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.

Low turnout? Shortfall?

[gowen]

In an apparent reply to the low turnout for their fourth quarter fundraiser

"Apparent" here, meaning "Something I've made up".

The 2005 Wikimedia Budget says [wikimediafoundation.org]

Only $160,000 was available at the start of the quarter, creating a budget shortfall of $161,200. A fund drive starting on 1 December was scheduled at the meeting as well. --Daniel Mayer 18:18, 1 October 2005

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.

They also sent me a holiday wish for donating

[Jugalator]

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. :-)

Well Spent Money

[BigDork1001]

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.

Re:Just sue...

[kebes]

I'm assuming this is a joke. All Wikipedia text is licensed under the GFL [wikipedia.org], 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.

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/ [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 ;-)

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:They need look no further than their own polici

[slavemowgli]

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 [wikimedia.org]. Maybe you'll come out on top in the end - who knows.

Until then, good luck guy.

Re:Is Wikipedia in serious trouble?

[Raul654]

What a lie. Check the 2005 budget [wikimediafoundation.org] for yourself. There are four employees (two full time - Jimbo's assistant and Wikimedia's chief developer and two part time - a coordinator for the International Wikimedia meetup and an intern to help physically maintence the servers). Notice, Jimbo isn't one of them.
 
As to travel, the entire 2005 budget was $17,000. For comparison purposes, Wikimedia speds roughly the same amount on office supplies. Are they using too much paper too?

Re:Community Collaborative?

[Joe Decker]

Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees?....

If you look at the budget, [wikimediafoundation.org] you'll see that the purchase of servers is the biggest line-item.

Re:Community Collaborative?

[r3m0t]

The money is for:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005 [wikimediafoundation.org]
Hardware (they have dozens of caches, apache servers, and DB slaves)
~$100,000 a year hosting
~$132,000 a year to pay for 2 full-time and 2 part-time employees
~$30,000 a year legal expenses...

There's some serious money needs.

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[slashdotnickname]

I like seeing how Wikis have become more neutral over time

This is going to sound like trolling, but I honestly see the opposite occuring as Wikipedia becomes more popular. As proof, check out the currently (as of Dec 3 2005) disputed articles [wikipedia.org]. The history itself shows a rise in the count.

Re:Community Collaborative?

[Raul654]

"Why would a community collaborative project such as Wikipedia even need sponsorship, other than bandwidth fees?" - see for yourself [wikimediafoundation.org]. Wikimedia has spent roughly $400,000 dollars on hardware this year alone (the inevitable downside of having your traffic double every 4 months). Hosting adds roughly another $100,000 per year to the costs. And that's not counting the tons of other actual expenses that a real life charity (as opposed to some person's hobby on sourceforge) has to deal with - legal fees, banking fees, office supplies. So please check your facts before spreading FUD.

Re:Wikipedia + Adwords = $

[zanimum]

We will not have ads on Wikipedia, in the far-forseeable future. Most people don't know of Google's potential support-- which is "unstringed". Nicholas Moreau Canadian press contact Wikimedia Foundation

Re:Why fund Wikipedia?

[r3m0t]

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.

There are 50 changes a minute at peak times on the English Wikipedia - and peak times are a few hours every day.

Distributing "in a decentralized fashion" would not work. People must have the latest revision, otherwise when they press "edit" they will either get old text (think Lotus Notes) or be confused by a change.

Besides which, the database http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/ [wikimedia.org] is 13.1GiB, and that's compressed. And that's just the English Wikipedia, and without images.

Good luck distributing that. Add the encryption and... owch.

The budget is clearly laid out

[brian0918]

There is a link to the Q1-2006 budget at the top of every English Wikipedia page, detailing the expected needs.

Re:Community Collaborative?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

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).

Buying servers. They get an unholy amount of traffic. As a theoretical (Fermi) example: look at how often Wikipedia is updated [wikipedia.org] - everything on that page, as I look at it, is within the same minute. Try making two changes to an article in quick succession and see if you can get the changes to show up next to each other on recent changes. I counted about 119 changes at 12:52 PM Eastern today - that's about two changes per second.

And now consider that that's only changes - not pageviews, which will be several times more - and that's only from the English Wikipedia (which, although the largest, by no means dwarfs the other Wikipedias). And consider that Wikipedia is constantly growing, so it needs more servers periodically. If you've ever noticed it slow down over a month or so and then get back to normal, it's probably because they added one or two servers to their rotation.

Meta has a nice diagram of their hardware [wikimedia.org] from last April - every pictogram in it represents one server. They have - and need - separate Apache/PHP servers, Squid (cache) servers, MySQL servers, load-balancing servers, etc.

If you want to see the exact numbers, the Wikimedia Foundation has a few budgets on their site, e.g., 2005 budget [wikimediafoundation.org]. They're using over a million dollars a year.

Re:Low turnout? Shortfall?

[SailingDeity]

"In an apparent reply to the low turnout for their fourth quarter fundraiser

"Apparent" here, meaning "Something I've made up"."

"Daniel Mayer, Wikimedia CFO, indicated he hoped it could raise at least US$500,000", so 200 is a low turnout. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-12-26/News_and_notes [wikipedia.org]

The present $200k raised in the fund drive is about twice what was raised by the same drive in February last year...

Yes, and we (Wikipedians) get four times the traffic of February last year. -- http://noc.wikimedia.org/reqstats/reqstats-yearly. png [wikimedia.org]

Re:They need look no further than their own polici

[controlguy]

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.

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[AxelBoldt]

This would allow every person who donated to confirm that their donation was actually listed on the site.

You can check here [wikimedia.org] whether your donation made it into their account.

Re:Continuous donations?

[trip23]

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 [wikipedia.org]

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.

Re:Is Wikipedia in serious trouble?

[Jamesday]

Not stop serving pages serious. Unable to keep up with growth serious.

This is the year when Wikipedia page views will pass Google page views if growth continues as it has in the past. That's a hardware capability of 6,000+ page views per second today and 3-5 doublings expected this year, taking it to 50,000-180,000 page views per second.

When growth will stop is an interesting question. Nobody knows.

One certainty: hundreds of thousands of authors writing an encyclopedia accessible to anyone free of charge hosted by a charitable Foundation and in the top 25, likely ending in the top 5 sites on the net, is a great achievement for the open source model and people getting together to build and support what they want: an ad-free ever-improving (and ever-imperfect) information resource for all.

It's many end users writing this, tremendously broadening participation in the open source model beyond the programmers who've traditionally been involved.

Some have suggested that people who have donated in the past aren't donating and that's why more money is needed. Not really. When you're doubling what you serve every three or four months you also need to substantially increase the hardware and donations to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for more, though we've managed to do considerably better than doubling the hardware for each doubling in load.

I'm one of the roots on the Wikimedia Foundation servers.

Wikipedia rocks.

[Screaming Harlot]

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!

Re:Wiki have got to be a bit more clever

[Jamesday]

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.

Don't donate to Wikimedia just for Wikipedia

[Brushen]

When you donate to Wikimedia, the non-profit organization that owns Wikipedia, please do not just do it for Wikipedia.

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.

Re:why we need money

[Jon Chatow]

Note that that's not a budget, merely a proposed budget - given the significant short-fall in donation income, it will have to be scaled back somewhat (and another donation drive run quite soon). The reason the items aren't split down further is that the money hasn't been spent yet.

What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?

It's money to fund the start-up costs of the local chapters [wikimedia.org] - legal costs, primarily, and capped at US$500 or so per chapter, IIRC; we currently have chapters in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Serbia and Montenegro, and are working on founding ones for Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Local chapters work locally as ground-roots organisations, and form tax-friendly donation conduits.

Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?

The list of domains [wikimedia.org] is quite extensive, which might give you some clue; also, remember that some TLDs and especially SLDs within CCTLDs are (significantly) more expensive than a bog-standard .com would.

I hope that this answers your questions.

Re: Dresden article

[hayne]

Yet, the article on Dresden in Wikipedia cites "The Bombing of Dresden" by David Irving as a key reference in regard to the historical event near the end of WW2
Some mistake?
How would you know to check the misleading and false citation on that historical event, especially if you didn't recognise that the source of that information came from a virulent racist, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier who blatently and repeatedly falsified history in his books to the benefit of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?

The Irving book is just listed as additional reading in the Dresden article. It is not mentioned in the text of the article itself.

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.)

Re:How can they survive non-commercially?

[commodoresloat]

...but I don't want to see the founder driving a Porsche.

He already drives a Ferrari, which he bought before founding Wikipedia. This is definitely not a money-making venture for him.

It's still possible to edit Wikipedia in China

[ironfrost]

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

145.97.39.155 en.wikipedia.org upload.wikimedia.org

to your /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

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).