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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
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?
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!
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!
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
I'm assuming this is a joke. All Wikipedia text is licensed under the GFL, which is free and open, allowing anyone else to copy and modify the text (so long as it remains free and open). This means that other sites (like Answers.com, etc.) are legally allowed to copy text from Wikipedia (as long as they correctly describe the copyright terms, which they do). In fact, I believe an agreement is in place to allow them to mirror Wikipedia content more efficiently.
Personally, I don't understand how Answers.com makes any money from their adds. Who would go to Answers.com instead of just checking out the latest version on Wikipedia? I would prefer if they didn't exist, since, as you said, they simply dilute search engine results. In any case, what they are doing it legal and no big deal.
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?
Wikipedia is nothing more than a MMORPG disguising itself as an encyclopedia. It would get a lot more respect if it just owned up to what it really is, and cut out all the lofty, "bringing information to the masses" poseur BS. Jimmy Wales' only goal out of all of this is gratification of his ego (though the free travel, and a hefty salary doesn't hurt either).
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
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
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?
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 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?
"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 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.
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.
1) I don't have a permanent copy of it on a DVD, like I would for Encarta
you may download the database to solve your problem: Wikipedia:Database_download
2) I feel like I'm being "forced" to buy the latest upgrade of Wikipedia when they set up these pleas for donations, since the performance of my encyclopedia directly depends on these fund drives.
see the answer to 1)
In Germany wikipedia.de-DVDs were distributed through IT-Magazins, those DVD-ISOs are also available for download.
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!
A donation of $5 would pay for something like 200,000 to 500,000 more pages delivered over the course of a year.
If no capacity expansion at all happened, with money raised used only for running costs, not expansion of page serving capacity, the $5 would pay for about 180,000 page views over a year. But it will increase capacity, so it'll actually deliver more value than that.
Numbers are _very_ approximate, based on ballpark capacity of the system today (about 6,000-8,000 pages per second, 500 million per day) and ballpark equipment costs to get there, adjusted for guestimated efficiency improvements.
I'm one of the roots on the Wikimedia Foundation servers.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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 $$$ required to buy a full encyclopedia set, and my small donation to Wikipedia is a show of appreciation to those who volunteered their time to write for the site.
Why you believe I or other users of Wikipedia are "co-dependant" or "zealots" is simply odd. I'm hardly surprised, though, given that this is Slashdot, where geeks pretend they are gods. Regardless, it's a free market and this is a non-profit organization. If you don't support Wikipedia, don't make a donation. Others of us who use it regularly will.
you know if you actually looked at the wiki for where contributions were spent you'd realize that jim is only allocating about 40k/year for himself(since he had to quit ihis job to run wikimedia full-time). if he has a porche or a wide screen tv, someone must have dontated them... because he certaintly didn't pay for them with wikimedia money...
now good old jim could be affording a porche, and a wide screen, all he'd have to do is incorperate a single 'google adwords' box to every page displayed and with about 10 million page views a day, he'd be getting quite the $$$
but he's got some philosophical thing going on that adverts shouldn't be used to fund wikipedia.
but yeah, just so you know, good old jim could afford all that stuff you accuse him of owning without even fact checking it, if he just switched wikipedia over to an ad revenue based model.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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.
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).