Wikipedia Founder Releases Personal Appeal 444
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.
Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
WikiAds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia + Adwords = $ (Score:5, Insightful)
Community Collaborative? (Score:4, Insightful)
While freedom of information is a great goal, it's on of the few that I feel doesn't require large monetary contributions, but rather large intellectual contributions.
I'll keep giving my money to Child's Play [childsplaycharity.com], The Red Cross [redcross.org], and Doctors without Borders [doctorswit...orders.org].
Re:Is Wikipedia in serious trouble? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How can they survive non-commercially? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't quite believe the F/OSS customer base doesn't have money to spend. If they did not any money to spend the project wouldn't have gone one for 6 years.
Switching to a commercial market may not be a bad thing, but who's to say it won't lose its (growing) neutrality on issues?
I guess I'm gonna have to do it (Score:3, Insightful)
Fix Wikipedia first (Score:4, Insightful)
-End the correction wars
-Respect different viewpoints
-Respect expertese
-End people fucking up good articles
Re:Why fund Wikipedia? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How can they survive non-commercially? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:why we need money (Score:4, Insightful)
- What is this "chapter startup" and why does it need two grand?
- Where I do my shopping (GoDaddy) $1500 will buy me 167 domain names. How many does WikiMedia have/need?
I can't really contest any of the rest of the fees because I lack enough info, but the complete ommision of data regarding these irks me.Re:Parent has a point. (Score:3, Insightful)
My concerns are as high as yours that Wikipedia articles can be partisan, vandalized or simple untrue at times. However, not helping is not going to improve the situation. Do you think that the Panera Bread article is serving Panera? Edit it - cut down on what you reckon is advertising. Question lack of sources or claims that are not backed up. I don't care if you picked that one article as an emblematic case, if you did. If everyone did this, Wikipedia would be so much better for it.
I'm not saying that everyone owes it to Wikipedia to help improve it. I'm just saying that, at times, I wonder if all its critics have actually tried to help out. You may be right that people don't know what to write. You may be right that there are assholes tearing down the advice of experts. But there's an extraordinary opportunity to with very small means make a huge difference. By editing, you're setting a good precedent for others to follow. I'm positive that it will eventually add up.
Re:Donate, I did! (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of things are "pocket change" to these players. They donate to a lot of causes. What makes Wikipedia so special that they deserve a cut of the pie versus, say, donating to a battered women's shelter, cancer research, or children's home.
Don't get me wrong, I like Wikipedia. I think it's an interesting experiment. But I think of a hell of a lot of things come first when we're talking about general donation funds.
Or to put it another way, Wikipedia begging for money is going to put it against a lot of priorities, and Wikipedia is probably going to lose, especially in a big year for natural disasters. They need to find a more self-sustaining model, even perhaps finding some hidden angels who believe in their cause.
Re:Donate, I did! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm suprised they don't lock up the donations completely without any reason.
http://www.paypalsucks.com/ [paypalsucks.com]
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, people tend to judge Wikipedia by its worst class of articles (those on politics). But if you look at Wikipedia's science articles, they tend to be highly accurate (and the recent Nature analysis bears this out). In my areas of expertise (mathematics and computer science), I rarely see any serious errors on Wikipedia. I imagine this is because nonexperts tend not to dare to edit them, and because there is little controversy.
Your post is an outright lie.... (Score:2, Insightful)
As a Historian (Score:0, Insightful)
The whole million monkeys concept is very valid regarding most of the data I've found on Wiki.
In fact, I find more relevant data from a narrow google search than I do from wiki.
Why I didn't donate this time (Score:4, Insightful)
Why?
Those are the two minor reasons - the big one?
As I read the responses from the Wikimedia Foundation and the community to this issue, a cold chill spread through me. The attempts by the Foundation to dodge responsobility made me nauseated. The numerous 'blame the victim' posts, (why didn't *he* edit it?), were even worse.
Here was a signal rocket brighter than a Space Shuttle launch that something was wrong - that the wiki principles were failing (I.E. 'errors are invariably caught and fixed within minutes, hours at most', among others), and the powers that be at Wikipedia seemed more interested in spinning the issue away rather than learning, fixing, and moving forward.
I, and others, have posted numerous times in numerous places about the problems and shortcomings with the 'pedia - but the Sigenthaler affair showed that Thales et al were more interested in their ivory tower principles than in the practical applications thereof. Desite their proud rhetoric, the denizens of and powers that be at the 'pedia turned out to be more interested in anarchy than accuracy.
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
furthermore, all those "stub" articles are often acceptably informative on their own. often two sentences is all i need.
finally, your question as to who would bother to put information into Wikipedia, which rhetorically implies that the answer is "nobody", is disingenuous, as it is clearly evident that in fact the answer is "lots of people". i myself have, on a couple rare occasions, started or contributed to articles; and there is apparently a whole subculture of people who do it constantly.
your beef sounds like the famous quote where Bill Gates asked "who would write software for free?" golly gee, free software could never be as good as software you pay for. only... it is, abstract theories of human behavior be damned. we know that it works, because in fact it exists. in math and computer science they call that "proof by construction", which is proving that something can be built by... building it.
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:1, Insightful)
That's weird -- I thought the Wikipedia fundraising was to support its exponentially increasing popularity. Despite many people like yourself complaining that Wikipedia isn't good enough for them, the readership seems to be growing, to the point where new servers are regularly needed just to keep up with the number of people it's providing free encyclopedias to.
According to the stats page, they stopped counting when readership reached 6 million pages per day. So for some people, the possibility of coming across an inaccurate biography in the senators section isn't enough to stop them using it.
The correctness, factual reliability, etc. are completely irrelevant to the discussion here, namely that Wikipedia has created the largest encyclopedia in the world, one of the most popular websites in the world, and if people want to continue using that without delays, it needs more hardware.
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
You've corrected the Wikipedia article on Slashdot, why not correct it on Wikipedia?
As for people reversing corrections and arguing back and forth, well need I remind you that the truth is the truth by consensus. That's why an encyclopedia is valuable, because it gives you the mainstream, consensual, objective opinions on a subjects. If there is contention, and it's not a minority opinion, then that contention becomes a part of the consensual opinion.
The Wikipedia has succeeded because it is the essence of what an encyclopedia is: a consensual, mainstream opinion. Wikipedia entries are honed and shaped by millions of visitors from all sorts of different backgrounds from all over the world. What you get in the end is valuable not because it is accurate, but because the majority of people think it's accurate.
But if you have any faith in the intelligence of crowds, then you will have faith that Wikipedia entries will become ever more accurate with every new reader.
I have no idea why anyone would trust a handful of "experts" over the intelligence of the mob. Who are those experts? Who determines the choice of experts? Who makes sure the experts are correct? Obviously, once you've designated an authority in a certain area, that authority can never be criticized. You just have to trust them. This old-school approach to encyclopedias is quite simply madness.
I want to hear the opposite argument: Why is the fascist, totalitarian, despotic encyclopedia superior to the Wiki? Why is it better to trust a dozen people over millions?
The way I see it, the despot-o-pedia is also a consensus, but a consensus of the experts who were able to - through whatever means - win favor from the despotopedia's main despot. Who knows how this process works?
I think what people are really uncomfortable with is that the Internet has completely and utterly destroyed the concept of "authority". An authority has traditionally been someone who possessed or had access to exclusive information. Now, in the age of information technology, information is free. Information is no longer a commodity that "authorities" possess and control. Now information is accessible to all. and it will only get more free in the years ahead. There is no longer any such thing as an "authority". Authorities were only make believe anyway. We are all fallible. We can all happen upon something another might have overlooked. When you grow up, you see that daddy is just a man like yourself.
To be an expert in the age of free information, you'll have to back up your arguments. You'll have to be convincing and methodical. You'll have to accept that mere novices will challenge you and sometimes be right - especially when you err. Yes, perhaps this was always the case, but with the two-way communication of the Internet, an "expert" can be challenged much more readily. No longer do you need to write a letter to the Britannica's editors. Now you can change the Wikipedia's entry to suit your sense of the facts - but beware, you better back up your claims, because you too will likely be challenged.
If you're an intellectual, the Wikipedia has to be one of the most exciting things to have happened in the history of knowledge. Perhaps second only to the printing press.
One more point: There's one area where the Wikipedia consistently and will always beat out the despotopedias: Sheer volume of knowledge. If you have knowledge of a subject, and want to share it with the world, you can create a Wikipedia entry. Let me ask you despotopedia fans a question: Does any despotopedia include an article on the video game "The Curse of the Azure Bonds"? [Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]]. This is an article I stumbled across while researching MMORPG
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
There are plenty of anarchist projects that work. I've visited quite a number of them. Wikipedia could be described as an example of anarchism in action, in that it is a decentralized collaboration of relatively equal volunteers. The free software movement is another example of anarchism in action. Or the Indymedia network, now featuring over 150 websites and a smaller number of newspapers and physical locations.
"Erm, no it's not. Science definitely isn't based on collaborative scholarship. Science is based on expertise, experimental verification and continual testing both theoretical and empirical. Scientific progress is made by tearing down old paradigms with new ones."
Hmmm, having worked for Science magazine at one time I can see some of your points, but you are missing the fact that science relies on collaboration and cooperation between scientists. Look at any research paper and you will see numerous authors listed. These scientists don't work in isolation and they share their work through the scientific literature. There are a growing number of open archiving projects for scientists. These aren't as open as Wikipedia--they have a system of peer review--but the concept is similar.
"It's definitely not the case that 6 billion ignoramuses = 1 Albert Einstein."
Again, Albert Einstein didn't work in a vacuum, although many of his theories relate to behavior of physics in a vacuuum. Einstein built his theories on the work of other scientists, both dead and living. He worked with other scientists (cooperation) and shared his ideas publicly (collaboration which continues to this day).
"I think you've imbibed on the Wikipedia weed rather heavily."
I'm pretty skeptical about Wikipedia and I don't smoke.
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the fuck should I do that? Anyone who actually builds planes for a living isn't going to use Wikipedia as a reference source when laying out building plans. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain, and those who don't have even that won't be building planes for anyone but themselves any time in the future.
But then, you're the one who's insisting on talking about aerospace engineering instead of the actual topic at hand: Wikipedia. Perhaps when you're better able to distinguish between the two you'll have something of worth to say.
Or perhaps when you're able to distinguish between the reality of wikipedia and the fantasy of some Orwellian end to factual information world-wide.
Max
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
nevertheless, what i'm saying is that contrary to your claim that wiki articles could never be high quality due to their being edited by unpaid authors, in fact we know that wiki articles can be high quality under that model, because we in fact have that (again, proof by construction).
of course, all that is an opinion, my opinion. a person such as yourself, who thinks wiki articles are low quality, might say the opposite: that the low quality of the information implies or at least suggests that the model does not or can not produce quality articles. it's all in how you see the Wiki, and i happen to agree with the huge number of people who think Wikipedia is highly useable.
the only thing you said which is clearly not true is that unpaid individuals would never bother to add their drop to the bucket of public knowledge. economists call this the tragedy of the commons, but it isn't an absolute law or anything like that, and Wikipedia is a pretty good example of how a commons-owned good can flourish.
PS one of the few times i ever "contributed" to an open-source program, i changed one, maybe two lines of code, to make it work slightly differently, the way i wanted it to. i'm not sure whether or not that would fit your hypothetical or not, but the software continued to work great.
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
And I'm not sure what your beef is about "democracized scholarship". You appear to be claiming it doesn't work. Frankly, Wikipedia and associated projects are excellent counterexamples despite your arguments to the contrary.
And your analogies in that section are pretty bad. I can think of some examples of democratized rocket science, car mechanics, and aircraft piloting. There are democratic rocketry clubs in the US. For example, I worked for a few months with the Portland State Aerospace Society. They are doing research into hybrid motor engines (solid fuel, liquid or gaseous oxidizer). Car mechanics simply is the most democratic of all. There's plenty of people fixing their own cars and making their own modifications to their cars. And aircraft piloting? You have to be healthy, pass some tests, and fly a number of hours. But once you qualify, you can fly in the States with broad freedom on where you go, you just need to file a flight plan first. Sounds relatively democratic to me.
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
You haven't even specified a problem. All you've said so far is that you don't like the fact that Wikipedia exists in its current form. Big deal.
There's a wide difference between scholarship and government-imposed information filtered to the masses.
Except that on the internet there is no way for you or anyone else to replace Wikipedia (or anything else) with your scholarly sources without the imposition of standards by force. The only thing you can do is offer your work *in addition to* the stuff that's already there. You don't get any other options.
That's one of beauties of the internet; you have to live with the things you don't like *because you don't get a vote in the matter*.
You've already said won't accept authoritative information that is critical to the functioning of some machinery that you rely on.
I've said no such thing, although apparently stooping to the level of a lying sack of shit isn't beyond you - and rather ironic, since you've made such a fuss over the presentation of inaccurate information. Pot, here's kettle.
What I've said so far is that wikipedia threatens nothing, other than, it appears, the egos of a certain few.
What use is freedom of speech if what you've been taught are lies?
If you can't handle freedom of speech, move to a country which doesn't allow it. And make sure you never use the internet again, because the one thing you can count on with the internet is that you'll ALWAYS run into speech you don't like just about anywhere you go. Or you could suck it up and deal with it, but that doesn't seem to be one of your strong suits.
I'm sure that you can dance around why you accept scholarship and expertise when you want it, yet think that Wikipedia is some sort of MMORPG with history, and it doesn't matter.
For a person who bemoans the fact that information on the internet isn't ordered according to his own tastes, you sure don't have a problem with flat-out lying when you think it'll further your argument. Just like every other asshole here, in fact. Like them, you are - common.
Max
Re:The danger of Wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
> accurate and even more scarily, complete?
That could be said of any book, newspaper, encyclopedia...
Bank accounts (paypal) (Score:3, Insightful)
Paypal is NOT a bank. There is tremendous risk in storing such large amounts of capital in Paypal, as the company could go broke or hiccup or otherwise wipe out the balance. Because Paypal is not a bank, AFAIK there is no insurance on deposits there (no FDIC insurance).
This is never a concern for us people storing a few hundred dollars there, but this is too much money to put at risk. For safety sake, Wikimedia should diversify and hold more cash in real, government insured bank accounts or bonds.
I'm not saying this because I think Paypal is a scam or anything, but the cash must be held somewhere safer and preferably where it earns interest. Wikimedia could easily negotiate high interest savings with a real bank and collect $8k or more a year from interest alone.