Want to donate to Wikipedia?

I just noticed a burst of traffic from a site discussing whether to donate to Wikipedia.  Welcome to Beyond Necessity.  On donating, I'm not necessarily saying don't, but do check where your money is going first.

If you are logging in from an IP based in the UK, even if you are not from the UK but here on business or pleasure, you will be taken to a page owned by Wikimedia UK.  Note that carefully.  It says Wikimedia with an 'm' not a 'p', and it says 'UK'.  If you are outside the UK you don't get the 'UK' but you still get the 'm'.

Wikimedia is not the same as Wikipedia, so you are not donating to Wikipedia.  Now some of the money will go to Wikipedia to pay the costs of running the enormous servers which support the huge Wikipedia traffic. But that  is small compared to the sum that Wikimedia spends annually, and in any case you are not supporting the construction of Wikipedia itself, which is entirely written by volunteers.  Often very badly written, as I have said many times here. Gregory Kohs has some good financial analysis here.

Wikimedia International (the Wikimedia Foundation) spends lots of money on travel, entertainment, and Sue Gardner's decent salary.  But none of this supports Wikipedia itself. As for Wikimedia UK, the money will go entirely on what is listed here, none of which I can make any sense of.

If you want to help education, donate via gift aid to an institution run by competent and qualified staff.  I donate generously to the Warburg, which is a great place and offers great courses, and has a great library of Renaissance books.  I don't give any money to a bunch of incompetent clowns at Wikimedia UK.

Three million dollar Wikipedia

Jay Walsh of the Wikimedia foundation writes

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – October 5, 2011 – The Wikimedia Foundation announced today it has been awarded the largest-ever grant in its history: $3.6 million from the Stanton Foundation. The purpose of the grant is to fund major investments in the technology infrastructure that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects, in order to successfully serve their growing readership. The Wikimedia projects currently reach more than 422 million unique visitors around the world every month (comScore, August 2011), making Wikipedia the fifth most-popular website in the world. The grant will fund development of a new editing interface that will make it possible for people to easily edit Wikipedia without needing to learn special wiki syntax. It will also support development of new technical features to make Wikimedia a friendlier and more understandable environment for new editors.

Goodness.  Nearly four million dollars, but how is that going to solve the problem of people being scared off by a site that coddles vandals and trolls, insults experts, and is generally run by pricks?

What is Wikipedia doing with our money?

Events again take over again. In the Examiner today, Greg Kohs reports that the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) which runs Wikipedia awarded a contract to a consulting firm which had close connections to a WMF employee. The contract was not put out to competitive bid and when interviewed by Kohs the executive director (Sue Gardner) said she did not know what it cost. This is an obvious concern. WMF is entirely financed by donations. They have a fiduciary responsibility to be responsible with that money, and to use it in ways that they told the donors they would use it. Not even to know how they are using it is irresponsible.

This is almost certainly the reason why Kohs was banned from the WMF mailing list. Why I was blocked is still unclear, although the concerns I expressed there are similar to Kohs. I like the mission of the WMF 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". But I have a concern that the WMF is not pursuing this mission, that it is (for example) deliberately ignoring the problem of plagiarism, use of outdated or biased sources, as well as sources that are blatantly incorrect.

How can we trust an organisation that claims it is committed to free dissemination of information, and yet rigorously prohibits any dissemination of information about itself?

Free culture?

Today I was going to write something serious about encyclopedias, but events have overtaken all that. Today Gregory Kohs has been banned from the mailing list ('foundation-l') run by the Wikimedia Foundation ('WMF'), and I have been put 'on moderation' (meaning my posts are monitored for any 'negative comment'). Our crime? Greg has been making a series of well-argued posts about the potential misuse of funds by the WMF. For example, he questioned the connection between the WMF and a firm it hired for a donor survey. For more about this, and for an excellent summary of why you shouldn't donate to Wikipedia, see his well-argued essay here.

My fault was to make the same sort of comments about Wikipedia and 'free culture' in general as I have been making here, for example about Andronicus of Rhodes - "if Wikipedia now is relying on century-old sources, what sources will Wikipedia be relying on in 100 years time? For Wikipedia has apparently made traditional sources obsolete". This seems to have caused an outcry. Fred Bauder, a lawyer who has close connections to the project, writes "This list is for people who support the project, not those who are actively opposing it . Gerard Meissen says "Mr Damian uses hyperbole to the extend [sic] that you would believe there is nothing good to be found in Wikipedia".

I don't particularly mind - far more people read this blog than the WMF mailing list. In fact, I find it fascinating and I love the absurdity of it. The advocates of free speech and free culture preventing open discussion and critique of the very idea of free speech and free culture. And in any case, actions like these are much more convincing evidence for my views about Wikipedia, than anything I could write about here.