Wikipedia Raises $16 Million to Remain Ad-Free
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Just looking at the top comments here, and other places around the internet - I think it's far too common.
Let's be more positive. Wikipedia is amazing - congrats to them for successfully achieving their fund-raising goals.
It's not all that different from other bureaucracies. Like the bureaucracies responsible for administration in other spheres, the practical result is more than serviceable. Your city council, despite its backroom deals, manages to keep your town livable. Your insurance company, despite its shrewd actuarial restrictions, generally has your back. Wikipedia, despite its policy of deletionism, is a great first resource for a vast variety of subjects.
Every bureaucracy could do with a lot of improvement, and Wikipedia's no different. But we're still much better off with it and its imperfections than we'd be without it.
What it comes down to is that Wikipedia is really one great big edit war, though they'll never admit it.
I am somebody who can't see himself as contributing to wikipedia, but some changes might make me reconsider. What would you like to see changed?
That's the only big policy change since I quit that I can remember right now, though I know there have been several other that I felt were misguided or inappropriate. When I browse talk pages these days, I see very many new policy links, and that's part of the problem. Wikipedia has a pretty steep learning curve just to format an edit in a way that won't be reverted under a cavalcade of acronyms from the WP pagespace.
Edits on controversial topics are nearly impossible, primarily because articles will often be locked in the first place, or if they're not, each member on each side exhausts his/her three reverts, someone complains to an admin, and the page is locked so that it can all pick back up in a few days. It becomes especially difficult on pages that are hand-sanitized by a politician's staffers or other editors paid to keep WP articles favorable, because they literally have all day and they make their money by being combative, intimidating opposing editors, and otherwise staving off legitimate unfavorable edits.
And that's part of what makes this all so frustrating. Wikipedia has no real conflict resolution mechanisms. Open-source software is supposedly an inspiration for WP, but OSS has very clear, authoritarian project leaders that don't tolerate silliness. WP is an absolute free-for-all; there are policies, but in general they just mean you have to avoid specific phraseology and can still do whatever you want. As such, editing WP is very inconsistent but almost universally frustrating and it's often clear even to readers which group has established turf over a given article or set of articles.
On top of all of this, Jimmy Wales has an extreme aura of arrogance and ethical pliability. See the incidents around "co-founder" and "founder" of Wikipedia for just one example; there have been some other good ones over the years. Wales misappropriated Wikipedia, really the brain child of Larry Sanger, for his own and hasn't known what to do with it since. Sanger, meanwhile, started another wiki-based site that evolved on the Wikipedia model with approved revisions and a few other small tweaks (Citizendium, I don't know if it's still alive or not).
It also seems to me that Wales has been trying to carefully straddle the community line regarding policies, etc., (except a few cases where lawyers specifically said "this part is not optional, sorry") because he doesn't really know what's good for WP. It's all some kind of anomaly to him and he's just trying to keep a light touch so he doesn't scare it away. As such, WP yet languishes in its morass of "whoever-is-the-most-obsessed" methodology for resolving editorial conflict and lacks any serious drive or leadership.
WP is already like a big corporation because it already has a CEO that got there through business school instead of innovation. That's always the sign that you shouldn't expect many interesting advances from a given group anymore -- they are interested in maintaining their model and milking it for money until someone comes around and obsoletes them. Hiring a chief executive trained in milking money out of existing infrastructure instead of a chief executive trained in contributing something new is a huge red flag from every non-financial perspective (though the finances usually languish along with the invention and research).
Basically, it boils down to frustration over the lack of conceptual or procedural improvement in Wikipedia and the general belief that Wales is blatantly unqualified in almost all relevant respects and sort of wandered into his position accidentally. I don't necessarily blame him for that (though I do blame him for the morally dubious stuff, like Bomis, Sanger, and that girl), it just doesn't bode well for the organization.
And, as I'm sure we all know, it's generally a pretty bad thing when confused people get a whole bunch of money, as Wales just procured for himself. Wikimedia already emanates these astonishingly corporate vibes, I think we should only expect those to increase.
* That Wikipedia didn't go to bat for fair-use images, and instead adopted a harsh policy of copyright attribution that can be used by activist admins to require forms-in-triplicate process to get an image posted.
* That Wikipedia's conflict resolution processes add up to make it impossible to contribute to controversial articles.
Both of these may be true, but my response is, "so what?". The outcome you've spelled out here isn't the end of the world. The encyclopedia is still epic in scope and useful even to a cynical bastard like me. It dominates the top spot on most Google SERPs and by doing so drastically improves the quality of virtually every Internet search in the English-speaking world.
Particularly regarding controversial articles: seriously, just go edit somewhere else. You were a busy editor in your time, and you know exactly why those draconian rules exist: because controversial articles are massive neodymium magnets for crappy edits. Between daily attempts to rewrite the entire flow of articles to specific POV's (often in nitpicky work-to-rules fashion deliberately designed to incite days worth of arguments over how to revert) and mindless vandalism, how is anyone supposed to get anything done anywhere on the project if everyone has to patrol the articles cleaning up all the nonsense?
You bring up lots of valid points, but you don't seem willing to consider the other side. I might actually entirely agree with you about the project, but for the fact that your comment is overtly misleading.
P.S. Jimmy Wales doesn't run the Wikimedia Foundation.
I see you did not even read the link that sparked this very thread.
I will believe if you say it was only fifty days, I know no differently other than my estimate above, which was apparently wrong. Sorry. It did seem much longer, you're right.
I am not negative about Wikipedia, but about its management. The add campaign was distasteful and I suspect just an ego trip for Jimmy Wales.
The real Wikipedia is the thousands of faceless people who write the articles.
They published the results of the split tests: Jimmy Wales ROFLstomped all their other creatives. It blows my mind, too, but there you go: the people who matter (i.e. people who donate to the foundation) want to Jimmy's rugged and photoshopped good looks, and all he has to do is glance in their general direction and their wallets open.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-science-behin...
EDIT: Raw Data here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testi...
Were all the advertisements the same size? (i.e. were they all images or were some text - like google adwords?).
Then there is the question of how non-donors feel. The ad campaign made me negative about WP (and I bet quite a few other people).
The third problem is the damage to the image of WP. An idiot on the top of every page begging for money really knocks the image for me.
That's an important point that is harder to reveal through A/B testing. What would Wikipedia's fundraising look like if there were another online encyclopedia that appeared to be a credible contender? Is Wikipedia Google in this space, or is it AltaVista?
BTW, anyone wants to make a service, which hosts base content from wikipedia, but allows to fork and merge articles a la git? By default you see main article (if it exists), but if you want to see alternative opinions - they are just several clicks away.
Instead, we get places like Answers.com mass-duplicating Wikipedia content and slapping big image ads on it.
Why pay for an ad sense spot if you can just insert your own ad into the relevant wiki article?
If Wikipedia sold ads, they would have the alternative to buy an ad instead; I don't see how the problem of advertisement-as-content would be worsened when given a choice to buy an ad. If anything, I think it's the other way around.
Wikipedia isn't in the Answers.com business, and doesn't particularly want to be.
How well do you think Wikipedia is doing at that? (I ask as a new Wikipedian, registered and actively editing only for about a half year, who has seen many very controversial articles that are anything but neutral in point of view, ads or no ads.)
That's generally how it goes on the sensitive articles. The three main areas of political debate on Wikipedia are Israel/Palestine, Eastern Europe, and Northern Ireland. There have been perennial edit wars, and many ArbCom cases. There have been mailing lists and drives by external organizations to infiltrate the ranks of Wikipedia so as to have their viewpoint expressed. There are admins who have acted improperly and had their status stripped, and there are others who have done the same with impunity. Basically, it's a shitstorm.
It also affects less than 0.001% of articles on Wikipedia. As far as articles with promotional points of view, recognize that many companies will actively edit the article on them, and it takes diligent community members to counteract their whitewashing. That's why WP:COIN and other noticeboards exist. Similarly, some people will edit an article with the goal of making the subject of that article look bad. The remedy is the same as for whitewashing: a neutral community member needs to fix the article.
The problem is that there are millions of Wikipedia articles, most of which the average editor will never come across. The community is big, but not that big. We will never make Wikipedia perfect, although I have some ideas for making it more so.
In the end, the best you can do is fix problems as you come across them. If you notice any patterns that you think could be identified algorithmically, consider writing a bot or, if you are unable to do so, approach one of the prolific bot writers like MZMcBride with your idea. Otherwise, just keep plugging away, and realize that the dramawhoring that characterizes the Wikipedia community is largely absent from the articles themselves.
I'd love to hear ideas about making Wikipedia better. I'd especially like ideas about how to encourage new editors with good sources (that is, access to libraries or better specialized databases) on technical but controversial subjects to participate more. I left this thread for a few hours, following links to the annual reports and also doing some of my own Wikipedia editing, and I'm also very curious about how to reduce the decline in the number of active administrators.
As far as encouraging new editors, we need to stop the manic approach to vandal fighting. Vandalism is a problem, sure, but there are far more people who are driven away by hasty reverts and unfriendly warnings.
As far as admins are concerned, it really needs to be no big deal. Perhaps an admin review noticeboard, to look at questionable admin actions, and a clear demoppping process. Other than that, promote editors pseudo-randomly. I think by throwing mops at editors without requiring RfA, we could eliminate a lot of the politicking that goes on. If you need more admins, promote more. We know that the statistically optimum way of promoting people within an organization is to do so randomly, and I think Wikipedia would be a great testbed to try that theory out.
We do? What is the citation for that conclusion?
and I think Wikipedia would be a great testbed to try that theory out.
You don't think Wikipedia is already trying out promoting people randomly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20...
Bah. It's around here somewhere. They did a study, and found that promoting people randomly within a corporation led to better outcomes than any other strategy. I'm sure someone could find the citation.
As far as promoting people randomly, no, they're not doing that. I'm not sure what Essjay has to do with your point; he was a guy who claimed to have real life expertise as a way of gaining prominence on Wikipedia. I'm not suggesting Wikipedia currently promotes based on claimed qualifications; I'm suggesting they promote x editors with ~3k+ edits and ~1 year (numbers are very maleable) to adminship at random, doing away with the RfA process.
I'm going to be the asshole here and say some of us have things to do. convincing what are probably history majors with too much time on their hands due to being history majors that corrections are needed would be a huge time sink for no reward.
One year of ads. An eternity of freedom.
"Wikipedia should display ads and donate surplus to charity"
http://bonchibuji.blogspot.com/2008/12/wikipedia-should-disp...
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/91712
If you're using HTTPS-Everywhere (Firefox) or KB SSL Enforcer (Chrome), add
https://secure.wikimedia.org/*
EDIT: Paragraph wondering about A/B testing removed, as two people responded with links to the results of A/B testing, which I was not previously aware of.
Deletionists feel they can approach perfection by mechanically removing content according to some standard, even when readers are finding it useful or enjoyable.
The (most commonly expressed) logic behind deletionism is that WP occupies a privileged place on the web and thus the onus is on the project to have content be verifiable, so that people can't stuff totally bogus topics at the tops of Google searches. The project can't verify content for non-notable subjects.
If that was the case, there would be no need for notability policy, merely the current verifiability standards. Unfortunately, there are many verifiable subjects of legitimate interest to people (startups, English Premier League reserve goalkeepers, fashion models who have only appeared on six magazine covers in their career, Iranian power plants) that deletionists want Wikipedia to forget about entirely because they aren't "notable".
... which again gives lie to the idea that the issue is "disk space".
I'm not trying to get sucked into this "deletionism" vs "inclusionism" argument, since those labels suck all the oxygen out of the discussion ("what, you're siding with people who think _why doesn't belong in WP?" --- of course not.) I'm just pointing out how bankrupt the original comment was.
If the verifiability argument were sufficient, the notability policies would all be scrapped and deletion policy would round down to "delete articles which don't have any verifiable statements in them, merge articles which are less than two or three full paragraphs long". Which, incidentally, was more or less the radical inclusionist platform back when I wasted time on Wikipedia.
I wrote a big long comment about a year and a half ago where I supposed that the problems probably boil down to "editing as sport" and "status seeking quests for adminship". Both lead to situations where editing decisions are made in a slipshod fashion and then defended to the death to avoid losing points in RfA's.
Deletionism is not one of the things that is broken about Wikipedia. Deletionism makes absolute sense. Wikipedia owns the Google SERPs, there is tremendous incentive to paste up bullshit articles for profit, and the sheer volume of crap --- take this from someone who spent 4 months patrolling AfD --- is staggering. The "pure" deletionist ideology is harsh, but it ultimately serves the greater good of the project.
In every one of these debates, I see people lose sight of the fundamental point of Wikipedia. It is not, as many people believe, a repository of all human knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. The point is not to have all possible articles. In fact, that's the opposite of the point. The point is to have only good articles, using nothing but volunteer work.
I too am done wasting time on Wikipedia, and I'm pretty grossed out by what happens when you look under the rock that is the Wikipedia: namespace. But I respect the project itself. It is tremendously, staggeringly successful. It is clearly doing something right.
Why don't we get to say that the fundamental point of Wikipedia is to be an aspiring repository of all human knowledge? Asserting that the reason for these policies is that it's [merely] an encyclopedia [more or less in the traditional sense] is self-fulfilling rhetoric. You say "the point is X" but I say "the point was Y, and could have continued to be if certain people didn't establish turf and assert control."
From my point of view, Wikipedia was on the way to being something much more than what it is now, and value was lost.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/13512...
Not: o How many times have I sneezed today.
Barely: o The Ties of my Local Anchorman
Notable: o Pokemon Characters, _why, Canada
The first is that notability is in no small part a function of scale. Many things that would not make the cut in a global, space-limited encyclopedia are nevertheless in Wikipedia (properly) because they're notable to some niche of contributors/readers. But once you start having articles about some episode of a 1980s TV show, how can you, in good conscience, say that an article about a selectman in a small town or an athlete at a small college isn't also notable?
And verifiability gets interesting in this context. Effectively, verifiability puts disproportionate weight on verifiability through traditional media. Thus, presumably, school newspapers and the like would be considered an indication that something is indeed notable.
What, you say, the selectman appeared in a newspaper article? Congratulations: you're done. Cite it. The article will stick. Someone will inevitably try to delete it; you'll point to the sourcing at the bottom of the article, and you'll win the AfD.
It's really not complicated.
It is also NOT ABOUT "FAIR". Notability and verifiability aren't value judgements about subjects. They are judgements about the COMPATIBILITY of subjects with Wikipedia.
For whatever it's worth: _why has a page. Nobody ever tried to delete Canada. Pokemon characters have pages because they are easily verified.
Having just appreciated your criticism of a sarcastic and unhelpful comment, I hope you’re not turning to easy point-scoring yourself.
I used to be of the opinion that it was justified, but has realised lately that it has become a tool for political censorship. Some of the editing cliques have become very adept at suppressing unwanted views with dubious, but to many persuasive, application of the verifiability and notability policies.
My observation of this abuse of policy has been as a bystander by the way. I've never actively edited any articles on these subjects.
Typical subjects where there most certainly are well organized and ideologically motivated editorial cliques include US foreign policy, anything to do with Israel, Turkey and its history, anything relating to Islam etc.
Abuse of the notability policy is just one, but very effective, tool for censoring and controlling the content though.
(Also, apropos nothing, but because I just looked up who you are: that CRAM-MD5 proposal on your website is terribly broken; please don't recommend it to people.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Acces... says:
Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally viewed. However, they remain in the database (at least temporarily) and are accessible to administrators, along with their edit history unless they are oversighted. Any user with a genuine reason to view a copy of a deleted page may request a temporary review (or simply ask an administrator to supply a copy of the page). Note that these requests are likely to be denied if the content has been deleted on legal grounds (such as defamation or copyright violation), or if no good reason is given for the request.
But if defamatory material is added to a popular article and reverted away, doesn't it remain in the edit history forever?
Or simply, knowing that it is likely to be deleted puts you off from contributing at all. I know that is one of the main reasons I have almost completely stopped contributing to Wikipedia.
And he's talking about the number of articles, if I'm not mistaken.
Also, Wikipedia itself was fully funded a while ago through next year, the foundation was trying to raise money for other projects and programs that aren't the encyclopedia itself.
Yeah, RWW says that in a couple of places, but I don't know why. I don't believe the Wikimedia Foundation has ever implied that. (Disclaimer: I work there.) The slogan/hashtag was #keepitfree, but I don't think that implies a number.
Anyway, if there had been a shortfall in community donations, the WMF would just have readjusted its budget, or sought more big-donor money. Ads on Wikipedia are not even a remote possibility.
But we prefer to get everything from the readership in small donations. Big donations expose the projects to charges of bias, or require us to jump through various hoops that don't directly benefit the community. We'd rather be working for the community 100% of the time, rather than balancing the concerns of the community and people with deep pockets.
Why change wikimedia's method of fund raising and budgeting? Because wikipedia is a valuable resource and it would be far greater if we could ensure it remains available for reading and continued revision not just for the next year or the next decade but indefinitely. They've already raised enough money to have ensured that had they invested the money correctly. Instead, the money has been squandered on salaries for positions within the foundation which provide questionable value.
Any info on that?
Is there actually paid staff/benefits? Because $16M is more hardware/bandwidth than I can fathom.
PDF for 2011: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1... (Page 24 for pie chart comparison)
Summary: They want to expand, a lot, almost every sector has more than doubled in allocated budget from 09-10s budget
2010 Wikipedia Spending, in USD, in thousands
8,972 Salaries and wages
1,837 Internet hosting
3,270 Capital expenditures
483 Donation processing fees, charitable registrations
2,274 External contractors
864 Travel for staff, Board, Advisory Board and volunteers
134 Wikimania Travel
155 Legal
1,273 Office rent, furniture and equipment, supplies and maintenance
813 Staff and volunteer meetings, conferences, training, workshops
325 New allocation for awards and grants supporting volunteer initiatives
--------------------
$20,400K TOTAL (*$20M*)
https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikime...
and the whole document in html/images
First, most of the value of wikipedia comes from random users. Second, we've seen a pattern of Wales and wikipedia administration not understanding where the value of wikipedia comes from. Third, we've seen a pattern of policies and practices that are actively hostile to the users and usages that are wikipedia's bedrock (deletionism, edit wars, unnecessarily tight permissions for article creation etc.)
And then we have wikipedia's budget priorities, which indicate that Wales et al seem to value creating cushy jobs for people who don't add much to wikipedia much more than just keeping the site running for as long as possible, by a ratio of around 10:1 (roughly).
In short, the people who run wikipedia don't seem to care or value the source of content on the site nor the continued operation of the site very much. Instead they seem to care about extracting money by effectively holding huge amounts of content that they did not create hostage.
I love wikipedia, it's a great site and potentially very positively disruptive to traditional norms in human society, culture, and education. Yet increasingly I am driven toward the conclusion that the people who run it are not in any sense good people and are holding it back as much as they are keeping it running.
I won't comment on your other points, but - Wikipedia is a non-profit. They can't just hang on to cash, they have to spend it somehow, and in a way in line with their charter. If they've already spent enough on servers, bandwidth, hosting, etc, where else will that go but to salaries? If you look at their financial reports (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1...) you'll see their donations exceeded their planned amounts significantly, so they're hiring more people to balance that out.
If you asked people what the benefit of donating to the wikimedia foundation was I'm sure at least 9 out of 10 would respond "to keep wikipedia running". Indeed, that is the context of all of the appeals for donations.
What value does hiring more staff provide? Specifically, what value higher than the long-term continued operation of wikipedia does it provide?
I personally think that most people would be happy if they just concentrated on keeping the site up and running. While they DO need a bit of workforce for that, they should stick to the "core" that is the website.
p.s. I'm perfectly happy with another non-profit trying to make workshops, grants and other things, but I'd prefer there to be a "we're just the website" one too...
How many of those that donated thought that the advertisements would disappear after they gave money?
In fact there are several wikipedia clones out there which just duplicate content, with ads inbetween.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...
When the FTC issues a ruling that looks almost exactly the same, everyone lauds them for their forward thinking stance.
Can you explain what, exactly, you thought was so horrible about what Google and Verizon did?
Note that the FTC ruling that they have been lauded for made the exact same compromise, for very similar reasons. What I'm really curious about is the disparity between how they are treated for their respective actions.
Furthermore Google didn't entirely leave wireless unprotected. They lost their 2008 bid for a bunch of wireless spectrum, but got a use restriction applied to Verizon that forces Verizon to respect net neutrality for that bandwidth. So there will be mobile internet services that follow net neutrality.
The FTC is a regulatory body - Google is a corporation. There's a difference in motivation.
In short they were attempting to make it easier for the FTC to do exactly what it did.
I'd don't think it's possible to view Google purely in terms of 'don't be evil'. 'Don't be evil' is a part of a marketing campaign.
This allows Wikipedia to be truly free.
However, in reply to your question: In many (I'd argue most) cases, people have a price. Hell, I'd bet that with enough billions you could bribe a hell of a lot of married couples to split up, yet alone someone to abandon their community spirit and sell a volunteer-run organisation.
(Second paraphrase doesn't, however, top the first.)
If they've already hit the target, presumably they must have already set a new target in order to make that statement?