Of course, there is the Internet Review Corporation, but that's not (yet) a tax-advantaged non-profit.

So, let's hear some other names, please.

Which non-profit with tax-advantaged status would you say is most clearly aligned against the principles (and principals!) of the Wikimedia Foundation?

And to get you in the mood:

Against the principles and the principals? I'm not sure that's possible, since the principals of the WMF are themselves against the principles of the WMF.

what are the basic principles? sharing all knowledge with everyone seems to be worth while principles. are they not?



...


..

BLP's and Wikia having follow links seem to me to be the two biggest problems... along with a bunch of angry admins... there are probably some others that have been mentioned here copiously...

why not be about bringing justice?

Completely true, but never the less most non-profits would probably only extend good will and a helping hand if WMF asked for help on issues like dispute resolution, child protect, board development to broaden which stakeholder are represented. They would probably do this even if they were aware of the ill will that Wales harbors against those evil altruists. They would just write it off as being political tolerant.

Well, no. On the other hand, "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" is something I could support.

... these seem like legal issues... why haven't the proper authorities gotten involved?!


and @anthony

"The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation 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."

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Freque...Asked_Questions

what a coincidence!

Well if you define "tax advantaged" as 501©(3) public charities, you probably would want to look at some of the large database foundations that sell access to collections of research papers, etc since they have the most to lose if WM were ever to start publishing all of the out of copyright materials they sell. There are at least a couple in Category:Commercial digital libraries that I am fairly certain are 501©(3)s.

You might also look at someone like the Recording Industry Association of America, which is technically a non-profit organization, they probably could find some piece of copyrighted material on WP at a given point in time.

But, I do think you are going to have a hard time motivating these charities and organizations to fight the WMF. As threatening as WP is to someone like the RIAA, there are 100 more websites out there doing significantly more damage to causes they hold dear than the WMF could ever do and most of the other charities are probably more scared of Google and for-profit concerns that are digitizing material than a small non-profit that like the WMF.

Realistically, there are very few charities with mission or vision statements that would match a negation of wmf:Vision or wmf:Mission.



I just can't see anyone actually claiming that.

So, you would need to find someone who objects to the WMF's practices, model, or participants. And right there you have moved off the ideological grounds to more nuts and bolts issues, that tend to bore the people who make decisions. Enough citations of the BLP, copyright, or other problems might move some people, but again, with quotes from Eric Schmidt making the headlines, the WMF simply isn't unique enough in its activities to draw the type of ire you want.

Note: Somey, I can't make a proper ( C ) since it keeps changing it to a ©.

Well, it's not completely aligned against the WMF, since they nominally have the same goals... but I'd suggest supporting traditional purveyors of public knowledge that are in danger of being marginalized by "Web 2.0": libraries, community colleges, public broadcasting, and such. These sorts of outlets have always been committed to educating the public with the highest standards of excellence. Irresponsible standards at Wikipedia, on the other hand, have arguably really lowered the bar of research and scholarship. (Much like blogs and asinine cable news have decimated the newspaper industry.)

Thank you, recent posts, we are starting to get into the territory that I wished to explore.

I think what I had in mind were organizations like the Creative Incentive Coalition, although they seem to have gone belly-up in the middle of 1998.

Still alive and kicking, though, is the National Writers Union, although that's probably a 501©(5).

Could you give us a primer or a quick link on what all these 501(c)(numb) things mean?

Jon

There's also the Author's Guild, which is affiliated with the Author's League Fund and the Author's Guild Foundation - the latter is a registered charity, AFAIK.

In the UK, some bands recently started the Featured Artists Coalition for musicians, but I don't personally know of a similar organization in the UK for writers.

501©(3)#Types is a badly written list. Short of it is that 501©(3) public charities are the kind of charities we are all accustomed to seeing (colleges, hospitals, Red Cross (I think), etc. The point Greg is getting at (I think) is that these organizations tend to be publicly supported and are therefore the kind of organization he wants to use to attack WM, which is also a 501©(3).

I'm not trying to "use" the organizations for "attack".

Just seeking mutual alignments of principles that I'm beginning to cherish more as I see the future of a world of Wikipedias and without newspapers and professional encyclopedias.

Okay, to be more specific, when people say "tax-advantaged" here's the kind of distinction that makes a difference to me and a lot of other people.

I contribute a certain amount every year to a Canadian Arts Group, and I didn't used to get a tax deduction because they hadn't done the right stuff to satisfy the IRS, but then they did, and now I do. That is a definite incentive for me to keep contributing. In a very real sense, it means that the U.S. Gov is supporting Canadian Arts.

Is WMF that kind of racket, or not?

Jon

Geek Note. Folks who want to write ï´¾cï´¿ and have it stay ï´¾cï´¿ even after previewing or quoting can try unicode 64830 and 64831 for left and right parentheses.

The Government of North Korea (on the basis that is it non-profit making and affords tax advantages to its leaders) ... grand spectacles and spying.

Unpaid serf castes, indulgences for its ruling caste, malicious and intrusive surveillance, non-elect and unaccountability cult leader, rule of fear and insecurity ... both leaderships appear to have a pathological belief in their own PR, both bodies of governance regularly rattle the donations can to outsiders, "loose" adherence to reality, regular executions of summary justice.

OK ... at least the brainwashed 'assassins' of the Pee-dia commit virtual assassinations and they stop short of abductions.

Ha ... no mention of the Wikipedia's policy of hosting all those pictures of engorged genitals, animated cum shots and hard core pornography with which it is inseminating its values effectively into the minds of children then?

Okay, I found it —

Presumably that would require you to gain control of those organizations first... Not saying you couldn't manage it, but it seems like it would be a lot of effort, when you could just build a really big bomb.


Another one might be the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation of the Society of Professional Journalists, but to be honest, I'm not seeing much evidence of their taking an active role in opposing the idea of crowdsourced journalism (which, to be fair, isn't much of a real trend unless you count bloggers in general as "journalists"). They seem much more concerned with First Amendment issues...

Moulton might get a laff out of this foundation's full name, but if anything they seem even less concerned with Big Picture issues like crowdsourcing's potential threat to their profession.

Haven't you asked Perverted Justice yet?

They operate Wikisposure, apparently.

Which has had many choice things to say about Wikipedia's pedophile-editor gang.

And WP reciprocated, by calling them an "attack site".

A long-running mathematical collaboration that pre-dates the Internet has just formed a 501ï´¾cï´¿ï´¾3ï´¿ foundation and is getting ready to re-launch its database on a MediaWiki site. I found their homepage to be very informative about all the mechanics of that process, including links to IRS forms and such.

The OEIS Foundation Inc.

Jon

Why not just use 9374 for â’ž?

501⒞⑶

I note from their Form 990's of the past three years, they seem to have started in 2006 with a seed fund of $850,000 from some source. Then in the subsequent two years, they're getting far less funding, and expenses are dangerously exceeding income. Not a good investment.

Not very pretty in my browser.

What I don't get is why we don't just shut off the ï´¾cï´¿ → © replacement, since it's always been easy enough to use © for ©?

So? PJ has admittedly developed a poor reputation in recent years because of their "stings" with the help of Dateline NBC. (That's where the $850k came from.)

Otherwise they're a genuine, official nonprofit, and they've clearly had bad relations with the wiki-slag patrol, because they dared criticize the Golden Wiki. The wiki article isn't what I would call "favorable" to them.

The potential for the perpetrator committing suicide when caught seems a weak reason to avoid investigation. Even so it is a loss that should be avoided if possible, and is another reason to include mental health monitoring as a condition of pre-trial release. It was not work of PJ that made the risk of perpetrator suicide so likely. It was the involvement of media in such an aggressive fashion. Local law enforcement also signed on for the use of PJ volunteers and the TV coverage, so the concern raised in the linked article that such sting projects should be left to law enforcement ultimately answerable the people through elected representatives seems invalid. It seems unfortunate that PJ should take a public relations hit here.

You misspelled "suspect", twice.

Anyway, would the local law enforcement have signed on to it if not pressured by NBC into doing so [would they have had the resources to do these investigations if not for NBC? Consider just who likely wrote that $850k check]? Should NBC have this power? Commercializing law enforcement is inherently dangerous.

Now that is odd, I read my post over several times since your helpful comment and I didn't even use the word "suspect" at all. Not even once:



Perhaps I so mangled some other word you thought meant "suspect?" You'll have to help me out here because I can't even guess what you might mean.

Perhaps your concerned with the word "perpetrator?" The right to "innocent until proven guilty" is an important right, but it is a right a person has vis a vis the state, not individual commentators.

I'm just glad that the media (including the linked article itself) usually knows better.

Remember the context here. The perpetrator will never be tried. He is dead. Under your reasoning we should always consider him "innocent." That would seem to have an odd impact on the conversation.

BTW where I come from it is the police that do the coercion, not receive it. They have guns and stuff.

So if someone is suspected of a crime, never charged, and then dies, he is to be presumed guilty? OK he can't sue for libel but that seems a shade steep.

So if someone commits suicide in the face of overwhelming evidence, including audio and video recordings, computer forensics and their own admission they must be forever treated as if innocent for the purpose of evaluating the investigative techniques used?

Well, how about the 9/11 alleged hijackers? Perhaps they were just Harold and Kumar and friends from Saudi Arabia, and everybody over-reacted to a really tragic set of comedy radio transmissions, and unusually bad landings? Assume good faith!

True that.

That sounds like a cirkular argument. Someone is proved guilty using certain techniques but not found guilty by a court because he died. We assume then that he would have been found guilty and that helps to prove that those techniques are good.

The only sane, and indeed the only ethical, thing to do is if someone dies, just scrub that case from the records for the purpose of evaluating the investigative techniques used.

But the whole point is to figure out if the investigation inappropriately causes suicides. Of course it would be a very bad thing if it caused the deaths of completely innocent people. So looking at bona fides of the case against the person who committed suicide is certainly relevant. To "scrub the case" would be very favorable to my point of view (eg that the investigations are valuable) but unfairly so to my thinking. Scrubbing them would essentially make the argument against the investigations moot. I wish people could figure out in which direction arguments cut before they make them.

People commit suicide for all sorts of reasons, some rational some irrational. I'm reminded of the case of Harold Shipman, who killed himself to ensure that his wife received his NHS pension. Not necessarily anything to do with an admission or denial of guilt.

Obviously the proper procedure is to get Kevin Costner to lead an investigation.

Back, and to the left.

Could somebody do a study to determine what percentage of the threads that I launch get utterly derailed?

Possibly, but why would anyone but you care?

Well, the obvious follow-up would be analysis of every WR editor who has started at least 10 threads, to come up with a head-to-head index of thread derailment likelihood. And, we could simultaneously figure out which editors are most prone to derail a thread.

It's not all about me, ME, ME, you see.

Compare the cases of Brandt's "BLP Train Wreck" thread and your "Seduction of Helping" thread.

The first was derailed with a major intrusion of Random Noise and yours went Free Associative (FA) on the 3rd or 4th post because you made tangential mention of every Wikipediot's Wiki-Pet topic of FA's.

I cleaned the latter out when I got back from other work, but Random Noisers are still intruding on the former, even after the Mods split the off-topic posts out.

I could tell you exactly why that sort of thing happens around here, but you know how much I fear the loss of Wiki-Popularity.

Jon

Greg asked for names of nonprofits that would be "aligned against" the WMF. I suggested Perverted Justice, which is admittedly a controversial outfit. I still think they would qualify, if you're looking for WMF opponents. Dragging this thread off into talk about PJ's aggressive tactics isn't helping -- they're well documented. Back to finding more nonprofits that don't like the Jimbosphere, okay?

I would suggest Scientology, but everyone seems to hate them.
How about LaRouche's outfit, the WYLM?
Wonder what they think of Wikipedia after all the editwarring and backstabbing........

PJ went after Wikipedia once and got stung badly. They mistook Lucky6.9 for a pro-pedophilia activist when he was actually the opposite. Poor Lucky gave up is admin bit and went and hid for a while, and PJ was publicly humiliated.

As I recall, some pro-pedophilia activists put out the call to torpedo Lucky's Request for Administrator vote because he was unfriendly to their cause. PJ got confused and thought it was a call for support.

http://www.perverted-justice.com/opinions/?article=11

Works well with Greg's question though. Scientology is opposed to the principles of the WMF (the development of educational content) as well as the principals of the WMF (I suppose). I was going to mention them but I thought they got their non-profit status stripped from them by the IRS.

Naive.

Suppose you could take down Google. Would search engines cease generally? The evoolutionary niche is there for a Wikipedia, or something that functions like a Wikipedia. Suppose WMF stopped. Today. What do you think happens? (Apart from dismay, jubilation, apathy and analysis all mixed up)

A few hundred million people missing the data they're used to... a few hundred thousand people willing to help kickstart a replacement, a few tens of thousands who'll find a host and a few hundreds or thousands with copies of the (public) data dumps. The meme's out there. Like search engines and blogs, like cars and hospitals... there's likely to be a free wiki collating knowledge under any likely future with high levels of online mobility.

Do you reckon the revised version will be more encyclopedic? I think the issues Wikipedia has are substantially due to human nature in large groups, and lack of a standard model for doing large scale collaboration ("figure it out as it goes"). So Wikipedia II is probably going to be similar to Wikipedia I in a lot of ways. It might convergently evolve under the same issues, or may die. Or will it? Maybe it'll fracture and now you'll have 3 or 4 wikis. Want to bet the one with best BLPs ends up as top rank on Google? I wouldn't count on it.

Or maybe removing Wikipedia will magically help those "newspapers and professional encyclopedias"? They're having problems already. Their problems were here before Wikipedia and will get worse after. Whatever saves them and whatever niche they move to in surviving, Wikipedia's a symptom of the change in information handling worldwide. It's not the cause. Remove it, and you don't help them that much. The problem's already there.

On a positive note, stuff changes. Unsafe cars evolve into safer ones over the years; groups that started from questionable or problematic origins and grow over the years can mature and turn out well. (Australia was once a prison colony; although I don't see the Cosa Nostra reforming any time soon.) Mainstream media will surely be prioritizing their survival internally regardless of Wikipedia, and culturally I don't think we'll see the end of professional media for a long time to come. A paradigm shift in how they work maybe, but the niche is too essential. Something'll fill it and an equilibrium will be reached.

So I don't see a problem in the usual sense. It's an example of an ongoing historical pattern that happens every few decades or centuries in the past, and (almost certainly again) in future. It's a symptom of culture evolving under the first decades of the information age, which is profound and pervasive, and within which Wikipedia is only one instance. Like religion losing to science, the industrial age, coal and horses losing to electricity and cars, writing, and many other times... we're always on the move. There's going to be that gap regularly at times where what's coming has started, and the norms we're adapted to are under strain. There will be gains and loses, just like for cars and writing, and some will be great, some very sad.

It usually resolves. We've been here before, many times, in other areas. History in 50 or 100 years (if we're around) will be better placed to say what Wikipedia's role was. A forerunner, a symptom maybe. Not a lot more. Unlikely to be the one fount of all knowledge. Will have evolved.

Pragmatic? Fatalistic? Probably accurate.

Why would you even bother writing all that? Why waste your time on the supposition that the WMF would simply stop in one day? Everyone knows that isn't going to happen.

Whereas, if your purpose is to demoralize or distract the opposition by explaining how the fantasy scenario isn't going to work out, meanwhile ignoring the more realistic scenario of a gradual WP decline concurrent with the rise of much better alternatives (and an eventual competitive shakeout between those alternatives), then fine - well done, but you should probably be writing about it on Wikipedia itself, where they seem to enjoy that sort of thing.


As for the rest, this is just my opinion of course, but independent critical-thinking-capable publishers and authors have increasingly been forced to get raw information from sources like Google and Wikipedia in order to keep their research costs down and reduce turnaround time. This has clearly caused sacrifices in quality - accuracy and reliability especially, but also readability and general coherence. Web-based media looks much more like cable news than it does newspapers and magazines - the emphasis is on scoops, immediacy, and oversimplification of anything resembling a difficult concept. That leads to a vicious cycle of qualitative downturn - a race to the bottom, of sorts, as more businesses and people within the system lose their credibility and are pushed out, unable to deal with the financial and practical requirements for producing quality work. So even if "professional media" survives in the near term despite pressure from Wikipedia et al, what survives isn't likely to be worth much.

I don't have that focus. It's all going to change over time. The point I'm making is that arguing about Wikipedia/WMF itself is pointless in some ways, because these aspects of Wikipedia reflect a well known and very powerful societal trend, they aren't a "cause" of it. The niche in society and culture for a crowd written source is there, what specific body fills it is going to be driven by social and cultural issues in a big way. Human nature will drive it, same as it drives that MacDonalds and pizza take over from more wholesome foods, and so on.

In brief, I think the focus of this thread is naive. The question isn't "Wikipedia is going to kill high quality media and professional encyclopedias." The question is, look at similar changes in other areas. Food, entertainment, board games, books, public speaking. A trend exists for exactly what you describe: - simplification, soundbites, quality, depth... all of these gradually become driven by mass motivators, and the core problem is discernment and quality are not very good at motivating the masses (and they should be). So markets diversify, think about walmart and macies... e-machines and apple... nike and some cheap shoe for $8... Dickens and pratchett... Eisenstein and Harry Potter... whatever. Used to be a basic education was about knowledge and betterment; now it's about a job. If there's a force that will stop that happening to knowledge, I don't know it. People (in the West) do seem to gravitate to a common denominator, and that's a bleak outlook but it seems to be what people and cultures do over time. It doesn't deny a high quality aspect too -- professional photographers, writers, datacenters, and the like.

The post above is really about how research and quality intensive areas would survive and prosper in an age of mass crowd information, and how we try and raise standards of quality against the usual trend - ie, it's more a cultural trend than an individual case example of it.

My personal answer is that we are effectively fighting some kind of entropy. Unless we get into classrooms and teach from the ground up to look for quality, think critically, research with care, we'll get the level of information we (culturally) seek. It'll be like MacDonalds and Disney - and all packaged and predigested. Yes it is discouraging. But recognition of the problem is a prerequisite for solving it. Maybe we can take this behemoth of information and somehow tilt it to higher quality. Maybe something else needs to evolve from it. But we're trying to educate a world about preferring and discerning quality here, even if it costs more or takes more time, thought, and effort... and that's not at all easy.

In the end, natural process may be what kicks in. We want hi-tech, life saving medicines, a safe planet, ... and if we don't fix education, we won't get it. Maybe that's the pressure that will ultimately change things. It's big enough, and strikes hard enough. It would be nice not to need a pressure like that to change culturally... but we might.

Neither of those are questions, strictly speaking, but whatever...


The alternate view is that Wikipedia, and crowdsourced information resources in general, are an aberration brought about by the confluence of anonymity, interactive technology, and narcissism. Take any one of those things away and you have a failed project, and take two of the three things away and the project actually does go away completely, and fairly quickly at that.

Unfortunately, the thing that's probably most valuable to society in general, namely anonymity, is also the thing that's easiest to misuse, and also easiest to take away if you're a government responding to demands for privacy, even-handed treatment for all publishers, social accountability/responsibility, etc. etc.

You also refer to the "cultural trend" whereby things get divided into cheap/free alternatives and "premium" alternatives - tap water vs. bottled water is one of the more heavily-used examples. But people don't have quite the same relationship to information that they do to water, food, houses, or cars; the value proposition for premium information is much harder to sell, even if the quality difference between a free reference-info source and a "premium" one is far more pronounced... But I'm not sure what that means for Wikipedia, other than that the damaging effect it has on the existing knowledge economy is inherent to the whole concept (which should have been obvious from the beginning).

Woof? Woof woof woof. Bow wow woof woof woof bow wow.

Er, but this was supposed to be what made Wikipedia work, wasn't it? The wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, the magic fairy dust that you sprinkled on any crap software and created something from nothing.

What went wrong?