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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.
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.
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 ;-)
There's a budget on-line, a quick read of it shows that the founder isn't paid a salary. Still, I do understand your point, I aim my charitable donations and volunteer work very carefully myself.
I'm a nature photographer.
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.
What a lie. Check the 2005 budget for yourself. There are four employees (two full time - Jimbo's assistant and Wikimedia's chief developer and two part time - a coordinator for the International Wikimedia meetup and an intern to help physically maintence the servers). Notice, Jimbo isn't one of them.
As to travel, the entire 2005 budget was $17,000. For comparison purposes, Wikimedia speds roughly the same amount on office supplies. Are they using too much paper too?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
If you look at the budget, you'll see that the purchase of servers is the biggest line-item.
I'm a nature photographer.
I like seeing how Wikis have become more neutral over time
This is going to sound like trolling, but I honestly see the opposite occuring as Wikipedia becomes more popular. As proof, check out the currently (as of Dec 3 2005) disputed articles. The history itself shows a rise in the count.
You can check here whether your donation made it into their account.
Not stop serving pages serious. Unable to keep up with growth serious.
This is the year when Wikipedia page views will pass Google page views if growth continues as it has in the past. That's a hardware capability of 6,000+ page views per second today and 3-5 doublings expected this year, taking it to 50,000-180,000 page views per second.
When growth will stop is an interesting question. Nobody knows.
One certainty: hundreds of thousands of authors writing an encyclopedia accessible to anyone free of charge hosted by a charitable Foundation and in the top 25, likely ending in the top 5 sites on the net, is a great achievement for the open source model and people getting together to build and support what they want: an ad-free ever-improving (and ever-imperfect) information resource for all.
It's many end users writing this, tremendously broadening participation in the open source model beyond the programmers who've traditionally been involved.
Some have suggested that people who have donated in the past aren't donating and that's why more money is needed. Not really. When you're doubling what you serve every three or four months you also need to substantially increase the hardware and donations to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for more, though we've managed to do considerably better than doubling the hardware for each doubling in load.
I'm one of the roots on the Wikimedia Foundation servers.
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.