prevent setting up a trust account (which can be done by donors... just not the non-profit) to save the money for a rainy day...

Say what? Then how is that the Wikimedia Foundation is starting to set up an endowment this year if such a thing is impossible?

The endowment which they are just now creating is being funded with $5 million, after burning through almost $300 million in the last several years, and it is just 7% of their projected fundraising revenue this year. And if their problem is that they are "swimming in money" why the aggressive year-after-year fundraising goals of 10-20% growth every single year? That is the growth plan of an aggressive for-profit start-up, not a non-profit.

The fact is, Wikimedia could have easily funded an endowment long ago that would keep Wikipedia on-line forever without requiring another dollar in fundraising.

Mod this guy up. The perpetual fundraising machine has become very troubling. They have cumulatively raised well more than $200 million dollars, most of that in just the last few years. We are constantly greeted by banners about how far they are away from their current fundraising 'goals' but those goals seem to be exploding every year, with no explanation about what that money is actually 'needed' for.

Jimmy used to boast about how little it cost to keep Wikipedia on-line, just a few million at most, and with the money raised in just the last two years they could easily have set up an endowment that would keep those servers running forever, without requiring another dollar in fundraising, ever.

It appears that the 'goals' are being set by simple formula: whatever we raised last year, plus 20%, and with an additional 20% "stretch goal". Seriously - that appears to be the only rationale I can glean from their reports.

Oh, and they are finally starting an endowment now next year of $5 million, after having burned through $200+ million, and representing only 7% of their new $71.4 million base goal.

With the cost of operating Wikipedia low and nearly fixed, and without paying any staff to actually produce their product (which is what this has become), why the 'need' for double digit annual revenue growth every single year?

I am now telling everyone I know not to contribute to Wikipedia. They really, really, really do not need the money. Their days of paupery are long past. Jimmy is now in $profit$ mode.

Like this? http://wikimediafoundation.org...

There are things to dislike in the report, but I don't get the "new Wikipediocracy blog post (study) reveals" breathlessness. It's an annual nonprofit report - read it. You might also be surprised to know that other major charities usually have a bunch of their own dirty laundry. Take the American Cancer Society: of the $890M it takes in, it only passes on about $680M, and it even has to worry about an employee pension system. http://www.cancer.org/acs/grou...

If any particular charity's overhead bugs you...go find another charity, or start your own. There will never be shortage of needs.

Did you look at the map from Wikimedia. I would give much more creedence to a map from the company involved with Wikipedia Zero than a two year old article.

I believe quite a bit of development work has gone into Wikipedia Zero (and into mobile generally, which is the Wikimedia Foundation's major growth sector, as desktop pageviews are going down). At present, the WMF staff and contractors page shows one Director of Mobile Partnerships, and four mobile partner managers. I don't know how much developer time Wikipedia Zero currently claims. There is also a project to get Wikipedia articles to subscribers via SMS. ("The Wikimedia Foundation added that it partnered with the Praekelt Foundation, a South African nonprofit with expertise in text messaging, to develop the necessary technology for the project.") Of course, SMS delivery seems like the worst possible format for article delivery, in terms of enabling a reader to assess a Wikipedia article's sourcing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... July 2013: India, with Aircel. From 2 March 2015, subscribers of Aircel no longer can access Wikipedia Zero. They will be charged as per their data plan if they access Wikipedia. http://m.wikimediafoundation.o... Fact checking is good.

Wikipedia Zero has not been launched in India. Check the map.

The article does not say that Wikipedia Zero is their only connection to the internet just that it is free. If one has enough money to spend on tuition to a business school one probably has enough money to do a Google search to verify a Wikipedia entry.

they also had been led to believe that they had researched by drinking from the unerring fountain of all human knowledge.

Anyone who still believes that needs help.

No. See Wikipedia Zero. "For many readers in the Global South, the primary (and often only) access to the internet is via mobile. However, mobile data costs are a significant barrier to internet usage. We created Wikipedia Zero so that everyone can access all the free knowledge on Wikipedia, even if they can't afford the mobile data charges."

For some real-world examples of made-up Wikipedia information entering other sources, sometimes to the major embarrassment of the people who reused it without checking, see two recent articles: How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia and I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoax. It happens quite a lot, at least in the English Wikipedia, that hoaxes stay around for years before they are discovered, by which time they have entered all sorts of other sources (remember the Bicholim conflict?). Even people who work for Wikipedia tell you not to trust it, but to check the underlying citations.

It would help if the English Wikipedia had edits by new and unregistered users looked at and approved by more experienced Wikipedians before showing them to the public (that's how it's done in the German and Polish Wikipedias for example), but the English Wikipedia community has steadfastly refused to introduce that system ("Pending Changes", also known as "Flagged Revisions") in all of its articles, saying it would be too much work and be a downer for new contributors who might have to wait a while before they see their changes go live.

For examples of Wikipedia being abused for personal vendettas against people, see Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia and The tale of Mr Hari and Dr Rose: A false and malicious identity is admitted. Anonymity encourages this sort of thing, of course. Again, Pending Changes would have helped a little ...

The Wikimedia Foundation has so far not really cared very much about content quality. They do not measure it, and don't know how to, by their own admission. Their metrics of success are the number of articles, the number of editors, the number of edits (more is better!), the number of page views (Alexa!), and how many millions in donations they take. Little if any of this money goes towards measuring and improving quality. Most of it is spent on their software engineering and product development department, which represents two-thirds of the 200 or so Wikimedia staff. They are approaching Wikipedia more like Facebook than an educational project. Quality assessment and real-time quality control, the job of sifting through all the millions of contributions, is left to all the volunteers, who are stretched ... and unlike the Wikimedia Foundation staff (many of whom are not really skilled professionals, but simply Wikipedians who have managed to join the gravy train), they are not getting paid. Short version: The Wikimedia Foundation now takes $50 million a year in donations (compared to just $2.5 million six or seven years ago), and they don't really know what to do with it. It's not making Wikipedia a more reliable reference source.

"The Wikimedia Foundation this morning reports that 50 links to Wikipedia from Google have been removed under Europe's "right to be forgotten" regulations,..."

Looking at the Wikipedia page listing the notifications they've received of pages removed from the european search engine https://wikimediafoundation.or... , two were english wikipedia, two wre italian, and the remainder are all nl.wikipedia-- Netherlands.

So, apparently the Dutch have much more desire to be forgotten than the rest of Europe. (Or else, possibly, they're just more efficient at getting the right-to-be-forgotten notices out)

From: Me
To: Wikipedia

I just saw this ad for a freelancer pop up (http://www.freelancer.com/projects/Articles-wikipedia/Create-wikipedia-entries.html) and thought that you might be interested in blocking the requested entries.

---

From: Wikipedia
To: Me

Paid editing is not prohibited but it is certainly not encouraged. At the moment the best I can do is to post a message on the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard alerting the regulars there to the request so that they can check whether those articles have been created and review them closely if and when they are. We do not usually block the creation of articles. However if an article that does not comply with policy and guidelines is repeatedly created, we do prevent further creation.

Thanks for contacting us. I hope this helps.

Yours sincerely,
Robert Laculus

---

From: Me
To: Wikipedia

Thank you for your response. I hadn't realized that paid article creation/editing was authorized.

---

From: Wikipedia
To: Me

I would say "permitted" rather than "authorized", although it is distinctly frowned upon. Such articles will be heavily scrutinised, and deleted if too promotional in tone. Users will be blocked from editing if it is clear that they are only editing Wikipedia for promotional purposes. In fact, unless we actually catch postings such as the one you found, or see other evidence of it, it is very hard to prove that someone has been paid to edit or create an article.

That said, his signature specifically states, "Disclaimer: all mail to this address is answered by volunteers, and responses are not to be considered an official statement of the Wikimedia Foundation. For official correspondence, please contact the Wikimedia Foundation by certified mail at the address listed on https://www.wikimediafoundatio...."

They have a major datacenter in Amsterdam, which backs up all the data, and runs Squid caches to reduce the read latency for European readers.

MIT Open Courseware is a good project.

And everyone knows the Wikimedia Foundation, but they can use more help.

Seriously... this is the first time I saw someone who releases "shareware" to be pissed when he sees people sharing his stuff. Wasn't that the whole point, to begin with?

Ugh. People don't know what they say when posting Anonymous on the internet. The "share" portion is as loosely tied to real-life term as "down" and "up" are tied to files "loading" in the world wide web... even more loosely, in fact. Shareware died due to oversharing: it was superseded by a mix of BBS fade-out, online piracy thanks to stolen keys, and the porting of mature FOSS software to the world of windows.

DON'T BE SURPRISED WHEN PEOPLE DON'T PAY YOU, WHEN YOU WERE THE ONE GIVING AWAY THE SOFTWARE WITHOUT REQUESTING PAYMENT.

ASK is another word for REQUEST. Donating is only different from Paying in that the software isn't built around a security model enforcing it. He's not surprised, he's just disappointed that the proverbial "out of the kindness of their hearts" is working from his magic coding fingers out, to thousands of individuals who receive real benefit using the software. Then the numbers game that you expect bankers have proved true with their percentages models shows that this "kindness" trickles from a potential 100% of x thousands to a meager tenth or hundredth of a single percent...

Another key factor killing shareware was all the nagging. Jimmy Wales asks for donations every year for Wikipedia. If he paywalled it by going full New-York-Times-style on users, I'm sure the net effect on traffic, earnings and seekers of alternatives would be severe. There's no trusted alternative to wikipedia, and google has a big part in keeping us continually stumbling upon his site when a simple dictionary definition site would have sufficed.

What are you talking about? Art and text of Wikipedia are licensed under the CC-SA-Attribution. There is no ND/NC restriction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

The text of Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by Wikipedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)

Re-use of non-text media

Where not otherwise noted, non-text media files are available under various free culture licenses, consistent with the Wikimedia Foundation Licensing Policy. Please view the media description page for details about the license of any specific media file.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy

Free Content License
        A license which meets the terms of the Definition of Free Cultural Works specific to licenses, as can be found at http://freedomdefined.org/Definition version 1.0.

http://freedomdefined.org/Definition

To ensure the graceful functioning of this ecosystem, works of authorship should be free, and by freedom we mean:

        the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
        the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
        the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
        the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

Fwiw, Wales isn't "the head of Wikipedia" anymore either. He remains one of the 10 members of the Board of Trustees in a special member-for-life seat, but he no longer runs the organization day-to-day (the staff do that), and has no specific authority to make decisions, except via his vote on the Board.

Fwiw, Wales isn't "the head of Wikipedia" anymore either. He remains one of the 10 members of the Board of Trustees in a special member-for-life seat, but he no longer runs the organization day-to-day (the staff do that), and has no specific authority to make decisions, except via his vote on the Board.

Yeah, doing it right is more important than doing it instantly. Also, Wikimedia's been a bit busy, what with the end of the fundraiser and another anti-SOPA protest that got just a bit of attention.

Good luck doing that against all the trustees of the WMF at once.

Now donating money to Wikipedia is especially powerful. It supports a public benefit org that sticks to its principles of openness, and takes money from GoDaddy which is a scumbag operation. And gives that money to GoDaddy's competitors, which sticks it to GoDaddy some more.

Want to help kill SOPA and the rest of the slaver culture working against us? Give to Wikipedia now. And help pay for all those articles you've been reading, too.

I support it -- as long as a third party does it. It could be done browser side with GreaseMonkey. Someone can host a mirrored censored Wikipedia. Multiple people can host censored Wikipedia's. Different groups can censor whatever they don't want their members to see. For example a fundamentalist Christian/Muslim Wikipedia could remove all references to biological evolution and astrophysics (the whole big bang thing.)

A system whose purpose is to curate what amounts to a record of the entire record of knowledge of human civilization has absolutely no place in censoring itself, even if that censorship is a thin sheet. The mere addition of such a feature sends the message to children and the naive that there are things which we should pretend didn't happen if it makes us feel uncomfortable.

Hiding something such as pictures of war crimes should be embarrassing to anyone. In this case it is appalling. These are not pictures hanging up in your living room, this is content that people pursue when trying to learn specifically about the very subject.

This feature was requested by the Wikimedia board of trustees unanimously. In their resolution they specifically state: "We support the principle of user choice; readers should have control over their experience on the projects." Why is this addressing only images? If someone can hide a picture of a black man being lynched 100 years ago, why not also allow a reader to hide the statement that it ever happened in the first place? If the Wikimedia Foundation wants to do with Wikimedia Commons or whatever, fine, but Wikipedia too, then everyone one of them should be replaced.

All this discussion is for not.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content

If this is correct, then it's almost ideal. Not legally watertight, but, certainly sufficient to proceed with.

I realise that I was assuming that copyright resided with the Wikipedia Foundation because the only alternative seemed untenable -- that the required attributions for every stage of revision could become exceedingly complex. But there actually is no single copyright statement on a Wikipedia page now that I look for one.

It seems, following this up, that the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use fills the gap I was worried about: any contributor agrees to be attributed simply by a link to the end product... (which will itself link to the version history and contributors).

Therefore, for any text you hold the copyright to, by submitting it, you agree to license it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ...

As an author, you agree to be attributed in any of the following fashions: a) through a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article or articles you contributed to, b) through a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) through a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)

+1 Anonymous. If this was StackOverflow, I'd select your answer. :)

Their annual reports are here:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report

Last year they spent about 45% of their budget on bandwidth, equipment and salaries (including contractors).

It will make a custom filter to block:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/

That will take care of it once and for all

I might've been looking at the 08-09 annual report, that's all they've got up: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report But saying they need $16M urgently, when their expenses were only $5.6M in 08-09 seems sketchy.

Care to link? Were you talking aout this?

I find it somewhat surprising that less than half of their money is spent on servers and infrastructure. (On the other hand, it could be a lot less if they were willing to set up a secure mirror system rather than try to serve everything themselves.) Also interesting is that 21% of their total budget ($4.2 million) is planned to be spent on Community Programs. I thought delivering the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia to the masses for free was already something of a community program?

I just get the impression from Wikipedia that they're trying to run this non-profit a little too much like a business. Sure, the company itself doesn't turn a profit in the traditional sense, but I'd be very interested to know how much the staff makes and how that had scaled over time in relation to their annual budget.

Am I the only one here amazed of what the spendings are ? According to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report page 4 :

There are 45% of technical spendings, including technical staff. But 20% to Management, Finance, Administration.

And 10% for "Fundraising". That's 1 in 10 you donate that's wasted in making you spit that money. I wonder if this is regarded as a sustainable business plan for a foundation ?

the book creator.

the Wikimedia press release

(note the date - yes, december 2007!)

See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use

"""Attribution: To re-distribute a text page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the page or pages you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.) This applies to text developed by the Wikimedia community. Text from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you. For example, a page may have a banner or other notation indicating that some or all of its content was originally published somewhere else. Where such notations are visible in the page itself, they should generally be preserved by re-users. """

Pays them what? $3.3M isn't really much in a year paying of 30 people.

Wikimedia is terribly understaffed. They have about 35 employees, for one of the 5th largest sites on the Internet (and that includes legal/finance/MediaWiki devs/etc. staff). Basically the site is run by a dozen guys. Compare that to any other Top 10 site, this is just crazy.

Given their limited resources (both human and financial), it is amazing that Wikipedia is down so rarely. If you want the site to be more reliable, there is something you can do: Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia is terribly understaffed. They have about 35 employees, for one of the 5th largest sites on the Internet (and that includes legal/finance/MediaWiki devs/etc. staff). Basically the site is run by a dozen guys. Compare that to any other Top 10 site, this is just crazy.

Given their limited resources (both human and financial), it is amazing that Wikipedia is down so rarely. If you want the site to be more reliable, there is something you can do: Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation

According to Sue Garnder's email (she is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation), the gift is "completely unrestricted" (which isn't common - many major grants are restricted to a certain use, e.g. ford, stanton gifts).

According to Sue Garnder's email (she is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation), the gift is "completely unrestricted" (which isn't common - many major grants are restricted to a certain use, e.g. ford, stanton gifts).

Even more interesting is to compare their 2007-2008 budget with their 2008-2009 budget.

Even more interesting is to compare their 2007-2008 budget with their 2008-2009 budget.

Nothing like that will happen. The Wikimedia Foundation has received large grants before (such as Omidyar's $2M grant). WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees, which is composed of 3 community-elected seats, 2 community-seats elected by chapters, a "Jimbo-seat" for the Wikipedia founder, and up to four "Specific expertise" seats elected by the board itself (source). Google could attempt to get a "Specific expertise" seat, but they can't do anything to significantly change the course of the foundation. Also, if they tried, there'd be a major outcry by the community (and perhaps a fork).

(To be fair, one should address the Omidyar case. Around the time Omidyar granted $2M, Matt Halprin, an Omidyar employee got a "Specific expertise" seat. There were of course conspiracy theories about Omidyar 'buying' a seat in the board. I've discussed this matter with one of the board members, and the result was something like this: Omidyar didn't 'buy' a seat, but in the grant negotiations, they became aware of Matt Halprin's expertise and realized of which value he'd be on the board.)

Nothing like that will happen. The Wikimedia Foundation has received large grants before (such as Omidyar's $2M grant). WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees, which is composed of 3 community-elected seats, 2 community-seats elected by chapters, a "Jimbo-seat" for the Wikipedia founder, and up to four "Specific expertise" seats elected by the board itself (source). Google could attempt to get a "Specific expertise" seat, but they can't do anything to significantly change the course of the foundation. Also, if they tried, there'd be a major outcry by the community (and perhaps a fork).

(To be fair, one should address the Omidyar case. Around the time Omidyar granted $2M, Matt Halprin, an Omidyar employee got a "Specific expertise" seat. There were of course conspiracy theories about Omidyar 'buying' a seat in the board. I've discussed this matter with one of the board members, and the result was something like this: Omidyar didn't 'buy' a seat, but in the grant negotiations, they became aware of Matt Halprin's expertise and realized of which value he'd be on the board.)

Nothing like that will happen. The Wikimedia Foundation has received large grants before (such as Omidyar's $2M grant). WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees, which is composed of 3 community-elected seats, 2 community-seats elected by chapters, a "Jimbo-seat" for the Wikipedia founder, and up to four "Specific expertise" seats elected by the board itself (source). Google could attempt to get a "Specific expertise" seat, but they can't do anything to significantly change the course of the foundation. Also, if they tried, there'd be a major outcry by the community (and perhaps a fork).

(To be fair, one should address the Omidyar case. Around the time Omidyar granted $2M, Matt Halprin, an Omidyar employee got a "Specific expertise" seat. There were of course conspiracy theories about Omidyar 'buying' a seat in the board. I've discussed this matter with one of the board members, and the result was something like this: Omidyar didn't 'buy' a seat, but in the grant negotiations, they became aware of Matt Halprin's expertise and realized of which value he'd be on the board.)

because Bing does http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors