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Wikipedia Meets $16M Budget Goal
netbuzz writes "Thanks to some 630,000 individual contributions that averaged $22 apiece, Wikipedia has reached its fundraising goal of $16 million, founder Jimmy Wales announced over the weekend. Writes Wales, '... this year is a little more incredible than most because this year we celebrate Wikipedia's tenth anniversary. It's so important that we kick the year off just like this: by fully funding the Wikimedia Foundation's budget to support Wikipedia and all the sister projects as we head into the next decade of our work together.' The online encyclopedia now boasts of being the Internet's fifth largest site, which renews questioning by some as to whether it can afford over the long haul to stand by its policy of refusing advertising."
You're not supposed to cite Wikipedia!
Ask NPR, it has been their business model for quite some time.
That begging campaign got so annoying that I haven't been to wikipedia in the last two months. I don't think I'll go back either, so consider that my contribution -- an infinitesimal decrease in server load and bandwidth required to keep the site running.
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
This is fine reasoning, even the opinion article linked to advocates this. But there is an important issue that needs to be addressed first and that is how ads are handled for each particular page. Google's highest bidder model is what I am most afraid of. These don't even have to be selling advertisements. For example if I went to the page on Anti-lock Braking Systems I would suspect automakers would pay large amounts of money to be the ad banner for that page with the simple statement of '<highest bidding automaker> provides the #1 ABS with a safety rating surpassing all others.'
... if not for no one else than at least to a high degree for me.
And, though insanely lucrative, a part of me fears that this would really disrupt or even destroy the concept of a peer reviewed encyclopedia. When I edit a page and look at it, I don't want to see some banner ad with lies or half-truths at the top of it and you know as well as I that that is exactly what advertising degrades to. The problem is that online advertising has become so savvy that these pages would specifically be targeted en mass by manufacturers and bid on through whoever provides the advertising for Wikipedia. And I will make the statement that giving them the ability to put advertising would be severely detrimental to the integrity for Wikipedia
My work here is dung.
Sometimes I feel like I prefer the ads than the constantly begging for money...
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
I hope that means I won't have to see Jimbo's creepy face any more.
TFA says:
More than 500,000 donations averaging $22 apiece were made to the Wikimedia Foundation, while local Wikipedia chapters generated another 130,000 gifts worldwide.
The summary is incorrect.
I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
Honestly, I would expect them to stay just the way they are, if they want to badly enough. Think about it: They're already the fifth most popular website. They are unlikely to become substantially more popular than that, which means that their operation costs are already close to their peak level. Now consider this:
1) The cost of bandwidth and servers, which has got to be some large fraction of their expenses, go down over time.
2) They made their financing goal for this year, a year in which by (1) their costs are likely to be higher than in future years.
Also, $16M in the scheme of things is not a lot of money. If that's their yearly budget then all it would take is one billionaire to provide them a $350M or so endowment in a will or something and they would be set forever just on the interest. (That is, once interest rates get back above 0% again.)
Realistically, the biggest threat to Wikipedia is ISPs violating network neutrality. If Wikipedia had to pay whatever tithe each ISP decided they were entitled to in order to reach their subjects, that could explode their costs pretty quickly and require them to seek other sources of funding.
Obligatory just-to-try-set-the-record-straight (as the summary perpetuates the common myth) Jimmy Wales isn't "the" founder of Wikipedia, he didn't come up with the idea for Wikipedia, didn't agree with the idea initially and had to be convinced, didn't come up with the name, didn't build the initial software, and didn't create the first Wikipedia community. Most of the credit for all of the above goes to co-founder Larry Sanger; in the beginning Wales acknowledged this but he has since been attempting to rewrite history by going around marketing himself as "the founder" of Wikipedia. He is at very best "co-founder".
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001424.html
I just believe strongly in credit where credit is due, and in not taking credit for other people's work.
I prefer to put my money where my mouth is and support public radio. After not watching any commercial news for probably the last few years and just relying on NPR and BBC for the most part, I happened to visit a relative when the TV news came on. I am not exaggerating when I say the news show had a jittery cartoon-like appearance in its speech and presentation style. And it was mostly commercials. That is the mindless garbage you get when you let someone else pay for your news.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I would have donated, but apparently I'm not notable enough, and so my donation was speedily deleted.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
>Sometimes I feel like I prefer the ads than the constantly begging for money...
Indeed ... until, I's warrant, you have reason to consider the power and influence the companies that adverise, then exert over the content broadcast.
Corporate censorship is pernicious as government censorship (esp. as we've seen recently where the two walk arm-in-arm).
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
I always thought this was self-destructive behavior on Slashdot's part.
I can't speak for others but just the fact that I was given the option to block ads at the site level is enough for me to allow them. I feel that little checkbox is a sign of respect from this site and since I'm too cheap to pay to be a subscriber, I show my respect by leaving the ads in place.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
I can't understand the mentality of the story summary.
The news is: the annual fund raiser was a success. It raised more money than ever before, in a shorter time than the previous fund raisers.
How does raising oodles of money without ads make someone wonder if ads will soon be required?
The news story answers this question: No, there is clearly no need for ads.
Ads could even ruin Wikipedia's funding model. Would so many people donate if there were ads and if Wikipedia had a conflict of interest (don't offend the advertisers)?
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Wikipedia can make the ad section blatantly obvious, so to distinguish between ads and content.
I think you missed eldavojohn's point. The fear is that the ads will inevitably leak into the content -- that is, not only will you have the "blatantly obvious" ads on some separate section of the page, you'll also have content rewritten to push products. And this fear is quite justified. Any time you take money from someone, you have aligned your interests with theirs. We /.ers love to complain, with good reason, about the "Senator from Disney" and the blatant corporate spin in the mass media, and it's easy enough to see why this happens: campaign contributions and advertising money set the agenda. There's no particular reason to assume Wikipedia would be immune to this sort of corruption.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Over the last 50 years, cigarette companies were the biggest advertisers in women's magazines. Half their ad pages might be cigarette ads.
Women's magazines warned about every cancer but one -- lung cancer. For 50 years, health coverage was a major topic for women's magazines, but they pointedly avoided any mention of the health effects of cigarettes. The editors of these magazines admitted it, and it's been proven in published academic studies. Or you can just go to the library and look at them.
Conversely, the few women's magazines and consumer magazines that didn't take cigarette advertising did run articles on smoking and health.
Cigarettes are the most obvious example, but you can find that same bias in the coverage of all the major advertisers in most news media -- alcohol, automobiles.
Public radio is now taking advertising. I've heard a lot of local news stories about their advertisers, particularly in the music and entertainment business.
Wikipedia is already getting all the money it needs. (TFA doesn't explain *why* they need more money -- more server farms?) There's a real risk advertising would compromise their objectivity. It has everywhere else.