

Wikimedia Foundation Raises $20 Million From 1 Million+ Donors - B-Scan
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/02/wikimedia-foundation-raises-20-million-from-1-million-donors/

======
talkingquickly
"Funds raised in this campaign will be used to .... provide legal defence for
the projects .... "

It depresses me that an institution such as Wikipedia which relatively
speaking achieves so much with so little money will have to spend what I
expect is a none trivial amount of its limited funds on legal defence.

~~~
tommorris
It's not actually that much. Most of it goes on technical: namely, servers and
developers. I think they currently have two people in legal, and something
like 50 in technical (development, ops etc.).

I'm an OTRS volunteer - that is someone who answers email sent to the
Foundation. A lot of the potential legal issues get resolved amicably by
volunteers before ever hitting the legal department.

An aside - one thing I've learned dealing with people making legal threats to
Wikipedia: it's astounding how even some of the biggest multinational
companies on the planet are completely clueless about copyright law.

~~~
neilk
And thank you for doing that work!

FYI, there are three FT legal now. There also are a number of legal interns at
any given time. I worked with one of them in 2011 on making Commons a little
more robust against potential lawsuits.

<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Legal>

------
neilk
Can I start the inevitable thread: "OMG why don't they use Google Ads. It
disturbs me that someone else is achieving such a high audience share, and is
so beloved by its users, and is not answering to a VC or advertiser. This
threatens my worldview, so as a valued member of the startuphackerseoblogging
community, I am going to suggest, _nay_ , insist they change business models."

~~~
edge17
For the scale on which wikipedia operates, it is dangerous to the
dissemination of knowledge for them to have a business model. I for one
applaud wikimedia for not going that route. Furthermore, the quality of the
content and the alignment of the motives would be greatly changed, and they
would lose the credibility that they have built since the project began. It's
certainly not a perfect source, but for better or worse, it has made an
enormous impact to the way research is done.

They create a much greater value for the world by remaining disentangled from
corporate reins. Open source will always be a 'bad business model' if you want
to call it a business model in the first place.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, that's also their explanation for focusing on diffuse small donors. It's
not _really_ strictly the case that Wikipedia is going to go offline if they
don't raise enough money--- for one thing, their actual core
servers/admins/bandwidth budget is much lower than the overall Foundation
budget (which includes a number of ambitious research/outreach/etc.
initiatives), and for another thing, companies like Google have offered to
donate bandwidth and servers. For a while they accepted some South Korean
servers/bandwidth in a Yahoo datacenter, but generally they prefer to remain
independent as Plan A.

~~~
neilk
This is correct. It's an encyclopedia with few personalization features, so
well over 90% of HTTP requests are served directly from cache.

It may not be easy to explain this in a banner ad, but the money is really
going to different efforts that are trying to expand / entrench / defend
Wikipedia in its adolescent phase.

Like: making operations run more smoothly, on more continents, and not require
the constant intervention of a few wizards; enabling a virtualization
framework which so more volunteers can work with ops or do wilder experiments
(the "labs" project); inroads into academia; improving automated testing;
expanding our ability to host multimedia; the GUI editor and usability
projects; or the Wikipedia Zero project, where we try to get the site
delivered to mobile devices in the developing world for free.

~~~
_delirium
I do like some of those, especially the technical improvements to things like
the editor interface, but as a long-time Wikipedian I confess I'm a little bit
skeptical of some of the larger ambitions. I think Wikipedia's competitive
advantage basically is writing an online, unencumbered encyclopedia, and
providing useful data export so others can reuse and adapt it.

When it gets into things like the Foundation itself improving education in the
third world, there are a lot of complexities where I don't think it really has
a competitive advantage over many of the other charities who have been working
on that problem for a long time. So if _I_ had my say (which I don't), I'd
focus more on making the data more easily exportable in various forms so third
parties can take on those missions, rather than Wikimedia itself becoming some
kind of global NGO working to bring knowledge to the developing world (a
mission that seems uncomfortably missionary / "white man's burden" ish to me
in the first place).

The situation has improved recently, but for years there was a bunch of hiring
and spending on ambitious projects, but what I see as a _core_ function of
Wikipedia, the database dumps, which give the free-as-in-freedom practical
effect (free licensing isn't that useful if you can't get the data) languished
in a pretty poor state (with no full-history dump for a long time), which
seems like misplaced priorities. Even today the dumps aren't all that user-
friendly, even for technically inclined researchers, let alone less
technically inclined adapters/remixers/reusers, and as far as I can tell,
improving data export isn't one of the top Foundation priorities.

~~~
neilk
I'm with you all the way on that one.

But as you know, MediaWiki's brand of wikitext is famously impossible to work
with.

So, while it may not seem that way, really, the most important thing we're
doing is redoing the parser and all the parsing infrastructure so it can
export in forms that people can actually do something with. So if someone else
wants to make the ultimate Wikipedia mobile app we won't have to be involved.
Our official reason for redoing the parser is to make the GUI editor more
possible, but IMO exporting is going to be the bigger application.

In the meantime though, I still think the WMF has a role to play, particularly
in making content available on mobile. Only this year, they finally got some
of that straightened out (previously there was an inadequate Ruby on Rails
proxy that was serving m.wikipedia.org).

As a technologist, it's easy for me to point fingers, and say that some of the
more ambitious stuff isn't warranted, or is too "soft", and we should focus on
other stuff. But I have to say, my mind was completely changed by seeing how
the academic outreach program worked out brilliantly. It will one day seem
weird to have done a research paper that was reviewed and read by only one
person.

(Similarly, the people who work on that stuff have no idea what the "tech
side" of the foundation are doing, in detail. Like if they ask when are they
going to be able to upload more than 100MB long videos, it's hard to explain
to them that we're undergoing a painful transition from NFS file storage to a
media abstraction layer with a Python-powered distributed-hash-table + object
storage server, and we're also making sure our new chunked uploading protocol
works.)

Anyway, it's a non-profit. These institutions are far from ideal and sometimes
end up doing strange things for reasons which don't make sense outside the
institutional context. The same things happen all the time at for-profits, but
you don't get to debate it as much. :)

------
TobbenTM
I wonder if they even noticed a bump in donations after they spoke out against
SOPA (with the reddit donation thread and all)

