
An urgent appeal from git-scm.com maintainer Scott Chacon - kneath
http://git-scm.com/appeal
======
jrockway
Man, people really hate that Wikipedia fund drive. It really worries me how
people have no trouble with ads blaring music and obscuring the text of pages
they are reading, or with advertisers dictating what content can and cannot be
published, but everyone gets super upset when the guy who started the website
puts his picture at the top and says, "hey guys, providing a free encyclopedia
costs money, mind chipping in $10?".

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.)

~~~
astrofinch
I wouldn't donate to Wikipedia because I don't think they spend the marginal
donation dollar very well. Here's a picture of the Wikimedia headquarters:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_Wikimedia_Foundation_O...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_Wikimedia_Foundation_Office_14.jpg)

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.

~~~
adambyrtek
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit with only 27 full-time employees[1]
(data for 2009) which runs, among others, the 7th most popular site on the
web[2], and provides the world with an amazing source of knowledge. Of course
the contents is provided by volunteers, but logistics of running a site and
community of this size are far from trivial. I think that they spend the money
wisely, so I donated myself and encourage you to do the same.

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.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation>

[2] <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org>

------
seiji
It's a joke parodying <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA032/en/US>

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.

~~~
klochner
Speaking of wikipedia, I'd be perfectly content if the "urgent appeal" banner
were replaced with an ad.

~~~
lambda
That would be horrible. Replacing it with an ad would mean that they are now
beholden to the advertiser, as opposed to being beholden to their donors.
Right now Wikipedia depends on their editors to provide content, and donors to
provide money. If instead they relied on advertisers to provide money, they
would lose an awful lot of credibility.

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?

~~~
gojomo
The problems you cite depend on the implementation. Wikipedia could require
ads to be unobtrusive, from a diverse set of advertisers, and placed via a
system (perhaps completely automated) that insulates from advertiser meddling
in content. And, anyone who's truly offended by ads could turn them off at
their option, just like the [X] on the campaign ad.

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?

~~~
sandal
Many of the things you describe here would make for a more palatable
experience on an ad-based website. But you completely miss the boat by
assuming that people 'fear' advertisement, some people just really dislike it
on principle. This is especially true when it comes to free culture projects
who wish to be self-sustainable and perhaps even feel as if their efforts are
validated a bit by the willingness of their users to support their project.

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.

------
schacon
Though nearly everybody seemed to get the joke, a few people didn't - one in
particular who seemed very upset about it, thinking that it was fraudulent in
some way. I was only planning on keeping it up for one day anyhow, so I've
taken the page and banner down. I thought it was an amusing parody, as did the
majority of people who gave me feedback on it, I'm sorry if you did not.

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).

~~~
spooneybarger
Everytime I see a 'how could people not get that it was a parody' posts or
commments, I wonder, really? How long have you been on the internet/lived in
this world. Of course plenty of people aren't going to get it. If you are
'surprised' by that you are either being disingenuous or have a highly
inflated idea of how critical most people are of what they read.

------
Udo
I think the banner asking for donations is just fine. However, I take issue
with two things:

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.

------
Groxx
Love the photo. What appears to be alcohol, an explosion in the background,
and he looks like he's saying something off-camera.

Twice.

------
ztan
My guess is that the floating head and staring contest with Jimmy Wales
banners finally got to him.

[http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTemplate/view&template=2010_JA1_Banner7_US)

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...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testing)

------
danielh
In case you wonder what the fuzz is about: the page has been changed in the
meantime.

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.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018992>

------
gnok
The footnote mentions this is a parody. And quote "Donations made will
actually go to the Git project under the Software Freedom Conservancy.".

------
js2
Background: [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-
control.git/16384...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-
control.git/163845/focus=163846)

------
bcl
They just joined the SFC - <http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/dec/16/git-
joins/>

------
ludwigvan
Awesome! Has a meme on this started yet?

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 :)

------
rohitarondekar
Not everybody can donate money. Is there any other way we can contribute?

------
mkramlich
Can someone tell me which link leads to their high-end brothel?

