Slashdot Mirror
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.
Im sure Google will be more than happy to help
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
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'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
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.
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
I certainly understand, and in no way wish to dismiss your concern. I don't have any personal contact with Wikipedia save for a few donations of information and cash.
Speaking for myself, I tend to worry less that the money is not making into Wikipedia's accounts at all because, well, frankly it doesn't seem worth the effort to leave such an obvious paper trail for the IRS to prosecute. The concern that the money for Wikipedia is being subverted to the founder (or whomever) seems likely untrue in part simply because I can "sense" the purchase of a lot of servers in the fact that Wikipedia continues to exist at all, even with it's poor response time the bandwidth being served, with the software being used, well, there's clearly a pile of hardware out there.
Now, over and above that, is the money being spent "well", even if not in a corrupt manner? Were, say, Wikipedia's server receipts to be published, it might be kinda interesting to argue whether they could have saved a few bucks by using a different vendor and such.
I'm the Board Treasurer for a non-profit whose size is not all that different than Wikipedias, Impact Bay Area. Obviously my own donations to that organization are something I get the pleasure of feeling very comfortable with. But, despite considering it, I'm doubting that I'll be promoting your idea of publishing every receipt and donation to our board. I expect that that would be, roughly speaking, a half-time position, and that would be (and I'm handwaving here), a ten percent increase in expenditures, and I'm not convinced that's the best use of our resources. 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. I'm not saying that these issues couldn't be worked out, I'm saying instead that the problems they might (or might not) solve seem, for our organization, to not be as big as the, problems they create, and it would still be fairly easy to game the system you described by the creation of false receipts for expenditures.
Again, I'm not trying to get you to donate to WF, the issues of trusting non-profits to spend money with integrity and without waste—they're at the heart of the questions I ask myself when I look at where to put my own money. I myself came to the conclusion that WF looked pretty good when I dug through what I saw... your mileage may vary, and that's totally cool.
I'm a nature photographer.
- What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?
- Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?
I can't really contest any of the rest of the fees because I lack enough info, but the complete ommision of data regarding these irks me.Jeremy Logan's Website.
Lots of things are "pocket change" to these players. They donate to a lot of causes. What makes Wikipedia so special that they deserve a cut of the pie versus, say, donating to a battered women's shelter, cancer research, or children's home.
Don't get me wrong, I like Wikipedia. I think it's an interesting experiment. But I think of a hell of a lot of things come first when we're talking about general donation funds.
Or to put it another way, Wikipedia begging for money is going to put it against a lot of priorities, and Wikipedia is probably going to lose, especially in a big year for natural disasters. They need to find a more self-sustaining model, even perhaps finding some hidden angels who believe in their cause.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Also, people tend to judge Wikipedia by its worst class of articles (those on politics). But if you look at Wikipedia's science articles, they tend to be highly accurate (and the recent Nature analysis bears this out). In my areas of expertise (mathematics and computer science), I rarely see any serious errors on Wikipedia. I imagine this is because nonexperts tend not to dare to edit them, and because there is little controversy.
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.
counterpoint: i find wikipedia highly useful and accurate. i don't quote it in cites because it isn't authoritative, as you note, and i also read it with an eye for misinformation, which you also note, but neither of those things discredits the mind-boggling quantity of valid information to be gleaned from the articles.
furthermore, all those "stub" articles are often acceptably informative on their own. often two sentences is all i need.
finally, your question as to who would bother to put information into Wikipedia, which rhetorically implies that the answer is "nobody", is disingenuous, as it is clearly evident that in fact the answer is "lots of people". i myself have, on a couple rare occasions, started or contributed to articles; and there is apparently a whole subculture of people who do it constantly.
your beef sounds like the famous quote where Bill Gates asked "who would write software for free?" golly gee, free software could never be as good as software you pay for. only... it is, abstract theories of human behavior be damned. we know that it works, because in fact it exists. in math and computer science they call that "proof by construction", which is proving that something can be built by... building it.