Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Cheers,
P
From: Adam Wight [mailto:adam.m.wight@gmail.com]
Sent: 03 December 2021 17:32
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: [Marketing Mail] [Wikimedia-l] Re: Auction at Christie's
This is a good opportunity for us to take a look at the new conflict of interest policies [1], in light of preventing this sort of email in the future. In my opinion, the WMF Board had the right idea—this is a personal project, and broadcasting to a movement list gives a strong sense of capitalizing on fame and networks, at the expense of nudging us towards venal boosterism.
I'm sure this was an innocent idea and something good will be done with the money, but that's beside the point, we're not a forum for major donor press releases. Thank you for sharing some of the thought process behind your post.
On Fri, Dec 3, 2021 at 3:10 PM Jimmy Wales <jimmywales@wikitribune.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I am writing to let you know that I am doing an auction with Christie’s auction house, commencing today and closing on December 15th.
We’re auctioning two things - the original Strawberry iMac that I used during the founding time period of Wikipedia, and an NFT artwork that I created to commemorate the earliest moment of Wikipedia.
A bit of Q&A...
**What is an NFT?**
NFT stands for ‘non fungible token’, there is a fairly thorough article about it on English Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token>.
**What is this NFT exactly?**
I saw earlier in the year that Tim Berners-Lee did an NFT of “the original source code of the web”. In his own words: “"I’m selling a picture that I made, with a Python program that I wrote myself, of what the source code would look like if it was stuck on the wall and signed by me.”
I thought I should try to push forward from that and so instead of just doing a picture (screenshot) of what Wikipedia looked like when I first installed the Usemod software and typed “Hello, World!” I would prefer to do something interactive.
The artistic concept is not just to see what Wikipedia looked like to me in that moment, but to relive the experience: here is this incredible vulnerable thing, a wiki, and you dream of it becoming an encyclopedia for the whole world, but will it? Will it be taken over by vandals and trolls instantly? What policies will you need? What kind of community can you attract?
**Will any portion of the proceeds go to the WMF?**
The Wikimedia Foundation board has explicitly asked that I not pledge any funds to Wikimedia. (They aren’t asking me not to donate, just not to pledge to do so up front.) I am pledging to donate to “help support a variety of charities working in the free culture world.” I’ll decide after we see how it goes in terms of what exactly I’ll do! (Advice welcome! I’d be interested in a community process to help choose.)
I’ve worked with the WMF per the board’s instructions on getting approval on all the marketing materials to make sure that it’s clear that this is a personal project of mine and not a WMF thing at all. I believe the WMF will also post about that.
**What about the environmental costs of creating an NFT?**
Ethereum is moving from 'Proof of Work' to 'Proof of Stake', which requires a lot less energy per NFT - I’m happy to see that and hope it happens soon.
In the meantime, I’ve looked for the highest estimate of the amount of electricity consumed to mint an NFT. I’ve found an estimate that the average NFT minting consumes 340kWh. For scale, my friend has a Tesla Model X, and 340kWh would charge it about 3 ½ times. This is roughly 81.6 kg of CO2. For further comparison an economy-class ticket to NYC from London generates about 1800 kilograms of CO2. (Citation needed, and very happy for anyone with expertise to help me improve these calculations.)
While I generally think it is better not to generate emissions than to generate and offset, I also think that generating withOUT offsetting is much worse. So I’ll be finding the most pessimistic estimate of the CO2 that I’ve generated and offset it by 5x.
** What is the estimate for the auction? **
Christie’s was unable to offer any public estimate for either the computer or the NFT. I can sincerely say that I have absolutely no idea what to expect. Given the current state of the NFT market, I’m very hopeful that some crypto whale will find this irresistible, who knows though?
I’ll be around for the next 8 hours or so to answer any questions but to keep it all centralized, let’s keep it on my English wikipedia talk page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jimbo_Wales>
Article at Christie’s website here:
https://www.christies.com/features/First-Wikipedia-edit-to-be-sold-as-NFT-11983-1.aspx <https://www.christies.com/features/First-Wikipedia-edit-to-be-sold-as-NFT-11983-1.aspx>_______________________________________________
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