Five reasons you should not donate to Wikipedia, ...preemptive anti-fund drive Options

[thekohser]

We all know that come December or January, the WMF is going to put up the banner ads and donation "thermometer" in order to scrounge up another million bucks from donors who don't realize the monster they're feeding.

I think Wikipedia Review could get a lot of media attention if we prepare a page (probably on the new blog) that would list "Five reasons you should not donate money to Wikipedia". The list should be simple, not foaming at the mouth, and objective in its tone. Can we come up with 5 really good reasons, then wait until the WMF fund drive starts, then spring the blog page on Digg and Reddit and Slashdot?

I would start with the following ideas:

1. Your non-profit donation will ultimately line the for-profit pockets of Jimmy Wales, Amazon, Google, the Bessemer Partners, and other corporate beneficiaries. How? Wikipedia is used as a commercial traffic engine, with 4,000+ external links to Wales' Google AdSense-supported Wikia sites, plus 25,000+ links to Amazon product stores. Clearly, others are making millions from the success of Wikipedia. Do you want to further endorse their profiteering?

2. While Wikipedia is disguised as an encyclopedia, it is actually nothing more than a fluid forum where ultimate editorial control belongs to a corps of administrators, most of whom act without real-world accountability because they don't reveal their real names, locations, and potential conflicts of interest -- even though they will not hesitate, through "complex investigations", to "out" the real names, locations, and perceived conflicts of interest of other, non-administrative editors. Why give your real-world dollars to a virtual-world multi-player forum? Have you made your donation to Second Life, too?

Will you please help keep this thread going with additional ideas? What have you ever seen happen on Wikipedia that makes you say, "Ugh, why would anyone ever give their hard-earned money to that project?"

Possible other ideas:

3. Citizendium is a new encyclopedia project founded by a co-founder of Wikipedia. There, the editors do disclose who they are in real life. You probably donated to Wikipedia last year, so why not spread the wealth to new projects like Citizendium this year?

4. Do you live in Brazil, Israel, or Saudi Arabia? Wikipedia has gone to painstaking detail to host articles about how your countries allegedly practice apartheid. If that's how you want your country described for the rest of the world, get out your checkbook.

5. Do you want your grade-school children looking at graphically-described, photo-rich pages about nipple piercings, anilingus, labia piercings, child modeling (erotic), frenum rings, strappado bondage, erotic spanking, incest pornography, smotherboxes, and Courtney Cummz and her directorial debut 'Face Invaders'? Send them to Wikipedia, while you make a donation to support the hosting of this and other material that would be shocking to most adults, housed on servers that make no attempt to filter what even pre-pubescent children can access.

Greg

This post has been edited by thekohser:

[LamontStormstar]

What is this "vuser" category for users there and who is this Garret who is the only one there?

(IMG:http://centiare.com/images/f/f0/GarrettMinks.jpg)

If the image doesn't come up, see http://centiare.com/Image:GarrettMinks.jpg

Is he a pimp? (This is meant as a compliment)


This post has been edited by LamontStormstar:

[thekohser]

What is this "vuser" category for users there and who is this Garret who is the only one there?

(IMG:http://centiare.com/images/f/f0/GarrettMinks.jpg)

If the image doesn't come up, see http://centiare.com/Image:GarrettMinks.jpg

Is he a pimp? (This is meant as a compliment)

Garrett is the PimpDaddyMinks, recently graduated from high school and moving on to college now. He is a "vuser", meaning "verified user", which confers just a notch higher editing privileges (he can edit other users' Directory pages) than a standard user. We did this for Garrett since he was providing Directory-editing services for payment for a multitude of clients, plus he was one of the first to get the Centiare religion of ad-supported, semantically-tagged, SEO-optimized wikitude.

Garrett's main fault (if one were to ask me) is that he can be a little too gung-ho with our concept. I really appreciate his enthusiasm, but the other co-developer and I are both coming to the conclusion that Centiare (for whatever reason) lacks the "popular appeal" factor that brought thousands of editors to Wikipedia.

We're definitely keeping Centiare up and running, though, in hopes that some larger organization will one day realize its potential to serve as a dynamic, semi-protected, semantic database. (As I've said before, imagine an annually-archived directory of all Little League teams in the United States, with player rosters, statistics, and game summaries -- all searchable on multiple semantic dimensions; e.g., "find all left-handed pitchers in Ohio with at least 5 wins in 2006 and less than 3.50 ERA".) Those kinds of database searches are not only fairly easy to construct on Centiare, they return results in a split-second. The tough nut to crack is finding people who are willing to enter all of that data -- in a semantically-tagged fashion -- into the database.

Bots are also a possible solution to content-generation, as the other co-developer experimented with his own Sarbanes-Oxley directory data. Over the course of a few days, this bot was able to insert about 24,000 new article pages into Centiare. They simply provide a location map, telephone contact, stock quote window, SEC filings, and RSS news feed about every company. (Plus Google ads and a link back to Karl's Sarbanes service page -- which is one way to monetize Centiare.)

Sorry if I've hijacked this thread. DON'T DONATE MONEY TO WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION! There, we're back on topic.

Greg