You would have thought that one of the most basic things they could have included alongside the campaign banner was a like/dislike button, in a similar style to Facebook and something that almost every ad supplier except Google seems to be picking up. Voila, instant feedback from your readers about why they do or don't like the banner concept. Collect the data, phase out unpopular ads and replicate concepts used in the popular ones.

Is this stuff really that hard?

Ahhh Ha HA HA HAAAAAAH ! ! !

Somebody just wasted $6.66 out of their allowance!

I wonder if these people would appreciate

Best Buy Children's Foundation Tag Team Awards

the works of SKANKBONE User:TwoWings and the other Namblers, and Peds
who are active on the mighty wiki.

The Childrens Foundation would appreciate
the articles and photos which would be available
to all young school children like this one
A how to picture
Got to love the frenchies
(NOT)

Ahhh Ha HA HA HAAAAAAH ! ! !

Somebody just wasted $6.66 out of their allowance!

It would be great to see the foundation adopt proposals like that. I know I could do quite a bit more work if I had access to a site like Lexis-Nexis.

The phrase "(ad-)free forever" keeps reminding me of those gawd-awful "Evony: Free Forever" ads that are plastered all over Google's ad network.

Um, it still seems to be there.

Another idiot business owner who will need to buy my e-book.

You should put Ben in touch with Lisa Baur aka Durova and her Sekret ways of wiki.

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."

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.)

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.

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:


"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).

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.

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."

Are you sure?

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.

The Comments are certainly worth reading.

Are you sure?

The Comments are certainly worth reading.

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

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.

...

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.

[...]
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.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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

Not since I audited Hilton have I ever seen this much slight of hand in a 'financial report.' If there are other public accountants here, please don't let me take the limelight. Report here Not only is this quite unacceptable in the business realm, but the lack of annotation, and the focus on imagery is what one would expect from a company that owns an image farm.

Actually, thinking about Commons, this is what shareholders are given. This is what they expect. This is why donations are called upon, because investors would rather see a Shankbone shot of a vagina (not sure that exisits) then what Wikimedia considers to be a financial report. When the US goes IASB, fuck us all, and when I say that, I mean this endeavor may be strong as not for profit, fail as 'one uses it everyday' and even worse for what can pass as a business. 14 employees, with 'hopes' to gain 6 more, makes this nothing more than a site that has top rankings in Google, and nothing else.

I'm certainly not dogging out those who contribute, but if my own contribution can show how financial papers look like a Kinko's copy of doom - it will only be allowed until the rest of the world forces the US to produce a decent FAR. This is a joke.

A sick joke. And when wales says that many rely on WP 'every day,' God help us if we, who have doctors, lawyers, and parents, actually do rely on a site where you may be in the middle of a hysterectomy, but you are relying on a generally stable article, where another editor, IP or registered, has changed the venue, before you make that final stitch.

Three million articles might well be "just about done", if they were the right three million articles.

Not since I audited Hilton have I ever seen this much slight of hand in a 'financial report.'

Um, does the professional association to which you presumably belong have any ethical code at all?

The concept of "ethical code" used to describe "Wikipeidia" is a laughable oxymoron.

A true apologist. People, like you, are like the mother who cries.... Johnnie not a bad boy, while Johnnie is on trial for mass murder.

Lets have no mistake or mis-understanding, Wikipedia has no system of governance, no rules. The only system Wikipedia has is gang rule, corruption, and jungle law.

Think of Wikipedia to be a failed state, run like Somalia. The rule of guns, gangs, and warlords.

There's a school of thought that holds that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a statist institution, enhancing the power of courts to impose social change without the request or consent of the populace. That school of thought overlooks, though, that the Charter is designed to empower the individual in the face of the state; the only entities subject to it are public entities (i.e. organs of the state), and in virtually all cases the restrictions it imposes prevent those entities from infringing on individual freedoms.

So your implying that Wikipedia a "sovereign state" which supersedes the law of the United States of America?

Oh, no, I'm sorry, I thought we were having a contest to see who could come up with the comment that was least related to the post to which it was putatively replying.

WIKIPEDIA is a JUNGLE of Lies, Misappropriation, Slander, Liable.

Wikipedia run by irresponsible, power drunk assholes, whose over-site, over a web site with such dominion on the internet, is a disgrace.

The concept of "ethical code" used to describe "Wikipeidia" is a laughable oxymoron.

There's a school of thought that holds that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a statist institution, enhancing the power of courts to impose social change without the request or consent of the populace. That school of thought overlooks, though, that the Charter is designed to empower the individual in the face of the state; the only entities subject to it are public entities (i.e. organs of the state), and in virtually all cases the restrictions it imposes prevent those entities from infringing on individual freedoms.

Oh, no, I'm sorry, I thought we were having a contest to see who could come up with the comment that was least related to the post to which it was putatively replying.

They are up to $5.8 million received. It makes me sick, but what are you going to do?

They are up to $5.8 million received. It makes me sick, but what are you going to do?