
Wikipedia Raises $16 Million to Remain Ad-Free - rwwmike
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_raises_16_million_to_remain_ad-free.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d1fa1b01149c6b1%2C0
======
clemesha
Why are people so consistently negative about Wikipedia?

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.

~~~
cookiecaper
I don't trust Wales to run the organization effectively. I think that things
are just going to get worse for Wikimedia as they get more money. My opinion
on Wales is not high generally and Wikipedia has implemented some policies
that I find rather undesirable in the recent years. Wikipedia has also done
little to really actively improve the encyclopedia; they make all the wrong
organizational changes, which in general tend to further stupid political
bickering and turf wars, and these are the biggest problems to successful
Wikipedia editing. Good governance would move to minimize these so that
editing remains (or now, becomes) reasonable for people who don't have time to
sit around for six hours a day and justify every change they make over and
over again until the other guys get sick of it.

What it comes down to is that Wikipedia is really one great big edit war,
though they'll never admit it.

~~~
zmmz
Not trying to provoke you or anything, but as I am somebody who has not given
this topic much thought I would be curious to hear of your concrete examples
and arguments about bad policies?

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?

~~~
cookiecaper
I don't remember them all anymore -- I keep only loose tabs on Wikipedia these
days. I was a very active editor and a founding member of a WikiProject in the
2004-2005 timeframe. I thought the blanket removal of most fair use images and
the policy banning them was inappropriate and one of the least pragmatic
things from an editorial quality perspective that could have been done.

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.

~~~
tptacek
You've written a lot of gut-check stuff here about why you distrust Wales, and
I respect that. But you really only made two substantive criticisms of the
project's actual work:

* 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.

------
Ryan_IRL
I'm aware it is temporary, but I'm surely not the only one thinking that
banner is more annoying than the occasional ad would have been.

~~~
chaosmachine
They could definitely make a killing with just a single AdSense block at the
bottom of every article. Maybe even just the top 1000 articles.

Instead, we get places like Answers.com mass-duplicating Wikipedia content and
slapping big image ads on it.

~~~
_delirium
One of the things people are worried about with that it would allow something
close to paid additions/rebuttals to Wikipedia articles, at least if ad buyers
were good enough at the AdSense targeting. The goal is to have a neutral
article that covers all viewpoints fairly, but then you'd have this little box
where whoever pays the most money would get the opportunity to insert a link
to _their_ take on the subject.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Exactly. Or to put a finer point on it: there becomes a much greater pressure
to insert ads _as content_.

Why pay for an ad sense spot if you can just insert your own ad into the
relevant wiki article?

~~~
jimmybot
So all the merchants that can't buy an ad aren't trying to subtly insert ads
as content currently? Advertisers only have one choice now--try to get a
mention, try to get a link, perhaps as a source--do whatever it takes to get
into the content of the 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.

------
StavrosK
Great, now how much more money do they need to buy the disk space necessary to
stop deletionism?

~~~
slig
All the editing history is archived, right?

~~~
kens
No, normal users cannot see deleted articles or their edit histories (which I
think is crazy). Only Wikipedia administrators can see this information.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Acces...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Access_to_deleted_pages)
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.

~~~
klipt
> Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other
> legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally
> viewed.

But if defamatory material is added to a popular article and reverted away,
doesn't it remain in the edit history forever?

~~~
bdonlan
I believe there are ways to hide portions of the edit history as well - they
usually don't bother to do this if it's only part of a larger article, but if
necessary, it can be done.

------
kprobst
I wasn't aware that not meeting that goal would result in slapping ads on
articles.

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.

~~~
checoivan
Or raising for the future instead of waiting for the imminent to happen,
running out of money, and act in desperation.

~~~
kprobst
That would be a good idea, but they seem to do the same thing every year.

~~~
nitrogen
Why change what works?

~~~
InclinedPlane
That's a pathology called "non event feedback", just because you've avoided
catastrophe with risky behavior in the past doesn't mean that the risk doesn't
exist, it just means you've gotten lucky.

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.

------
ck2
Is their budget public? I'd really like to see how you spend $16 million.

Is there actually paid staff/benefits? Because $16M is more hardware/bandwidth
than I can fathom.

~~~
citricsquid
<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget>

PDF for 2011:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf)
(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

~~~
ck2
Thanks! So they spent nearly $9M in salaries vs $2M for bandwidth, $1M in
travel expenses, $2M in office rent/furniture/meetings
[https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikime...](https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Ffoundation%2Fd%2Fdd%2F2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf&docid=a9195ac7cb3a86770a771ec7db3ac037&a=bi&pagenumber=44&w=972)

 _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*)
    

Direct link to pie chart as image (thanks to google)

[https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikime...](https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Ffoundation%2Fd%2Fdd%2F2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf&docid=a9195ac7cb3a86770a771ec7db3ac037&a=bi&pagenumber=24&w=972)

and the whole document in html/images

[https://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=http://u...](https://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf&pli=1)

~~~
InclinedPlane
This data is concerning to me, here's why:

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.

~~~
bdonlan
> 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).

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...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf))
you'll see their donations exceeded their planned amounts significantly, so
they're hiring more people to balance that out.

~~~
InclinedPlane
They could do what every other similar organization has done in the past,
create a trust fund to keep the organization running into the foreseeable
future without having to routinely solicit donations. Whether or not their
charter is set up correctly to allow that today is immaterial, they can found
on a new charter if necessary.

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?

~~~
eddieplan9
That reminds me two different attitudes towards life. If all you need to
support a good meaningful life is $100k, and somehow you can get $1M a year by
running a business, soliciting dontations or whatever, you could choose to get
$1M for year one, and continue with your lifestyle for another 9 years without
getting more money; or you could change how you spend your money, aim big
things and spend $1M all in year one. My zen master taught me to aim big. How
big an impact your life can make depends on how wise you spend your money and
also, equally important, how much you can spend.

------
solipsist
If someone was asked, _"Would your rather use a website that has ads or one
that has no ads?"_ , they would most likely choose the latter. However,
Wikipedia has shown the world something that no one would have expected; it
seems as if most people would rather have the ads given the circumstances.

~~~
philipn
Most people being commenters on HN? Or the 500,000 people who have donated to
Wikipedia?

~~~
Untitled
> Or the 500,000 people who have donated to Wikipedia?

How many of those that donated thought that the advertisements would disappear
after they gave money?

------
d2viant
I've always thought Google should just buy them. If you're going to index the
worlds information, this is a good start. Google has the resources and power
to make sure it remains alive and well.

~~~
coderdude
I don't think you deserved the many downvotes you received. It's not like you
were trolling. People here just downvote things they disagree with.
Personally, I think Google should donate a decent amount to WP because
Freebase relies on it. Without WP, Freebase would have been useless.
(Disclaimer: I have no idea if Google actually donated.)

~~~
gojomo
Google donated $2 million in early 2010:

[http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...](http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_announces_$2_million_grant_from_Google)

~~~
coderdude
Thanks for the link and the info. It would seem Google is on top of this
situation. :)

------
gopi
I don't understand why they are so adamant about ads... A small adsense block
(with 2 text ads) will cover all their expenses and more. It will not be
intrusive and useful to visitors in most situations (as their content is well
suited for a contextual ad system like adsense)...Also there is precedence in
non-profits doing this like firefox with their google search deal (which makes
them $100 million or so a year)

------
corin_
I'm now seeing 'If everyone reading this donated £5, our fundraiser would be
over today. Please donate to keep Wikipedia free.' banners.

If they've already hit the target, presumably they must have already set a new
target in order to make that statement?

------
known
Wiki is really worth $16 million.

~~~
carussell
It's called Wikipedia, FYI.

