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Wikipedia Founder Releases Personal Appeal
brian0918 writes "In an apparent reply to the low turnout for their fourth quarter fundraiser, Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales has just released a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. 'Wikipedia is soon to enter our 6th year online, and I want to take a moment to ask you for your help in continuing our mission. Wikipedia is facing new challenges and encountering new opportunities, and both are going to require major funds.'" The fund drive will run until Friday, January 6th.
I made a genarous donation.
Then I went back and edited it. Now Wikipedia owes me money!
Im sure Google will be more than happy to help
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
anyone second this donation?
That was oddly perfect time for some hit pieces in the media, wasn't it?
I was always very surprised at how much Wikipedia took in during fund raising drives -- I use Wiki on rare occasions but always felt I should throw them a few bucks.
The problem, from what I can tell, is that as more people contribute article text, they seem to feel they have less reason to contribute financially -- which may be true.
I like seeing how Wikis have become more neutral over time, and I think we do have a great need for an information store like Wikipedia, but I don't see how it can sustain itself in the long run (at least for free). They're facing the same dilemma that many not-for-profit information companies are: people seem to have less money today than they did a few years ago. My charitable contributions have gone UP this year, but I spend all my charity dollars locally where I can see them making a difference. I'm not certain if I want to give to Wiki without knowing how the money is used. I don't mind supporting dozens of servers and bandwidth fees, but I don't want to see the founder driving a Porsche.
Note that I'm not against profitable companies -- I just don't trust not-for-profits with my money. If Wiki became subscriber only, I'd definitely subscribe, but would the quality or quantity of articles drop if the user base dropped from closing it off? For sure.
Wikipedia, and every other freely available information store, will have to find news ways to generate income. I don't believe they'll add advertisements, but I don't see what other ways they can break even. Maybe offering pay-for-articles for vanity or for advertisement but mark it as such? Just like privately funded libraries were ways for the wealthy to gain immortality, maybe Wiki will offer the "bronze plaques" so the billionaires can get recognition for their "altruism."
It's only a matter of time. Either Wales is going to have to turn to ads to generate some revenue, or look into getting a grant from a University or the Feds. However, either solution is going to infringe on his desire to present a neutral viewpoint, even if just in principle.
I gave just 5 pounds last year, but I am about to give what I can, what surprised me most was the christmas card I recieved even though i live in the UK. I had completely forgotten since I made my donation in July. The donation helps keep knowledge free, think just how often you use wikimedia websites.
Do they just want more money to fund the project, or are they actually in dire need?
all the wikipedia ripoffs that have flooded every search engine...
I use Wiki quite alot... but i never actually paid attention to its "Cause" .. All that energy/effort money for "A Poor Kid" , i believe that $750K used to run wiki last year would of been a better "generous offer" - Like BOOKS
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
I'm sure the partnership with google is a viable mechanism to support Wikipedia into the future. The text only ads aren't overly intrusive and are automatically added based on keyword selections in the page. Seems to be a natural fit. ..in fact, I'd take a guess that rumors of google's involvement are why donations are down.
..don't panic
By 2007, it will cost several million dollars just to keep Wikipedia running. If Google comes through on its past statement of support, and other companies join in, then Wikipedia probably wouldn't need to go to ads. Some ideas that have been suggested for non-invasive implementation of advertisements would be to only display them for anonymous users (not registered users), or to have a separate site that only hosts high-quality, highly-accurate articles, and make that site ad-based.
Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees? (And they don't go through $750K a year in bandwidth fees). There should be little or no administrative overhead, and I've never seen an advertisement for Wikipedia (and don't know a reason why I should expect to).
While freedom of information is a great goal, it's on of the few that I feel doesn't require large monetary contributions, but rather large intellectual contributions.
I'll keep giving my money to Child's Play, The Red Cross, and Doctors without Borders.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
The 2005 Wikimedia Budget says Since that fund raising drive is now $50k above the budget shortfall, it's not a shortfall anymore. The present $200k raised in the fund drive is about twice what was raised by the same drive in February last year...
Now, it's possible that there is now a massive shortfall for 2006/Q1, but if the submitter knows something about that, perhaps he feels like sharing it, rather than just mindlessly speculating.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Perhaps he should call well-known philanthropist and First Amendment Center founder John Seigenthaler and ask him to help spread the word!
"An elite few?" Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?
I'm a nature photographer.
Today I had received a letter from Wikimedia Foundation (yes, not an e-mail!) sent by international mail, saying something like "Wikimedia thanks you for your support and wish you pleasant holidays and new beginnings". It was even written in Swedish, where I live. I think that was pretty cool of a non-profit organization. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Let's say there's an article about, oh, I don't know, cookies. At the end of that article, chances are there are links to the websites of a few cookie manufacturers. Why not start charging companies for the right to have links to their sites on article pages? Inobtrusive advertising. Sites that aren't used as a means of generating cash could still be linked for free, but there'd need to be some kind of screening process.
TFA says: "Thousands of people, all over the world, from all cultures, working together in harmony to freely share clear, factual, unbiased information"
At least one culture, namely the Chinese, is permanently excluded from this harmonious collaboration since November 2005. This is because China deems Wikipedia "detrimental to society" (or at least not so unbiased in a few articles).
This is not Wikipedia's fault, but whenever I try to access Wikipedia from Anonymouse, it says Wikipedia has blocked access from that very anonymizing gateway... hilarious. I really don't have time applying proxies or go throguh SSH accounts in the West.
I think Wikipedia needs to start distribute its stuff in a decentralized fashion, letting others deliver the stuff through their pipes. And it also should have encryption enabled to circumvent the censorship in the filter regimes.
I've been using Wikipedia a lot lately. Some of it for work related items but mostly because I'm so freakin' bored at work. Nothing like spending five hours reading random articles. Lots of interesting stuff out there. Anyway, I just tossed them $25. Well spent money in my opinion. Whenever I need information on something I will either turn to Google or Wikipedia or both to get the answer I need. It is definitely something that is worth spending a few bucks a year to keep on the net. Hopefully they raise the money they need to keep going.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
to one accessible for contribution by only an elite few
I always wanted to be elite. I guess I've finally got my wish! Thanks, Wikipedia!
I sent $100. The least I can do, considering it is the first place I go almost every time I need information on any subject.
I don't understand, which "elite few" are you talking about here??
I've rarely seen my edits, to both new and existing articles, been removed.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Well, this is how it has always been. Almost all of the funds are needed to keep up with the exponentially-increasing traffic to the site. Without those, the site will just get slower and slower (and slower).
This is just not true. Anonymous editors can still edit articles. There is a difference in that they can no longer start articles. However, creating an account takes mere seconds, so your accusation that it is "accesible for contribution by only an elite few" is simply false. There do exist tools that allow administrators to "protect" articles that are experiencing especially heavy vandalism, however, this is used only as a last resort.
Running a read-only site would be much easier, we could do that with much smaller budget. What money is spent for - supporting collaboration infrastructure. We're running on 100 servers now, all quite cheap and efficient. We're pumping out 500mbps of information now, but we're still doing that low budget. But it all needs to grow and scale, and though software is doing that quite well, resources are needed.
This is very low-budget operation, comparing to other huge sites. There's no corporate funding, no huge revenue streams. I've seen sites running with same budgets but only 1% of Wikipedia's load. A donation made will go into collaboration infrastructure, rather than being forgotten forever. A donation made may allow thousands of articles to be created, extended and viewed. There is a price for information, but you won't find lower margins ;-)
What the hell are you talking about? I'm not elite and I'm not part of any such few, and yet I have contributed substantially to Wikipedia and have done so recently.
If they are preventing average Joes like me from contributing, I haven't seen any evidence of it. Care to point us to some?
The last time it was even suggested that Wikipedia might go to advertisements, a large portion of the Spanish Wikipedia split off and formed Enciclopedia Libre, drastically setting back the entire site. Only more recently are they being merged back together.
An elite few? I'm not sure in what parallel universe you're using Wikipedia, but last I checked (a few hours ago), it was still editable by anyone - you don't even have to create an account to do so.
Sure, there are semi-protected pages now, and you need an account that's (IIRC) 4 days old to edit those. Calling accounts that are older than 4 days "an elite few" is ridiculous.
Of course, there's regular protections as well, but those are either temporary, in which case they're not bad (pages get protected when there's edit wars, but arguably the "anyone can edit anything at any time" model didn't work at that point - the edit war is proof of that. So protecting a page for a day or two so people get their act together and talk about their differences is reasonable), or (in the very, very few cases where pages are permanently protected) they're affecting pages that have been the target of high-profile vandalism in the past. Would you like to go back to a world where the main page has to be checked every ten seconds to see if some clown inserted a goatse picture? I wouldn't.
All in all... if you're not happy with Wikipedia or the way it's handled, feel free to start your own. You can even use Wikipedia's data to get started - it's all on http://download.wikimedia.org. Maybe you'll come out on top in the end - who knows.
Until then, good luck guy.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Yeah, it shows. I think I've read some of the pages you contributed to.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
It isn't like Wikipedia is some lame-ass piece of shareware I use twice a year; I use it almost every day, expecially when I'm arguing on Slashdot and need a quick citation. Where else can you reliably go to get the gravitational constant, an article on Duverger's law, a bio of Robert Johnson or a really cool picture of a dragonfly?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I don't know if they have tried, but why not try getting corporate sponsorships? From my viewpoint asking for money from the users are the last resort (although it teaches that nothing is for free, which is healthy). I'd imagine big companies like Intel, IBM, GM etc. would not write off such an idea in exchange for a logo somewhere on Wikipedia. I think it's a much better approach than running ads on the site, and with a public transparent deal (ensuring that they won't have any editorial control what so ever) would be clever.
I am a regular wiki user and happily contrib. to the site quite often - however the fundraisers are badly organised and in need of a look at. It is highly ironic that the whole system is very transparent, yet at the same time appears very opaque.
I look at the front page and see that with this fundraiser they have already amassed over 200k! I realise sites like wiki do cost a fortune to run due to the general costs of operating something that huge - but for the average user it appears to be big sums they have already raised, yet they are asking for more!
You don't exactly encourage contributions when you have a big banner on all pages happily stating that you already have that kind of money - it doesn't send out the "poor and needy" message does it?!
Also they probably want to have a look at the timing of these things - Post holidays is not a sensible time to be trying to ask people for money - generally everyone is broke, full up with food and tired out. Gifting £10 after the credit card statement has come in for the Christmas purchases is going to be a lot less likely. You have to be smart as well as kind hearted, Mr Wales.
The fund drive will run until Friday, January 6th.
Why do fund drives have a time limit? What, are they going to reject donations on the 7th?
"An elite few?" Isn't that a bit hyperbolic?
The few, the proud, the ones who edit. Be an army of one and donate!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
No damn it. Stop asking for money, Wikipedia is starting to be like Freenode.
Wikipedia is broken. I'll donate some money if you fix it.
-End the correction wars
-Respect different viewpoints
-Respect expertese
-End people fucking up good articles
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
One of the highest bodies on Wikipedia is the Arbitration Committee. Originally it was appointed by Jimbo, who I thought made several poor choices. Then last year there was an election to ArbCom, and I think the community made excellent choices to who would go ArbCom. Then in the interim, Jimbo appointed two more arbitrators, one of which I think is of very poor quality. Now he is changing the democratic election of last year, which I think went very well, and is trying to change it so it is more centralized towards himself. I think there are many signs of the problems, but this is just one of them.
While I think Wikipedia covers science and mathematics articles well, it has many problems when it comes to political matters, the Seigenthaler matter yet again just being a sign of the problem. I think Wikipedia should simply acknowledge that a "neutral" standpoint is not realistic with regards to history and politics. Wikipedia should concentrate on scientific articles and the like, and cede articles like George W. Bush to partisan wikis like Demopedia and Wikinfo.
I'm tired of the Wikipedia mess and am not contributing any money.
Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism.
Too many experts are turned away by the teeming, uninformed Wikipedians who tear down useful contributions under the mistaken notions of "balance" or "being informative." Look at Panera Bread; 25% of the article is unequivocal information, the other 75% are advertisement and random facts. It also doesn't use proper paragraphs, and the entire article lacks structure. This is a typical Wikipedia article, but you see many of the same flaws in "Featured" articles. People don't know what to write in this supposed "encyclopedia," nor how.
And yes, Africans probably care more about staying alive than reading Wikipedia. To anyone considering donating to Wikipedia: your money would be better spent in the hands of an AIDS-related charity or a broad-action organization. Believe it or not, people can still starve to death even if they can look up Calculus in Wikipedia.
There is a link to the Q1-2006 budget at the top of every English Wikipedia page, detailing the expected needs.
I'm all for charitable organizations and such, but Wikipedia is a little bit of a different beast. Organizations like the Red Cross can keep asking for donations continuously because that's what they do - they give the money out because there is always a need. Wikipedia always has a need too; however, it being an encyclopedia, I want a usable product after some amount of donation.
I'm glad somebody finally released some of this "personal appeal" stuff. I've been needing to get that for ages. I wonder how much it costs?
Considering that Wikipedia's traffic has been doubling every four months, and that in a single year it has gone from 35 servers (January 1, 2005) to 165 servers (January 1, 2006) and 0 employees to 4 employees (an executive assistant, a developer, an intern to maintence the servers, and a coordinator for the international meetup) -- comparing bugets from 2005Q1 and 2006Q1 is clearly wrong.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Whenever a good cause needs money, media personalities are usually good about donating money or raising awareness. How about asking John Siegenthaler?
I'm not in the slightest bit surprised by Wikipedia's funding crisis-in-the-making. I think what has happened is the John Siegenthaler affair has caused serious examination of exactly what is Wikipedia, and what is the quality of their scholarship?
A: What's scholarship? What's quality?
It's time to face some facts. Wikipedia should be no more authoritative as an encyclopedia as Slashdot comments are about technology and current affairs. The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual.
Actually what you get is a disorganized mess, where the relatively few articles are genuinely good, then there's a large number of articles which may have started well, but have been mediocritized and dismembered after the original author decided to give up trying to revert stuff, and there's a considerable number of factual articles on subjects you've never heard of which are little more than a couple of lines followed by the Wikipedia disclaimer:
"This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
What really happens is the article is never expanded, because of the human need to improve something only if that person has a stake in its improvement, and that improvement is recognised. Face it, would you rather take over somebody's half finished, buggy computer program which has no documentation or would you rather start again and do it properly?
If you flick through Wikipedia using the "Random Article" link, what you find is the mixture of articles that I have mentioned: the great few, the large mediocre and poorly constructed, and the tremendous number of unhelpful half-and-quarter articles which give no information and no citation.
Even if you do create a great article, there's no stopping any number of morons from turning your well-thought out and considered article with full references into a mishmash of non-sequiturs and out-and-out false statements. Nobody's on your side because as long as the dreaded "NPOV" is observed, no-one could care less about the effort you put in.
Eventually you give up and accept the entropic effect of thousands of ignoramuses. You relax and realise that you tried your best but no-one gives a shit. A frog is dissected. Pinkerton does not return.
The problem comes when you want some vital information. Wikipedia is highly rated by Google (which if you think about it, is another anarchistic idea promoted to Internet paradigm) so you go to Wikipedia and you read the article.
Now the question: Is what I'm reading in the article factually and historically correct? How can I check? Erm. Is the person I must speak to, a scholar, a college geek, an idiot with too much time on his hands, an IP address?
Ah, but Wikipedia has an answer to this conundrum! If you believe anything that Wikipedia says then "Fool You!". It's your responsibility to check whether all, most or any of the facts are correct. "We cannot help you, we are just facilitators in this great experiment in democratized scholarship"
I'll believe in democratized scholarship when I believe in democratized rocket science or democratized car mechanics or democratized aircraft piloting.
It's a nonsense and anyone with an ounce of sense, knows that its a nonsense. And it's a very dangerous nonsense, because in an interconnected world, false information and twisted history leads to conflict. Real conflict, because conflicts and wars are waged because of history.
You want to know what I find scary about Wikipedia? Read this chapter and tell me whether or not someone could have written Comrade Ogilvy into Wikipedia.
I'll tell you for free, I already know that there are articles on Wikipedia which are largely or completely fictional. Your mission, should you choose to take it, is to work out which ones, because Winston Smith lives and he's speaking into the SpeakWrite and changing history before our very eyes.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I would have NO problem with wikipida using google style ads. They are unobtrusive and they could generate a lot of cash to keep the project going.
Ads are NOT a problem if they are useful and not a pain in the ass.
Why can't web site developers understand that most people (it seems) are perfectly fine with ads if they are done right?
http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/2005q4/ Day-by-day you can see a serious shortfall until the "personal appeal" notice went up. Daniel Mayer (aka mav) wrote on one of the mailing lists that he hoped to raise $500,000.
"Apparent" here, meaning "Something I've made up"." The present $200k raised in the fund drive is about twice what was raised by the same drive in February last year...
Wikipedia has gone from a free, editable-by-everyone encyclopedia to one accessible for contribution by only an elite few.
That's just plain wrong! Just this past week, I made several corrections to some existing pages and submitted another page for deletion.... and I only just created my new user name last week! Before then, I just made my contributions anonymously. Sure, administrators are given the final say in matters like page deletion, but that's simply administrative work, and the majority of Wikipedians don't need such "cleanup" powers anyway.
I'm giving some bucks to the best damned free encyclopedia out there.
I suspect that in this you're mistaken. People can and do contribute charitably if they see the need - and, as far as educational charity goes, Wiki's where it's at.
I also think that Wikipedia does not have a hope of going commercial, for any variant thereof. Basically their stock-in-trade is the casual drive-by good Samaritan. If they went pay-to-subscribe, that would vanish utterly. Compare Britannica's site - they charge, and they provide a service by aggregating the world's most authoritative sources. If the users had to write Britannica's content, they'd laugh and refuse. "I'm paying you, why should I do the work?". Wikipedia could carry topical ads, but I don't put much faith in ads as a business model. Adblocking is going to make them unsaleable inside two years. And, any dilution of content quality, such as pay-to-post articles, and their creative-commons licensed data would simply be forked and rehosted.
I suppose the best thing for Wikipedia, beyond continued funding drives, would be if someone with BIG money could donate a "foundation" such that they'd be assured a money supply in perpetuity. Folks have done that for universities and libraries and such.
BTW, here's a charity with a clever idea I think it might appeal to your ancap philosphy (because it does to mine): http://www.modestneeds.org/ - it also fulfils your criteria of "where I can see them making a difference", because of the donor-directed way they allocate money.
As the other replies point out, Wikimedia certainly needs the money. I contributed money to Wikimedia, as well as Doctors without Borders (and several similar organizations) this year. The real question in my mind is: Which of these organizations will contribute most to the welfare of humanity in the long run? As with the stock market, since I don't know the answer, I diversify to get the best results under uncertainty.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
And why does slashdot have to serve as a bullhorn for this company's advertising? This is not news.
just like slashdot, so correct and relevant changes are pushed up. Knowledge is what people believe it to be, even in the real world (democracy, peer reviewed journals or even words of a revolutionary or historian). That does not seem to have changed in the last 6K years. Wikipedia's best bet is to probably just follow it instead of trying to impose an artificial equality.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I think I'm funny.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
"And I hope to win the lottery. But hopes are not expectations."
Quite the rebuttal.
...Bill Gates will have no money left. / considers running a "mo money, less problems" drive on website
Cool. I love Encyclopaedia Britannica too. Oh, wait. You meant you were giving money to Wikipedia. BAD co-dependent enabler of half-assed articles by zealots. Bad! Bad! Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia (or encyclopaedia). It is a wiki. It will always be a wiki... unless it establishes an editorial policy, pays specialists/academics to write articles, and restricts editing of said articles to a qualified few. In other words, as long as it's a wiki, it won't be an encyclopedia. You're welcome to send them money but I can't help feeling that money would be better spent on a copy of Britannica. I simply don't trust a homebrew repository of 'knowledge'.
I only donate to charities that don't pay any of their staffers more money than I make.
Since I am currently unemplyed that leaves all of them out I guess.
Most insightful comment about wikipedia EVER!
That is if it hadn't been a re-posted idea that had already been marked as a troll. C'mon buddy, your childish rant was exposed once, so you repost it? Gimme a break...
... but the deletionists wiped it out.
Whoever runs the back-end servers should write a book on how they are scaling everything and how the back-end architecture has evolved over time.
In another post it says they run over 100 servers, and do it with a budget equivalent to some sites with 1% of their traffic -- I'd certainly pay money for a book giving me some insight into how they are doing this.
They could also provide consulting to commercial companies that would assist them in doing the same thing.
Wikipedia will be exhibiting at the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo. Other exhibitors will include: IBM, KDE, Scalix, Ubuntu, Debian and more...
Throughout all this low turnout, I've seen many methods administrators used to entice people to donate. First, they tried using no bar graph and had no set fundraiser goal on their donations page, unlike their past fundraisers. As an administrator explained to me, after a goal has been met, people feel less obligated to donate, feeling Wikimedia will be alright on its own after that, with the same feeling being evoked from a viewing of a mostly filled bar graph.
I explained to them that with me, and most people I've talked to, seeing a bar graph that has not reached its goal adds more incentive for people to donate and help fill it up, but to know visible avail. About two days later, they had begun using the bar graph on their donations page, but without a goal. Within a week, they had put the bar graph on top of every page, with a daily report, as never done before. I asked in #wikipedia on the Freenode server, and they explained they planned to empty the bar graph after it becomes full. If you observe the bar graph they've put on every page, you'll seen it's divided into $100,000 segments, with a full graph being $500,000.
I do not think it would be wise to empty out the bar graph after it fills up. People would be very disappointed to see it be emptied, going back to the beginning, leaving a feeling of being deceived inside. Silly, yes, to be concerned over a graphic like that, but I believe people are silly like that. I hope when they empty it and begin to refill it, they at least use a different color for a "progress" feeling. Yellow, then orange, then red, then purple.
The personal appeal, though, is the most effective "marketing" tactic they've used. Wikipedia just can't survive for long unless they get those donations. Most Wikipedia users would rather have Wikipedia die than see a banner ad anywhere on Wikipedia, as would I. People would not want to contribute, they would think, to put money in the pockets of Wikipedia's sponsors. AdSense would not work either, because to have a campaign ad or political mudslinging brought up when you look up John Kerry or George W. Bush is just plain wrong for an encyclopedia. The closest Wikipedia has ever come to advertising, or even proposing advertising, is the Answers.com scandal. You see how well that turned out!
Some people have been concerned about the budget and how things are being spent. As my fellow Wikipedia editor, Brian, has pointed out, there is a link to the quarterly budget at the top of every page. It is here if you can't find it.
Please mod me and all parents up. For Wikipedia.
As an amateur historian, I adore Wikipedia. I have learned so much - and in my opinion there are few places that can even come close to the -contemporaneousness- of the open encyclopedia. Why do I say this? Because I have recently begun compiling a looooong index of history for every country that exists on the planet, and some of the information of my other sources, while the same as what I remember from my high school lectures, is completely contrary to what is actually believed at this point by most historians. Case in point? The Hyksos 'invasion' of Egypt. I love it, and I think it's wonderfully neutral. I adore reading the 'discussion' tabs on controversial articles. And if you want to see a really neat article, go to 'neoconservatives in america' and some of the supplementals (if you like politics, that is). Very good read! /struggling student, gave $5. You can afford to give some too!
Two words: Dot-com bubble burst. Commies don't play that game.
I'm no Randroid or Randrian by any means. While I can appreciate her fiction, I believe she was too direct in her push for Objectivism, of which I am not a believer.
For me, happiness IS a personal profit. I tend not to do anything that doesn't make me feel good -- including working. If my work doesn't make me feel good, I'll decommission that business or that contract and move on.
The same is true with gift giving: I feel good when someone gets something that they can use. This Christmas I tried to give gifts that allowed the recipient to use them with me on occasion, which increases my happiness in the future: again a personal profit.
Is it callous to think this way? I sure hope not. As my life becomes more stable (ie, financial stability), I find myself wanting to spend more time with friends, family and fans. My last "vacation" was to go visit some of my regular readers in Las Vegas, and I had a ball, even though I didn't profit financially. Maybe if more people realized that life can be about yourself and not forcing others to do anything they don't want to do, we'd live in a better world.
Even if they just switched to using perl or python under fastcgi it would be much better. Then they could easily profile the app and write C modules to speed up the most time consuming pieces. They are apparently not interested however, as offers to write a high performance wiki to replace the (rather poor) current one have been met with semi-polite "fuck off"s.
Wikipedia is exactly as advertised: Wikipedia is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser.
Because it is based upon free-content, anyone can "correct it". Because it based upon free-content, multiple view points will come into conflict. Because its on the Internet, it has a high degree of annonymity which is great sometimes (it levels the playing field, anyone can contribute) but not so great when you actually want to verify (how does one actually check if someone is an expert as opposed to a jerk). How do you even identify "good articles"? How do you identify people screwing them up? All of this takes people and capital. Time and money donated. And once again because it isn't some utopian ideal some want to raze it. Whatever....
It would be one thing if you don't want to contribute to Wikipedia because you simply don't want too but to claim it is broken is highly erronious. It is functioning exactly as discrbied with warts and all.
Even if the error rate is less?
The #1 reason that people don't continue to donate to a charity is that they dont feel their donations are appreciated.
Knowing where to draw the line is a different matter. It's probably wasteful to send an airmail letter to someone who donated $5, when an email would suffice. However if someone donates $100 then it's worth sending them xmas cards for the rest of their life to solicit a second $100 donation.
Some charities spend more than 50% of their income on soliciting further donations, others spend far less. Make sure you know how that breaks down before giving anything.
The worrying thing is that I can edit the next quarter's budget - perhaps putting 'Ferrari for Jimbo Wales' as one of the items. Not a good idea I don't think!
A "low budget"? $750K/year for a website where the website owner doesn't even provide content? It's just a framework. That's it. There's very little new coding needed. What are they paying somebody to do, babysit the servers? True, they're spending less money than most dot-com hype-driven useless businesses, but they're still spending MUCH, MUCH more than they should be. I certainly wouldn't donate to a non-profit that wasted money like they do. The owner's loaded. Why doesn't he spend a tiny fraction of his money on it? We all know he's going to make out like a bandit when he finally gets around to selling Wikipedia in the next few years.
I don't respond to AC's.
I don't see how ads would harm anyone... And if someone thinks othervise then make then optinal, So that users can choose wheather or not they wish to see ads... Anyhow I would never notice a little google ad...
Here's a very long list of articles for you to write. Actually, it's a list of lists of articles for you to write. The Main Focus section covers articles other encyclopedias have, but not Wikipedia. Completing them all might put Wikipedia at around 1,300,000. Good luck Googling.
Unless wikipedia is able to bring in some big name people on its board of directors, people will not feel comfortable donating. My feeling is this jimmy wales character will do a "pat robertson."
Beg, Beg, Beg, Beg and build a huge empire then sell the empire and enrich himself in the process.
He needs to immediately bring in some big name people to wikipedia board.
I like to contribute, but I am not going to contribute to make this jimmy character rich.
If wikipedia was the invaluable resource many think it to be, someone would have stepped forward and provided the funds necessary to keep it running. Google or some other entitity would kick in the needed money. But that hasn't happened.
Why? Because Wikipedia has gotten too big and is having difficulty scaling. Add to that the trust issues that have surfaced recently and it's hard for Wikipedia to succeded in the current environment.
i assume you chose 10usd as a "reasonable but small sum", similar to the logic behind KoL's donation system? it turns out that ten dollars is a lot of money in some places.
Do I get to use a sword?
I liked the suggestion by Jimbo himself that maybe Wikipedia would consider putting ads on just their search feature. That page itself would generate millions of dollars, which would permit wikipedia to make some money without violating it's neutrality. Having ads on the individual articles themselves would be a major no-no I think.
Philosophistry
Why donate to this thing?
It's provably broken.
The admin corps is corrupt and needs to be replaced entirely.
Their abuses of power silence innocent people and create errors in the entries, guaranteeing that it will never be an accurate and trustworthy source of information.
Wales knows it. And he refuses to fix it.
So why give him more money? The problem isn't capital, it's leadership.
Considering that the budget jumbles together capital expenditures along with actual expenses looking at the budget at all is clearly wrong.
Do it for Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks, and Wikimedia Commons. Wikisource aims to be a library of all public domain and GFDL texts, like a wiki Project Gutenberg. Wiktionary is a wiki dictionary and Wikibooks is for educational textbooks.
Wikimedia Commons, however, is a database for public domain and GFDL images. Like Wikipedia or not, that is where a wiki shines. If you go to the trouble to take a picture of Wikimedia and upload it, odds are it's not going to be vandalism. The entire works of Picasso and Vincent van Gogh, for example, at your fingertips. These are lesser known than Wikipedia, but in the eyes of Wikipedia dissidents, some, especially the last, might be more useful.
On the subject of accuracy, my high school text book says that the Senate voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and then he was acquitted by the Senate. Unfortunately, in reality, it is the House of Represenatives that votes to impeach. It is made by the company that has distributed all science, math, and history-related books every school I've gone to has ever used, but unfortunately, it cannot be edited.
Please mod up for Wikimedia.
90% of the content should be history. We're only making about 1 year of history every year. If wikipedia covers history even poorly, it should remain the vast majority of content. So like 99% of it's content should remain stable year to year. Obviously, they haven't tapped out potential topics, but they can't add this many articles every year - it's like Moore's law, at some point your growth slows because you've catalogued most useful things, and/or your audience/contributors plateau with population growth after sufficient penetration.
Which is the long winded way to say, controversy should die down as number of articles increase, or wikipedia isn't feasible long-term. Edits should DECREASE as a percentage of activity in the future, because static content dominates new content. You can always add another entry reviewing some niche activity, like the latest Anime cartoon, but a general article on Abraham Lincoln shouldn't change much in the next 5 years - or it isn't general enough.
Time For A Timely Death For Wikipedia
Um...Google?
In an apparent reply to the low turnout for their fourth quarter fundraiser, Wikipedia
It looks like they've made $230,000 in 18 days according to the link. Given that last year, they spent $750,000, I don't think this is a bad fund raiser. They should just keep the thing at the top of the pages that says the amount raised. I donated when I saw that. If that's up year round, they should get well into the millions.
No Sigs!
People are voting with their cheque books - like Abe Lincoln said:
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
Not necessarily a death.
A reorganization, starting with the non-leader at the top.
Make adminship easier to get, but even easier than that to lose.
Rotate it around, kind of like Slashdot moderation, but with some more significant criteria than gaining a few karma points.
Most of all, don't make it self-sustaining. If it takes admins to make admins, corruption is sure to follow.
And make admins follow the policy. They don't have any special editorial authority (widely ignored right now) and their opinions are not significant (also widely ignored). They are merely the intelligent automatons that apply measures to repair and stop vandalism.
The fact that there are hundreds of admins means that every act by any user can be mistaken by one admin for something malicious, and once it happens it's all but impossible to find other admins more willing to protect the user than the admin who screwed up. That's the most important thing to fix. Admins presume guilt, and clique together. They should be purely adversarial to each other and beholden to the users. Then they'll apply their powers only as policy dictates.
When admins are un-created at about the same rate they're created (with a slight inflation for the sake of keeping up with true entropy), then I'll consider the system to be reasonably constituted. Until then, it's poorly designed and guaranteed to frustrate virtually everyone who attempts to participate.
Speaking of arbitrator quality, I've been a lousy arbitrator. I've done almost nothing- mostly because I made plans for the summer after failing to be properly elected the first time, and subsequently finding myself absolutely swamped with other matters, like my internship, and school. I kind of feel bad about it, really, and I hope the new election can get underway quickly so someone else can fill this spot effectively...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
This Christmas I tried to give gifts that allowed the recipient to use them with me on occasion, which increases my happiness in the future: again a personal profit.
Did it work? (splitting up the jumbo pack of condoms and wrapping then individually as gifts for the office party)
resigned
According to your reference, the error rate of wikipedia is larger on a per-article basis. The counterargument was that the error-rate was smaller on a per-word basis, which means precisely jack. Any high-school sophomore can turn a one-line thesis into a five page paper without adding any actual information, whereas a professional encyclopaedia writer's job is to take as much information as possible and fit it into as small a space as possible. Of course, it doesn't matter because the sample space of the 'study' cited was way too damned small for the cited figures to mean anything anyhow.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Watching the troubles of the "altruistic" firm that dominates this niche actually makes me feel sad for the for profit firms that have been trying to created a financially sound information resources on the net.
The prevailing idea of the dot bust era was that a few firms would take anti-market measures to dominate the market.
Such firms have been great at stifling the develop of straight pay for information services, but have not led to the information paradise we desire.
I like the Wiki service. But, rather than "donating" to wikipedia, I've subscribed a well know British Encyclopædia that competes with the Wiki.
Unless you consider $0/yr a hefty salary.
Anyone who was really interested in the firebombing issue would read the separate Wikipedia article ("Bombing of Dresden in World War II") that is referred to in the Dresden article. And in that other article you would find quite adequate discussion of the Irving book and its discredited numbers.
I think Wikipedia comes out quite well in this article. I knew a little bit about the Dresden bombing before but had not heard of the Irving book. Your example seems to me to show that Wikipedia is working quite well. (And yes - I checked that this article wasn't just fixed up after you mentioned it in SlashDot.)
We're on the verge of Slashdotting Wikipedia!
Now they'll need even MORE money for their fundraiser...!
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
If this guy can't make enough money to sustain his collaboration portal, why doesn't everyone start their own Kiwipedias?
It was once said that the average CEO shouldn't make 120 times the earnings of their employees, so we made a new system out of "collabware" so everyone could be their own CEO.
Now we're being told no, you can't be your own CEO, you need to pay someone 120 times what you make from your work to be on this site.
Funny how no matter how many times we start over with a new concept of information owned by the people, we humans keep ending up swearing our allegiance to individuals or else.
As a historian, you should be far more concerned with how valid your data is.
The whole million monkeys concept is very valid regarding most of the data I've found on Wiki.
In fact, I find more relevant data from a narrow google search than I do from wiki.
"I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly shadowed seaport of dea
Why?
Those are the two minor reasons - the big one?
As I read the responses from the Wikimedia Foundation and the community to this issue, a cold chill spread through me. The attempts by the Foundation to dodge responsobility made me nauseated. The numerous 'blame the victim' posts, (why didn't *he* edit it?), were even worse.
Here was a signal rocket brighter than a Space Shuttle launch that something was wrong - that the wiki principles were failing (I.E. 'errors are invariably caught and fixed within minutes, hours at most', among others), and the powers that be at Wikipedia seemed more interested in spinning the issue away rather than learning, fixing, and moving forward.
I, and others, have posted numerous times in numerous places about the problems and shortcomings with the 'pedia - but the Sigenthaler affair showed that Thales et al were more interested in their ivory tower principles than in the practical applications thereof. Desite their proud rhetoric, the denizens of and powers that be at the 'pedia turned out to be more interested in anarchy than accuracy.
... out of interest, did you actually donate money to stop the child dying of AIDS? If so, how far do you think it went? AIDS in the 3rd world is largely caused by ignorance. If the parents of the child were better educated, don't you think that AIDS would be reduced by a large degree?
The Wikipedia article on AIDS is very good. Perhaps that would go some way to dealing with the problem?
TBSDY
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How would you know that? Have you done a statistical sample before and after the rise in article numbers?
TBSDY
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Well change it then, giving these reasons.
I agree thouugh with the previous poster that the main section on the bombing of Dresden would be where one looks. This continued use of one of Goebbels' last piece of propaganda is an oversight.
Please cite your source for the proposition that "a professional encyclopaedia writer's job is to take as much information as possible and fit it into as small a space as possible." Either way, you can go up and down the wall with the sample space and whether the error rate was higher per-word or per-article. The fact of the matter is that, for every article studied in this way, Wikipedia and Britannica are substantially identical in terms of erroneous content. The error rate is simply not that different between the two.
I am not in any way a Wikipedia fanboy. I actually own a full Britannica and will be getting another (along with their full bound collection of books and so forth) in the future. I am just reporting the facts, which indicate that your original commends are ill-founded at best.
Some have insightfully pointed to distributed distribution. Some argue that it would be impossible or impractical...I disagree, in fact distributed distribution should be one of the primary efforts of wikipedia supporters. If the aim to truly free information they should go about thinking how they can de-contextualize it from the wikipedia-brand/ institution. To free information we must aim to maximize possibilities for non-coercive free association. To accomplish these goals within our capitalist context we must align with institutions that can concentrate power to the point of which it is beneficial to the collective, wikipedia is one such institution. But at the same time we should do this with an end goal of freeing the information from the context provider. To do this we should do some serious thinking about distributed distribution.
As many of the posters have identified non-profit institutions are vulnerable to corruption, coercion, capital mismanagement, government regulation etc. Free culture should aim to dismantle exclusive information distribution within its own institutions, in effect supporting wikipedia as something larger than its-self. We can already loudly applaud database dumps, the open source backend, and openness of the foundation, but let us not assume that wikipedia as a mediator of free information is the end goal because then we might be left with another Google when the potential of participatory culture is so much greater.
How many "oversights" are there? And why is it my responsibility to fix Wikipedia? What do I get out of it? What happens if some moron reverts it? Who is responsible then? Do I have to stand guard in perpetuity? Why should I do this?
That's the other thing about Wikipedia. Everyone is responsible except the WikiMedia Foundation who publishes it. You find a problem? You're responsible for fixing that problem. The response to Siegenthaler was the same at first: "it's your biography - you fix it".
Jimbo Wales have created a large "Somebody Else's Problem" Field around Wikipedia. Nobody is to blame for the mistakes. Nobody takes responsibility.
Wikipedia will take the credit for somebody else's scholarship, but when the crap flies, its somebody else's problem.
Where's Comrade Ogilvy? He's definitely in there...
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
As an experiment, it has been interesting. As an encyclopedia it proved it has no future. If you want unbiased, serious, and quality content you are better off buying Encarta.
And as of donating money to charitable entities, buying Encarta might be a good choice, since part of your money is going to those entities.
Open source, gnu and free content is good and all, but it's not reality.
Wikimedia isn't getting larger donations because people don't want to be paying for Jimbo's porsche, and his new wide-screen.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Slashdot loves to censor anyone would doesn't regurgitate back anything that a geek looking guy in a $10 white lab coat says - whether its about so-called HIV, or Global Warming, or Apple Monopolists.
And if one does challenge what the guys in the $10 white lab coats says - then one is deemed a Troll or given Zero scores - or both.
Both Wikipedia and Slashdot Mauraders think that "Bullshit Will Always Baffle Brains" - it just aint so.
Now Slashdot and Wikipedia are not unique when it comes to "Bullshit Will Always Baffle Brains" attempts. 50% of all masters theses in the USA and Canada are cooked - not factual and once one starts to lie - it seems they can't stop.
In part that's why:
- most urban planners know nothing about the design of cities,
- most teachers don't know how to teach
- most doctors can't heal person with emotional dis-ease
and so on.
Part of the act is to have the figurehead stump for change from time to time. The Wikistry of Truth will always be funded as long as the caretakers do their job of editing the facts to suit the purposes of the rulers. Same as it ever was.
Wikipedia should really link authors, books, and movies to sites like amazon.com. Yesterday I was reading H.G Wells biography, and wanted to buy one of his books (Time Machine). Instead of simply clicking from Wikipedia to Amazon, I had to open up a new browser window and go the book manually. Not only was it troubling for me, Wikipedia didn't make any money , even after driving me to Amazon to spend money!
Also they should not allow donations of less than $5, since Paypal fees go through the roof. I see many donations of $1, of which Wikipedia gets only 48 cents. Also if someone is able to donate $1, I am sure they can donate more.
This is the problem with Nature's call last month for experts to get involved- why should they have to keep it under review? Extremely inefficient. But perhaps this IS the price of stopping the Ogilvys?
Exactly.
I have been watching somebody deliberately planting false information about real people and fake references into Wikipedia. I know its false. That person knows its false. But nobody notices because nobody is responsible. He can't be the only historical revisionist at his SpeakWrite at the Ministry of Truth.
I think that it won't change significantly until Wikipedia discovers that Comrade Ogilvy has started a conflict. People have been killed in panics or conflicts caused by false information. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a warning from history, but everybody thinks that "it won't happen now because we're more sophisticated".
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
with paypal, it's, frankly, 2 clicks. 15 $ is the amount that's not too much for me to be worried about and not to little for me to feel guilty.
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
> Anonymous editors can still edit articles
... only as a last resort
But most of the changes will be automatically deleted. I know dozens of people that have tried to get the damn Wikipedia claim that Wyoming has 57 electoral votes fixed. They only have 3, but the elites at Wikipedia kept pushing their lie until recently.
> creating an account takes mere seconds
But it means that only an elite few can create articles. I don't understand why you keep pushing your agenda.
> "protect" articles
Unless it's used to push a politcal agenda.
Proud AC since Oct 98
In other words, Wikipedia is most useful for half-baked citations in Debate Club-type situations.
I couldn't agree more.
You have to explain to people, briefly, why the money is needed and why you should donate. A simple message at the top of every page would help (not guilt trippy stuff like, hey you're using this, pay up).
Advertisements never bother me (apart from the *really* annoying moving ones), but advertisements on Wikipedia would be a bad idea. For example you got funding from say Coca Cola, you put their ad up, but they don't want you telling people how much sugar is in the drink, and they don't want you to link to an anti coke website, etc.
The Wikipedia folks should start their own hosting business, or some other sideline to make money and use the profit to fund wikipedia.
Also, open up a page for users to mass brainstorm fundraiser ideas.
I remember some /. story from a while ago which stated that Google and Yahoo! each want to donate servers and bandwidth. What happened to that? Or is this support already in place but still not enough?
1) They need servers, as someone already pointed out... but they can do with more efficient software (so they need help from programming geniuses) and perhaps by borrowing CPU time from users, like SETI (just a wild guess)...
2) They need to get income from ads. A little management help from Google wouldn't hurt and would benefit both parties -- as we all know the better part of a search business is when you find the things you search... and finding in Wikipedia is like shooting in a fish barrel...
BAD co-dependent enabler of half-assed articles by zealots. Bad! Bad!
Not only a poor joke, but poor judgement as well. Simply put, Wikipedia "The Free Encyclopedia" is a terrific resource. I generally use it cross-reference higher level mathematics (which, by the way, you'd be hard pressed to find in Encyclopaedia Britannica) alongside Mathworld and Planetmath, and I enjoy reading random articles on topics of interest. As a graduate student, I don't have access to $$$ required to buy a full encyclopedia set, and my small donation to Wikipedia is a show of appreciation to those who volunteered their time to write for the site.
Why you believe I or other users of Wikipedia are "co-dependant" or "zealots" is simply odd. I'm hardly surprised, though, given that this is Slashdot, where geeks pretend they are gods. Regardless, it's a free market and this is a non-profit organization. If you don't support Wikipedia, don't make a donation. Others of us who use it regularly will.
Many wikipedians seem to be getting a hardon each time there is a tinyest "fact" not included in their beloved collection of wisdom. They then race to be the first to create an article about that item, no matter, how outlandish.
Consider this article about Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. An infamous UK tabloid The Sun has published a story alleging that Stalin ordered a creation of human-monkey supersoldier hybrids. The story was reprinted by someone else, then by someone else, then by someone else. It was reprinted in several Russian tabloids (with reference to The Sun), which apparently was enough for some other Western newspapers to pretend that "published in Russian newspapers" is proof of something.
Now we have some moron eager to copy-paste the content of all those articles into Wikipedia. And noone pays any attention. Other users just copyedit the story, fixing commas and other shit. Now Wikipedia does have official policies on Verifiability and Reliable sources, apparently written by some competent people. But who cares about policies? It's like a policy against trolling on Slashdot, totally unrealistic and unenforceable.
Then people who also contribute to articles about Kabbalah, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Holy Spirit, Fingering (sexual act) and Cannabis (drug) join in. Yeah, like I would trust them to report on human-monkey supersoldiers.
And this goes on an on. Yes, there are mechanisms in place to fix this sort of situation, but the problem is that like in real life playing by the rules takes too much effort. And only crazies can afford to spend the time. People who add wacky stuff to Wikipedia become proficient at superficially respecting the rules, while pushing their agenda (i.e. include all sorts of crazy stuff in Wikipedia). People who are rational usually have other things to do with their time and will just go away.
No one likes a democracy controlled by those with the most money. But how about encyclopedia controlled by those with the most free time?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
One day wikipedia will only be available to those ISPs willing to pay to allow their customers access.
It will be like paying to watch A&E or the Discovery channel on cable or satellite dish.
I wouldn't donate to Wikipedia because, when some idiot with an account reverted my edits to "Lego" three times in a day, for stupid reasons, when I addressed his (bogus, but I addressed them) concerns after each revert... nobody noticed or said a word. I had citations to peer-reviewed academic journals; he had his own incorrect conception of English grammar; he won the flamewar.
I don't blame them for having an asshat in the system, but when one asshat can override an anonymous person who actually knows the subject, my money goes elsewhere.
If you divide the personnel costs evenly among the bosses of this place, and assume the "part time" part means they'll put $11,000 into the "part time", whatever number of hours that is, you get an annual income of $53,000 for these guys.
In reality the CTO probably gets a bigger cut than the other "permanent" employees. Even at $53,000 with no "benefits" whatever a benefit is, that's an incredible amount for someone living in Fl*rida to make. There are a lot of people in this world who would be grateful to make $15,000 a year and these guys act like $53,000 in donated money is "pleading".
By the way, we don't think disclosing executive salaries is as much of a "private" matter as kiwipedia says it is. Most companies list their executive compensation in order to be listed on a stock exchange.
7 years ago we got tired of Mr. Softy and NBC, and 1 or 2 media elites from dictating what we saw on TV, so we made personal web pages and blogs and said now the masses have unfiltered media.
Now it's 2006 and we're saying, gee, having a couple of guys take care of the distribution of our information is real convenient and it's kind of cool that someone can make enough money off of free media to buy a house. Ok, so what if they had to start filtering it a little. Ok, so what if they had to start taking a small amount of money for their services. Ok, so now instead of investing that $5 in our own web server they're "begging" us to invest in their portal.
It just feels like a familiar cycle keeps repeating.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in _World_War_II states Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. By Frederick Taylor, page 262-266, see bibliography There were an unknown number of refugees in the Dresden, so the historians Matthias Neutzner, Götz Bergander and Frederick Taylor have used historical sources and deductive reasoning, to estimate that the number of refugees in the city and surrounding suburbs was around 200,000, or less, on the first night of the bombing. Is this wrong too, or am I misunderstandign what you are saying?
This Page + Adwords = ?
Sorry, I can't work out if you are responding to the Roman Catholic church or Wikipedians when you say "you guys"... I suspect you are referring to the RC church, though. Is this the case?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Moreover, I'm not sure I'm comfortable making the pay (I'd say salary, but we only have two salaried staff members) of each employee public information, when I've had "day jobs" I have rarely wanted my personal income to be a matter of public record.
t s.r484.cgi?entry_id=2032
I concur wholeheartedly with your point here. It does not seem unreasonable to publish the total amount spent on salaries though.
Personally, I stopped donating to the Red Cross when I found that the San Diego Director was pulling in a $200k+ salary. Wow! How many people had to donate just to pay her salary? It is obviously not an organization that poor or middle class people should be donating too.
An interesting (but seemingly biased) link is here: http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/cgi-bin/mt-commen
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Too many experts are turned away by the teeming, uninformed Wikipedians who tear down useful contributions under the mistaken notions of "balance" or "being informative." Look at Panera Bread [CC]; 25% of the article is unequivocal information, the other 75% are advertisement and random facts. It also doesn't use proper paragraphs, and the entire article lacks structure.
Wikipedia is not *perfect*, this is true...but that doesn't mean that it isn't the best thing currently out there. Britannica lacks any entry for Panera whatsoever.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Paypal is NOT a bank. There is tremendous risk in storing such large amounts of capital in Paypal, as the company could go broke or hiccup or otherwise wipe out the balance. Because Paypal is not a bank, AFAIK there is no insurance on deposits there (no FDIC insurance).
This is never a concern for us people storing a few hundred dollars there, but this is too much money to put at risk. For safety sake, Wikimedia should diversify and hold more cash in real, government insured bank accounts or bonds.
I'm not saying this because I think Paypal is a scam or anything, but the cash must be held somewhere safer and preferably where it earns interest. Wikimedia could easily negotiate high interest savings with a real bank and collect $8k or more a year from interest alone.
As plenty of others have said, Wikipedia needs to be self sufficient. Whether they raise an endowment, accept ads, or what have you, people aren't going to keep pitching in donations indefinately, especially when the needed funds are over $1 millon/year. In the interim, they need to follow the practice of every other charitable organization out there: have a "sponsor" list. Post the names of anyone donating above, say, $1,000, and put it in a prominent place. Corporations are among the biggest charitable givers, but they're not going to give if they don't get recognition.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I mentioned this on a previous story, but there is a pretty easy way to edit Wikipedia from China. The GFW apparently has 2 types of blocking, and Wikipedia uses the lesser one - all they did was remove it from the DNS servers. Adding
/etc/hosts file (or windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts if you're using Windows) will allow you to access WP without going through a proxy, and therefore to edit articles. Feel free to google 'wikipedia 145.97.39.155' to be sure I'm not sending you to goatse :p
145.97.39.155 en.wikipedia.org upload.wikimedia.org
to your
The fact that they only removed it from the DNS servers and didn't actually block the IP like they have for BBC News, Google Cache etc implies that they know WP is still useful for some people.
(I am a foreigner working in Beijing, and a regular Wikipedia contributor).
If you had cared about it enough, you would have fixed it (removed the false info) and if it got put back again, then you would remove it again, it would get put back again, you would remove it again,
But since you didn't care, it will take longer for someone to notice the problems with this article.
What I find hard to understand is how you can complain about such things and not even mention which article you are talking about. Sure, the process of reverting someone else's incorrect or malicious edits takes a fair bit of work and sometimes a lot of persistence. But it doesn't take much effort at all to mention what article you are talking about. If you did do so in a public forum like this, the problem would likely be investigated and fixed.
In other words, it's not true that nobody is responsible for reporting and fixing errors/misinformation in Wikipedia. The responsibility lies with you.
As I'm using wikipedia in both German and English quite a lot, I did donate quite a reasonable sum. I hope many others here do the same.
In Korea, all your base are Only For Old People
Go to wikipedia and help them do it! It is open. Become a part of it instead of a grumpy bystander
Mark
Since that fund raising drive is now $50k above the budget shortfall, it's not a shortfall anymore. The present $200k raised in the fund drive is about twice what was raised by the same drive in February last year... The shortfall was for Q4 of 2005. The current drive aims to get rid of that shortfall and put us in a good position for Q1 of 2006. That proposed budget, so far, is well above $500,000 and may need to be cut pending the outcome of this drive. Either way, we will still need to have another fund drive later this quarter to get rid of this quarter's shortfall and put us in a good position at the start of next quarter. Hopefully some large percentage of the huge increase in people using Wikipedia in the last month will have come to love Wikipedia enough by then to donate. BTW, I'm Daniel Mayer.
Anyone citing wikipedia as a referred source in an academic paper (other than in one dealing directly with wikipedia) must have shit for brains and must be expecting to have their academic paper used as toilet paper (for the shit in their heads presumably).
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
For every dollar donated to wikipedia paypal is getting close to 7 cents.. I guess thats too much they are asking for just letting wikipedia use their credit card portal...
Quote from Wikipedia article "Expertise":
"Expertise is a form of power; that is, experts have the ability to influence others. Alvin Toffler's Powershift argues that the three main kinds of social power are violence, wealth, sucking cock, and knowledge and, further, that these three kinds of power interact.
Nuff said.
(And they can't even count.)
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
When paypal screws win over, I am going to sit back and laugh, doesnt win know better than that? I dont really like banks myself, but then again, my piggie bank stays at home with me, but still, I would never trust pp.
...we just need to pay the bail!