Any non-retarded reindeer on Santa's sleigh would be able to fly. There's a problem in the premise. Calling an imaginary purchase and transition plan non-retarded doesn't in any way explain how Wikipedia could have any market value, or how it could somehow retain enough volunteer leaders once dedicated to the non-commercial purpose of the project to assure a critical mass required to maintain an open document against malicious or ill-informed tampering. The only thing that could possibly be sold that a well-funded entrepreneur couldn't reproduce on their own is the URL. There is no way to assure the goodwill of thousands of contributors would somehow magically attach to a string of a dozen characters.
If Google purchased the Wikipedia.com URL, the mere purchase would probably inspire a couple of well-funded forks, including at least one that would try to somehow step in to replace the non-profit ownership of an open-source encyclopedia. The division of participants would assure no one would have enough personnel to defend a wide-open edit process against vandals, which as I postulated earlier, would probably increase driven by a motivation that Google had somehow stolen property donated to a charity for non-profit purposes.
You can postulate all you want on Slashdot that Wikipedia has tangible value, but no working commercial property appraiser or financial auditor will publicly agree with you. Unless you can point to an offer on the table, all you have is a big fat imagination. The contributions have no value and the community of contributors is not a marketable asset.
I agree. They can cut expenses, make realistic revenue projections and seriously consider how their social environment affects their reputation as a charity.
Payroll seems to have grown as fast as any other category. That's an easy place to cut, considering their access to volunteers. Travel is juicy and could be slashed to zero. If virtual communities work, they can stick with a virtual community.
They might do well to consider ultimate limits in their potential revenue growth - a couple of fast-growth years when the mechanism was put in place for donations can't be treated as an indicator of ultimate growth potential. Then they can take a long hard look at how their policies affect donations. Calling people trolls and meatpuppets isn't the best way to solicit donations. Admitting to donors that your charity is overrun by vandals doesn't tend to inspire donations. I wouldn't donate to the Red Cross if they rountinely left their office doors unlocked, and people with money aren't generally inclined to give it to people who have a habit of squandering assets.
In what ways is Wikipedia noxious? I can answer that.
First, is the inclusion in a supposedly intelligent collaborative project the notion to "ignore all rules." For the get go, that encourages uncooperative activity.
Then, take the "anyone can edit" philosophy. It's a lie. Not anyone can edit. There is a long list of people permanently banned and the list of people blocked in the past hour is several screens long. People edit at the pleasure of 1,000 secret administrators, any of whom can block anyone else for any reason that suits their whims. We are asked to beleive that the other 999 will keep them honest. That takes us to the core of the noxious gas.
Wikipedia appeals to our faith and not to our capacity to reason. We are presented unsourced articles and encouraged to accept them as factual. We are required to "Assume good faith" of people who are obviously editing the project to advance a personal ideology. Some highly politicized editors are allowed special access as "Experts" (check user cberlett) while others with real expertise are banned.
Wikipedia allows anonymous attack pages to be created in which writers can secretly libel whomever they can get away with. We are asked to believe Wikipedia admins have it under control, and if not, it's not their problem -- it's our problem and we are supposedly obliged to fix it. Unless we are the one who was libeled. Then we are asked to sit on our hands because we are not one of hte "anybodies" who can edit Wikipedia when it comes to something we know best -- our own lives.
Then there is the constant video game of "kill the vandal." Technical means are readily available to control most of these incidents, but Wikipedias cadre of admins are having too much fun being the righteous cops defending the most precious thing in the world against total destruction.
Related is the common use of terms such as "troll" and "meatpuppet" to disparage the motivations of people invited to contribute to the project. Add to that the occassional "go away you're not wanted here" comment from an administrator who lacks the equity among other admins to get away with blocking someone with whom they disagree.
Did I mention the use of administrative tools to control content disputes? Need I name names? Let's start with ideologues such Slim Virgin (linda mack) and Jzg, but there's a long list that includes the likes of William Connelly, Raul456, Phil Sandifer and Cyde. Others, such as co-founder Jimmy Wales have more sophisticated and covert techniques. Wales goes on IRC to instruct powerful admins how he wants the history of Wikipedia written. He drops hints how he wants his own bio written and actually whitewashed his own bio until his obviously conflicting policies for his own activities compared to normal users became a national news story.
Speaking of national news stories, remember John Seignethaler? But then I already mentioned attack bios.
Let's look at the generally substandard language, and poorly organized reasoning. If this is meant to steer the direction of world knowledge, we are going beyond something that is merely noxious to an actual toxin. Need more? There's plenty that is noxious about Wikipedia. Short live the god-king and all of his creation.
Wikipedia certainly promotes some grandiose ideas among cult followers. Wikipedia also solved world hunger and global warming, and is working on problems related to teen pregnancy and AIDS.
No it's not, and it hasn't had a significant impact on the economy, except some people have lost their jobs because they stayed up overnight too many nights entertaining their Wikipedia addiction. There is no information on Wikipedia that is not readily available elsewhere, usually on the Internet. In most cases, the primary, secondary and tertiary sources from which wikipedia pulls content are far more reliable.
Wikipedia is not being used in any serious economic activity, including in schools where such a project would seem to be able to reduce costs for currucular materials if the project had any value at all as an educational asset. It's another copy -- it's about.com redux, with a bit of expanded google search stirred in among some often unintelligable language. It's not much more than that.
December donations set a record, nearly tripling the previous record of January, 2006. But the rate of increase, based on 7 of 12 months in fiscal 2007, is slowing, from more than 400$ annually in the past two years, to only 175% or so this year. I exposed these figures in some other posts, here and here
oop's -- it's not the yahoo server farms that comprise the $114K of in-kind revenues, according to notes at the end of financial statements. Just $114K more slushy "you don't need to know" sort of funding, maybe.
Wikipedia's payroll for fiscal 2006 is in the six figures, and has since increased with the hiring of new employees.
Though Wikimedia claims to be an open group, all we get to see of their financial picture is the audited statement and whatever else they decide to dole out. We don't get to see how many thousands of dollars "unpaid volunteers" get to spend on travel (nearly 10% of Wikimedia Foundation's expenses in 2006) or even on Wikimania (is that part of the 8 percent of "other" expenses?).
Financial statements
What I really liked about the supposedly GATT compliant financial statement was the way auditors picked and chose between "in-kind revenues". They don't list what were the in-kind revenues, but we can guess Yahoo's Asia server farm is a big part of it. What we do know is the value auditors placed on the in-kind donations of content that built Wikipedia. Zero. Notta. Nothing. So intangible as to be worthless.
The namespace and servers might have value, but the unprotected copyright makes the content unmarketable. The community's brand-loyalty to the goals of the original project might be so tenuous as to be a liability instead of an asset.
Imagine you are google, and you just bought Wikipedia for a billion bucks. All the admins just quit, but worse, a portion of them return using their inside knowledge to derail the project under Google's ownership. Then, instead of slowing the tide of vandalism and misinformation, they become part of it. Brand loyalty of the community is no more likely to transfer to a new owner than it is to a fork such as citizendum.
Then we have the problem that Wikipedia only seems to be one Web site, which is the reason it ranks 12, or 13 or 17 on Alexa. If each Wikipedia site in every language were reported seperately, it would not have nearly the share. And if Wikipedia were sold to a commercial interest (or even to a reputable public broadcasting foundation), the first thing likely to happen would be that several these national contributors groups would restart their own open-source non-profit.
A well-managed fork is more likely to succeed. A well-capitalized fork using the about.com model to clean up content and not ashamed of its commercial footing might make steady progress while Citizendium continues to spin its wheels and Wikipedia spends its time forever changing the same flat tire.
That's not enough data to demonstrate no real trouble. My intitial analysis mirrored yours -- revenues outpaced expenses every year. Yearly increases in revenue which exceed increases in expenses, and the related increase in net assets could seem to indicate a thriving, growing business.
But then I looked at this year's donations. We have to project to see where things are headed. If we project expense growth based on prior years' growth, and revenue growth based on this year's donation rates, at least for this year, they will still come out on top (revenue/expense=1.08) But, if they have no more fundraisers this year, their seven-month income rate might not carry through all 12 months.
Even if they did continue for the next 5 months at the pace of the past 7, increases in revenues have slowed dramatically. Maybe that's what the president of their foundation knows but is only revealing in veiled terms.
Revenue growth:
FY 2007/2006: 1.730238138 (projected)
FY 2006/2005: 4.461453801
FY 2005/2004: 4.15047311
More of this arithmetic here
Payroll is the single largest expense of the Wikimedia Foundation. Donating servers would deprive those paid Wikimedia staffers of jobs maintianing the servers at donors expense. That will never fly, at least not as long as the boards friends hold those jobs.
Would you consider organizing a fork of Wikipedia independent of the foundation and hosted on shared servers?
Please cite evidence. Otherwise, we have no evidence that Wikipedia writers, administrators and the "vandals" welcomed by the "anyone can edit" policy are not responsible for most of the bandwidth demands.
Contrary to impressions created the public persona of folklore, conversing with Jimmy Wales directly is not always a useful way to get reliable information about Wikipedia. At best, Wales can be counted on for spin. That's if you meet him in a public place where his response is likely to be witnessed by others. Elsewhere, contrary to his libertarian front, he leans toward totalitarian views. His project is "undoubtably (sic) good". Anyone who had complained about his administrators, when he investigated, turned out to be a "compelte (sic) and total ass". Talk to those close to the day-to-day operations of the foundation. Ask about yelling matches and arguments that quickly turn personal.
For some of the Wikipedia Faithful, Wales is a god-king. For others, he is yet another capitalist whose wealth-inflated ego lets his followers treat him as devine royalty until their fawning admiration becomes a public embarassment.
Flame? Indeed. Great? Not so. And nowhere near the great library of Alexandria in reputability, except maybe in the dubious accuracy of the information contained therein. The libary at Alexandria was indeed a great collection, but it is not and was not a source of reliable information. It was a source for whatever had been collected there, reliable or not. Unlike Wikipedia, it was not a collection of largely unsourced and often plagiarized content -- it was a collection of material forbidden in Wikipedia including original research and autobiographies.
Nostalgic appeals to imaginary great things from the past are among the more passé and less persuasive propaganda techniques.
Wikipedia is useless in the matter -- it redirects to an article on prostitution. Princeton's wordnet says pander means to pimp, or to arrange sexual partners for others. I think it's a correct usage.
"Give me money and I'll let you put your thing in Wikipedia," Foundation says.
I looked at their financial picture for the past three years. See the analysis, with links to the audited financial statements here.
As I initially compiled the review, I erred in supposing the Foundation president has specified the size of "major" donations needed. Otherwise, my analysis stands -- Foundation donations have slowed significantly in the past year, but are still on track to exceed projected revenues.
Also from this thread, we see the link to the foundation's summary of a monthly budget. Note that payroll comprises nearly half of monthly expense. All this talk about bandwidth is a red herring. There is now a cadre of full-time and part-time staff suckling at the Wikimedia Foundation tit.
And, note that the "What we need the money for" page presented on the members-only-can-edit Wikimedia Foundation site does not include links to recent budgets, or to recent financial statements.
Wikitruth -- a project created by Wikipedia adminstrators that fosters an atmosphere of personal insults, while providing a convenient off-wiki venue for anonomously stereotyping and developing campaigns against fellow wikipedia writers, all the while using black arts to tilt wikipedia policy in the direction the secret operators of wikitruth prefer.
Devouard's desperate outburst follows by two months Wikimedia Foundation's most successful fundraising month ever, if Wikimedia Foundation's Web pages can be trusted to report even the foundation's internal affairs accurately. Dec. 2006 produced $899,207 in donations -- more than three times the previous record of January, 2006.
Currently reported fiscal 2007 donations from July 06 through Feb. 07 are $1,317,438. That is 7 of 12 months, and if revenues continued at that pace for 12 months, total revenues for fiscal 2007 would be $2,258,466. As I estimated in the post at the root of this thread, based on previous year's growth rates, expenses this year would be $2,077,609. Estimated year-end revenues are still 108 percent of expenses.
Ms. Devouard's comments might be more desperate than the situation warrants, but her anxiety does inspire us to look at Wikimedia Foundation reports. An expanded review of recent Foudation reports reveals that growth in contributors' financial commitments is slowing down. Ms. Devouard might in fact realize that public fascination with Wikipedia has peaked, and the numbers show it. Donations in the first seven months of fiscal 2007 matched the total for fiscal 2006, but were on track to grow at half the pace of the previous two years.
If Devouard and the board (which Wales chaired at the time current expense levels were set in motion) naively anticipated that donations would continue to quadruple year after year, and budgeted expenses based on those unrealistic projections, we need to consider whether a slowdown in revenue increases or an irresponsible board of directors is to blame.
for the sake of accuracy:
I can't find the source of my presumption that Devourd said she needs millions more, only that fundraising must increase. And her claims relate to the second and third quarters of fiscal year 2007, not the first quarters.
My analysis stands, with the exception of my calculation of Devourds off-hand expense estimates based on the unsubstantiated belief that she sought millions more, instead of an unspecified amount.
The analysis she needs to respond to is that revenue has exceeded expenses every year, and that growth in revenue has exceeded growth in expenses every year. Now growth in expenses are exceeding revenue growth? check the math, then if that's the fact, cut expenses. Cut spending on "wikimania" and use donors money for what they donated to: Wikipedia, not the Wikipedia annual party.
If in fact Ms. Devourds improbable claim is true, then potential Wikipedia donors are voting with their pocket books against Wikipedia.
If Wikimedia Foundation's new president Florence Devouard claims the foundation needs another $3 million to operate Wikipedia another four or five months, on top of the $1 million she already received on behalf of the foundation this year from donors, either something has seriously changed in Wikimedia Foundation operations since 2006, she is confused, she can't do basic math or she is lying.
Total Expenses:
2006: $791,907
2005: $177,670
2004: $23,463
Total Revenues:
2006: $1,305,292
2005: $292,571
2004: $70,491
And now Ms. Devouard claims the foundation needs 10 times as much revenue to meet expenses in 2007 as in 2006? It just doesn't fit the curve, even according to the audited financial statements the foundation eventually released (two months ago) about the foundation's first three years.
Do the math:
Devourd's statement implies Wikimedia Foundation needs $4 million for the first two quarters of 2007, or $8 million for the year. That would be about a 10-fold increase over 2006 expenses.
In fact, 2005 expenses were 7.57 times 2004 expenses. 2006 expenses were 4.45 times those of 2005. Expense growth (445%) from 2005 to 2006 was only about.59 (0.58861255)
as much as growth in the prior year (757%). On this somewhat limited graph, if the downward trend in expense growth continued in a straight line, growth in 2007 expenses would be 59% of growth in 2006 expenses. This curve predicts 2007 expenses of $2,077,609 - not the $8 million Devourd implied the Foundation requires to preserve the millions of edits users have contributed since Wales and Sanger started the project in 2000.
Meanwhile, as increases in expenses have tapered, increases in revenues have been steady, at more than 400% annually. Total revenues were 300% of total expenses in 2004, and 165% of total expenses in both 2005 and 2006. How then does the president of Wikimedia Foundation support the claim that 2007 revenues ($1 million in January) are projected to be only 25 percent of 2007 expenses, which she implies will grow 10-fold this year, after growing less than three-fold last year.
In my view, Devouard is either lying as part of a fear-mongering fundraising strategy, or suffering the same clouded reasoning that seems to infect many Wikipedia writers' appreciation of facts.
Microsoft is considered a greedy company, but the world is considered flat.
Would you care to explain who's considerations you report?
If Google wants to help the purpose of public collaboration, they can fork Wikipedia, run ads to generate enough revenues to fund responsible management and tell Jimbo and Co. "Thanks a hundred million, we'll take it from here."
Try reading the Wikipdia article on false dichotomies, which redirects to an article titled "false delimna." When you finish reading the lead Wikipedia paragraphs, forget about trying to figure out what reputable source associated "wishful thinking" and "fuzzy logic" with this simple concept from the study of logic. Expand your scope and see what other sources might be just as instructive and less likely to lead a reader down the path of a writers' speculative musing. Gee Whiz, Beaver, the "references" section of the Wikipedia article only points to other Wikipedia articles. Let's see if we can find one on "circular logic". Or we can just Google "false dichotomy -wikipedia", where we can find among more than 1 million hits qualified explanations from reputable sources, or explanations that do indeed cite their sources.
Point: wikipedia vs. britannica is a false-dichotomy
Having established that, we can then begin to consider the relevance of "scapegoating" or "shared enemies" in building new social structures. Wikipedia lucky to have such a noble enemy as britannica around which it can rally its troops.
Anyone familiar with public broadcasting should be familiar with this sort of "your silence is killing us" appeal.
So they have only four months operating revenue on hand? Many small businesses have only short-term reserves for operational purposes. Many charities support next quarter's activities with this quarter's donations. Even PBS continues to struggle with a desire to fund operations from endowment proceeds when charitable donors don't seem to find the charity worthy of endowment funding. Wikimedia Foundation can get in line with thousands of other charitable solicitors who believe their cause is worthy of big money.
Until that money comes in, there's plenty Wikimedia Foundation can do to cut expenses, which have skyrocketed in recent months. First, they can cut payroll, which has grown exponentially in the past year. It could cut expenses such as the recent hiring of a head-hunter firm to select the foundation's next well-paid executive director. That's an odd approach -- wikis are good for writing dubious biographies but apparently the community that is entrusted with the responsibility of compiling "all the world's knowledge" is not qualified to select from among itself a qualified executive director.
Then the Foundation could look at its travel budget. Wikimedia Foundation supposedly thrives on volunteer contributions, but some volunteers get more perks than others, including subsidized vacations at Wikipedia's many off-line community-building events.
The problem in the travel budget is that Wikimedia Foundation leaders - especially Jimmy Wales - claim the Wikipedia community "knows each other" through online personas. They don't. Wikipedia writers know only the slice of other contributors' personas they choose to reveal. That's not enough to create the critical mass of a community, so contributors, with the Foundation's blessing, created several other venues where core members could conspire outside the collaborative, all-edits-are-preserved, know-them-by-their-work constraints of Wikipedia. And this sort of international community-building, outside the low-cost online venue, is costly. The Foundation has footed much of the bill for building an offline community using donors' cash.
Even if the Wikimedia Foundation were to fold, which might not be a bad thing, Wikipedia content and development of MediaWiki software would survive. Wikipedia has been forked by hundreds of other sites. If wikis work, as the founders of WF claim, they can work elsewhere. Chances are, if the Foundation folds, the first company to benefit will be Wikia, Inc. -- founded by Wikimedia Foundation board members -- and which offers free hosting to almost any wiki that can demonstrate public interest.
Hosting by a for-profit company would be a more honest approach. Instead of presenting the project as "undoubtably (sic) good" as Jimbo Wales presents wikipedia, it could be presented as would be any other enterprise -- an effort of its principles to advance their social standing (profit) while advancing their individual ideals (in Wales' case, libertarian objectivism of the Ann Rand variety).
Slashdot Mirror
Any non-retarded reindeer on Santa's sleigh would be able to fly. There's a problem in the premise. Calling an imaginary purchase and transition plan non-retarded doesn't in any way explain how Wikipedia could have any market value, or how it could somehow retain enough volunteer leaders once dedicated to the non-commercial purpose of the project to assure a critical mass required to maintain an open document against malicious or ill-informed tampering. The only thing that could possibly be sold that a well-funded entrepreneur couldn't reproduce on their own is the URL. There is no way to assure the goodwill of thousands of contributors would somehow magically attach to a string of a dozen characters.
If Google purchased the Wikipedia.com URL, the mere purchase would probably inspire a couple of well-funded forks, including at least one that would try to somehow step in to replace the non-profit ownership of an open-source encyclopedia. The division of participants would assure no one would have enough personnel to defend a wide-open edit process against vandals, which as I postulated earlier, would probably increase driven by a motivation that Google had somehow stolen property donated to a charity for non-profit purposes.
You can postulate all you want on Slashdot that Wikipedia has tangible value, but no working commercial property appraiser or financial auditor will publicly agree with you. Unless you can point to an offer on the table, all you have is a big fat imagination. The contributions have no value and the community of contributors is not a marketable asset.
Hereare my other musings on the foundation's financial position. I thought I had these in the same thread, but they weren't.
I agree. They can cut expenses, make realistic revenue projections and seriously consider how their social environment affects their reputation as a charity.
Payroll seems to have grown as fast as any other category. That's an easy place to cut, considering their access to volunteers. Travel is juicy and could be slashed to zero. If virtual communities work, they can stick with a virtual community.
They might do well to consider ultimate limits in their potential revenue growth - a couple of fast-growth years when the mechanism was put in place for donations can't be treated as an indicator of ultimate growth potential. Then they can take a long hard look at how their policies affect donations. Calling people trolls and meatpuppets isn't the best way to solicit donations. Admitting to donors that your charity is overrun by vandals doesn't tend to inspire donations. I wouldn't donate to the Red Cross if they rountinely left their office doors unlocked, and people with money aren't generally inclined to give it to people who have a habit of squandering assets.
In what ways is Wikipedia noxious? I can answer that. First, is the inclusion in a supposedly intelligent collaborative project the notion to "ignore all rules." For the get go, that encourages uncooperative activity. Then, take the "anyone can edit" philosophy. It's a lie. Not anyone can edit. There is a long list of people permanently banned and the list of people blocked in the past hour is several screens long. People edit at the pleasure of 1,000 secret administrators, any of whom can block anyone else for any reason that suits their whims. We are asked to beleive that the other 999 will keep them honest. That takes us to the core of the noxious gas. Wikipedia appeals to our faith and not to our capacity to reason. We are presented unsourced articles and encouraged to accept them as factual. We are required to "Assume good faith" of people who are obviously editing the project to advance a personal ideology. Some highly politicized editors are allowed special access as "Experts" (check user cberlett) while others with real expertise are banned. Wikipedia allows anonymous attack pages to be created in which writers can secretly libel whomever they can get away with. We are asked to believe Wikipedia admins have it under control, and if not, it's not their problem -- it's our problem and we are supposedly obliged to fix it. Unless we are the one who was libeled. Then we are asked to sit on our hands because we are not one of hte "anybodies" who can edit Wikipedia when it comes to something we know best -- our own lives. Then there is the constant video game of "kill the vandal." Technical means are readily available to control most of these incidents, but Wikipedias cadre of admins are having too much fun being the righteous cops defending the most precious thing in the world against total destruction. Related is the common use of terms such as "troll" and "meatpuppet" to disparage the motivations of people invited to contribute to the project. Add to that the occassional "go away you're not wanted here" comment from an administrator who lacks the equity among other admins to get away with blocking someone with whom they disagree. Did I mention the use of administrative tools to control content disputes? Need I name names? Let's start with ideologues such Slim Virgin (linda mack) and Jzg, but there's a long list that includes the likes of William Connelly, Raul456, Phil Sandifer and Cyde. Others, such as co-founder Jimmy Wales have more sophisticated and covert techniques. Wales goes on IRC to instruct powerful admins how he wants the history of Wikipedia written. He drops hints how he wants his own bio written and actually whitewashed his own bio until his obviously conflicting policies for his own activities compared to normal users became a national news story. Speaking of national news stories, remember John Seignethaler? But then I already mentioned attack bios. Let's look at the generally substandard language, and poorly organized reasoning. If this is meant to steer the direction of world knowledge, we are going beyond something that is merely noxious to an actual toxin. Need more? There's plenty that is noxious about Wikipedia. Short live the god-king and all of his creation.
Wikipedia certainly promotes some grandiose ideas among cult followers. Wikipedia also solved world hunger and global warming, and is working on problems related to teen pregnancy and AIDS.
No it's not, and it hasn't had a significant impact on the economy, except some people have lost their jobs because they stayed up overnight too many nights entertaining their Wikipedia addiction. There is no information on Wikipedia that is not readily available elsewhere, usually on the Internet. In most cases, the primary, secondary and tertiary sources from which wikipedia pulls content are far more reliable.
Wikipedia is not being used in any serious economic activity, including in schools where such a project would seem to be able to reduce costs for currucular materials if the project had any value at all as an educational asset. It's another copy -- it's about.com redux, with a bit of expanded google search stirred in among some often unintelligable language. It's not much more than that.
December donations set a record, nearly tripling the previous record of January, 2006. But the rate of increase, based on 7 of 12 months in fiscal 2007, is slowing, from more than 400$ annually in the past two years, to only 175% or so this year. I exposed these figures in some other posts, here and here
oop's -- it's not the yahoo server farms that comprise the $114K of in-kind revenues, according to notes at the end of financial statements. Just $114K more slushy "you don't need to know" sort of funding, maybe.
Though Wikimedia claims to be an open group, all we get to see of their financial picture is the audited statement and whatever else they decide to dole out. We don't get to see how many thousands of dollars "unpaid volunteers" get to spend on travel (nearly 10% of Wikimedia Foundation's expenses in 2006) or even on Wikimania (is that part of the 8 percent of "other" expenses?).
Financial statements What I really liked about the supposedly GATT compliant financial statement was the way auditors picked and chose between "in-kind revenues". They don't list what were the in-kind revenues, but we can guess Yahoo's Asia server farm is a big part of it. What we do know is the value auditors placed on the in-kind donations of content that built Wikipedia. Zero. Notta. Nothing. So intangible as to be worthless.
The namespace and servers might have value, but the unprotected copyright makes the content unmarketable. The community's brand-loyalty to the goals of the original project might be so tenuous as to be a liability instead of an asset.
Imagine you are google, and you just bought Wikipedia for a billion bucks. All the admins just quit, but worse, a portion of them return using their inside knowledge to derail the project under Google's ownership. Then, instead of slowing the tide of vandalism and misinformation, they become part of it. Brand loyalty of the community is no more likely to transfer to a new owner than it is to a fork such as citizendum.
Then we have the problem that Wikipedia only seems to be one Web site, which is the reason it ranks 12, or 13 or 17 on Alexa. If each Wikipedia site in every language were reported seperately, it would not have nearly the share. And if Wikipedia were sold to a commercial interest (or even to a reputable public broadcasting foundation), the first thing likely to happen would be that several these national contributors groups would restart their own open-source non-profit.
A well-managed fork is more likely to succeed. A well-capitalized fork using the about.com model to clean up content and not ashamed of its commercial footing might make steady progress while Citizendium continues to spin its wheels and Wikipedia spends its time forever changing the same flat tire.
That's not enough data to demonstrate no real trouble. My intitial analysis mirrored yours -- revenues outpaced expenses every year. Yearly increases in revenue which exceed increases in expenses, and the related increase in net assets could seem to indicate a thriving, growing business.
But then I looked at this year's donations. We have to project to see where things are headed. If we project expense growth based on prior years' growth, and revenue growth based on this year's donation rates, at least for this year, they will still come out on top (revenue/expense=1.08) But, if they have no more fundraisers this year, their seven-month income rate might not carry through all 12 months.
Even if they did continue for the next 5 months at the pace of the past 7, increases in revenues have slowed dramatically. Maybe that's what the president of their foundation knows but is only revealing in veiled terms.
Revenue growth:
FY 2007/2006: 1.730238138 (projected)
FY 2006/2005: 4.461453801
FY 2005/2004: 4.15047311
More of this arithmetic here
Would you consider organizing a fork of Wikipedia independent of the foundation and hosted on shared servers?
Please cite evidence. Otherwise, we have no evidence that Wikipedia writers, administrators and the "vandals" welcomed by the "anyone can edit" policy are not responsible for most of the bandwidth demands.
Contrary to impressions created the public persona of folklore, conversing with Jimmy Wales directly is not always a useful way to get reliable information about Wikipedia. At best, Wales can be counted on for spin. That's if you meet him in a public place where his response is likely to be witnessed by others. Elsewhere, contrary to his libertarian front, he leans toward totalitarian views. His project is "undoubtably (sic) good". Anyone who had complained about his administrators, when he investigated, turned out to be a "compelte (sic) and total ass". Talk to those close to the day-to-day operations of the foundation. Ask about yelling matches and arguments that quickly turn personal. For some of the Wikipedia Faithful, Wales is a god-king. For others, he is yet another capitalist whose wealth-inflated ego lets his followers treat him as devine royalty until their fawning admiration becomes a public embarassment.
Nostalgic appeals to imaginary great things from the past are among the more passé and less persuasive propaganda techniques.
"Give me money and I'll let you put your thing in Wikipedia," Foundation says.
I looked at their financial picture for the past three years. See the analysis, with links to the audited financial statements here.
As I initially compiled the review, I erred in supposing the Foundation president has specified the size of "major" donations needed. Otherwise, my analysis stands -- Foundation donations have slowed significantly in the past year, but are still on track to exceed projected revenues.
Also from this thread, we see the link to the foundation's summary of a monthly budget. Note that payroll comprises nearly half of monthly expense. All this talk about bandwidth is a red herring. There is now a cadre of full-time and part-time staff suckling at the Wikimedia Foundation tit.
And, note that the "What we need the money for" page presented on the members-only-can-edit Wikimedia Foundation site does not include links to recent budgets, or to recent financial statements.
Wikitruth -- a project created by Wikipedia adminstrators that fosters an atmosphere of personal insults, while providing a convenient off-wiki venue for anonomously stereotyping and developing campaigns against fellow wikipedia writers, all the while using black arts to tilt wikipedia policy in the direction the secret operators of wikitruth prefer.
Foreigners should stick to their own wikipedias? That's funny. Even the Wikipedia article on xenophobia has non-english characters in it.
Devouard's desperate outburst follows by two months Wikimedia Foundation's most successful fundraising month ever, if Wikimedia Foundation's Web pages can be trusted to report even the foundation's internal affairs accurately. Dec. 2006 produced $899,207 in donations -- more than three times the previous record of January, 2006.
Currently reported fiscal 2007 donations from July 06 through Feb. 07 are $1,317,438. That is 7 of 12 months, and if revenues continued at that pace for 12 months, total revenues for fiscal 2007 would be $2,258,466. As I estimated in the post at the root of this thread, based on previous year's growth rates, expenses this year would be $2,077,609. Estimated year-end revenues are still 108 percent of expenses.
Ms. Devouard's comments might be more desperate than the situation warrants, but her anxiety does inspire us to look at Wikimedia Foundation reports. An expanded review of recent Foudation reports reveals that growth in contributors' financial commitments is slowing down. Ms. Devouard might in fact realize that public fascination with Wikipedia has peaked, and the numbers show it. Donations in the first seven months of fiscal 2007 matched the total for fiscal 2006, but were on track to grow at half the pace of the previous two years.
If Devouard and the board (which Wales chaired at the time current expense levels were set in motion) naively anticipated that donations would continue to quadruple year after year, and budgeted expenses based on those unrealistic projections, we need to consider whether a slowdown in revenue increases or an irresponsible board of directors is to blame.
Revenue growth:
FY 2007/2006: 1.730238138 (projected)
FY 2006/2005: 4.461453801
FY 2005/2004: 4.15047311
http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/en/fundcore/brows e/2006
http://fundraising.wikimedia.org/legacy/ongoing/
for the sake of accuracy: I can't find the source of my presumption that Devourd said she needs millions more, only that fundraising must increase. And her claims relate to the second and third quarters of fiscal year 2007, not the first quarters. My analysis stands, with the exception of my calculation of Devourds off-hand expense estimates based on the unsubstantiated belief that she sought millions more, instead of an unspecified amount. The analysis she needs to respond to is that revenue has exceeded expenses every year, and that growth in revenue has exceeded growth in expenses every year. Now growth in expenses are exceeding revenue growth? check the math, then if that's the fact, cut expenses. Cut spending on "wikimania" and use donors money for what they donated to: Wikipedia, not the Wikipedia annual party. If in fact Ms. Devourds improbable claim is true, then potential Wikipedia donors are voting with their pocket books against Wikipedia.
Total Expenses:
2006: $791,907
2005: $177,670
2004: $23,463
Total Revenues:
2006: $1,305,292
2005: $292,571
2004: $70,491
Revenue/Expenses:
2006: 1.648289509
2005: 1.646710193
2004: 3.00434727
And now Ms. Devouard claims the foundation needs 10 times as much revenue to meet expenses in 2007 as in 2006? It just doesn't fit the curve, even according to the audited financial statements the foundation eventually released (two months ago) about the foundation's first three years.
Do the math:
Devourd's statement implies Wikimedia Foundation needs $4 million for the first two quarters of 2007, or $8 million for the year. That would be about a 10-fold increase over 2006 expenses.
In fact, 2005 expenses were 7.57 times 2004 expenses. 2006 expenses were 4.45 times those of 2005. Expense growth (445%) from 2005 to 2006 was only about .59 (0.58861255)
as much as growth in the prior year (757%). On this somewhat limited graph, if the downward trend in expense growth continued in a straight line, growth in 2007 expenses would be 59% of growth in 2006 expenses. This curve predicts 2007 expenses of $2,077,609 - not the $8 million Devourd implied the Foundation requires to preserve the millions of edits users have contributed since Wales and Sanger started the project in 2000.
Meanwhile, as increases in expenses have tapered, increases in revenues have been steady, at more than 400% annually. Total revenues were 300% of total expenses in 2004, and 165% of total expenses in both 2005 and 2006. How then does the president of Wikimedia Foundation support the claim that 2007 revenues ($1 million in January) are projected to be only 25 percent of 2007 expenses, which she implies will grow 10-fold this year, after growing less than three-fold last year. In my view, Devouard is either lying as part of a fear-mongering fundraising strategy, or suffering the same clouded reasoning that seems to infect many Wikipedia writers' appreciation of facts.
Wikimedia Foundation financial statements:2 /28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/
They paid more than $100,000 a year in salaries to their growing staff? And built up a $500,000 cash reserve? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2006-12-11/Financial_audit
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2 /28/Wikimedia_2006_fs.pdf
Would you care to explain who's considerations you report? If Google wants to help the purpose of public collaboration, they can fork Wikipedia, run ads to generate enough revenues to fund responsible management and tell Jimbo and Co. "Thanks a hundred million, we'll take it from here."
Try reading the Wikipdia article on false dichotomies, which redirects to an article titled "false delimna." When you finish reading the lead Wikipedia paragraphs, forget about trying to figure out what reputable source associated "wishful thinking" and "fuzzy logic" with this simple concept from the study of logic. Expand your scope and see what other sources might be just as instructive and less likely to lead a reader down the path of a writers' speculative musing. Gee Whiz, Beaver, the "references" section of the Wikipedia article only points to other Wikipedia articles. Let's see if we can find one on "circular logic". Or we can just Google "false dichotomy -wikipedia", where we can find among more than 1 million hits qualified explanations from reputable sources, or explanations that do indeed cite their sources. Point: wikipedia vs. britannica is a false-dichotomy Having established that, we can then begin to consider the relevance of "scapegoating" or "shared enemies" in building new social structures. Wikipedia lucky to have such a noble enemy as britannica around which it can rally its troops.
So they have only four months operating revenue on hand? Many small businesses have only short-term reserves for operational purposes. Many charities support next quarter's activities with this quarter's donations. Even PBS continues to struggle with a desire to fund operations from endowment proceeds when charitable donors don't seem to find the charity worthy of endowment funding. Wikimedia Foundation can get in line with thousands of other charitable solicitors who believe their cause is worthy of big money.
Until that money comes in, there's plenty Wikimedia Foundation can do to cut expenses, which have skyrocketed in recent months. First, they can cut payroll, which has grown exponentially in the past year. It could cut expenses such as the recent hiring of a head-hunter firm to select the foundation's next well-paid executive director. That's an odd approach -- wikis are good for writing dubious biographies but apparently the community that is entrusted with the responsibility of compiling "all the world's knowledge" is not qualified to select from among itself a qualified executive director.
Then the Foundation could look at its travel budget. Wikimedia Foundation supposedly thrives on volunteer contributions, but some volunteers get more perks than others, including subsidized vacations at Wikipedia's many off-line community-building events.
The problem in the travel budget is that Wikimedia Foundation leaders - especially Jimmy Wales - claim the Wikipedia community "knows each other" through online personas. They don't. Wikipedia writers know only the slice of other contributors' personas they choose to reveal. That's not enough to create the critical mass of a community, so contributors, with the Foundation's blessing, created several other venues where core members could conspire outside the collaborative, all-edits-are-preserved, know-them-by-their-work constraints of Wikipedia. And this sort of international community-building, outside the low-cost online venue, is costly. The Foundation has footed much of the bill for building an offline community using donors' cash.
Even if the Wikimedia Foundation were to fold, which might not be a bad thing, Wikipedia content and development of MediaWiki software would survive. Wikipedia has been forked by hundreds of other sites. If wikis work, as the founders of WF claim, they can work elsewhere. Chances are, if the Foundation folds, the first company to benefit will be Wikia, Inc. -- founded by Wikimedia Foundation board members -- and which offers free hosting to almost any wiki that can demonstrate public interest.
Hosting by a for-profit company would be a more honest approach. Instead of presenting the project as "undoubtably (sic) good" as Jimbo Wales presents wikipedia, it could be presented as would be any other enterprise -- an effort of its principles to advance their social standing (profit) while advancing their individual ideals (in Wales' case, libertarian objectivism of the Ann Rand variety).