An urgent appeal from git-scm.com maintainer Scott Chacon
git-scm.com
git-scm.com
You know you can just click the "X" and it goes away, right?
(Just out of curiosity, do people get this upset when NPR and PBS do their fund drives? Or because you are getting a lunchbox for your $100 donation, it's not as annoying? The outrage just confuses me.)
it's just psychology
I'm probably not a good benchmark but personally I find Jimmy Wales really smug and annoying. This is due to my experience as an active WP editor back in the day. I hate the false sense of urgency that this campaign is pushing.
I'm not "outraged" by any means and haven't stopped using Wikimedia sites, but it is definitely asinine and repetitive. How long has this "urgent" fund drive been going on now? Are they just going to keep it until they hit their stated goal?
Wikipedia should find a way to become more useful, there's no need for all this crap. I wouldn't have any problem at all if WP just implemented an advanced history or page stats viewer and charged people $10/year to use it. Then they could stop with these humongous, recurring banners, the constant begging, and Jimmy Wales could quit pretending to be the saint that he definitely isn't.
I find wikipedia very useful in its current form.
The content and the hosting can be separated, as they are with Linux and many other open-source projects; Linus controls Linux, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he also controls kernel.org or any of the other places where it may appear. The authors of projects on Google Code control their projects even though Google provides the hosting -- individuals can still create content without centralized authority. If Wikipedia performed more experiments in this space, they may not need $20 million every year to continue operation.
That's a pretty hefty investment for something that doesn't make any money. Even non-profit or public endeavors are expected to operate in a generally self-sustaining way so that they don't become a burden and so that reasonable control isn't taken away from the endeavor's controllers.
Wikipedia could be developed independently of the Wikimedia Foundation. I don't think Wales et al have done a really spectacular job running things as it stands anyway.
The content is produced by the community. This fundraiser is not to pay people to produce content, but to pay for hosting and other costs associated with running a live instance of the Wikipedia content.
It is just annoying that the fundraiser has continued for so long and that the practices have been disruptive to the perusal of Wikimedia content for some time now. I am aware that Wikimedia wants my donation; I do not want to give it to them because I don't trust the Wikimedia Foundation to make very good use of it, and I don't like several of the policies they have promulgated and installed on Wikipedia.
I think it would be better for everyone if Wikimedia found a way to become self-sufficient because then: a) nobody would have to be bothered by huge donation banners for months on end; b) Wikimedia would have more consistent and improved cash flow, which ultimately translates into greater flexibility; c) Wikimedia would not be beholden to random subsets of people for its continued operation (they could focus on the subsets that specifically generate revenue and improve their revenue-generating functionality) and would not need to dedicate large amounts of effort to a sustained months-long fundraising effort. And so on.
So, I'm not casting moral judgment here. I just think it would be better for everyone if WM tried to do something less annoying and more focused to sustain its finances.
Yeah, actually. Most NPR listeners I keep in touch with hate fund drive season and find it highly annoying.
Frankly, I hate ads that play sound and obscure the page I'm trying to read, too. The reason I'm particularly annoyed at Wikipedia is because I hold Wikipedia to a higher standard. If Wikipedia had ads that played music or obstructed the article (even pledge drive ads featuring Jimmy Wales' goatee) I would be even more annoyed.
I kinda wish the politics and technology allowed them to offer a premium version with no corporate messages or pledge drives.
With online media you can. If Wikipedia went to the "with ads for free, no ads if you subscribe or pay a one time 'founders fee'" I think it would be much more successful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_Wikimedia_Foundation_O...
I'm not convinced that having a lot of foundation employees helps make the encyclopedia better. I'd like to see Wikipedia operate on a shoestring budget and stop collecting donations once they had enough invested to run their servers off of dividends and interest indefinitely.
When it comes to the photo that you linked, what does it prove? That they work in an actual office, not a bike shed or a tent? Do you claim that it's a luxury for them to have an office?
I personally admire their spine and dedication to reject corporate money, and I'm surprised that even HN readers complain so loudly about the appeal. I guess Wikipedia already became a commodity that we got used to taking for granted. For better or worse.
I can't imagine Scott or a tiny git website is in need of money.
Amusingly, if you try to enter an amount greater than $25000, google checkout just dies.
even if such 'influence' is disallowed, just the possibility of it occurring would hurt the site
They should just get one big sponsor per year to cover their costs and be done with it. Why not have a McDonalds or Pepsi banner somewhere in the corner? Bargain branding for them, free wikipedia for us.
And to limit the influence they could make it a rule to switch sponsor once a year. Why not auction the ad-spot and donate the overflow to charity?
$("#siteNotice").hide();
I just wish there was some way I could pay money to turn off the Massive Banner Ad off for a year. I'm happy to pay around $100-$150/year for WIkipedia, but the user experience is starting to degrade when a signicant chunk of my screen is a Massive "Urgent Appeal" banner.
div#siteNotice {
display: none !important;
}Also, why would you prefer an ad to the donation banner? Ads tend to promote excessive consumption or try and manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money. They tend to be animated, or play sounds, or dance all over your content. They provide vectors for malicious code to be injected into your site.
Instead, we have the founder of a highly useful collaborative educational resource (or sometimes some editors of same) asking for donations to support that without being beholden to corporate interests. Where's the problem?
It seems like an ad could be much more profitable than the donation banner, because ads can be targeted, even with zero behavioral history. For example, if I'm visiting a page on the new Tron movie, show me ads for the Daft Punk album! Odds are I might buy it.
Also, all of the things you said about ads could be said about in-house donation banners.
* Manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money
* Tend to be animated... etc
* Could provide vectors for malicious...Yes, I'm sure that ads could be more profitable than a donation banner. This is why most websites have ads instead of donation banners. However, Wikipedia is not a for-profit enterprise. It is an educational non-profit. If it were a for-profit enterprise, people would trust it much less, not as many people would contribute to it since they'd wonder why they were donating time and effort to a for-profit enterprise, etc.
And none of those things you list are true of a donation banner. Donating to an educational non-profit is not a "baser desire." I have never seen an animated banner asking for donations on Wikipedia, nor anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head. And donation banners are coming straight from Wikipedia, not a third party; if they wanted to send malicious code, they could do so directly. The point is that ad networks are notorious vectors to allow malicious code to be injected by third parties into other people's sites.
The decision to make money from advertising (or other services other than charitable donations) is independent of the decision to be a mission-oriented non-profit or a for-profit. A non-profit can still make most of its budget from selling considerations; see for example The Mozilla Foundation.
You'd be surprised to learn how many people have no idea wikipedia is non-profit. A lot have no idea that you can edit articles and just assume it's a regular encyclopedia written by paid people. I have witnessed people telling me this too many times, and yes, it's pretty depressing.
Such a system might generate 10X the revenues. If Wikipedia doesn't need them all, either for current year operations or a lasting endowment, they could liberally fund other free-culture projects with the surplus.
The biggest risk I see -- and what I believe to be the de facto reason ads haven't been more seriously considered -- is that a large portion of the editor community shares your (IMHO irrational) fear of ads, and this fear could become self-fulfilling if the introduction of ads drives away editors.
Even this might be addressable with careful handling, though. For example, what if there was one official Wikipedia mirror that had ads -- rather than the hundreds of unofficial ad-drenched mirrors? The default site would still be ad-free, for all editors, users who opt to visit or link-to the ad-free site, and inlinks from ad-free or primarily non-commercial sites. But, inlinks from major commercial entities (like say Google) would go to the ad site, unless that user had opted differently.
Doesn't that give everyone what they want -- lots more money for free culture projects with a large default sphere insulated from the 'corrupting' influence of money?
Wikipedia is a huge project with tremendous social value. It is sad to me that you may be right that an advertisement would bring in 10x the revenue, because it means we're in a culture in which one expects to perpetually be in commercial relationships. This makes the user more likely to purchase a consumer good than they are to donate to a service that has been consistently offering them more value.
The reason for this is that any direct donation based system is deeply damaged by the mass tendency to assume that someone else is in a better position to donate. In fact, the more valuable (and successful) a project is, the more this becomes a problem. But this problem is cultural, in an ideal world people would have a greater social responsibility without the need for assuming someone else is going to take care of important services like these. To push us in that direction, we get a giant fucking picture of Jimmy Wales to make us feel guilty and give. Personally, this has about the same negative impact on me that an advertisement would, albeit for different reasons.
I think the real solution is for Wikipedia to find a better way to fund itself in a grassroots fashion. I have trouble seeing how the Wikimedia Foundation can't come up with other ways to fund themselves. They have a tremendous amount of content and data. I'd love to see them build something they can sell that would support Wikipedia's operations.
There are other advertising models. For instance, why not Google ads or Bing ads? I don't see how there is much danger of those influencing editorial content.
(TBH I didn't actually recognise the parody myself and thought it was just a fairly crass call for donations that made a couple of silly claims. I guess I should read the small print).
If you did donate through the button, as was evident from multiple places, the donation went to the Software Freedom Conservancy for the Git project which will go to helping the Git project however the Git leaders see fit. Technically, even if you took the page seriously (which I still have a hard time understanding how that happens, the content of the appeal was simply ludicrous), I still don't think it could be considered fraudulent as the money does go to the Git project. If git-scm.com actually needed millions, which is ridiculous, it would go through the SFC. I'm also likely to transfer the domain to the SFC, so some of the donations will probably go to domain registration for git-scm.com at some point anyhow.
I apologize to anyone who took it more seriously than it was intended (except for one guy) and thank those of you who did donate because they like Git or because they like the other resources that I've put online. The money will go to the Git project and likely partially to the website for registration or transfer (the hosting of which has been donated by GitHub for a long time now and will continue to be).
If you decide to donate, the minimum amount is 20 USD. While it is highly debatable how much access to Wikipedia is worth to a person, I believe it sends a message that they really don't care for it if you give them anything less than that.
Also, despite assurances to not use private information gathered from the Paypal transaction, once they grab a hold of an email address, they keep sending reminders intended to pressure people into signing up for a monthly subscription. This is simply not very nice.
Another minor detail: a donation to Wikimedia is handled as an ordinary PayPal payment transaction, whereas a donation to SFC (the company behind git) is properly and clearly labeled as a donation. Not that it matters much, but it probably betrays the mindset of Wikimedia to some extent.
Twice.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...
Interestingly from what I can see in their published tests and stats for the banners, having pics of Jimmy on the banners actually had a significant positive effect. Which explains why they kept doing different variations of them despite the fact they creep some of us out.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testi...
This is how it looked: http://i.min.us/idDeBk.png
Meta: I'm reposting the link originally posted by recoil [1] because I just spent 5 minutes skimming the comments.
By the way, thanks to this, I got to read the Wales' appeal which I didn't bother to do before; but I can't take it seriously unfortunately anymore :)