The best comments off of the public donors list



<===Excuse me? Am I missing something here?



<===Why did you give them money then???

<===When Apocalypse theories and Free source software meet....

<==Entertaining???

In London, "2012 is coming" means the 2012 Olympics.

And the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar.

Yeah, I think that's what they refering too...but you never can tell!

More gems

<==File this one under "unfounded platitudes"....

<==Except if you're banned...

<==I guess that explains why so many admins are unhappy then?

Make sure you click the "filter contributions" link, and lower the threshold from $5 to $1. The $1 donors are a lot funnier. Example:



That's worth a buck, don't you think?

Greg

Here's one that's worth 20 quid :



Now, who could that be???

More gems :

<===I'd say that WP is more like the World's snooze button, myself....

Dec. 21, 2012 to be exact. At least we know WP won't be around after that!

<====Indeed!



<===Would you like another delicious glass of Koolaid??

<===Wikipedia + New Age = ???



<====Yes, but what about Ayn Rand??

* edited by Nathan: typo

This came off of the donation IRC channel, #wikimedia-donations. This is where the funds are keep on being tracked. At the time of this message, here are the unofficial stats:

Total donations: 5,375 (5.4%) -- Total USD: $139,266 -- Avg/person $25.91 -- Past 5 hours: $3,046 -- Total Anonymous: 3,375 ($88,070) -- Projected total: $2,591,000

This is lining up with my initial suspicions. This campaign is not going to reach their goal. And, I believe they are fooling themselves that a campaign in 2007 is going to have the same legs as the one started in late 2006 -- before Essjay, before university bans, before Wikiscanner, before Andrew Keen, etc. Annual campaigns get tedious for those who've already donated before in the past.

The fact that they've only gotten about 6,000 of the 100,000 donors yet tells me that they're way behind. Most of the eager-beaver donors will make their contribution on first sight of Jimbo's blinky eyes and wringy hands. They've already donated! That leaves everybody else, who isn't so eager, who is more suspicious, more tired of this "Wikipedia craze".

Sure, they'll drum up some big-donor support in November, when they see they're going to miss projections by 50%. But it still isn't going to cover the budget. Which means the budget will have to be cut. And maybe some heads will roll.

Greg

Even on the site, there isn't a target goal of donors wanted, and from my chats with some of the Foundation folks, they didn't want a money tracker like last year. I wish I could break things down by currency, but those stats are being kept by few people. Our highest donation, to my knowledge, is about 1,500 USD from an anon. who gave his comment as a security hash.

Wow I never knew that some of the people who donate are so stupid.

Keep in mind that, with this going on for about two months, tons of things can happen. I suspect that donations from my neck of the woods (it's on Brandt's site if you really wish find out), it is going to the fire relief effort. I am also seeing people in the US prepare for holiday shopping, so I don't huge donations to the extent of thousands. This is a constant problem I saw last year, not sure about 2005, since I did not pay attention to much of the Foundation matters then.

Anyways, the latest unofficial stats from the same IRC channel mentioned earlier:

Total donations: 6,379 (6.4%) -- Total USD: $166,247 -- Avg/person $26.06 -- Past 5 hours: $4,962 -- Total Anonymous: 3,959 ($103,268) -- Projected total: $2,606,000

Interesting, I didn't even think about the wildfires impacting potential fund raising but I imagine it will to some degree.

Probably the same effect with Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunamis in Asia; donations will be slow, but can still be large from non-affected areas. I also do recall that such events like that have been put in the sitenotice to where people should send money. With both of those cases, the English Wikipedia chose the Red Cross. I know the French Wikipedia did something similar for Darfur, but I am not sure what organization they asked funds to be sent to.

Hi Zscout! glad that you're here! I'm really sorry about your problems, but maybe our moral support will make you feel better?

Anyway, Jimbo claims that the rate of donations has never been better...

He might be stretching things a bit there...but their budget has never been larger and their operating expenses are way up over 2006 level. So, even if everybody who gave in 2006 gives more, they are not going to meet their goal...and their budget will have to be cut.

Maybe Floflo will have to pay for her own babysitter?

I think that relief for fire victims, Darfur and the like are probably a bit more important than buying baudwidth so that the Cabal can have unlimited flamewars, in the greater scheme of things....

Yet more :

<===Just ignore that man behind the Wikia curtain...

<===Never mind that atomic bomb business....

<===Somebody's been watching too much Star Trek...



<===He already has a credit card??

<===Oh, you're so kind. Here, have a glass of koolaid on us!...





(Are these people serious??? Man, how sad....)

I want to thank zscout370 for these invaluable updates on the Foundation's efforts to reach $4.6 million for 2008's budget. It isn't going to happen. Let's do the numbers...

They obtained 8,000 donors in the first week of a nine-week campaign. Average donation is $26. So, simply put, 8,000 donors x 9 weeks x $26 = $1.87 million. Nowhere near $4.6 million. It's even well short of the $2.6 million "projected" above. (Note, also, that the campaign has expressed that 100,000 donors is the goal, and the size of their "thermometer" matches that number. If we forecast the first-week tally through nine weeks, they're only going to hit 72,000 donors.)

Furthermore, I'd like to add in the concept of attrition. People tire of fundraising campaigns -- both longitudinally from year to year, and fatigue sets in within the campaign over each subsequent week. The "eager beavers" have already made their donations. This leaves behind the apathetic masses, bored of being asked to donate to something they regard as their "own" free creation. Let's imagine that over week-to-week, we'll see a conservative 5% attrition rate.

A 5% attrition rate will yield a grand total of $1.54 million.

A 10% attrition rate will yield a total of only $1.27 million.

How will the Foundation possibly make up the difference without completely slashing the budget?

Oh, here's the answer!



Anyone want to venture a guess where that dinner might be held?

Another way you can get a personal phone call from Jimmy Wales is to set up a website similar to Wikipedia Review.com, and use the word "Wikipedia" in your sales pitch. That worked for me, anyway. I got a call real quickly.

Greg

I'll bet that the telephone conversation would have been worth at least a USD 25,000 donataion....at least if you had taped it and sold it to the Enquirer or something....

Anyway, the numbers just don't add up. There ain't no well in Hell that they're going to come up with over four million bucks at this rate, even with "matching grants" which have yet to be announced.

So, who gets fired first?

Interesting little tidbit



I wonder how many people actually read this. If people really didn't want their money going toward legal fees and trustee salaries they would request their donations only be used for hardware and bandwidth costs.

Oh and as for donor sayings, I particularly like this one...



Arrrrrggghhh

I'd like to see a fund set up to retain a genuinely independent Ombudsman.

Any independent dispute resolution would be a major step toward social responsibility. It would be a curb on the unquestioned dominance of the dysfunctional social networking "community" and the blow to the last vestiges of the Cult of the God-king.

It would only go toward shoring up the fundamental delusion that Wikipedia Is Some Kinda Goobermint, instead of some kind of edited publication.

And that is the Φantasy that got them into the mess they're in.

Jonny

Better to take your chances with a professional trained to listen than 2,000 pseudonymous adolescent amateurs playing social networking games. It would be nice if it was Magister Ludi 's Castalia all academic and monastic but it's more like Lord of Flies and some GooberMint seems like a good idea.

I would like to see Wikipedia craft a functional social contract for establishing a more congenial climate for achieving and maintaining consensus on the issues which divide conflicted parties. The present architecture, which operates more like a high-intensity chess game than an orderly and sober process of civil negotiation, has proven to be needlessly aggravating, contentious, and interminable. I believe the Wikipedians would benefit from a more suitable framework, along the lines of a functional social contract, including some more functional protocols for conflict management and conflict resolution.

A social contract is a written document setting forth mutually agreeable terms of engagement and therefor (by definition) cannot be considered to be fiat imposed by one faction over another. A social contract represents a collection of promises that the parties have freely committed to, because they believe that it's in their mutual interest to adopt that framework. That is, a social contract is a consensus — a consensus on the terms of engagement. In the absence of mutually agreeable terms of engagement, the interpersonal dynamics of a cast of characters embroiled in conflict typically devolves into some form of a liminal social drama.

This is interesting. What would/might the contents of the contract be? Who would put it forward? How would it be enforced?

A social contract typically includes a mission statement setting forth the purpose of the organization or project. This is typically followed by a pledge to work cooperatively toward the common goals. In addition to the express goals of the project, the social contract typically includes social and interpersonal goals for establishing a congenial climate of community. These would include goals of treating each other with courtesy and respect, fostering cooperation, and peaceable resolution of conflict in accordance with express conflict resolution protocols spelled out in the social contract.

It's crafted by the leadership of the community and ratified by the members of the community who agree to subscribe to it.

The concept of enforcement does not apply to a social contract, as the philosophy is not one of rules and punishments, but of peer promises and protocols for handling breaches of expectations in a non-judicial manner.

In terms of the Kohlberg-Gilligan Ladder, social contracts operate at Stage 5 of Kohlberg's Ladder, several rungs above the Rules-and-Punishment paradigm. Social contracts thus require a level of maturity and responsibility a notch or two above the norm.

Lawrence Kohlberg's Six Stages of Moral Reasoning
Plus Carol Gilligan's Seventh Stage of Ethical Care

Stage 1: Punishment-avoidance and obedience — Individuals make moral decisions on the basis of what is best for themselves, without regard for the needs or feeling of others. They obey rules only if established by more powerful individuals; they disobey when they can do so without getting caught.

Stage 2: Exchange of favors — Individuals begin to recognize that others also have needs. They may attempt to satisfy the needs of others if their own needs are also met in the process. They continue to define right and wrong primarily in terms of consequences to themselves.

Stage 3: Good boy/good girl — Individuals make moral decisions on the basis of what actions will please others, especially authority figures. They are concerned about maintaining interpersonal relationships through sharing, trust, and loyalty. They now consider someone's intentions in determining innocence or guilt.

Stage 4: Law and order — Individuals look to society as a whole for guidelines concerning what is right or wrong. They perceive rules to be inflexible and believe that it is their "duty" to obey them.

Stage 5: Social Contract — Individuals recognize that rules represent an agreement among many people about appropriate behavior. They recognize that rules are flexible and can be changed if they no longer meet society's needs.

Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principle — Individuals adhere to a small number of abstract, universal principles that transcend specific, concrete rules. They answer to an inner conscience and may break rules that violate their own ethical principles.

Stage 7: Ethics of Care — An obligation of care rests on the understanding of relationships as a response to another in terms of their special needs. Focuses on the moral value of being empathetic toward those dearly beloved persons with whom we have special and valuable relationships, and the moral importance of responding to such persons as unique individuals with characteristics that require custom-crafted responses to them that we do not normally extend to others.

Don't many organizations, good, bad, otherwise, have such statements? Don't they usually have little or no impact on the behavior of these organizations? Remember just how deeply dysfunctional this community currently is, how feeble it's normal institutions, such as it Board of Trustees has become. Also is there any way that this contract can provide for meaningful participation for stakeholders that are not currently at the table at all?

Mission Statements are much more common than full-fledged Social Contracts. And there are plenty of organizations in which their charter documents (e.g. Constitution, By-Laws, etc) are mere window dressing. Corrupt and dysfunctional organizations are the norm, and have been since the dawn of civilization. In the Theory of Community Building, there are Communities of Interest, Communities of Practice, Communities of Commitment, and Centers of Excellence. Wikipedia might have become a world-class Center of Excellence, but it failed to become a Communty of Commitment. Instead, it has devolved into a dysfunctional Community of Malpractice.

It need not have been that way.

BTDT, too many times already.

Wrote it all down for Larry Sanger while he still had a chance of doing a NewPedia instead of the SameOleSameOleTedia. Will try to save some of that time on my hands by going off to look up what I wrote before.

Don't know why you can't see that Your Third Coming Saviour And All Round Young Virgin Omnibusman will end up looking indiscernible from Your First Messiah and Your Second Co-Flounder before the Year is Out.

Jonny

There are a few examples of open source projects that adopted the framework of a social contract, adhered to it, and developed into a world-class center of excellence. The Debian Linux Project is one that comes to mind. Google also has a social contract with its employees.

I thought from the title of this thread — oh, sorry, I forgot where I was for a moment there, nevermimd — that y'all were talking about a course correction for the brain-drain-train already in motion. Nope, too much MimboJimboMomentum there to keep it from going over the falls without a barrel — poor monkeys!

But if you are talking about starting from scratch, dumping that sorry site entire, well, dream on, dream on!

Jonny

Wikipedia Review should totally raise $30k - enough for a retired somebody to act as an ombudsman for a year, and enough to force Jimbo to meet with a couple people from here. Only $100 from each registered member!

Rather than hire a negotiator, I think we would be better served by stepping up to a professional level of investigative journalism. I'd like to see an article in a prestigious magazine like Atlantic Monthly which fairly reported the issues that Wikipedia is confronting as a function of its structural problems.

I don't understand the "force Jimbo to meet" part. Also I don't think Mr. Wales is the appropriate person to engage in any negotiations. Perhaps WMF B/T could designate a representative though.

BTDT. Ask Greg Kohs to tell you what Marshall Poe is up to lately. A year ago you might have excused Yet Another Gee Whiz MainDream Journalist for writing what MP wrote then, but now he appears even more clueless than he did before.
No, I'm afraid the information will have to flow from places like this to places like that.

Jonny

There is a progression in these observations that goes from disappointment to frustration to cynicism to bitterness.

Mebbe I should leap-frog you, Jonny, and go straight to bitterness.

I prefer to think of it as Dis-Illusionment.

And, y'know, that can be A Good Thing.

Well, after you get out of the Wiki-Pokey.

Jonny

Then again, there's the option of writing yet another comic opera.

That is so last year. There are sites-a-plenty that celebrate the absurdity of Wikipedia — came to act but only catharted — and leave you too weak from laughter to do anything about the threat to society. Sure, I would hate it if we couldn't keep our faculties intact, humour-wise, but I am of late less and less of a mind to believe that Wikipedia is Wikiφunny anymore.

Jonny

I spent a good part of the last decade of the last millennium thinking a lot and writing a little about the relation between Democracy and Inquiry. I have already spent a good part of the first decade of this millennium discussing the same issue in numerous online forums. The topic is a Perennial Hot One in Pragmatic Philosophy and a major theme in the works of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Company. The list of contemporary lights who have lit on it is too numerous to exhaust, but Richard J. Bernstein, Noam Chomsky, Jürgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam come to mind as having supplied memorable insights.

Trying to have intelligent discussions about these issues in Wikiputia — well, there is an old song about trying to roller skate in a buffalo herd that now comes to mind.

Jonny

Suppose there were an Ombudsman, and people went to him with a complaint of blocking as alleged sockpuppets. He'd ask for the CheckUser. No, he can't have it because of confidentiality rules or (WP:BEANS) because it might disclose information enabling people to sockpuppet more effectively.

It's Friday morning, which means we're half-way through Week 2 of the Jimbo Blinks, You Donate campaign. Remember that they hoodwinked 8,000 donors in Week 1? Remember that I suggested there would be attrition in subsequent weeks? We're half-way through Week 2, which would mean a steady donation flow should have added another 4,000 donors to the 8,000 from Week 1, or a current straight-line total of 12,000.

Instead, it looks like we haven't even hit 11,000 yet. Is there any possible way this campaign will be at 16,000 donors by Tuesday morning (the end of Week 2)? I'm saying "no way". Might even have to threaten to eat some liverwurst if they make it.

God, I'm lovin' Tuesdays now.

So, they're at about $275,000 currently. That's a far cry from $4.6 million. GOOD JOB, Wikipedia Review. I dare say that our efforts are actually having a real-world impact on the hearts and minds of people with "closed-source" wallets.

Greg

Anybody else see the Signpost blurb about the fundraising?



So, they admit that the first-week capital is about 19% LESS than the previous fund-drive, and thousand-dollar-plus donations are down a full 85%, but Jimbo proudly proclaims it's "the highest we have ever seen". More lies (or is it just careless, misinformed hucksterism?) from the Sole Flounder. Anyone surprised?

RED ALERT! The "Blinky Jimbo" video and thermometer-goal graphic have been replaced! I'm sure THAT will fix the problem. Muuu-wah-ha-ha-haaaaah!

Greg

Yes, it has been replaced by a very ugly banner too!

Good morning, class. Today's number is... 15,350. Remember, last week's number was 8,000 donors. If we subtract 8,000 from 15,350, we get 7,350. That means 650 fewer people donated to Wikipedia this week than they did last week. This is what we call attrition. Therefore, I am putting this two-pound block of liverwurst back in the refrigerator, since I am not obligated to eat it to fulfill my double-dog-dare of last week.

In fact, what we have just witnessed is a weekly attrition rate of 8.125%. Quite presciently, last week I offered you all projected grand totals based on either a 5% or a 10% weekly attrition rate. We are about in the middle between the two, aren't we? This would suggest a final fundraising total of about $1.43 million -- sixty-nine percent short of the $4.6 million goal to overpay Sue Gardner and Mike Godwin. However, that's the best-case scenario, if the Wikimedia Foundation can sustain an attrition rate of only 8%. I am going to predict right here and now that this attrition rate will increase over the remaining weeks, by as much as 1 or 2 percentage points per week! They're running out of "eager beavers", which leaves only non-donating visitors who are simply annoyed by the banner ad.

Of course, the predicted total depends on the average donation amount remaining near $26. We did have a nutter donate $10,000 this week, but that has the algebraic effect of boosting the average overall donation amount by about 75 cents. Perhaps the average donation is up to $27 now. Big deal.

I hope that Zscout returns with more Foundation-sourced totals from the IRC chat which I don't frequent. Those values would corroborate my estimates here, but I would say that the fundraiser is now at the $414,000 mark.

My prediction for next Tuesday morning's (9:00 AM Eastern) donor tally is: 22,040 donors, coughing up $584,000. It still sickens me, but clearly, it's a failure on the Foundation's part.

Greg

My gut reaction is, "what's with the counting of donors?".

You count amounts, not number of donations.

Unless the amounts are not impressive.

Then putting forth 70k donors, many of which donated 1 dollar, sounds impressive.

See?

They shouldnt even be mentioning number of donors. No one does that, unless they are:
1) Doing an analysis
2) Masking the amounts, and going for positive spin.

DL

With the recent analysis of Dragons Flight I believe he hypothesized they would miss their margin by quite a bit, Let me see if I can dig his quotes up.

Possibly the best $5.00 I've ever spent.