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.

Comments

Low turnout? Shortfall?

[gowen]

In an apparent reply to the low turnout for their fourth quarter fundraiser

"Apparent" here, meaning "Something I've made up".

The 2005 Wikimedia Budget says

Only $160,000 was available at the start of the quarter, creating a budget shortfall of $161,200. A fund drive starting on 1 December was scheduled at the meeting as well. --Daniel Mayer 18:18, 1 October 2005

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.

why we need money

[midom]

Obviously donated money doesn't go to someone's Porsche budget. All expenses are shown in public budget reports. All purchases are shown in purchase reports. All of them can be seen on http://wikimediafoundation.org/ - it's quite transparent there.

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 ;-)

Re:why we need money

[Jon Chatow]

Note that that's not a budget, merely a proposed budget - given the significant short-fall in donation income, it will have to be scaled back somewhat (and another donation drive run quite soon). The reason the items aren't split down further is that the money hasn't been spent yet.

What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?

It's money to fund the start-up costs of the local chapters - legal costs, primarily, and capped at US$500 or so per chapter, IIRC; we currently have chapters in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Serbia and Montenegro, and are working on founding ones for Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Local chapters work locally as ground-roots organisations, and form tax-friendly donation conduits.

Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?

The list of domains is quite extensive, which might give you some clue; also, remember that some TLDs and especially SLDs within CCTLDs are (significantly) more expensive than a bog-standard .com would.

I hope that this answers your questions.

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[Joe Decker]

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.

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.

Re:They need look no further than their own polici

[slavemowgli]

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.

Re:Is Wikipedia in serious trouble?

[Raul654]

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?

Re:Community Collaborative?

[Joe Decker]

Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees?....

If you look at the budget, you'll see that the purchase of servers is the biggest line-item.

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[slashdotnickname]

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.

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[AxelBoldt]

This would allow every person who donated to confirm that their donation was actually listed on the site.

You can check here whether your donation made it into their account.