
Wikipedia doesn't need your money - iProject
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia_chugging/
======
DanielBMarkham
Yes, it's a hit piece, but that doesn't mean that the author doesn't raise
some good questions.

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)

~~~
chris_wot
Demanding? Questions to answer?

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.

~~~
smackfu
The question it raises in my mind is how much of my donation is going to fund
the servers and bandwidth and what they are always asking for money for, and
how much is going to other things that I would not agree are worthy of my
charity dollars.

~~~
kybernetikos
Last time I looked at their finances it was about 50% went to fund servers,
bandwidth and engineering in general. Now I'm sure that they do need to spend
more than that, but I found that proportion different to what I had expected
and it discouraged me from donating.

------
Argorak
Just one short detail to show how ridiculous and picking on details this
article is:

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.

~~~
revelation
Thats exactly the point why people are reluctant to donate. The budget for
running Wikipedia the website is rapidly approaching single digit percentages
while the foundation is hiring at startup rate.

~~~
_delirium
A lot of those people are doing things like working on software and doing
DevOps, which seems like "running Wikipedia the website to me". People
complain that MediaWiki needs a visual editor that's easier for people to use,
so Wikimedia hired developers who are working on that. That's pretty directly
related to operational expenses, no?

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.

------
chris_wot
Ah, Andrew Orlowski. When I was administrator, at around the time that I
started the Admin's Noticeboard and maintained the Wikipedia In the News
section of the site (thank you Google News!), I noticed that he attacked
Wikipedia on an almost weekly basis.

The man has an axe to grind. Not sure why, but just bear that in mind when you
read his articles.

~~~
tomp
What's wrong with that? As long as he's got arguments, there's nothing wrong
with him focusing on an issue that he deems significant and educating people
about the issue.

~~~
fatbird
He's a British Drudge for the technology world. He's an inaccurate, rumour-
mongering, slanderous/libelous troll. He's not someone with a pet issue
offering useful critique, he's a vicious little ankle-biter who wants everyone
else to hate what he hates because it drives traffic to his site.

~~~
chris_wot
Case in point: he flamed Charity: water for having the temerity to promote an
event around twitter. The horror! This actually got a write up from Paul Carr
in The Guardian.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/17/twestival-c...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/17/twestival-
charity-trolls)

------
redthrowaway
So, in other 2005 news, The Register still hates Wikipedia. Honestly, I just
don't get it. Sure, the culture can be off-putting. Sure, the donation drives
can get annoying. But it's still a massive, eminently useful site run on a
shoestring budget. The constant intimation that editors should be paid, a
rather ridiculous assertion given the realities of open source communities,
gives this piece the air of someone's personal gripe. It really does seem like
someone set out to write a hit piece, then decided after what details to
cherry pick in order to make it as hitty as possible.

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.

~~~
rtkwe
$51 million isn't really a shoestring budget any way you cut it.

~~~
redthrowaway
Wikipedia serves more traffic than Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, or eBay. What's
their budget?

------
Jagat
Jimmy Wales' response on Quora <http://qr.ae/1A4iQ>

"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."

------
Tichy
They hired a lobbyist? That means they are evil, right? What would they need a
lobbyist for, it's not as if freedom of information on the internet is under
any threats at all? Nothing to see here, move along.

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...

------
zimbatm
Seriously ? Merely clogging a bunch of maybe facts together doesn't make an
evidence.

Every organisation is trying to grow and for that it's understandable that a
non-profit will try to secure more funds.

------
foobert
Dear smart people, stop upvoting sensationalist articles like this. I know
that you can read through it and understand it lacks real arguements. Dumb
people are not actually reading it, they're just reading the headline and
first paragraph and thinking 'IT MUST BE TRUE'.

Yes wikipedia is becoming more than just an online encyclopedia, because it
NEEDS to.

------
midko
The article reads as if it was published in a tabloid, to put it mildly.
Flashy headline, then looses the focus of the headline and glues together
separate paragraphs some of which seem far from the topic because there's no
point being made with them, like the paragraphs about WMF not listing all its
donations anymore and the decision not to show ads. In fact, there are very
little assertions made. Instead, the author seems to hope that by throwing
some statements, references and numbers, the readers would be impressed enough
and draw conclusions. Statements like the ones below are all stated without
ANY conclusion or are a conclusion on it's own but with no arguments preceding
it: A) _"Earlier this year Wikipedia attracted criticism for its new-found
enthusiasm for political campaigning - not a traditional activity for
encyclopedias, where fairness and objectivity is part of the "brand"."_ , B)
_"All this has been met with dismay by the loyal enthusiasts who do all the
hard work of keeping the project afloat by editing and contributing words -
and who still aren't paid. For the first time, Wikipedians are beginning to
examine the cash awards - and are making some interesting discoveries."_ \+
subsequently quoting the salary of the WMF's director (again, with no point
made), C) _"The Wikimedia Foundation hired a convicted felon as its chief
operating officer to look after its books while on she was on parole. The
executive's convictions included cheque fraud and unlawfully wounding her
boyfriend with a gunshot to the chest."_ , D) _"The substantial contributions
from Google leave the foundation open to the charge that it's lobbying for the
agenda of large corporations by proxy."_

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...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/4f/2012-13_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf)

[2]<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4947370>

~~~
tommorris
So, one thing that always gets brought up is "yeah, but what about those
reserves?"

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.

~~~
pwthornton
As someone who has worked in the non-profit sector for several years, having a
cash reserve is a best practice. Six months is on the smaller end. If you
don't have cash reserves and fund raising falls short, you have to start
laying people off, cutting programs, turning off servers, etc. Or if the
global economy tanks and people stop donating, your whole non-profit may be in
trouble.

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.

~~~
tommorris
Six months was the last time I attended a fundraising discussion meeting. I
think that there may be long-term plans to try and keep a bigger cash reserve.
It's what happens when non-profits grow up.

------
drcongo
Andrew Orlowski alert!

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Does anyone know why he's got such a bee in his bonnet about anything that
works against the continued expansion of copyright?

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?

~~~
justsee
He seems close to Dominic Young, previously News International’s director of
strategy and product development, who now runs <http://copyrightblog.co.uk/>
(intellectual platform or industry mouthpiece - you decide).

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...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/09/breaking_the_internet_no_property_no_privacy/)

------
luckystarr
I'd rather they use my money to buy themselves more hard drive so they
wouldn't have to delete as many articles.

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.

------
bane
I'd consider donating when they get serious about the deletionist problem and
stop pretending that the drop off in new contributions has anything to do with
the absurd notion that wikipedia is exhausting the depth and breadth of human
knowledge.

------
gcmartinelli
Wikipedia gives me so much value US$50/year is cheap. I wouldn't mind if
people there where getting rich building it. Although Corporate/Organizational
transparency is always a good thing, and should be demanded.

------
markdhansen
I donated, yet I still see the annoying banner. How do I make it go away?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
That's my top pet peeve. Pay and still see ads? Removes a major incentive. I
rememer long ago RealAudio introduced a constantly-rotating ad in their
player. Paid for it -the ads remained! Had to ask for my money back,
deinstall, never used it again.

~~~
tommorris
So, there's a reason for it. Namely, the way to implement that would require
setting a cookie to say you've donated. And it'd be a cross-site cookie
(because the payment is done on the Foundation site, not on Wikipedia).

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.

~~~
Jtsummers
Can the donations be tied to a user account? What prevents checking 'user
donated within 6 months'? (Assuming people can and do provide the information
and remain logged in)

~~~
brokenparser
The donation page is on wikimedia.org and there's no mechanism to transfer
your cookie, so good luck with that.

------
arikrak
I really think they should have taken the advertising route. A couple of
google ads would have been enough to fund the site, and they would be less of
a nuisance than they're fundraising ads.

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...

~~~
glomph
If they had goole adverts they would have to follow google content guidelines.
That would be awful.

------
greenyoda
You can see Wikimedia Foundation's latest IRS Form 990, which includes
information about their revenues, expenses and salaries of key employees,
here:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/c0/Form_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/c/c0/Form_990_-_FY_10-11_-_Public.pdf)

Additional financial reports can be found here:

[https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2012....](https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2012.E2.80.932013_fiscal_year)

------
smackfu
They sure are good at crafting that advertising message to make it sound like
they are in dire straits to even pay the hosting bills.

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"

------
esteer
Here's the response from Jimmy Wales [http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-
Wikipedia-collecting-more-...](http://www.quora.com/Wikipedia/Is-Wikipedia-
collecting-more-money-than-required)

------
_quasimodo
Wikipedia should allow per project/task funding, so you could dedicate your
money to infrastructure, lobbying, single research projects or any combination
of those.

~~~
gwern
Charities hate this. Ringfencing costs them a ton of money to track, exposes
them to legal liabilities, does little good, is often entirely meaningless
given the fungibility of money, and reduces flexibility. The way I put it
would be this: if you don't trust them to spend your money well, why do you
trust them to spend a restricted donation? Shouldn't you find a charity you do
trust? There's so many out there, after all.

------
edyang
If they ask for donations, it seems fair to know what their operating costs
are as others have pointed out. As a point of reference, all of the non
profits I donate to have annual reports that specify exactly where the monies
go, and are audited. People will indeed donate if they believe the money is
going to a good cause and there's adequate transparency. See Kiva.org and the
job they've done in that area.

~~~
absconditus
Wikimedia provides all of this. See if you can spot it hidden on this page:

<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home>

~~~
edyang
lol epic fail for me. Thanks for that! Funny, I usually enter Wikipedia from
search engines...

------
yarrel
Ah, Orlowski. He's still going?

Bless.

------
infoseckid
"You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villan" -- given the
contribution wikipedia has made to the world, personally I am ok paying
$100/yr to fund their beer.

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?

------
spobo
Just check his TED talk. <http://blog.ted.com/2006/08/29/jimmy_wales_on/>

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.

~~~
chris_wot
That was a talk from 7 years ago. Wikipedia experienced explosive growth at
around that time, and the WMF (the organisation you donate to) have expanded
their remit since then.

------
wilfra
Jimmy Wales is very active on Quora and answers pretty much any question with
his name in it (and it's "free" to ask him to answer) if anybody cares to post
this. I was going to, but since the comments here seem to say the article is
without merit, I wont.

~~~
chris_wot
I'm curious as to what questions it actually raises? There was, a long time
ago, someone who has now left as COO. The WMF (which the article consistently
calls "Wikipedia") runs quite an open operation. Sue Gardener put in excellent
processes into place and the organization is quite a tight ship by all
accounts.

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!

~~~
DanBC
I hate the Register and I haven't read the article.

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.

~~~
chris_wot
To be honest, it's been a very long time since I was an active participant on
Wikipedia. The issues I had we're always with Wikipedia, and almost never the
regulars (except Giano, who I notice has now left the project). I never had an
issue with anyone from the WMF, they were always very professional.

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.

------
thoughtcriminal
I donated, but yeah, I'd like to know what the operating costs are.

~~~
shrikant
I donated as well (and got a bunch of others to do so, without any guilt
tripping), but I don't really care what the operating costs are.

I (personally) price goods and services by the value they offer me, and not
the cost of providing said goods and services.

~~~
smackfu
So if it turns out Jimmy Wales always flies first class... still don't care?

~~~
tommorris
Jimmy doesn't take any expenses from the Foundation. He pays his own way with
things like flights and hotels even when he's on Wikipedia business.

~~~
smackfu
It was just an example. It's easy to say "I don't care about what they spend
their money on if I'm getting value" if they are reasonable about spending the
money. But it's very easy for foundations to start spending a lot of money in
ways that aren't very key to their mission.

~~~
teeja
Speaking as a long-time WP editor, if the Foundation decided to fly Wales
around First Class, that sure wouldn't bother me at all. The man has devoted
himself to a widely-recognized and ever-more-succesful project ... I think he
deserves some perks. (A helluva lot more savory than W's frequent flights to
'cut brush' on his 'ranch'.) He's the man who's got to answer the world's
questions, after all (and who was, I'll add, right about a LOT of stuff).

------
michaelochurch
An easy way to monetize would be to capitalize on the black market for
admin/sysop accounts. I bet politicians and corporate executives would pay for
a properly leveled-up account.

~~~
philwelch
Trust me, it really wouldn't be worthwhile.

~~~
chris_wot
Not to mention they would be quickly exposed.

------
IheartApplesDix
I got downvoted to hell for saying this is another ycombinator thread two days
ago... I guess I jumped out in front of the bandwagon instead of on to it.

------
pebb
I'll donate if they promise to never revert my edits again.

