Wikipedia doesn't need your money
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
What's the purpose of Wikipedia, anyway? Is it an online, open, encyclopedia? Or is it becoming some kind of quasi-political organization with tendrils everywhere?
There's one thing we are learning about the net: everybody wants to own the entire net. Whether it's Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or Wiki, once you get so large you start thinking of the internet and your service as being the same.
Wikipedia has the money it needs to operate, yet still it grows. If anything, the bigger they get, the more demanding they are getting with asking for contributions. Why? I believe that's an excellent question, and investigating the answer is also fascinating. (As is watching the story continue to develop over the next 5-10 years)
However, as I said in the other comment I made, this growth seems to be needed in order to maintain, "just operate", the achieved purpose of Wikipedia - online, open encyclopedia. The growth is needed because online, open encyclopedia is itself a moving target. The main problem, it seems (as pointed in the Annual Plan[1]), is the trend of fewer contributors with each year. If you read the comments at theregister article, all of them talk about the bad experience of editing a wiki and engaging with the contributor community. Now, I have no idea how true this is and how often this happens but the fact that there are fewer contributors each year remains. Wiki edits and the contributor community are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. If these and their quality are waning, then this will have a large impact on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia. Furthermore, to be a true encyclopedia, the quality of the articles needs to be as accurate as possible which certainly is a moving target. Investing into additional tools to better assess articles' quality certainly works towards this target.
Next, there is open and online. Part of the money goes towards broadening the reach of Wikipedia. Like making it available in the Global South via mobile for free, with no data charges (Wikipedia Zero). Or consider lobbying - if the foundation itself does not defend itself from acts like SOPA and thus remain online, who else should step in to WMF's interest? I think it's fair and very empowering to have people with very limited Internet access to at least Wikipedia.
With that said, the question changes. It is not about whether Wikipedia needs more money - it does - but it is about how much it needs, i.e is the foundation efficient enough while maintaining the target of an online open encyclopedia. revelation's comment[2] about hiring as a startup is quite a interesting comparison
[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/4f/2012-1...
This is a story about mission creep, and growth, and what happens to internet locations that become extremely popular. Would it even be possible to stick to one simple mission? I kind of doubt it. If not, are they being "forced" into growth simply to stay alive (as you mention)? Do they morph into a more traditional charitable NGO? Do they end up as a political party, or a multinational coproration? Or something completely different? Why aren't they moving to more of a PBS model where they operate entirely off of investment returns?
It's going to be a fascinating story. We make a mistake by assuming that they are in complete control over how this thing plays out. In my mind this has much more to do with the internet and technology in general than Wikipedia in particular.
1. They put up a temporary site notice asking for donations. They don't advertise on the project, and their sole source of funding is though donations. Very demanding.
2. What questions, specifically, does the article raise in your mind? Note - I say "questions", and not vague and ill formulated doubts.
It's just plain obnoxious IMHO - also, what for have cookies been invented?
If i click the ad/begging/whatever away, you're not increasing your chances for me to donate when it pops up again whenever i come back to WP - you're achieving the exact opposite..
Orlowski, again, doesn't name anyone. Lazy/deceptive journalism.
A "Wikipedia that allows everything". Try it. It'd turn to shit really quickly.
People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. Deleting it is a service to the reader in the same way anti-spam filters are to email users.
Articles need to be maintained. To be useful for readers, they have to be reasonably accurate, and in Wikipedia-land, we base accuracy on external sources. And if there aren't any external sources, how the hell can we even try and be accurate?
Fortunately, there is a solution: the rest of the web. Wikipedia has a constrained mission, namely the production of an encyclopedia. Outside Wikipedia, there is a big wide web where you can do whatever you like. Wikis that have explicit points of view, that are focussed on specific topics... all that kind of stuff.
The most common complaint I've heard was rather different: nobody questioned that some pruning is necessary but complained that the standards were incredibly arbitrary and niche interests like anime characters or minor porn stars frequently made the cut while e.g. academics were deleted because they didn't have a mainstream book, New Yorker article, etc. and the deletionist cadre wasn't interested in widely-cited papers, broad recognition within a particular field, etc.
Jason Scott also highlighted a similar problem in http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826 noting that the question again has never been quality but a very small number of people deciding a topic wasn't of interest to anyone else despite demonstrated activity.
Attempting to portray this as a question of spam control or lack of external sources is either uninformed or whitewashing.
The standards aren't that arbitrary: for an article to exist, there needs to be significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.
Some statistics would be interesting, though. I would imagine online sources are more common in articles on recent events, and in articles on popular culture. In the area I mainly edit in (pre-20th-century history) it's almost entirely books and journal articles.
"If Deltionists can't cull at their whim, WP will simply end up as a pile of rubbish!"
Junk is typically not that hard to find and cull, it's the actual content that gets removed, and the absurd politics behind it, that will probably bring about the end of WP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
I'd love to know which of these deletions are bringing about the end of Wikipedia.
Citation needed.
I don't understand why the developers resort to an irritating method for getting things reviewed - find the right community, know the right people, go to their court and appeal to their higher order with wonderful pitches about what should be done. There has to be a better way of dealing with things.
Wikipedia hit a sweetspot of lots of people entering lots of information which caused it to grow rapidly.
Early deletionism and care about what could be added meant that "Random Article" was a useful link - you'd learn interesting and useful stuff from clicking it. Now, not so much. There's just so much in Wikipedia that 'Random Article" will take you to some malformed stub about a teeny tiny little thing.
Today there's a weird mix of deletionism and inclusionism. It's luck and politics if the subject you're interested in is targetted by deletionists / inclusionists. (Note that I take no sides here. Inclusionism can be just as harmful for a good Wikipedia project as deletionism.
One thing I'd like to see Wikipedia try to do better is "A lead paragraph that anyone can understand". (Perhaps linked with better efforts for Simple English Wikipedia.) Unfortunately lead paragraphs are hotly contested and thus often pretty poor.
Is it not a common pattern for any company? They start small and innocent, with high moral values, impatient to take down the big nasty corporation. And soon enough, if successful, they fall pray to the fate of their past nemesis.
I think it is inevitable to turn evil at a certain threshold of growth. This is when moral values shift towards maximization of profit. And as company grows further and gains more social importance, it is a matter of time when it faces politics.
And if one's really lucky, it can grow to a point when it's too big to fail :)
How is covering Festivalsommer 2013 "highly questionable"? Thats a clever way do things!
Getting rights for pictures of artists is a long and messy process, so you best take them yourself and make sure that you are an accredited journalist, so you are actually allowed to publish them. For many german artists, there are no pictures at all. The project has already been tried on one festival last year (Wacken 2012) and they try to cover 30 festivals. Expecting 50 Bands per festival, this potentially yields 1500 pictures (more or less). For that, 18000 is a _steal_, especially expecting that volunteers provide their own equipment.
So, tl;dr: Wikipedia is more than a website, it is also a foundation[1] that tries to improve all aspects of the service in clever ways. This costs money as well.
[1] Actually, more then one, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. is something completely different. Another thing the Article misses: Wikimedia Deutschland has its own budget.
If you click through, for example in Germany, you get a pretty detailed explanation of where your money goes:
https://spenden.wikimedia.de/spenden/Ihre_Spende_wirkt
The largest part: support for volunteers. Isn't that what Wikipedia is all about?
That's the heart of the issue, right? Is the Wikimedia Foundation just supposed to run a website that is edited by volunteers, or is it supposed to also do other things that further the same goals as the actual Wikipedia? The foundation itself has the latter viewpoint, while I expect most people donating are just donating to pay for the former.
Please put numbers on the table, because I expect "most people" to be fully aware of how that non-profit thing works.
People also want more frequent and better database dumps, scaling to account for more traffic and improve reliability, worldwide mirroring of the database servers to reduce latency across the world, a replacement of the increasingly crufty template language, etc., etc. All reasonable requests, but they require a staff of developers and sysadmins to implement.
So the angle of advertisement may be improvable, but I still think that it is worthwile to fund all their other projects through donations.
The evidence appears to be against you on this claim.
Then there is a whole different issue of prioritizing resources while you get into projects like that. Why rock festivals? Why not illustrating Polka performers, or wurst wrappings, or carriages of subway park in Nuremberg? (Rhetorical, we all know rock festivals are fun)
Please read through the linked statement in the article, there is actually a long text attached.
And yes, you have to prioritize. One of the factors is actual volunteers. There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? Because Polka should be covered as well?
The article calls this "highly questionable". No, its a thought out decision that went through multiple levels of review.
Isn't the point - in part at least - that you aren't letting them do stuff they volunteer for but are paying someone else to do it. And that the payments to some editors or content providers automatically adds a political/social bias by favouring rock concerts over other performing arts (say).
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer_Diskussio...
(in german, obviously)
My point was that amateur photography doesn't cost on €12 a pop today, if only due to sheer abundance of imagery.
> There are people that volunteer for rock festivals and did a prototype that was well received. So why not let them do stuff that they volunteer for? Because Polka should be covered as well?
This is not someone's private project we're talking about, but resources contributed by people. These are not their money, they don't get to decide. I clearly don't give a damn about Polka either, but I'm sure there are tons of places in Wikipedia where investment would make more sense.
Thats where you have it wrong. Once you donated the money, it is theirs and they can use it at their discretion, as long as you haven't stated what the money is specifically for and the use isn't fraudulent. Yes, they can even spend it on beer to improve employee morale and they certainly do from time to time.
In Britain, for instance, most of the Wikimedia partnerships I've been involved in have had no cost to the chapter beyond a low-cost train fare and a few sandwiches. A lot of the cost is shared with the organisations we are partnering with. There are hundreds of organisations that want to work with Wikimedia, and it's usually of the "spend a few quid on sandwiches" variety.
The idea that people are getting rich off Wikimedia chapter outreach type work is ludicrous. If I want to get rich, well, my consulting day rate is a hell of a lot more than the cost of a sandwich and a train fare.
A clever way of doing it would be to ask people who are already attending the concerts to submit their photos. Or, you know, asking the bands themselves.
Hiring somebody, buying them a camera, sending them to the concert to take photos is what I would classify as the least cleaver way of solving the problem.
The problem is that if you are not accredited to concerts, picture rights are very messy. Most of the time, concert entry with proper camera equipment is not allowed or - by buying a ticket - you waive rights to the picture. The easiest way to get usable pictures at concerts is to get accredited as a photographer. Also, bands of note and their labels usually don't provide pictures with open licensing as requested by wikimedia commons. The same goes for accredited photographers already present at the concert.
Please click through to the discussion of the project, all this was discussed before the grant was given. The inability to gather usable media is the core of the funding request.
This is what irritates me about Orlowski. The community debated (extensively) what they want to do, and some "journalist" from the peanut gallery comes in sniping at the good work of others. Orlowski is a disgrace.
The man has an axe to grind. Not sure why, but just bear that in mind when you read his articles.
He's like one of those unmarried aunts who won't stop gossiping on other people's relationships because they don't have a life of their own.
He's basically a sort of troll, AFAICT.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/17/twestival-c...
One of these days, I'd be interested in finding out just what it is that makes The Register hate Wikipedia so much. The kind of vitriol you see from them is usually only matched by the Wikipedia Review, which leads me to believe that there's a jilted ex-editor somewhere on their staff whose mission is to expose the nasty, evil, free and open source encyclopedia to the world.
"That article is typical of The Register - typical nonsense. The number of falsehoods in it is substantial, so in the interests of time, I will cover just a few of the highlights.
1. "The vast potential for advertising attracted venture capital firm Elevation Partners (whose investors include Bono from U2) to court Wikipedia" - at no point in our conversations with Elevation was there ever a suggestion that Wikipedia should take advertising. Indeed, Roger McNamee was quite adamant that Wikipedia should not do that.
2. "Bono also urged Wales to drop the volunteers and hire professionals instead." This is absolutely and utterly false. Bono has never suggested any such thing nor anything even remotely resembling it. He's always been in awe of the community and how it all works.
The Wikimedia Foundation (and associated chapters) are incredibly transparent about our spending, hiring policies and practices, etc. The idea that the Foundation should restrict itself to the tiniest possible budget just to keep the site running is frankly idiotic.
And the idea that the Foundation has steadily increased our reserve position is bad is also idiotic. There can be such a thing as having too large a reserve, but we aren't close to that level yet. One think we know our donors are interested in (because of their response to banner messaging) is that we keep Wikipedia safe - and that means, in part, being fiscally responsible and building up a cushion for the future."
And they sent some people on a vacation with a work background, and printed business cards? Is it not allowed to throw parties for staff of charities? So why not work related vacations?
Very shocking...
Every organisation is trying to grow and for that it's understandable that a non-profit will try to secure more funds.
Yes wikipedia is becoming more than just an online encyclopedia, because it NEEDS to.
A) forgets to mention the implications SOPA had on Wikipedia.org B) Does the author confuse how the product (wiki) works - volunteers contribute for free- and the fact people employed by a charitable organization still get paid? C) The author "forgets" to mention that person worked at WMF only for 6 months instead of making it sound that person still works there. And what's the entire point of this? WMF is corrupt and hence money disappears? I'll get back to this later. D) "open to the charge" ? Ridiculous, anything can be left open to any charge; the question whether there's a substantial reasoning and/or proof for such charge(which are >completely< lacking here) is a whole another matter.
Now, let's look at the main (and only) statement of the article - WMF is awash with money and does not need donations to operate. "operate" is key. If the idea is to keep paying electricity, servers and maintenance, then yes, the author is right. This can be inferred from the stat he gives about WMF having only 3 employees in 2007 and operating with $3m. (Of course, ignoring growth in usage and costs)
But why should that be the goal of the fundraiser? Should it not aim to make Wikipedia.org the product we need it to be? Hence all the money spent on improving editing tools (yes, even if that means paying a research grant, what's wrong with that?), improving the community and especially reversing the trend of less and less people contributing to the wiki? These essentially are maintenance costs of the main product, even if the bits themselves are new development. Look at the projected staff growth for next year in [1]. Almost all of the jobs are software/system engineer jobs.
And the bit about the lobbyist is hilarious! I'm actually surprised they didn't have one until this year (or maybe I'm misreading).
The facts in the article about how some of the raised money has been spent indeed raises questions about the WMF's efficiency (and as Argorak points out[2], even those aren't definitive). But that's about it. Claiming that the foundation is "awash" with money and no donations are needed is a very large leap. It currently has $27.7m in reserve. According to WMF's strategic plan [1], this can last the foundation for less than a year. In other words, every year the money raised are extending the life of the foundation by 1 year. I find this very close to what the fund raising message on Wikipedia.org conveys.
edit: formatting
[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/4f/2012-1...
WMF have in the past said that they keep about six months of cash in reserve. And have for a few years now. Orlowski and some of the troll brigade get very antsy about this. I think it is... sound financial planning.
I don't know about you, but having a cash reserve is kind of a useful selling point if you are trying to hire programmers and engineers. "We're not suddenly going to go bankrupt overnight and leave you in the lurch" is something you actually need to be able to tell prospective employees if they've got families and mortgages and so on.
As a Wikipedia admin and volunteer, I'm actually mostly okay with how the Foundation operates. Some of the local chapters are probably a bit too bloated but the Foundation itself, I'm broadly okay with.
Six months of cash to cover all expenses is a selling point of Wikipedia, not a detraction. I want to donate to and work for financially prudent non-profits. If anything, I'd like to see their cash reserves upped to more like a year or so.
On neutral topics The Register can be fun and even informative, but when it comes to Things They Hateses, no rumor is too unsubstantiated, no conclusion too tenuous, and no argument too bizarre to be crammed together haphazardly into a nasty little ball of hate and called "an article."
They Hateses It, and It They Hateses, and that's good enough for them.
Seems ridiculous - very much a biased piece against Wikipedia, not well researched, and not particularly cogent.
The improvement from one star to four on the efficiency-as-a-charity thing and the innovative things they're doing with the money led me to have a more positive impression of wikipedia at the end of the article than I did beforehand; hopefully a decent percentage of readers will feel the same way.
His previous main argument against wikipedia was that anyone who uses it and supports it is advocating pedophilia.
Indeed when i , as eloquently could, disagreed with him in an email, he decided to publish snippets from my mail, with my name and email address on the reg. I had to contact the editor to get him to remove it and apologise for misrepresenting my remarks.
Feed not ye the troll.
1. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-Oct...
I realise he's a journalist and so sells the copyright to his own work, but he's so aggressive about it I always assume there's something else going on, like some weird religious or political affiliation? Anyone?
Dominic was a source for his piece railing against the "Don't break the internet" slogan [1].
I wouldn't really consider any of these Orlowski pieces journalism. He's clearly very close to certain industries (Content and Nuclear for instance) and seems to just write hit pieces for the industries he favours, relying on some intellectual sleight-of-hand and snark to woo readers to an industry point of view.
I suppose The Register is a channel to a particular educated, technical demographic and Orlowski uses his influece to try to shape the opinions of that demographic.
I've no idea whether he gets paid via other channels for his strident advocacy, and would actually prefer that it was a situation where Hanlon's razor is in play, because most of what he writes is ridiculous.
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/09/breaking_the_interne...
I feel there are enough music and politician articles already on Wikipedia. The fringe articles are what would drive more participants to WP, were they not deleted.
The Privacy Policy is pretty strong on things like that: we don't set cookies unless there's a need to. Fortunately, you just click the 'X' button in the top-right hand corner and the banner will go away for the rest of the fundraiser... whether you've donated or not.
In fact, I think if they had become a for-profit, they could have innovated more than they do as a non-profit. Quora and StackExchange show you can use user-contributed content in a balanced, but for-profit way. Imagine if Google had become a non-profit dedicated to an open search. We wouldn't have Gmail, Android or self-driving cars...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/c0/Form_...
Additional financial reports can be found here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2012....
Make it sound like a small org: "we have only 150 staff" ...
Lead with the necessary hosting costs, even if stuff like "programs" is where the money is being spent: "have costs like any other top site: servers, power, rent, programs, staff, and legal help"
Imply the whole project is on shaky ground: "take one minute to keep it online another year"
Bless.
As for the people editing wikipedia - its similar to facebook users adding their "data" and Mark profiting from it all. Why should this be an exception?
He basically says it's dirt cheap to host and operate and that it's one of the best things about it.
At the time of the video their bandwidth costs per month was just 5000$ and one paid programmer.
Aka you don't need millions to run it. So I was a little baffled when I saw his first big campaign to raise money.
It's 2012 and "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that."
Probably there are some stuff ups. It's a non-profit. The business cards issue sounds like one of those. That's something that can happen with any organization, so not sure if that's enough to see some sort of nefarious scheme conning people out of their money...
Of all the issues that Orlowski could nit-pick on, he chose the most ridiculous. There's nothing to see here, just a bunch of assertions with no evidence or even earth shattering revelations.
Frankly, the article is a hatchet job. Bravo El Reg, a quality publication!
So, ignoring that article: You have some knowledge of Wikimedia, and Wikipedia, and the foundation. What problems do you think those projects have, and how could they overcome those problems?
I ask in the spirit of learning, not bashing.
The few issues I did have were based on unsubstantiated rumour, so I'm not about to repeat them here, suffice to say that those perceived or real issues were cleaned up a long time ago.
One could just post a link to the article and ask his opinion. I'm sure he would respond.
1. http://thomashawk.com/2005/11/andrew-orlowski-and-register-b...
His response:
That article is typical of The Register - typical nonsense. The number of falsehoods in it is substantial, so in the interests of time, I will cover just a few of the highlights.
1. "The vast potential for advertising attracted venture capital firm Elevation Partners (whose investors include Bono from U2) to court Wikipedia" - at no point in our conversations with Elevation was there ever a suggestion that Wikipedia should take advertising. Indeed, Roger McNamee was quite adamant that Wikipedia should not do that.
2. "Bono also urged Wales to drop the volunteers and hire professionals instead." This is absolutely and utterly false. Bono has never suggested any such thing nor anything even remotely resembling it. He's always been in awe of the community and how it all works.
The Wikimedia Foundation (and associated chapters) are incredibly transparent about our spending, hiring policies and practices, etc. The idea that the Foundation should restrict itself to the tiniest possible budget just to keep the site running is frankly idiotic.
And the idea that the Foundation has steadily increased our reserve position is bad is also idiotic. There can be such a thing as having too large a reserve, but we aren't close to that level yet. One think we know our donors are interested in (because of their response to banner messaging) is that we keep Wikipedia safe - and that means, in part, being fiscally responsible and building up a cushion for the future.
It's mostly just called "Expenses" and don't cover actual server operating costs specifically, if that's what you're looking for.
I (personally) price goods and services by the value they offer me, and not the cost of providing said goods and services.
http://www.quora.com/Jimmy-Wales-1/How-does-Jimmy-Wales-make...
http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/wikipedia-head-accused-of...
And there are so many unhappy-family moments with chapter politics, that if there were any good reason to think Jimmy wasn't keeping his word, that would get leaked.
All of that existed when he was doing this in the first place. I didn't say he was still abusing expenses, I am asking if there is any evidence to support his claim that he no longer has any expenses paid for at all. I can not find any auditors or board members supporting that claim.
Right, which is why claiming auditors, etc support the claim is farcical. Wikimedia financials only say "salaries" and "expenses", it isn't broken down per person.
>But can you see any auditors or board members denying the claim?
I don't know that they are even aware of the claim.
For instance, while most of our 10-person Board (who all volunteer our time) have travel and lodging for Board meetings reimbursed, he arranges his own.
To the contrary, he promotes WMF fundraising, and encourages groups to which he speaks to donate or provide in-kind support to the WMF.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=File:2012-...
For example, on pp. 54-58, we see that their 2012-2013 plan expects to spend around $42 million, of which about $17.5 million goes to "Engineering". The largest area within engineering, about $6 million, is "Core Site Ops". The plan is for staffing to rise from 119 to 174 people over the year of the plan.
Really, that's all you get from it: more work and more drama.
Everyone else sees Wikipedia administrators as supreme overlords when in fact they are basically janitors.