My brain has re-wired itself to completely ignore advertising. Never occurred to me to donate until I read this post, because I just flatly ignore ads, even from nonprofits.
Just an observation about myself that might perhaps hold true for others.
Here's my question: what's wrong with advertising?
If users don't mind adverts on commercial sites that offer free content, why would they mind it on a not-for-profit site?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for donating to charities in general (and do, regularly), I'm all for donating to Wikipedia (and have done more than once), and I'm all for websites that allow people who donate to disable adverts. But despite having donated to Wikipedia, I'd have no problem with seeing adverts on every page (as long as they're reasonably subtle, and don't consist solely of the cheapest of the cheap adverts, such as "omg you won an ipod lol!!"). In fact, I think I'd prefer seeing normal adverts than the constant reminder that they want donations.
"No ads. No agenda. No strings attached."
Why does being a "community website" mean they shouldn't use advertising revenue to support their growth?
Because the community of contributors has on multiple occasions strongly objected to advertising, on several occasions resulting in fracturing.
In 2002 when the idea of banners ads was seriously raised the majority of the Spanish Wikipedia contributors forked and started Enciclopedia Libre, despite the fact that Wikipedia decided not to go ahead with adverts it took two years to attract enough contributors back to rival the forked site. That's not an experience the Wikipedia community want to repeat.
Back in 2004 I proposed that Wikipedia made opt-in ads so people who wanted to support Wikipedia by watching ads could do so, but there wasn't enough support for the idea to gain traction.
Because at times, the interests of advertisers can conflict with the interests of Wikipedia. And should that happen, Wikipedia's reputation and value becomes seriously undermined.
I consider it somewhat analog to BBC being funded through a license fee rather than commercial advertising - aka Sky (BSkyB, owned by Murdoch).
You raise an interesting question. I wonder if Wikipedia had steady advertising revenue, then would it have both resources and incentive to drive off many of the point-of-view pushers who now skew so many Wikipedia articles to fringe points of view? From the point of view of many onlookers, that could be either a feature or a bug. The Wikipedia projects worldwide have had a static number of active editors for the last few years
and I have to think that one thing that turns off conscientious editors who refer to reliable sources is drive-by POV-pushers who can edit more article text per day, because they don't bother looking up sources to verify their opinions.
But reasonable minds can differ both about this description of the problem, and about any proposed solution. So far Wikimedia Foundation still prefers the approach of seeking donations.
Among other reasons, because it may work. Should it make a load of money (and it isn't at all unlikely, given the traffic), you'll have a big pull to turn it into a commercial entity and maximize profits. And at the end of the day, what do you do with the money? Start paying contributors?
Free donation supported model works, so no reason to risk the change.
The fear might be that many Wikipedia contributors believe that advertisements are wrong and evil. Introducing ads might cause serious upheaval among contributors and corresponding public relations problems. (Think: Digg.)
After reading about the money they spend... no thanks. I'll find the link, but apparently they spend over $10,000,0000 a year and this year they're aiming for $25,000,000. That to me is just ever so slightly ridiculous.
Edit: To clarify, the issue I have is with the increase, not the costs for this year. They're going from 10m to 25m and I don't understand how, if there's an explanation somewhere please do link :-)
Given the scale of Wikipedia, the fact that they can run it on only $10M/year is rather impressive.
Glancing at the docs you reference, roughly $6M of their spending goes to straight operating expenses (servers, bandwidth, travel, etc). I don't think anyone would disagree that is completely reasonable for an organization Wikimedia's size with the amount of traffic they have (it seems quite lean, even compared to most startups).
The other big chunk ($3.5M) is salary for people.
There you have to take into account that they have ~70M unique users a month. Assuming $150K/engineer/year all told (office space, computers, salary, benefits, etc) and that all the salary were just going to engineering, that's only enough cash to hire about 23 engineers (or about 1 engineer for every 3M users). In practice, not all their employees are engineers, so it's probably closer to 5M users per engineer. As a point of comparison, Facebook brags about having only 1 engineer per million users.
Wikipedia is being laudably frugal and efficient. I can't imagine running a site their size with much fewer resources.
The top five spending increases for 2010-11 are: 1) An additional $3.8 million will be spent on technical operations. This will include funding to establish and maintain a new data centre, increased spending on bandwidth to support our growing readership, and five new positions supporting technical operations. 2) An additional $2.6 million will be spent on ten new (non-ops) technology positions such as a QA engineer and a community liasion position, annualization of salaries of existing tech positions including some positions that were previously paid under restricted grants as well as development of a database to track relationships with editors, readers, donors and others. 3) An additional $1.3 million will go towards administration supporting all Wikimedia Foundation activities. This will include rent for additional office space, plus nine new support positions to support the work of staff and community members. 4) An additional $1.1 million dollars will be spent on community outreach and volunteer convenings. In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been increasingly offering financial support for, and/or staged itself, volunteer convenings of various kinds, including for example the Berlin chapters/developer meetings, as well as paying some travel costs for volunteers, including more funding for Wikimania scholarships. We intend to do more of this in 2010-11 as key activities to grow and strengthen the movement. 5) In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to spend $400,000 on various forms of support for the chapters. This will include an expanded grants program for mission activities, staff positions supporting our chapters network, and a board-sponsored project designed to help the Wikimedia movement develop clarity around roles-and-responsibilities across the network.
How does it matter how much they're spending if they are indeed spending on something fruitful? It's not like they're wasting those $25m away. It's been properly invested in education. As you pointed out on those .pdf, they're transparent enough to make it clear what they're doing with the money. Specially on page 30, where they detail each top spending increase.
It's very clear from visiting their site and the sister sites, that they are indeed improving.
It's an important investment in education. For those of us who believe more investment in education is needed on a global level, but can't rely on your government for that. Donating to wikimedia is a great alternative.
You're not very specific or constructive in your complaint. I assume that money is spent freely serving encyclopaedic content to the masses via the web on a nearly incomprehensible scale, which I assume donors already know about.
The main reason is they are expanding to an additional data centre, so a lot of the increase relates to capital outlay, new staff and operating costs on the new facility.
There's something about that picture that makes me really not want to donate. I understand it's working on others and its probably silly of me but something just puts me off.
I don't think there would be anything seriously wrong about Wikipedia displaying ads to support itself. If I were in charge, I'd probably do just that. That being said, though, there's something very cool about the 5th most visited website in the world being completely ad free and 100% visitor-supported. That's why I donated.
This is not your typical fundraiser, unfortunately.
A few questions I'd like answered:
1) How much money do they need?
2) How much of that have they raised so far?
3) Is this going to be an annual fundraiser?
4) Do they have an endowment which can fund Wikipedia going forward?
5) Have they relied on donations thus far?
6) What happens if they can't raise the money?
I want Wikipedia to stay around in it's present form, but I'd really like to know what my commitment for that needs to be for the next 40 years, not just right this second.
I know I shouldn't promote tabloids, but I am always reminded about his, Jimmy Wales, IM transcripts with his former girlfriend, Rachael Marsden, where he discussed buying a jet after starting up wikia.
I think this is a good example of why the profit motive is important. Maybe they could figure out how to lower costs instead of almost tripling costs if they had some incentive.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PostOnce|15 years ago|reply
Just an observation about myself that might perhaps hold true for others.
Or maybe I'm just abnormal.
[+] [-] corin_|15 years ago|reply
If users don't mind adverts on commercial sites that offer free content, why would they mind it on a not-for-profit site?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for donating to charities in general (and do, regularly), I'm all for donating to Wikipedia (and have done more than once), and I'm all for websites that allow people who donate to disable adverts. But despite having donated to Wikipedia, I'd have no problem with seeing adverts on every page (as long as they're reasonably subtle, and don't consist solely of the cheapest of the cheap adverts, such as "omg you won an ipod lol!!"). In fact, I think I'd prefer seeing normal adverts than the constant reminder that they want donations.
"No ads. No agenda. No strings attached."
Why does being a "community website" mean they shouldn't use advertising revenue to support their growth?
[+] [-] lwhi|15 years ago|reply
One of the defining features of Wikipedia is absence of advertising - introduce adverts and the brand will lose a great deal of its power.
[+] [-] ig1|15 years ago|reply
In 2002 when the idea of banners ads was seriously raised the majority of the Spanish Wikipedia contributors forked and started Enciclopedia Libre, despite the fact that Wikipedia decided not to go ahead with adverts it took two years to attract enough contributors back to rival the forked site. That's not an experience the Wikipedia community want to repeat.
Back in 2004 I proposed that Wikipedia made opt-in ads so people who wanted to support Wikipedia by watching ads could do so, but there wasn't enough support for the idea to gain traction.
[+] [-] mwg66|15 years ago|reply
I consider it somewhat analog to BBC being funded through a license fee rather than commercial advertising - aka Sky (BSkyB, owned by Murdoch).
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_P...
and I have to think that one thing that turns off conscientious editors who refer to reliable sources is drive-by POV-pushers who can edit more article text per day, because they don't bother looking up sources to verify their opinions.
But reasonable minds can differ both about this description of the problem, and about any proposed solution. So far Wikimedia Foundation still prefers the approach of seeking donations.
[+] [-] radu_floricica|15 years ago|reply
Free donation supported model works, so no reason to risk the change.
[+] [-] ugh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PostOnce|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citricsquid|15 years ago|reply
Actually that was easy, here is their financial information: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports and a specific outline of what they want to make/spend is on page 12 of this PDF: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1... (Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/43973767/Untitled?secret_password=... )
Edit: To clarify, the issue I have is with the increase, not the costs for this year. They're going from 10m to 25m and I don't understand how, if there's an explanation somewhere please do link :-)
[+] [-] smanek|15 years ago|reply
Glancing at the docs you reference, roughly $6M of their spending goes to straight operating expenses (servers, bandwidth, travel, etc). I don't think anyone would disagree that is completely reasonable for an organization Wikimedia's size with the amount of traffic they have (it seems quite lean, even compared to most startups).
The other big chunk ($3.5M) is salary for people.
There you have to take into account that they have ~70M unique users a month. Assuming $150K/engineer/year all told (office space, computers, salary, benefits, etc) and that all the salary were just going to engineering, that's only enough cash to hire about 23 engineers (or about 1 engineer for every 3M users). In practice, not all their employees are engineers, so it's probably closer to 5M users per engineer. As a point of comparison, Facebook brags about having only 1 engineer per million users.
Wikipedia is being laudably frugal and efficient. I can't imagine running a site their size with much fewer resources.
[+] [-] fbailey|15 years ago|reply
The top five spending increases for 2010-11 are: 1) An additional $3.8 million will be spent on technical operations. This will include funding to establish and maintain a new data centre, increased spending on bandwidth to support our growing readership, and five new positions supporting technical operations. 2) An additional $2.6 million will be spent on ten new (non-ops) technology positions such as a QA engineer and a community liasion position, annualization of salaries of existing tech positions including some positions that were previously paid under restricted grants as well as development of a database to track relationships with editors, readers, donors and others. 3) An additional $1.3 million will go towards administration supporting all Wikimedia Foundation activities. This will include rent for additional office space, plus nine new support positions to support the work of staff and community members. 4) An additional $1.1 million dollars will be spent on community outreach and volunteer convenings. In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been increasingly offering financial support for, and/or staged itself, volunteer convenings of various kinds, including for example the Berlin chapters/developer meetings, as well as paying some travel costs for volunteers, including more funding for Wikimania scholarships. We intend to do more of this in 2010-11 as key activities to grow and strengthen the movement. 5) In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to spend $400,000 on various forms of support for the chapters. This will include an expanded grants program for mission activities, staff positions supporting our chapters network, and a board-sponsored project designed to help the Wikimedia movement develop clarity around roles-and-responsibilities across the network.
[+] [-] vib|15 years ago|reply
It's very clear from visiting their site and the sister sites, that they are indeed improving.
It's an important investment in education. For those of us who believe more investment in education is needed on a global level, but can't rely on your government for that. Donating to wikimedia is a great alternative.
I donated and I'm sure it was a great move.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErrantX|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fragmede|15 years ago|reply
From page 12 of said pdf.
[+] [-] axod|15 years ago|reply
Sorry if that sounds uncharitable, but I don't agree with donating to such a large bureaucratic organization.
[+] [-] SimplePast|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toolate|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chappi42|15 years ago|reply
Even disabled the banner with 'Special:BannerController' in AdBlock.
Thought, I'd give again this year but after the banner didn't go away and the equally annoying pledge email they lost me (no donaion for this year).
[+] [-] FluidDjango|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzury|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodh257|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raquo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earnubs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ithkuil|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErrantX|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonsen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PedroCandeias|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euroclydon|15 years ago|reply
A few questions I'd like answered:
1) How much money do they need?
2) How much of that have they raised so far?
3) Is this going to be an annual fundraiser?
4) Do they have an endowment which can fund Wikipedia going forward?
5) Have they relied on donations thus far?
6) What happens if they can't raise the money?
I want Wikipedia to stay around in it's present form, but I'd really like to know what my commitment for that needs to be for the next 40 years, not just right this second.
[+] [-] lwhi|15 years ago|reply
All of the information you require is available - some of your questions have actually been directly answered in the comments here.
[+] [-] cantbecool|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnutter|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theNeutral|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danio|15 years ago|reply
* Original Research - Wikipedia does not allow any. Wikinfo's solution: Allow original research with editor registration.
* Wikipedia only allows certain types of information, as it is purely an encyclopedia. Wikinfo's solution: All types of information are allowed
[+] [-] Kilimanjaro|15 years ago|reply
There, a steady income source way better than asking for $20M every year.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|15 years ago|reply
I find it hard to "donate" to megalomaniacs.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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