I think there's a tendency toward cynicism with Wikipedia precisely because it's an amazing idea that, in many ways, has been beautifully delivered on – but that where it falls short, it can be maddeningly frustrating.
It's not all that different from other bureaucracies. Like the bureaucracies responsible for administration in other spheres, the practical result is more than serviceable. Your city council, despite its backroom deals, manages to keep your town livable. Your insurance company, despite its shrewd actuarial restrictions, generally has your back. Wikipedia, despite its policy of deletionism, is a great first resource for a vast variety of subjects.
Every bureaucracy could do with a lot of improvement, and Wikipedia's no different. But we're still much better off with it and its imperfections than we'd be without it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yes, I see that he is no longer the chairperson, though he still sits on the Board and I would expect holds other powerful positions relative to Wikipedia. It'd also be silly to think that he didn't exert a large influence on the Board as presently composed and Wikipedia's community as a whole -- his face was just plastered all over the site for four months, as you may recall.
You're right that I didn't read the article completely -- I skimmed, since its premise is pretty straightforward; the results of WP's fundraiser was $16 mil. My replies have much more to do with the parent comment and why I don't donate to Wikimedia in general than the specific incident reported here.
I will believe if you say it was only fifty days, I know no differently other than my estimate above, which was apparently wrong. Sorry. It did seem much longer, you're right.
The add campaign was distasteful and I suspect just an ego trip for Jimmy Wales
They published the results of the split tests: Jimmy Wales ROFLstomped all their other creatives. It blows my mind, too, but there you go: the people who matter (i.e. people who donate to the foundation) want to Jimmy's rugged and photoshopped good looks, and all he has to do is glance in their general direction and their wallets open.
Then there is the question of how non-donors feel. The ad campaign made me negative about WP (and I bet quite a few other people).
That's an important point that is harder to reveal through A/B testing. What would Wikipedia's fundraising look like if there were another online encyclopedia that appeared to be a credible contender? Is Wikipedia Google in this space, or is it AltaVista?
Suspecting A/B tests, I actually waited until I got one of the photos of Mr. Wales looking off in the distance before I donated (anything was better than the glaring full-on eyes). I didn't see any of the volunteer ads until after I donated.
My theory: I think people feel more like they owe the "Wikipedia Founder" (or at least would derive some benefit themselves) than some random author named Kartika.
'Thousands of faceless people' generally don't make great donation drives, advertising campaigns, etc. Sounds like the ad campaign was effective to me and nothing to do with Wales' ego.
Wikipedia is amazing, but deletionism policy is bad.
BTW, anyone wants to make a service, which hosts base content from wikipedia, but allows to fork and merge articles a la git? By default you see main article (if it exists), but if you want to see alternative opinions - they are just several clicks away.
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.
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.
The express purpose is to remain neutral and to avoid conflicts of interest.
How well do you think Wikipedia is doing at that? (I ask as a new Wikipedian, registered and actively editing only for about a half year, who has seen many very controversial articles that are anything but neutral in point of view, ads or no ads.)
I've been editing for a couple years now. The vast majority of articles beyond stub class are great. The ones that get brought up on AN/I or ArbCom or MedCab are generally on subjects that people hold very strong opinions on. For example, the first article I became very involved with was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Ar.... When I came to that article, it was in the middle of an edit war between Republican and Unionist factions. Each wanted the article to reflect their POV, so there was much arguing over whether the IRA "caused"/"was responsible for" X deaths, or they "murdered" X people. Similarly, many editors wanted to be sure that the page clearly showed they were a terrorist organization. WP:TERRORIST specifically prohibits the labelling of an organization as such, so instead those editors fought to have the article state that other organizations had labelled the IRA terrorists, etc.
That's generally how it goes on the sensitive articles. The three main areas of political debate on Wikipedia are Israel/Palestine, Eastern Europe, and Northern Ireland. There have been perennial edit wars, and many ArbCom cases. There have been mailing lists and drives by external organizations to infiltrate the ranks of Wikipedia so as to have their viewpoint expressed. There are admins who have acted improperly and had their status stripped, and there are others who have done the same with impunity. Basically, it's a shitstorm.
It also affects less than 0.001% of articles on Wikipedia. As far as articles with promotional points of view, recognize that many companies will actively edit the article on them, and it takes diligent community members to counteract their whitewashing. That's why WP:COIN and other noticeboards exist. Similarly, some people will edit an article with the goal of making the subject of that article look bad. The remedy is the same as for whitewashing: a neutral community member needs to fix the article.
The problem is that there are millions of Wikipedia articles, most of which the average editor will never come across. The community is big, but not that big. We will never make Wikipedia perfect, although I have some ideas for making it more so.
In the end, the best you can do is fix problems as you come across them. If you notice any patterns that you think could be identified algorithmically, consider writing a bot or, if you are unable to do so, approach one of the prolific bot writers like MZMcBride with your idea. Otherwise, just keep plugging away, and realize that the dramawhoring that characterizes the Wikipedia community is largely absent from the articles themselves.
We will never make Wikipedia perfect, although I have some ideas for making it more so.
I'd love to hear ideas about making Wikipedia better. I'd especially like ideas about how to encourage new editors with good sources (that is, access to libraries or better specialized databases) on technical but controversial subjects to participate more. I left this thread for a few hours, following links to the annual reports and also doing some of my own Wikipedia editing, and I'm also very curious about how to reduce the decline in the number of active administrators.
As far as encouraging new experts to edit, I like the current Wikipedia Ambassador program. What I'd really like, however, is Final Revision. On an article-by-article basis, propose articles for final rev in the same way they are proposed for FA class. This would involve a thorough review, hopefully be experts in the field, to weed out inaccuracies. Then, the article would be fully protected indefinitely. Proposed changes could be submitted, but the idea would be to consider it a final product. By moving through many of the articles that would be suitable for this process, we could focus the community's energy on improving articles that needed it. I think we've written most of what needs to be written. With the exception of dynamic subjects, we should be archiving those articles which are done.
As far as encouraging new editors, we need to stop the manic approach to vandal fighting. Vandalism is a problem, sure, but there are far more people who are driven away by hasty reverts and unfriendly warnings.
As far as admins are concerned, it really needs to be no big deal. Perhaps an admin review noticeboard, to look at questionable admin actions, and a clear demoppping process. Other than that, promote editors pseudo-randomly. I think by throwing mops at editors without requiring RfA, we could eliminate a lot of the politicking that goes on. If you need more admins, promote more. We know that the statistically optimum way of promoting people within an organization is to do so randomly, and I think Wikipedia would be a great testbed to try that theory out.
Bah. It's around here somewhere. They did a study, and found that promoting people randomly within a corporation led to better outcomes than any other strategy. I'm sure someone could find the citation.
As far as promoting people randomly, no, they're not doing that. I'm not sure what Essjay has to do with your point; he was a guy who claimed to have real life expertise as a way of gaining prominence on Wikipedia. I'm not suggesting Wikipedia currently promotes based on claimed qualifications; I'm suggesting they promote x editors with ~3k+ edits and ~1 year (numbers are very maleable) to adminship at random, doing away with the RfA process.
You might feel that way, and certainly there are others who take issue with the general tone of Wikipedia. My advice is simple: try to fix it if you think it's a problem. Wikipedia is generally democratic, but not entirely. it's not majority rules. Come up with convincing arguments and get yourself taken seriously.
I'm going to be the asshole here and say some of us have things to do. convincing what are probably history majors with too much time on their hands due to being history majors that corrections are needed would be a huge time sink for no reward.
I was with you except for the part about slamming history majors. I'm not one, nor am I friends with any, but it's not clear to me that academics are hurting Wikipedia. If anything, I think Wikipedia could do better by following a more academic approach, and putting more emphasis on things like accountability.
It was much more intrusive than it could have been. Also, the claim of 'Urgent' was not credible. Maybe they've managed to engage with their 500,000 sponsors. They've also shown they're willing to degrade the quality of the site to raise funds. That's no different to advertising for the casual user.
500 thousand times. 16 million dollars donated, but only 500 thousand donors.
EDIT: Paragraph wondering about A/B testing removed, as two people responded with links to the results of A/B testing, which I was not previously aware of.
There are tens of great arguments you could have made against deletionism, why make a bullshit one? You know it's not about the disk space --- though presumably not all of the 16 people who modded you up know that as well.
You have captured the spirit of deletionism perfectly. There is nothing wrong with the comment. Quite the opposite: it was witty, hence the upvotes and it's position at the top of the page.
Deletionists feel they can approach perfection by mechanically removing content according to some standard, even when readers are finding it useful or enjoyable.
One person's wit is another person's snark. On HN, either is fine if accompanied by content. Stavros' comment not only didn't have content, it had anti- content; WP's notability requirements are not a space-saving mechanism (surely they could save more space by getting rid one of of the several tens of thousands of War and Peace's worth of words in the Wikipedia: namespace.)
The (most commonly expressed) logic behind deletionism is that WP occupies a privileged place on the web and thus the onus is on the project to have content be verifiable, so that people can't stuff totally bogus topics at the tops of Google searches. The project can't verify content for non-notable subjects.
The project can't verify content for non-notable subjects.
If that was the case, there would be no need for notability policy, merely the current verifiability standards. Unfortunately, there are many verifiable subjects of legitimate interest to people (startups, English Premier League reserve goalkeepers, fashion models who have only appeared on six magazine covers in their career, Iranian power plants) that deletionists want Wikipedia to forget about entirely because they aren't "notable".
WP people don't want the encyclopedia to "forget about" those topics; they are bickering about whether they deserve entire pages to themselves.
... which again gives lie to the idea that the issue is "disk space".
I'm not trying to get sucked into this "deletionism" vs "inclusionism" argument, since those labels suck all the oxygen out of the discussion ("what, you're siding with people who think _why doesn't belong in WP?" --- of course not.) I'm just pointing out how bankrupt the original comment was.
Virtually no deletion arguments conclude with a merge, though. Typically the information is completely lost, no matter how well cited it is. Which makes the verifiability argument bankrupt as well, at least as a defense of what actually happens on Wikipedia.
If the verifiability argument were sufficient, the notability policies would all be scrapped and deletion policy would round down to "delete articles which don't have any verifiable statements in them, merge articles which are less than two or three full paragraphs long". Which, incidentally, was more or less the radical inclusionist platform back when I wasted time on Wikipedia.
I wrote a big long comment about a year and a half ago where I supposed that the problems probably boil down to "editing as sport" and "status seeking quests for adminship". Both lead to situations where editing decisions are made in a slipshod fashion and then defended to the death to avoid losing points in RfA's.
Deletionism is not one of the things that is broken about Wikipedia. Deletionism makes absolute sense. Wikipedia owns the Google SERPs, there is tremendous incentive to paste up bullshit articles for profit, and the sheer volume of crap --- take this from someone who spent 4 months patrolling AfD --- is staggering. The "pure" deletionist ideology is harsh, but it ultimately serves the greater good of the project.
In every one of these debates, I see people lose sight of the fundamental point of Wikipedia. It is not, as many people believe, a repository of all human knowledge. It's an encyclopedia. The point is not to have all possible articles. In fact, that's the opposite of the point. The point is to have only good articles, using nothing but volunteer work.
I too am done wasting time on Wikipedia, and I'm pretty grossed out by what happens when you look under the rock that is the Wikipedia: namespace. But I respect the project itself. It is tremendously, staggeringly successful. It is clearly doing something right.
But for several years, up until, oh ~2005 or so, Wikipedia was on the path to becoming the repository of all human knowledge. Many people, including myself, found that to be extremely valuable, and exciting.
Why don't we get to say that the fundamental point of Wikipedia is to be an aspiring repository of all human knowledge? Asserting that the reason for these policies is that it's [merely] an encyclopedia [more or less in the traditional sense] is self-fulfilling rhetoric. You say "the point is X" but I say "the point was Y, and could have continued to be if certain people didn't establish turf and assert control."
From my point of view, Wikipedia was on the way to being something much more than what it is now, and value was lost.
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Jimbo Wales, Slashdot interview, 2004
I'm guessing at _least_ 15 out of those 16 people knew that deletionism has nothing to do with the cost of disk space. It was more a vote of frustration over the overreaching that occurs when seminal figures like _why have their Wikipedia Page deleted. There are _shades_ of notability, and I agree that someone has to make a call:
Not: o How many times have I sneezed today.
Barely: o The Ties of my Local Anchorman
Notable: o Pokemon Characters, _why, Canada
Unfortunately, the deletionists have moved from "Not" to "Barely" and in some cases have started yanking out very clearly notable pages. The upvote, above, is, I suspect, people expressing that frustration.
Notability is a really tough concept in the context of Wikipedia for a couple of reasons.
The first is that notability is in no small part a function of scale. Many things that would not make the cut in a global, space-limited encyclopedia are nevertheless in Wikipedia (properly) because they're notable to some niche of contributors/readers. But once you start having articles about some episode of a 1980s TV show, how can you, in good conscience, say that an article about a selectman in a small town or an athlete at a small college isn't also notable?
And verifiability gets interesting in this context. Effectively, verifiability puts disproportionate weight on verifiability through traditional media. Thus, presumably, school newspapers and the like would be considered an indication that something is indeed notable.
Because the selectman wasn't written about in a reliable secondary source, and the TV show was.
What, you say, the selectman appeared in a newspaper article? Congratulations: you're done. Cite it. The article will stick. Someone will inevitably try to delete it; you'll point to the sourcing at the bottom of the article, and you'll win the AfD.
It's really not complicated.
It is also NOT ABOUT "FAIR". Notability and verifiability aren't value judgements about subjects. They are judgements about the COMPATIBILITY of subjects with Wikipedia.
Your anti-deletionism argument is insufficiently doctrinaire: it acknowledges that there may exist some true statements that might merit deletion from Wikipedia. Many inclusionists find that idea repellant.
For whatever it's worth: _why has a page. Nobody ever tried to delete Canada. Pokemon characters have pages because they are easily verified.
This continuous lowering of the "delete or not" bar should be pretty obvious to anybody who has followed Wikipedia for some time.
I used to be of the opinion that it was justified, but has realised lately that it has become a tool for political censorship. Some of the editing cliques have become very adept at suppressing unwanted views with dubious, but to many persuasive, application of the verifiability and notability policies.
I have seen this happen on several subjects, but as it has been over a year since I actively participated and followed Wikipedia internals, I cannot immediately give you a particular example.
My observation of this abuse of policy has been as a bystander by the way. I've never actively edited any articles on these subjects.
Typical subjects where there most certainly are well organized and ideologically motivated editorial cliques include US foreign policy, anything to do with Israel, Turkey and its history, anything relating to Islam etc.
Abuse of the notability policy is just one, but very effective, tool for censoring and controlling the content though.
I was being intentionally absurd because I wanted to highlight that deletionist policy is not very relevant. Sure, you don't want every article about what I ate today, but well-written articles about obscure subjects don't hurt anything, why should they be deleted?
That first sentence doesn't even make sense: the whole debate over deletionism vs. inclusionism isn't even relevant to this article. You're like the guy who can't stop from commenting about Wikileaks on Amazon stories. Please, stop.
You didn't debate issues of any service. You tried to score points with a snarky and ultimately false comment.
(Also, apropos nothing, but because I just looked up who you are: that CRAM-MD5 proposal on your website is terribly broken; please don't recommend it to people.)
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.
> 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?
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.
> Some stuff is never written because people know it would be deleted.
Or simply, knowing that it is likely to be deleted puts you off from contributing at all. I know that is one of the main reasons I have almost completely stopped contributing to Wikipedia.
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.
> I wasn't aware that not meeting that goal would result in slapping ads on articles.
Yeah, RWW says that in a couple of places, but I don't know why. I don't believe the Wikimedia Foundation has ever implied that. (Disclaimer: I work there.) The slogan/hashtag was #keepitfree, but I don't think that implies a number.
Anyway, if there had been a shortfall in community donations, the WMF would just have readjusted its budget, or sought more big-donor money. Ads on Wikipedia are not even a remote possibility.
But we prefer to get everything from the readership in small donations. Big donations expose the projects to charges of bias, or require us to jump through various hoops that don't directly benefit the community. We'd rather be working for the community 100% of the time, rather than balancing the concerns of the community and people with deep pockets.
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.
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.
> 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...) you'll see their donations exceeded their planned amounts significantly, so they're hiring more people to balance that out.
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?
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.
We have lots of processes to head off problems, like OTRS. Also, Wikipedia benefits from the strong safe-harbor provision in the DMCA (the only good part of it).
If you actually read the PDF, page 23 shows that they had 47 paid staff for 2009-2010, and they plan to have 91 (almost double) by the end of 2010-2011, so it's a case of increasing staff numbers, not (or at least, not entirely) increasing staff salaries.
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.
I think the problem for a lot of people is that "the website" doesn't seem to be where the majority of the money is going. There are grants, "External contractors", salaries, ...
I personally think that most people would be happy if they just concentrated on keeping the site up and running. While they DO need a bit of workforce for that, they should stick to the "core" that is the website.
p.s.
I'm perfectly happy with another non-profit trying to make workshops, grants and other things, but I'd prefer there to be a "we're just the website" one too...
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.
Buying wikipedia would be like paying money for an empty shell. Editors would leave, starting another service, since all the content is free to use and duplicate.
In fact there are several wikipedia clones out there which just duplicate content, with ads inbetween.
It's essentially an open source encyclopedia. Would buying an open source project be worthless? Not if you're buying the brand name, search engine rankings and recognition that go with it. The #5 website in the world is worth something, and the fact that I don't know the names of any wikipedia re-publishers is significant.
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.)
Thanks, I appreciate that. I wasn't trying to troll at all. It's simply a reality that it takes a certain amount of resources to keep Wikipedia running. If a large donation is more favorable than purchasing them -- then by all means that's the route to go. I simply meant that I would hate to see something like WP suffer if the situation came about where donations aren't enough to keep it running.
I tend to disagree due to future uncertainties. While Google may seem like the ultimate do-no-evil company at this moment, what will happen in 15, or even 30 years? If Google eventually "turns", it may lead to fragmentation of the Wikipedia project, and consequently a lack of focus. To me, Wikimedia (the foundation) seems like the type of foundation that will always keep a clear focus and maintain the core values of Wikipedia.
The world is going to eventually become far more reliant on wireless internet services - Google reneged on their promise to fight for net-neutrality, because they left wireless/mobile internet services unprotected.
Yes, that is a significant compromise. But it is one that the carriers will fight very hard, so Google considered it worthwhile to get agreement on the rest. That's why it was called compromise, rather than being called what Google really wants.
Note that the FTC ruling that they have been lauded for made the exact same compromise, for very similar reasons. What I'm really curious about is the disparity between how they are treated for their respective actions.
Furthermore Google didn't entirely leave wireless unprotected. They lost their 2008 bid for a bunch of wireless spectrum, but got a use restriction applied to Verizon that forces Verizon to respect net neutrality for that bandwidth. So there will be mobile internet services that follow net neutrality.
Google's motivation was to encourage exactly what the FTC did by coming up with a compromise position that was politically realistic. Making it something that a major carrier could sign up to was part of their goal.
In short they were attempting to make it easier for the FTC to do exactly what it did.
I don't understand how a corporation can be altruistic and self-motivated at exactly the same time; Google will always have an incentive to create conditions that are favourable to its business aims.
I'd don't think it's possible to view Google purely in terms of 'don't be evil'. 'Don't be evil' is a part of a marketing campaign.
Why wouldn't the foundation ever go corrupt? Trusting a single institution is never the kind of system that works--that's practically the first lesson of political history. What will keep Wikipedia going is the GFDL/Creative Commons licensing. The freedom to fork (thus distributing trust over many) is better than trusting any single entity.
For the various reasons other people have commented, I can't see anyone ever trying to buy Wikipedia.
However, in reply to your question: In many (I'd argue most) cases, people have a price. Hell, I'd bet that with enough billions you could bribe a hell of a lot of married couples to split up, yet alone someone to abandon their community spirit and sell a volunteer-run organisation.
(Second paraphrase doesn't, however, top the first.)
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)
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.