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

Donate, I did!

[Anonymous Coward]

I made a genarous donation.

Then I went back and edited it. Now Wikipedia owes me money!

Google

[u16084]

Im sure Google will be more than happy to help

How can they survive non-commercially?

[dada21]

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."

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[manavendra]

I agree. However, I also believe such public-interest systems *have* to be self-sufficient if they are to truly serve the purpose of providing free information to the child in Africa reeling under crushing poverty, or the future generations being able to access unbiased info.

I'm sure discussions in this domain have happened quite a few times in the past, however, but perhaps with growing penetration/contribution, it maybe be time to look for alternate sources of revenue - for example, the much-used ad-based model?

Or maybe I'm opening a whole new can of worms here...

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:How can they survive non-commercially?

[Joe Decker]

My problem is that it is very hard for me to trust the charities to handle my money properly. I've always thought about how charities could detail their money coming in and their money going out, and I came up with a solution. I'm not sure if anyone already has used this solution, so I don't know if its new and unique or already something everyone (but me) knew.

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.

This is a charity well worth giving to.

[Winckle]

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.

Is Wikipedia in serious trouble?

[hahafaha]

Do they just want more money to fund the project, or are they actually in dire need?

Why fund Wikipedia?

[liangzai]

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.

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 ;-)

The danger of Wikipedia

[DiamondGeezer]

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.