This can be a continuously updated thread, showcasing those individuals who felt it was a good idea to donate at least $1,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation's Drive to Pay for Mike Godwin's 2008 Salary (goal of $182,000).

Grand Donors:

#1 Tyko Strassen
Mathematician (specializing in computer science), full professor at a university of applied sciences, teacher of different didactic courses (in German) for university professors, registered as a Swiss Engineer STV.

"I use wikipedia almost every day. Best project on earth - keep it up!"

#2 Anonymous
Who can be identified (sha1:338c3706b3f34653d195ee40a310f73d2fb52b5c), but only by himself.

#3 Joichi Ito
He's more commonly known as Joi Ito, an American-educated Japanese activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Ito is the chairman of the board of Creative Commons and the chairman of Six Apart Japan. He is on the board of Technorati, Digital Garage, WITNESS, Pia Corporation, Socialtext, and iCommons. But since he is not on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, he is not entitled to be on the board of Wikia, Inc.

Haven't we seen you moblogging, Joi?

I think that it would be more interesting to focus on foundation grants, both because they will be much larger and more significant, and also because the political agenda will be easier to ascertain.

Bleh seems like a german editor, remember the german wikipedia is one of the very few wikis that succeeded and became "respectable".

Yeah, the German Wikipedia seems to have their shit together a lot more.

As an aside, the video of Jimbo begging for money is hilarious. Talk about cliche.

I am a bit uneasy about this.

How so?

The only "offence" is to give to wikimedia, and should this thread go the wrong way, it may end up as just an opportunity to belittle them. Sure you may believe them to be misguided for donating, and i know the information on them is easily availiable but it still makes me feel uneasy that they are getting singled out.

To date the only other grand donor is this guy:

Anonymous
sha1:338c3706b3f34653d195ee40a310f73d2fb52b5c Wed, 10/24/2007 - 20:18 USD 1,500.00 $1,500.00

Now, Mr Anonymous (or Miss or Ms or whatever title you may have), I notice that you like jumbling random letters and numbers. Now, we here think that there is something wrong with that. What are you playing at? Sha1? Does that mean you are Shakira? Or someone else?

I think that it is reasonable to see a potential conflict of interest in who contributes.

After all, why would you give money to something that gives you something for free? Only if it benefits you.

A professor is giving money because presumably he uses it in class. A bit dangerous, but I guess I can see why. Other people may have less honourable reasons.

They might have been swayed by the video?

I dunno - but that random sequence of numbers and letters is a sha1 hash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1

For the same reason as why we should give money to great projects like Blender, Gimp and Linux distro's developpements etc.

Giving money to Wikipedia is a mistake though.

If you see someone performing on the street (singing, dancing, acting, comedy etc) then you might toss them some coins, some loose change, money that you don't need - perhaps 20 cents, perhaps even over a dollar, maybe even $5 sometimes. If you enjoy a service that is offered for free you might happily donate $5 up to even $20. I'd give that much to Wikipedia Review happily (although I've already donated over $200, but that wasn't actually intentional), or to CricInfo (who don't need the money as cricket teams give them heaps), or to AFL.com (again, they are rich already) or a number of other places that I enjoy going to. I might give it to a MUD if I enjoyed the mud, or a talker, or something like that. Just in thanks for all of the good times that I've had there. Wikipedia I am sure isn't any different. A lot of people would say that hey for a year of pleasure they can give them $5-$20. Either as an editor who is addicted to it, who wikifiddles and perhaps even is an administrator, or as a student who gets to use Wikipedia to cheat on assignments, and so forth.

But going beyond that amount, we start to get in to real money, money that amounts to an investment. Now, this varies person to person. $100 represents a new good quality computer game, or a new stereo system or a DVD player or half a week's rent. For $100 you'd want to be pretty sure that that money is going to some use. $500 represents a fortnight's rent, a new TV, a cheap computer, or a cheap 2nd hand car. For $500 it is becoming a decent sized investment. For $1,000 it represents a new good quality computer, a month's rent, a plasma TV, a good quality sofa set, a slightly better cheap 2nd hand car that might actually work, and so forth. For most people $1,000 isn't throwaway money.

Of course, there are people that have millions of dollars at their disposal who can probably just donate money all over the place so who cares. But they wouldn't stay rich for long if they didn't account for it somehow. If your company donated $1,000 to Wikipedia, they'd want to be able to justify it.

If your company made $1,000 (either in real terms or in terms of enjoyment etc) from Wikipedia, then they'd be happy to donate a significant amount. They wouldn't want to throw the same amount back though, so perhaps a $1,000 profit warrants a $200 donation. Ergo a $1,000 donation probably indicates a $5,000+ amount of profit.

So this teacher, has his career benefitted by $5,000 from Wikipedia? Did he get a pay rise to that extent? Or is he just a fool with too much money? Or does he feel that it benefits society that much?

I mean if I was using Linux to set up muds and talkers and such, and to build operating systems and networks, I might feel inclined to donate money to them, especially if they make money for me. But why would I do it for Wikipedia? Only if, in some way, it makes money for me, or benefits me significantly.

$1,000 is a good amount of money. Even rich people don't throw it away without some decent reason.

Of course, looking at the $500 donors, all bar the one mentioned above are anonymous anyway:

http://donate.wikimedia.org/en/fundcore_br...ons_filter_form



And at the other end of the scale:



That's my 2 cents.

Viridae, I see where you're coming from.

But, just for a moment...

Imagine a world where potential donors to a non-profit organization that falsified its IRS Form 990 are dissuaded from giving money because they saw a guy in a pink blazer with a 1978 moustache. That's what we're doing.

I am most interested in why someone gave their name as a cryptographic hash?

Perhaps they want to remain anonymous in terms of anyone like us looking in, but then when they ask Wikipedia for a favour, they can refer to the hash code to verify it was them, and that Wikipedia owes them a favour?

I dunno, just speculating here.

I would say it's because they're some kind of socially-maladjusted uber-nerd with dot-com wealth from before March 2000. Nothing at all sinister like expectation of future favors.

Greg

I think you got it nailed Blissy. It is not unusual that a donor's identity would be known to the non-profit but not made public. This means that the "favor" requested upon confirming the donor's identity might be directed to someone not directly within WMF. If you recall the Merkey/JzG type of hot and cold relationship this might make sense. Note that the types of favors that might be granted to anon donor who can later verify his identity might be rather unseemly.

I could not disagree, I generally contribute to open source as a way as if I bought the product. Lets say someone makes a donation of 20$ to the Blender foundation, I would have paid 20$ if Blender costed that much, for a software which its equivalent cost hundreds if not over a thousand, it is a real deal. The same goes with R (statistics), Maxima (equivalent to Maple), Gimp etc. For a Linux distro, I will be willing to contribute 50$, for the sole reason that had I bought an equivalent operation system, it sure would be in the couple of hundreds.

Those are the cheap people who contribute like me, others will make donations in the hundreds or thousands, higher than had they bought the similar product who is not free. But those people are really rare, generally those giving away that much needs the developpement of the product and it is a way of sponsering it. I don't know anyone who will be giving in the thousands because of some ideologies they subscribe to. Even if they are rich.

To co-opt Viridae's expression of unease, is this really a wise move by a Wikipedia critical site?

You have people who obviously do not share the (perceived - cos I certainly do not agree 100% with 100% of what is said here, and I doubt anyone here does) opinion of this site as regards Wikipedia. Some of them are prepared to "gift" money to Wikipedia, for reasons that they may or may not wish to share. Some of these peoples intentions will be noble, and perhaps some will be less so. There is no true way of knowing.

Some of these donors may be aware of WR, and some of the other WP critical sites. Some may even wish to review what these sites say about WP before committing an amount. So, what will they see when they get here? They will click the donation/WP related topics to find... this discussion...

...not only will they feel justified in wishing to donate to WP, they are never going to bother reading any of the other topics and never see the other possibly more legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia. This might prove counterproductive to those who feel that WP should be more accountable with and for the money they receive, or those who wish that WP will wither and die from lack of funding.


Of course, the truth and free expression are the only things worthy of consideration here - yadda, yadda, yadda - but, sometimes, you gotta know when a dignified silence is the best response.

I share your unease. Sure, they are giving money to a website that drags
people's names and pseudonyms through the dirt on top of Google. But
they don't necessarily know that, or know how prevalent it is. One would
think the purpose of a GFDL encyclopaedia would be to help people, not
defame people. I thought that for quite awhile, and some people probably
are there for that reason, and probably some people are donating for that
reason. Effects aside, many of the donors probably mean well, at least.

And suppose they are donating for their own personal benefit? Well,
honestly, that sounds like the sort of thing I would do, if I thought it would
work. I mean, I did offer to write good articles and/or featured articles
(by their standards) in exchange for courtesy blankings and deletions.
However, they treated the offer with contempt, leading me to believe they
are not dragging my psuedonym through the dirt on top of Google for the
good of the encyclopaedia, as they claim, but for sadistic reasons.

So, if anyone is donating in the hopes of getting defamatory or other
harmful information removed from WP as a favour, the best of luck to them!

There's more hand-wringing going on here than in a Jimbo fund-drive public service announcement video!

Let me assure you of two things:

1. The number of independent donors to Wikipedia who visit here before donating, divided by the number of independent donors to Wikipedia approaches 0.0000000413%.

2. So, of those two people, one might exit our site more determined to make that $15 donation, and the other one might withhold that donation to go find out why it takes $182,000 to pay a lawyer to defend an open-source encyclopedia project.

Now, sleep tight because there are no monsters under your beds. Check Wikipedia Review's traffic on Alexa. We're basically talking amongst ourselves here.

Greg

Fair comment in regard to this one donor, but I still question the legitimacy of targeting the quirks of those who wish to give money to WP, and speculating on their reasons, rather than the what's, why's and wherefore's of WP use of such monies.

I am much more the WP sceptic for reading this site (long before I registered), but I am also very much the WR sceptic too - and this seems to me part of the unfortunate tendency of bashing the pro-WP minded folk just for having that opinion. This is how some WP folk foster the idea that WR is an attack site, which allows them to disregard any valid criticism that comes up here.

I think this thread should be moved to a non public forum at the least. Even if it's not likely they'll come across it, other people might and something about me doesn't like the idea of mocking people in public for doing something they believe is right.

Mocking is a strong word. Were I to remove the moustache comment, what else is full-blown mocking?

Greg

Okay, wrong word. But things like this are basically being a dick:



The guy in question is anonymous, yes, but I don't like the idea of making a thread of everyone who donates big amounts and then implying that basically they must have a COI or be making underhand deals, etc, when we have no evidence for reasonable suspicion.

Questioning the nature of the type of person who gives money to WMF seems appropriate to me.

There's a difference between talking about that 'type of person' in general and holding up specific examples and saying 'Hmm, I wonder what their shady motive is'.

I don't subscribe to the "shady motive" thing. I subscribe to the "misguided benefactor" thing.

But, since we seem to be nudging toward that Wikipedia Review conniption fit that seems to happen every so often, I've decided to transcribe the database to my own site. I intend to keep mockery to a very bare minimum.

WR Sysop Patrol -- please delete this thread from the site, leaving only the following:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I have created an annotated listing of the 2007 donors to the Wikimedia Foundation who contribute at least $1,000.

If you support the display of this list, please show your support through Digg love.

Greg

It seems fine if you want to make that point. But do you really want moderators to take some action concerning the other posts? I can't see it.

I guess not. I don't really want to contribute to the drama here recently. I just don't like this thread. Don't mind me ...

(In the interests of transparency, I deleted some posts between AB and LHvU that were, in my opinion, a misunderstanding, and a regrettable one at that. Hopefully nobody will miss 'em...)

Anyway, this is an interesting problem to say the least. I hope I'm not looking at it too simplistically - the issue is that once we've posted their names, along with some background info, financial donors to WP might be ridiculed here simply for having given money to what they honestly believe is a worthy cause, or worse, accused of attempting to buy influence there, which in turn makes us WR folks look excessively prone to conspiracy theorizing and general disrespect for well-meaning acts of (what could arguably be deemed) charity... correct?

My immediate reaction would be to suggest that some of us may be overreacting. I mean, sure, there is Joseph100 are people here who might make unfounded or scurrilous suggestions merely out of anger and general hostility... That's true of a lot of things, though. It really comes down to whether or not one believes the Wikimedia Foundation is sufficiently controversial, or simply out-and-out damaging, that if people make four- or five-figure donations to it, they should be scrutinized for it.

And how can we, knowing what we know, seeing what we've seen, possibly conclude that it isn't sufficiently controversial? If you ask me, these people should at least be made aware of the fact that there are people out here who feel that they're contributing to what may be the ultimate demise of an important institution that should not be allowed to disappear - namely, the great Western tradition of professionally produced, peer-reviewed general reference materials for education and knowledge dissemination. (Sorry, I know there's probably an Eastern, Northern, and Southern tradition for that too... I'm just trying to prevent feature-creep here.)

Still... we probably shouldn't be unwilling to remove something that's clearly a personal attack on a WMF donor without real justification, particularly if it borders on libel in some way, though I don't believe we've seen anything quite like that, not yet anyway. If we do, then sure, maybe we close the thread and move parts of it "elsewhere"... But hopefully the regulars who read these ramblings will remain rational and reasonably respectful. (Hey, alliteration! )

How is that being a dick? I was making light of it, because quite frankly we will never know who they are.

I guess that there is an argument that we shouldn't care who donates. On the other hand, perhaps we should care.

Ultimately, if you choose to donate good money to a bad cause then that's your right to do that. If you choose to do it because you're an ignorant fool, an idiot, or because you profit from the badness of the cause, then quite frankly we are very unlikely to find out which of them it is.

I think that it is a genuine concern that some might have as to the secret conflict of interest amongst those who are donating. After all, if a high level businessman donates too much to a political campaign, and then soon after being elected, the politician changes laws to significantly benefit the businessman, both of them can get in to serious trouble for corruption.

This is what we are talking about here. Someone donating and then in return getting something significant back from it.

The problem, I think, is that this thread began without a clear aim as to which of the 3 we were trying to catch out.

Are we:

A) Trying to stop the ignorant fool from donating when most of the money goes to a high-price lawyer's salary etc? i.e. Trying to educate them.

Noting the number of idiots who use Wikipedia and the stupid comments that they make while donating $1 or so.

C) Trying to note the people who donate in return for kickbacks somehow.

I'd like to think that it is for option C, as that would seem to me to be the most important one.

The problem is that most people say that they are anonymous, and the few that don't probably don't have anything to hide.

Hence the fishing expedition is unlikely to catch any big fish.

Linking Amazon to Wikia was a good catch though, but this trip I think we are going to come up empty.

Perhaps we can stick with warning the ignorant fools, make a new thread to say that, and be done with it.

It may be time to lock this thread.

The root of this thread will continue on Centiare. While you're checking it out, please go through Digg or Reddit and give it a thumbs-up before you go to the actual page!

Greg

I still see no need to lock the thread... not yet, anyway. Like I say, we'll just have to be careful about specific and unwarranted personal "attacks" on individual donors, in some cases deleting them outright if they start to approach libel or conspiracy-theory territory. Whereas the non-specific, well-deserved, and non-personal attacks, well... maybe that sort of thing does make us all look bad, but it's still within our purview, and I wouldn't say the topic has been "fully explored" yet. (Has it?)

So... is that acceptable to everyone who's raised an objection so far? It's not like we're running some sort of contest to see who can make the nastiest remark(s) about these folks. If it starts to look that way, then sure, we'll close the thread, but until that happens, I just don't see it.

Of course, it may be a moot point - this has already gone off-topic and turned itself into a "meta-thread" about whether or not the thread itself should be closed.

If someone is donating in the hopes of getting defamatory or other harmful information
removed, I think we should wish that person the best of luck. : )

Someone from the Belgian Wikipedia came onto Centiare and attempted to troll my website, adding this devious, NPOV edit. I was forced to revert the edit and protect the article.



The primary charitable mission of Wikipedia is to buy hardware and bandwi<d>th? Bah, humbug!

Greg

Blissy, if people are making super-secret COI deals with the WMF, they are going to make their donations privately, not via a publicly available list.

You'd think so. But they always slip up somewhere.

By the way, who is Joichi Ito? The latest non-anonymous grand donor.

Oh and as for our anonymous donator, he's got 6 hits on google anyway:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=338c3706...fe=off&filter=0

Wow, what is that website coming up #2 behind Reddit.com (a Top 1000 site), as well as above Wikimedia.org (a Top 300 site) on that Google search? Must be a highly-optimized site for Google PageRank, being that that particular article only came into being a few days ago.



Greg

That's fair enough. Its primary mission is to host websites, and obviously a high proportion of its expenditure is hosting costs. How is that POV?

The fundraiser for the german wikipedia is somehow successfull. See for November and for October. They also got 3 1000+ donations in October. In 2005 they got about 120.000 euro donated in 2006 90.000. I think they tried to avoid getting too much money as they coud not really spent it and they can't transfer money to the foundation in the us, cause german law doesn't allows this. I guess they didn't really want to invest in servers as they didn't want to be responsible for the hosting. Half a year ago they finally bought 15 servers in Amsterdam.

Welcome aboard, -_- , interesting username you have there

I don't know... how are 50% of the edits of Jimmy Wales in Wikipedia article space original research?

Here's the thing -- hosting websites is decidedly not the Wikimedia Foundation's mission. They could outsource the website hosting to Yahoo or Google tomorrow, and not be in any violation of their mission.

Their mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

Nothing about that mission says it has to be done on Wikimedia owned-and-operated web servers. In fact, they could free up a lot of money for truly useful empowerment and engagement if they allowed the server function to be outsourced (perhaps in an exchange for on/off switchable contextual advertising).

But, they've got all their donors hoodwinked that web servers and bandwith are ultra-expensive, and require people based in San Francisco to groupthink them, and demand someone with a $500,000 staff and salary to protect them.

C'mon, Guy -- I didn't expect this apologist viewpoint from you.

Greg

Do you think there's any ulterior motive that this guy donated $10,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation? Laying the groundwork for a Net Neutrality alliance with Jimbo, perhaps?

Greg

Just a comment.

As someone who has overcome some difficult nasties in my own day....in fact, not unlike your challenges with Wikipedia .... I wish you would not bring the Wikipedia maltreatment of you (which is truly was) into the C----- sphere.

Centiare deserves to stand on its own two feet, for what it can offer the business community. There is an unmet need for this, given that Wikipedia finds marketing and business presentations to be disgusting and immoral (as we all know too well, but the SEO community hasn't yet figured out).

Bringing the entire situation of your maltreatment is accurate. But it brings attention to it, and as good as that might feel (believe me, I understand your anger) it doesn't give the right vibe, and you are doing yourself (and Centiare) an injustice. It also gives the wrong impression that you are an outcast, which isn't entirely true. Centiare was founded because of their rigidity. But it will be successful for other reasons.

Say, "C----- is focused on providing a wiki-based venue for business marketing and content publication. This differs from Wikipedia which is less business-friendly, less business-welcoming, and has some huge risks for businesses, in terms of content control, both for the article, and for off-article chit-chat, which can wind up in a google search. Wikipedia has a well-known high risk factor for businesses. Getting on Wikipedia, for most businesses, will result in a debate over notability. Attempts on the part of the business to contribute content can be viewed as conflict-of-interest, and are generally unwelcome. This creates a dilemma for busiesses with a Wikipedia article, who can find themselves criticized for correcting or adding to their own article, and the criticisms are always online, and receive immediate Google top billing. The C----- environment is risk-free! On C-----, businesses control their article content, and Business presence is our raison d'etre, hence Business presentation on C----- is win-win. On request, Centiare can provide assistance in the content creation, if needed, for a small fee. Most businesses presenting on C----- have been quite satisfied, particularly with the Google hit-rate Centiare provides them, as well as giving them the ability to publish content in the Wiki-format with which their clients are familiar.

I'd even avoid mentioning truisms, such as that wikipedia is mostly run by really young people, etc. Try to avoid using the name at all, other than to say, "C----- fills in a gap left open by Wikipedia" Try to avoid talking about the fight, almost to the point of denying it. You are the little guy, and they are Goliath. To explain is to justify, so don't explain. Don't talk about the history. Don't talk about what they are still doing by mentioning your name, etc. At least not on C-----, or anyone related to Centiare (and in general, if you can manage it). Don't let them spoil your project. Complain on WR, if you must.

You have good reason to be emotional and angry, but you are falling into the trap of allowing your anger to infiltrate your business model. I've been there, believe me, and frankly, I wish I would have completely shut off my anger, earlier, because when I did, and when I focused solely on moving forward, and ignoring the stonewallers, things took off. .

Really, you should thank them (if you turn the situation on its head). The fact that this effort was excluded from Wikipedia makes it possible to be more interesting as a standalone unit. You can make more money this way. Wales probably rejected you personally as he is really competitive, and he only either likes two kinds of people: 1) Toadies who kiss his backside, or 2) "Better people" who can serve him to improve his 'whatever' (stature, power, finances, press-coverage). Anyone else is useless to him, and he treats them like dog dirt. He's terribly short sighted like this. Look at how he treated (or treats) Larry Sanger. Completely disrespectfully, and for no reason.

I think you should be honored that you weren't an acceptable slave. He only insulted you because he was threatened (and he has poor, short-sighted, selfish social skills). Your ideas were good, but that wasn't at all the problem he had with them. You didn't fit into 1 or 2. Ergo dogdirt.

My 2 cents. Sorry to butt my nose in where it doesn't belong (I don't mean to be offensive here). I'll edit this post in a day or so, to clear out this pov. Best, DL[/size]

Very helpful analysis, DL. I thank you for taking the time to outline your thoughts. There are substantial changes about to take place within Centiare, and I'm sure that this topic of "where do we stand vis-a-vis Wikipedia" is going to be evolving actively. Believe me, I have considered your position in my own mind, many times.

In my (feeble) defense, the "anti-Wikipedia" pages in Centiare probably number less than a dozen. Out of 30,000+ pages, that's not too pervasive.

Greg

Hey, I'm not criticizing you, or at least I don't mean to. I was in your shoes, and I was so angry I could barely think clearly. My bad guys werent even as smart or entrepreneurial as Wales (part of the problem), and lacked his imagination (which he surprisingly does have). Really, it would be expected that he'd have been supportive to you, but it is his personality that hinders this (and probably other things too - his reaction wasn't about you). He doesn't like compatriots. Only people working for free, or providing something from a higher level than him. He's really transparent like that, though most don't get that yet.

I'm not telling you anything you don't know, about marketing and presentation, which you are clearly good at. But when someone makes you very angry, it is easy to forget what you know about presentation. Esp. when they are making war on your name and business online, (and generally acting like they are 12 years old). Even in the present.

My 2nd set of 2 cents? Ignore the crap out of them on C------, where you are doing a better job of what they haven't the brains to do something (and Wales should know better to not leave this hole open, but he's too Wikia-eyed to bother to see it), and mock the crap out of them on Wikipedia.

Really, you have no reason to be angry with Wikipedia proper, as such. If you want to exercise real anger, you know that there is a serious means for attaching that, which I will refrain from stating, but we all know it starts with an L.

The little people are baiting you to lash out at them. Don't do it, unless it is with a serious and powerful gesture.

You are more grown up than them. And more professional.

##Im deleting the name of C----- from this post, so it isn't giving any google mileage to the topic.

Lawrence Lessig and a very crazy-looking Brooke Burgess have made their donations to the Wikimedia Foundation / Carolyn Doran Legal Fund.

They're down at the bottom of my ongoing list.

Greg