"Wikipedia Forever" - fundraising campaign, or non-stop laff riot? Options

[EricBarbour]

I'm not one to mindlessly criticize WMF, but how is it that every fundraising drive is marred with technical problems? It's not as if these now-annual drives are planned at the last minute, but they always seem to suffer crashes, payment problems, and frankly insane discord from the "community."

And if you, an Arbcommer, can ask this question, please ask yourself:
why aren't more of the Wiki-Freakies asking the same question?

And if you find the reasons, please share them with us. Because we're just
as mystified as you are.

(Don't forget to take it up with other Arbcom people, past or present.)

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Mon 23rd November 2009, 1:36am

[GlassBeadGame]

I'm not one to mindlessly criticize WMF, but how is it that every fundraising drive is marred with technical problems? It's not as if these now-annual drives are planned at the last minute, but they always seem to suffer crashes, payment problems, and frankly insane discord from the "community."

And if you, an Arbcommer, can ask this question, please ask yourself:
why aren't more of the Wiki-Freakies asking the same question?

And if you find the reasons, please share them with us. Because we're just
as mystified as you are.

(Don't forget to take it up with other Arbcom people, past or present.)

I don't know about the technical problem but I think I understand the "community" part. Did you ever play the board game Risk? It is a game of collaboration, up to a certain point. Then broken alliances and betrayal have to occur to move the game forward to a conclusion. Wikipedia's community is something like this, with the players forming alliances for mutual MMORPG gain up to a point and then...drama. The most important difference between Wikipedia and the board game is the potential for seemingly endless iterations on Wikipedia.

[EricBarbour]

Did you ever play the board game Risk? It is a game of collaboration, up to a certain point. Then broken alliances and betrayal have to occur to move the game forward to a conclusion. Wikipedia's community is something like this, with the players forming alliances for mutual MMORPG gain up to a point and then...drama. The most important difference between Wikipedia and the board game is the potential for seemingly endless iterations on Wikipedia.

At least Risk has a point. There's an end to it, somewhere.

[Jon Awbrey]

Also, Sue Gardner's breakin' out the big bucks … donating at least one-third of one percent of her annual income (not including travel benefits!) back to the Foundation:

Ms. Susan Gardner
Wikipedia is a treasure! I am happy to support the work of the people who built this amazing repository of information, the biggest the world has ever known. — 20:38, 10 November 2009
USD 500.00

"Treasure" or "treasure chest"? Also, it would seem that she's never heard of Google or the Library of Congress (at 20 terabytes, not including manuscripts, photographs, maps, and sound recordings; compare to Wikipedia at 10 to 15 terabytes).

Yeah, but she misspelled suppository …

Ja Ja

[Krimpet]

As far as I know donating money to WMF generally does not help players advance in the MMOWPG, though some seem conditioned to expect that. I think most would rather donate time anyway.

Are you sure?

[MZMcBride]

Um, it still seems to be there.

If I had to guess, I'd say they restored some backup and forgot to re-remove the deleted comments, though I'm simply speculating. It's Sunday, so nobody is really around right now. I sent an e-mail to the relevant people asking them to re-delete it.

I'm not one to mindlessly criticize WMF, but how is it that every fundraising drive is marred with technical problems? It's not as if these now-annual drives are planned at the last minute, but they always seem to suffer crashes, payment problems, and frankly insane discord from the "community."

Good question. They announced the upcoming banners in October. They were met with a massive amount of criticism, but they pressed forward. On the talk page, there were several people (including the Chair of the Wikimedia Board) criticizing the banners.

After they put the "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" banner live on the English Wikipedia (and everywhere else), the criticisms grew enormously. In all my time following Wikimedia-related drama, I've never seen the English Wikipedia community so unanimously against something as it was here.

They pulled the banners the following day after repeated reports that users using Internet Explorer couldn't click them. The relaunch was a few days later with a more limited scope (putting the Wikipedia logo on every Wiktionary was deemed a bit retarded, go figure) and with fewer capital letters.

That's most of the background that you may or may not have missed in your absence (welcome back, by the way). As for why the Wikimedia Foundation is so incompetent, it's pretty unclear. It's not simply a perception that they don't have their shit together—it's the honest-to-God truth. Anthere's comment at Meta captured a lot of the frustration.

For an organization that's existed for close to six years now, it's simply unacceptable how mismanaged and amateurish things are.

P.S. Got an e-mail back from one of the Wikimedia Foundation staffers. Seems the PayPal API sent data back to Wikimedia causing the bad comments to be reinserted, or so I'm told. Hopefully this and other inappropriate comments will be removed in the next day or so, though it's about to be Thanksgiving in the U.S., so we'll see.

[grievous]

As far as I know donating money to WMF generally does not help players advance in the MMOWPG, though some seem conditioned to expect that. I think most would rather donate time anyway.

Are you sure?

A lot of drama could have been avoided if only Daniel Brandt had known that all it would have taken was $5K to delete his bio.

Surprised how no one has pointed out how ludicrous the claim of "ad free forever" is when the banners themselves are ads. Even PBS has dropped the claim of being ad free from their bi-monthly pledge drives.

[Gazimoff]

Is it me or is this precisely the kind of thing you don't want to see in the middle of a fundraising drive?

[thekohser]

Is it me or is this precisely the kind of thing you don't want to see in the middle of a fundraising drive?

The Comments are certainly worth reading.

[Gazimoff]

Is it me or is this precisely the kind of thing you don't want to see in the middle of a fundraising drive?

The Comments are certainly worth reading.

Indeed. It's fantastic material for two bits of research I'm doing at the moment - one is on producing a better user experience for readers, while the other talks about how to then convert those readers into contributors.

Also interesting is that others are beginning to suggest that something better may eventually come along, as I've also mentioned in my response to your blogpost comment. I think this is the WMFs biggest risk.

Interestingly, I recently got asked if I was anti-Wikpedia. I still don't think I am - I like the idea of a crowdsourced project that creates a free to access source of information. What I am against is intransigence stifling innovation - where something is so obviously broken that it stares everyone in the face, yet the mountain of rules and regulations act almost like a safety blanket that people cling on to.

[grievous]

Is it me or is this precisely the kind of thing you don't want to see in the middle of a fundraising drive?

The Comments are certainly worth reading.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article requires a subscription. But the video is free here.

If I were a loyal editor, I'd have to admit that I'd be just a little disenchanted to learn about Sue Gardner's $500k paycheck from a non-profit. But as an ex-editor I'm simply appalled. This reminds me of the picture of a snake eating its own tail.

This post has been edited by grievous: Mon 23rd November 2009, 6:27pm

[CharlotteWebb]

As far as I know donating money to WMF generally does not help players advance in the MMOWPG, though some seem conditioned to expect that. I think most would rather donate time anyway.

Are you sure?

Hey, I did make a point to say "generally".

Obviously somebody's lying there, I don't know which. I only know better than to take either of these gentlemen at their word.

What I meant is donating money will never give normal, non-famous editors (you, me, and Randy-from-Boise) the upper hand in anything.

[MZMcBride]

Is it me or is this precisely the kind of thing you don't want to see in the middle of a fundraising drive?

The Comments are certainly worth reading.

Some of the comments were interesting, I suppose. Most of them seem to accurately define butthurt, though.

[Somey]

Some of the comments were interesting, I suppose. Most of them seem to accurately define butthurt, though.

Typical attitude...

In any group of individuals who are active on the interwebs, you're going to have increasing numbers of anti-Wikipedia voices appearing over time - that's because Wikipedia is, by nature, the sort of endeavor that's highly inclusionary to begin with, and then reaches a "critical mass" point at which it gradually becomes more and more exclusionary. That happened to WP in 2006... This will all become more obvious during the Lockdown Phase™, which will probably begin in about 2-3 years, or sooner if WP starts running banner ads.

In fact, one might even call the Lockdown Phase the "Exclusionary Phase," and the Growth Phase (already in the past) the "Inclusionary Phase," but that's only from the WP user's perspective, not from the more general perspective of readers/websurfers.

But the way to postpone (or even theoretically prevent) the Lockdown Phase is to actually listen to those who feel they've been excluded and figure out if there's a way to address their concerns. Wikipedians don't really do that anymore - they were sort of doing it half-heartedly for a while, about a year or so ago, but mostly they're no longer interested now. (Perhaps this is because they're far more worried about how attrition will affect the future maintenance effort, or perhaps they've had too many bad experiences, from their perspective, with trying to be fair to those they consider "spammers.")

Obviously, I personally think the sooner the Lockdown Phase occurs, the better, but in order to encourage it I should probably start calling it the "Stabilization Phase" or the "Integrity Phase" or something like that.

[Jon Awbrey]

Obviously, I personally think the sooner the Lockdown Phase occurs, the better, but in order to encourage it I should probably start calling it the "Stabilization Phase" or the "Integrity Phase" or something like that.

I have a vague recollection of people I know in Organizational Development referring to phases of freezing and unfreezing, but they usually regard these stages as being cyclic, at least, under normal circumstances — maybe because they prefer to study mostly viable organizations. Engineers in materials science and, by analogy, software development, refer to a process of annealing.

Jon

[One]

I'm not one to mindlessly criticize WMF, but how is it that every fundraising drive is marred with technical problems? It's not as if these now-annual drives are planned at the last minute, but they always seem to suffer crashes, payment problems, and frankly insane discord from the "community."

...

That's most of the background that you may or may not have missed in your absence (welcome back, by the way). As for why the Wikimedia Foundation is so incompetent, it's pretty unclear. It's not simply a perception that they don't have their shit together—it's the honest-to-God truth. Anthere's comment at Meta captured a lot of the frustration.

For an organization that's existed for close to six years now, it's simply unacceptable how mismanaged and amateurish things are.

P.S. Got an e-mail back from one of the Wikimedia Foundation staffers. Seems the PayPal API sent data back to Wikimedia causing the bad comments to be reinserted, or so I'm told. Hopefully this and other inappropriate comments will be removed in the next day or so, though it's about to be Thanksgiving in the U.S., so we'll see.

Looks like they took it down again. Huzzah, I guess.

As for the rest of it, I completely agree with you. Its one thing to criticize the foundation for paying staff too much, or for relocating to an absurdly expensive part of the country, or for failing to support the volunteer contributors (which it doesn't even consider to be volunteers). But when the Foundation can't even manage it's supposed core competence, I have to wonder how deep the problem extends.

At any rate, for those of you without subscriptions, here are some highlights of "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages":

[...]
Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia's data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages.

Eight years after Wikipedia began with a goal to provide everyone in the world free access to "the sum of all human knowledge," the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia's ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. Errors and deliberate insertions of false information by vandals have undermined its reliability.
[...]
Executives at the Wikimedia Foundation, which finances and oversees the nonprofit venture, acknowledge the declines, but believe they can continue to build a useful encyclopedia with a smaller pool of contributors. "We need sufficient people to do the work that needs to be done," says Sue Gardner, executive director of the foundation. "But the purpose of the project is not participation."
[...]
Wikipedia contributors have been debating widely what is behind the declines in volunteers. One factor is that many topics already have been written about. Another is the plethora of rules Wikipedia has adopted to bring order to its unruly universe -- particularly to reduce infighting among contributors about write-ups of controversial subjects and polarizing figures.

"Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment," contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."
[...]
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who is chairman emeritus of the foundation, acknowledges participation has been declining. But he says it still isn't clear to him what the "right" number of volunteer "Wikipedians" should be. "If people think Wikipedia is done," he says, meaning that with three million articles it is hard to find new things to write about, "that's substantial. But if the community has become more hostile to newbies, that's a correctable problem."

Mr. Wales says his top priority is to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia's articles. He's pushing a new feature that would require top editors to approve all edits before they are displayed on the site. The idea is to prevent the kind of vandalism that in January declared Sen. Edward Kennedy's death months before his actual passing.
[...]
The Wikimedia Foundation employs a staff of 34, mostly in San Francisco, to run the site's computers, guide its planning and serve as its public face. In its fiscal year ended in June, it reported expenses of $5.6 million. It funds its operations mostly through donations. Earlier this month, it launched a campaign to raise $7.5 million from users.

Wikipedia's popularity has strained its consensus-building culture to the breaking point. Wikipedia is now a constant target for vandals who spray virtual graffiti throughout the site -- everything from political views presented as facts to jokes about their friends -- and spammers who try to insert marketing messages into articles.

In 2005, journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. wrote about his own Wikipedia write-up, which unjustly accused him of murder. The resulting bad press was a wake-up call. Wikipedians began getting more aggressive about patrolling for vandals and blocking suspicious edits, according to Andrew Lih, a professor at the University of Southern California and a regular Wikipedia contributor.

That helped transform the site into a more hierarchical society where volunteers had to negotiate a thicket of new rules. Wikipedia rolled out new antivandalism features, including "semiprotection," which prevents newcomers from editing certain controversial articles.

"It was easier when I joined in 2004," says Kat Walsh, a longtime contributor who serves on Wikimedia's board of trustees. "Everything was a little less complicated. . . . It's harder and harder for new people to adjust."

In 2008, Wikipedia's editors deleted one in four contributions from infrequent contributors, up sharply from one in 10 in 2005, according to data compiled by social-computing researcher Ed Chi of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
[...]
The Wikimedia Foundation says it is seeking to increase participation, but that growing the overall number of participants isn't its main focus.

"The early days were a gold rush," says Ms. Gardner, the foundation's executive director. "They attracted lots and lots of people, because a new person could write about anything." The encyclopedia isn't finished, she says, but the "easy work" of contributing is done.

To attract new recruits to help with the remaining work, Ms. Gardner has hired an outreach team, held seminars to train editors in overlooked categories, and launched task forces to seek ways to increase participation in markets such as India. The foundation also invested $890,000 in a new design for the site, slated to go live in the next few months, that aims to make editing easier for contributors who aren't computer-savvy.

She says increasing contributor diversity is her top goal. A survey the foundation conducted last year determined that the average age of an editor is 26.8 years, and that 87% of them are men.

Much of the task of making Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers falls to Frank Schulenburg, the foundation's head of public outreach. An academic, he began contributing to articles about French philosophers on the German Wikipedia in 2005.
[...]
In Germany, to recruit more academics, Mr. Schulenburg had devised an educational program called Wikipedia Academy. In July, he conducted the first such program in the U.S., for scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. His goal was to entice the scientists to contribute.

Wikipedia already attracts lots of academics, but science isn't its strength. By its own internal grading standards, the article on Louis Pasteur, one of the founders of microbiology, for example, is lower in quality than its article on James T. Kirk, the fictional "Star Trek" captain.

For the July event, Mr. Schulenburg got about 100 scientists and NIH staffers to spend the day listening to arguments about why they should bother contributing to Wikipedia, despite the fact that it doesn't pay, won't help them get a grant or even win them applause from their peers.

His audience was skeptical about the lack of credentials among Wikipedia editors. "One of my concerns is not knowing who the editor is," said Lakshmi Grama, a communications official from the National Cancer Institute.

Several participants started contributing to Wikipedia right after the event. The NIH says it is considering whether to adopt formal policies to encourage its staff to contribute while at work.

Each year, Wikipedians from around the world gather at a conference they call Wikimania. At this year's meeting in Buenos Aires in August, participants at one session debated the implications of the demographic shifts.

"The number one headline I have been seeing for five years is that Wikipedia is dying," said Mathias Schindler, a board member of Wikimedia Germany. He argued that Wikipedia needed to focus less on the total number of articles and more on "smarter metrics" such as article quality.

He said he disagreed with dire views about the project's future. "I don't expect to see Wikipedia follow the rule of any curve or any projection

Some of the comments were interesting, I suppose. Most of them seem to accurately define butthurt, though.

Actually, I think most of the comments are interesting. The comment about oversight seems off-the-mark though. When ranking Wikipedia's numerous problems, the problem of excessive oversight ranks about #78 in my view.

This post has been edited by One: Mon 23rd November 2009, 8:26pm

[thekohser]

...I'd be just a little disenchanted to learn about Sue Gardner's $500k paycheck...

Was this information published somewhere?

The comment about oversight seems off-the-mark though. When ranking Wikipedia's numerous problems, the problem of excessive oversight ranks about #78 in my view.

If you're talking about the Carolyn Doran comment about oversight, that baby is feeding oodles of traffic to my website today. So, it's rather on-the-mark, from my perspective.

[EricBarbour]

A lot of drama could have been avoided if only Daniel Brandt had known that all it would have taken was $5K to delete his bio.

I'm fairly certain that blackmail is, you know, um, kind of illegal......

[Peter Damian]

At any rate, for those of you without subscriptions, here are some highlights of "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages":

To my mind, your selection omitted the most interesting part, which was.

Wikipedia's struggles raise questions about the evolution of "crowdsourcing," one of the Internet era's most cherished principles. Crowdsourcing posits that there is wisdom in aggregating independent contributions from multitudes of Web users. It has been promoted as a new and better way for large numbers of individuals to collaborate on tasks, without the rules and hierarchies of traditional organizations.

"People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen," says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. "Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It's too many cooks in the kitchen."

This is exactly what an old fart like me who knows nothing about computers or Web 2.0 would have said. In fact it's blindingly obvious. Why wasn't it obvious to the Internet Generation?


I also noted Wales's stupid argument that 3 million articles is just about 'done'. Old farts know that quantity is not to be confused with quality.

[EricBarbour]

Here's a version of the WSJ article that avoids the paywall.

This part really cracked me up, partly because I donated money to Paley to help her get her "Sita Sings The Blues" cartoon finished.

Nina Paley, a New York cartoonist who calls herself an "information radical," had no luck when she tried to post her syndicated comic strips from the '90s. She does not copyright their artwork but instead makes money on ancillary products and services, making her perfect for Wikipedia's free-content culture.
It took her a few days to decipher Wikipedia's software."I figured out how to do it with this really weird, ugly code," she says. "I went to bed feeling so proud of myself, and I woke up and found it had been deleted because it was 'out of scope.'"
A Wikipedia editor had decided that Ms. Paley's comics didn't meet the criteria for educational art. Another editor weighed in with questions about whether she had copyright permission for the photo of herself that she uploaded. She did.
Ultimately, it was decided that Ms. Paley's comics were suitable for the site. Samuel Klein, a veteran Wikipedian who serves on the board of trustees, intervened and restored her contributions. Mr. Klein says experiences like Ms. Paley's happen too often. Mr. Klein says that the Wikipedia community needs to rein in so-called deletionists -- editors who shoot first and ask questions later.

Nice work, assholes. You just chased away Nina Paley--just the kind of creative person your nutso-pedia needs more of. Congrats on the "weird, ugly code" too.