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.
How can they survive non-commercially? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem, from what I can tell, is that as more people contribute article text, they seem to feel they have less reason to contribute financially -- which may be true.
I like seeing how Wikis have become more neutral over time, and I think we do have a great need for an information store like Wikipedia, but I don't see how it can sustain itself in the long run (at least for free). They're facing the same dilemma that many not-for-profit information companies are: people seem to have less money today than they did a few years ago. My charitable contributions have gone UP this year, but I spend all my charity dollars locally where I can see them making a difference. I'm not certain if I want to give to Wiki without knowing how the money is used. I don't mind supporting dozens of servers and bandwidth fees, but I don't want to see the founder driving a Porsche.
Note that I'm not against profitable companies -- I just don't trust not-for-profits with my money. If Wiki became subscriber only, I'd definitely subscribe, but would the quality or quantity of articles drop if the user base dropped from closing it off? For sure.
Wikipedia, and every other freely available information store, will have to find news ways to generate income. I don't believe they'll add advertisements, but I don't see what other ways they can break even. Maybe offering pay-for-articles for vanity or for advertisement but mark it as such? Just like privately funded libraries were ways for the wealthy to gain immortality, maybe Wiki will offer the "bronze plaques" so the billionaires can get recognition for their "altruism."
This is a charity well worth giving to. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is Wikipedia in serious trouble? (Score:5, Interesting)
Still waiting on Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is Wikipedia in serious trouble? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How can they survive non-commercially? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure discussions in this domain have happened quite a few times in the past, however, but perhaps with growing penetration/contribution, it maybe be time to look for alternate sources of revenue - for example, the much-used ad-based model?
Or maybe I'm opening a whole new can of worms here...
Why fund Wikipedia? (Score:5, Interesting)
At least one culture, namely the Chinese, is permanently excluded from this harmonious collaboration since November 2005. This is because China deems Wikipedia "detrimental to society" (or at least not so unbiased in a few articles).
This is not Wikipedia's fault, but whenever I try to access Wikipedia from Anonymouse, it says Wikipedia has blocked access from that very anonymizing gateway... hilarious. I really don't have time applying proxies or go throguh SSH accounts in the West.
I think Wikipedia needs to start distribute its stuff in a decentralized fashion, letting others deliver the stuff through their pipes. And it also should have encryption enabled to circumvent the censorship in the filter regimes.
WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
If they are preventing average Joes like me from contributing, I haven't seen any evidence of it. Care to point us to some?
Re:On A More Serious Note, (Score:3, Interesting)
Wiki have got to be a bit more clever (Score:1, Interesting)
I look at the front page and see that with this fundraiser they have already amassed over 200k! I realise sites like wiki do cost a fortune to run due to the general costs of operating something that huge - but for the average user it appears to be big sums they have already raised, yet they are asking for more!
You don't exactly encourage contributions when you have a big banner on all pages happily stating that you already have that kind of money - it doesn't send out the "poor and needy" message does it?!
Also they probably want to have a look at the timing of these things - Post holidays is not a sensible time to be trying to ask people for money - generally everyone is broke, full up with food and tired out. Gifting £10 after the credit card statement has come in for the Christmas purchases is going to be a lot less likely. You have to be smart as well as kind hearted, Mr Wales.
Re:How can they survive non-commercially? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe they don't need money, maybe they need a big hosting company to donate the servers and bandwidth freely in exchange for a tagline:
Wikipedia
Hostly freely by GoDaddy
Or something of the sort.
Re:Community Collaborative? (Score:5, Interesting)
Servers are not cheap, and Wikimedia needs lots of them. [wikimedia.org] They list 129 new servers in 2005. Looking at the hardware stats of these servers, they obviously cost many thousands of dollars each (can someone give me more accurate pricing?).
All of these things are not cheap. Also note that Wikipedia needs more server coordination that many other sites, because the content is dynamic and the database huge. If you're just looking up info, that's fine, the content can be mirrored across many different servers across the world. But when you edit material, there must be a way to propagate those changes quickly. In fact, those of us who edit Wikipedia know that it becomes much slower when you enter edit mode, since all such changes have to go through a central server (as I understand it), rather than just the "closest and faster" server available.
All of this to say that running Wikipedia is by no means cheap. Yes, they really do need that much money ($100,000/year for servers and bandwidth is pretty cheap when you realize how much they manage to accomplish with it). Hopefully the donations will always be enough to keep up with the demand for this content.
(P.S.: Yes, some of the servers they use were donated. These donations are also vital to the ongoing success of Wikimedia.)
Reasons not to contribute... (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the highest bodies on Wikipedia is the Arbitration Committee. Originally it was appointed by Jimbo, who I thought made several poor choices. Then last year there was an election to ArbCom, and I think the community made excellent choices to who would go ArbCom. Then in the interim, Jimbo appointed two more arbitrators, one of which I think is of very poor quality. Now he is changing the democratic election of last year, which I think went very well, and is trying to change it so it is more centralized towards himself. I think there are many signs of the problems, but this is just one of them.
While I think Wikipedia covers science and mathematics articles well, it has many problems when it comes to political matters, the Seigenthaler [slashdot.org] matter yet again just being a sign of the problem. I think Wikipedia should simply acknowledge that a "neutral" standpoint is not realistic with regards to history and politics. Wikipedia should concentrate on scientific articles and the like, and cede articles like George W. Bush to partisan wikis like Demopedia and Wikinfo.
I'm tired of the Wikipedia mess and am not contributing any money.
Parent has a point. (Score:5, Interesting)
Too many experts are turned away by the teeming, uninformed Wikipedians who tear down useful contributions under the mistaken notions of "balance" or "being informative." Look at Panera Bread [wikipedia.org]; 25% of the article is unequivocal information, the other 75% are advertisement and random facts. It also doesn't use proper paragraphs, and the entire article lacks structure. This is a typical Wikipedia article, but you see many of the same flaws in "Featured" articles. People don't know what to write in this supposed "encyclopedia," nor how.
And yes, Africans probably care more about staying alive than reading Wikipedia. To anyone considering donating to Wikipedia: your money would be better spent in the hands of an AIDS-related charity or a broad-action organization [makepovertyhistory.org]. Believe it or not, people can still starve to death even if they can look up Calculus [wikipedia.org] in Wikipedia.
The danger of Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
A: What's scholarship? What's quality?
It's time to face some facts. Wikipedia should be no more authoritative as an encyclopedia as Slashdot comments are about technology and current affairs. The basis on which Wikipedia is founded is indistinguishable from the political viewpoint of Anarchism, the idea that without leadership and expertise, a collection of people can be collectively wiser than any individual.
Actually what you get is a disorganized mess, where the relatively few articles are genuinely good, then there's a large number of articles which may have started well, but have been mediocritized and dismembered after the original author decided to give up trying to revert stuff, and there's a considerable number of factual articles on subjects you've never heard of which are little more than a couple of lines followed by the Wikipedia disclaimer:
"This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
What really happens is the article is never expanded, because of the human need to improve something only if that person has a stake in its improvement, and that improvement is recognised. Face it, would you rather take over somebody's half finished, buggy computer program which has no documentation or would you rather start again and do it properly?
If you flick through Wikipedia using the "Random Article" link, what you find is the mixture of articles that I have mentioned: the great few, the large mediocre and poorly constructed, and the tremendous number of unhelpful half-and-quarter articles which give no information and no citation.
Even if you do create a great article, there's no stopping any number of morons from turning your well-thought out and considered article with full references into a mishmash of non-sequiturs and out-and-out false statements. Nobody's on your side because as long as the dreaded "NPOV" is observed, no-one could care less about the effort you put in.
Eventually you give up and accept the entropic effect of thousands of ignoramuses. You relax and realise that you tried your best but no-one gives a shit. A frog is dissected. Pinkerton does not return.
The problem comes when you want some vital information. Wikipedia is highly rated by Google (which if you think about it, is another anarchistic idea promoted to Internet paradigm) so you go to Wikipedia and you read the article.
Now the question: Is what I'm reading in the article factually and historically correct? How can I check? Erm. Is the person I must speak to, a scholar, a college geek, an idiot with too much time on his hands, an IP address?
Ah, but Wikipedia has an answer to this conundrum! If you believe anything that Wikipedia says then "Fool You!". It's your responsibility to check whether all, most or any of the facts are correct. "We cannot help you, we are just facilitators in this great experiment in democratized scholarship"
I'll believe in democratized scholarship when I believe in democratized rocket science or democratized car mechanics or democratized aircraft piloting.
It's a nonsense and anyone with an ounce of sense, knows that its a nonsense. And it's a very dangerous nonsense, because in an interconnected world, false information and twisted history leads to conflict. Real conflict, because conflicts and wars are waged because of history.
You want to know what I find scary about Wikipedia? Read this chapter [online-literature.com] and tell me whether or not someone could have written Comrade Ogilvy into Wikipedia.
I'll tell you for free, I already know that there are articles on Wikipedia which are largely or completely fictional. Your mission, should you choose to take it, is to work out which ones, because Winston Smith lives and he's speaking into the SpeakWrite and changing history before our very eyes.
use Ads on wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
Ads are NOT a problem if they are useful and not a pain in the ass.
Why can't web site developers understand that most people (it seems) are perfectly fine with ads if they are done right?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Donate, I did! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder why Wikimedia isn't getting larger donations from big organizations. I know Google has offered support, but I feel they should be donating cash--Wikipedia has high-quality organic search results in tons of queries on Google, I'm sure that's generating quite a bit of ad revenue. Other players making money off Wikipedia's efforts:
-The other search engines
-PayPal - This one irritates me--why are they charging transaction fees for Wikimedia donations!? They should waive them or at the VERY least, donate a portion back.
-Visa/MC/Amex/etc. - Related to PayPal, I'm sure some of those transaction fees are mandated by the credit companies . . . who should also donate back or at least waive those fees!
Wikimedia's yearly expenses are mere pocket change for any of the players I mentioned. I really think they ought to donate.
-Nick
Write a book on infrastructure (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoever runs the back-end servers should write a book on how they are scaling everything and how the back-end architecture has evolved over time.
In another post it says they run over 100 servers, and do it with a budget equivalent to some sites with 1% of their traffic -- I'd certainly pay money for a book giving me some insight into how they are doing this.
They could also provide consulting to commercial companies that would assist them in doing the same thing.
It doesn't even have to be C++. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Reasons not to contribute... (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually it doesn't. What you see is only what is left after deletionists have had a go at things, personally I have had more than 30 percent of my new articles on the VfD (vote for deletion) and some were also deleted. All this by deletionists. Even more have been changed for hardly any good reasons, such as changing British English spelling into American English spelling.
I guess this is because I do not use a registered pseudonym or a name, as I find it unethical to use my university degrees, years of experience as a researcher in several countries as well as academic positions in order to somehow prop up my articles.
As a researcher I am used to have my writings scrutinised at great lengths. I am however not used to see my words twisted, certainly not by people who make the strangest changes under the alibi of NPOV. Does an article on, say, geoids on the Earth require a chapter on flat earth theories to "balance" things out? In the end I have found it not being worth my time to contribute until the day a working process can be set up.
Re:They also sent me a holiday wish for donating (Score:3, Interesting)
About 98% remains if using an average donation size (your $0.5 stamp for the $30 avg donation).
I'd be having second thoughts about supporting an organization that plans to waste the money given to them.
It's called building personal relations. Which other money than the donated could a non-profit organization use? The alternative would be to skip it altogether, and risk further decreasing donations the next fund drive. Would you be willing to take the risk? Sometimes the revenues more than make up for an expense; that's what good businessmen deal with.
Oh, and if you'd like to 'donate' to me, I'll send you a Christmas Card too, if you like. $500 minimum recommended.
I don't know what you mean with this greatly exaggerated remark. About 2% in the above were used to reward donators with something unexpected. So what does this have to do with?
Something isn't right here (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? Because Wikipedia has gotten too big and is having difficulty scaling. Add to that the trust issues that have surfaced recently and it's hard for Wikipedia to succeded in the current environment.
Re:How can they survive non-commercially? (Score:3, Interesting)
I realise they'd need to bring out a new version each year, but it seems to me it would be trivial to create such a product. Anyone know the reason why they don't?
Who knows, they could even find a market for dead-tree versions.
Re:Here's the deal (Score:4, Interesting)
now good old jim could be affording a porche, and a wide screen, all he'd have to do is incorperate a single 'google adwords' box to every page displayed and with about 10 million page views a day, he'd be getting quite the $$$
but he's got some philosophical thing going on that adverts shouldn't be used to fund wikipedia.
but yeah, just so you know, good old jim could afford all that stuff you accuse him of owning without even fact checking it, if he just switched wikipedia over to an ad revenue based model.