On 10/20/05, Dori slowpoke@gmail.com wrote:

On 10/20/05, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:

...

In a press release today (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051020/ukth030.html?.v=1), The Wikimedia Foundation announced a new partnership with Answers.com.

A proposal was made by Answers Corporation to add a link in the sidebar of the English Wikipedia to the Wikipedia:Tools page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools).

That page will highlight the "1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition" software. Revenues from this toolbar will be split with the Wikimedia Foundation. The Board have signed up to a 60-day trial of this proposal.

I would like to welcome comments on this, both before the launch early next year, and during the trial period. The talk page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Tools/1-Click_Answers should be used so that comments can be kept in one place.

This smells like advertising and spyware to me. I can't believe that the foundation would go along with this. If we're to be NPOV, we'd need to do this for Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc until that sidebar was all but useless. And if that's not done, than this is pure advertising.

I'd like to apologize as I thought it'd be placed in the side bar. While still smelling fishy, at least it's not getting as much exposure. I'd still like to know what is meant by "charter placement" as any placement constraint would be at the very least very anti-wiki.

On 22/10/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

It means it should be featured prominently. It's a Wikipedia namespace page, the tools page, so we don't have to be NPOV

We don't? Oh. Someone tell the editors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Miscellaneous_deletion/Wikipedia:Curr...

but of course Answers.com understands the community well enough to know that the page is community-built and that other tools will be on the page as well.

As far as I can see (and correct me if I'm wrong), there are no adverts for commercial products on that page at the moment (let's call the spade a spade). I was generally under the impression WP would never carry adverts.

It's pretty much non-fishy.

I think that not only should the revenue relationship be disclosed on the page, it should be prominently highlighted as a _feature_. You can use the Answers.com 1-Click tool, if you like, and if you do, it brings in revenue to support Wikipedia. (Though at the present time, we do not have any real clue how much revenue this might be... it depends on how many people download and use the tool.)

There must be some ball-park figures - eg if 1,000 people download it and use it as much as existing 1-Click users, Wikimedia will get $x...

Dan

I like these deals Jimmy Wales is making, they seem to often not only aid us but greatly increase use of our site and our visibility. One would think we are well known, but actually only a small fraction of the public is aware of us and use us. If Wikipedia opinion was strongly against them it would be strongly expressed.

Fred

On Oct 22, 2005, at 8:06 AM, Delirium wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

I think that not only should the revenue relationship be disclosed on the page, it should be prominently highlighted as a _feature_. You can use the Answers.com 1-Click tool, if you like, and if you do, it brings in revenue to support Wikipedia.

This somehow seems similar to the abandoned idea to highlight Amazon referrer links for ISBNs, who also would bring revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation if people wanted to use them, but which ran into considerable opposition...

-Mark

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Delirium wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

I think that not only should the revenue relationship be disclosed on the page, it should be prominently highlighted as a _feature_. You can use the Answers.com 1-Click tool, if you like, and if you do, it brings in revenue to support Wikipedia.

This somehow seems similar to the abandoned idea to highlight Amazon referrer links for ISBNs, who also would bring revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation if people wanted to use them, but which ran into considerable opposition...

Yes, but I think mostly because Amazon is under a boycott by RMS for their patent policies.

--Jimbo

--- Dan Grey dangrey@gmail.com wrote:

I think it was rather presumptious of the board to "announce" this without consulting editors first. The board may have "signed up" to a trial of this, but *we* haven't, and I think the board may well have a hard time stopping editors removing this advertisting from the site.

And how exactly is this advertising? Simply saying something is so does not make it so.

We need to aggressively develop many more partnerships like this due to our massively increasing costs. The entire budget for this year was about $700,000 with 70+% of that going to new hardware purchases. The year before the entire budget was less than $200,000.

Depending on just how exponential our growth continues to be, we will need to purchase 2 million to 4 million dollars worth of hardware just to keep up next year. Increase those figures by about 30% to arrive at a budget that *only* covers our very basic operating costs. If we don't keep up, then the sites go down.

We also have a much larger goal than just keeping the websites up; to distribute our content to the people who most need it. Money generated from partnerships like the one we are going to test with Answers.com are needed to help make that happen.

We have been small enough so far that we haven't really needed to form these type of partnerships. That is no longer the case.

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com

--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Promoting a company or product in return for payment is advertising, pretty much by definition...

A link to a tool is not advertising. It is a link to a tool.

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

--- Dori slowpoke@gmail.com wrote:

On 10/22/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:

...

--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

...

Promoting a company or product in return for payment is advertising, pretty much by definition...

A link to a tool is not advertising. It is a link to a tool.

-- mav

No, it's a paid link (or sponsored as Google might call it) to a tool, and a tool that could be used to snoop on people too.

Explain, exactly, how this snooping would occur?

We can't expect reader donations to carry us indefinitely. We need to diversify our income sources. Partnerships like this, along with other funding strategies such as grants, are needed to ensure we stay in the black.

BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers next year? And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com

On 10/23/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Daniel Mayer wrote:

...

BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers next year? And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?

What in the world sort of servers are we buying that cost a few million dollars?

Errr, ever tried to run a website within the top 50 in the world? I am not good enough at technology to tell you what kind of servers we have that cost the money we spend. But I trust the people who run and buy them. Now, if you have a master plan to balance traffic loads/manage the number of visits we have a day (should I say a second?)/requests and the whole lot for a quarter and a dime, by all means, please make yourself known, I am sure everybody is ready to listen to you.

Who is "we" who would like to fund these special projects?

*We* is the Wikimedia Foundation, whose goal, may I remind you is (quote from the bylaws): "The goals of the foundation are to encourage the further growth and development of open content, social software WikiWiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge."

Sending our content to developping countries in print, making Wikijuniors available to schools in print, or on CD, allowing access to knowledge to people in any way *we* can... Those are projects that *we* and I allow myself to encase every single contributor in that *we* should have at heart.

Not all of us are onboard with the "Wikipedia: the bigger and more corporate the better" strategy.

But again, please, do give other solutions. *We*'re all ears.

Cheers,

Delphine

-- ~notafish

Perhaps not, and some of the ideas may not be that practical, but learning through experience will occur. However the main expense is simply keeping up with the demands of the world reading, with a few trying to edit. We are now capable of handling usage of about 16,000 users per million. I think the end demand (how often people at large will consult the fully developed encyclopedia) may be quite a bit higher.

Fred

On Oct 22, 2005, at 9:47 PM, Delirium wrote:

Daniel Mayer wrote:

...

BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers next year? And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?

What in the world sort of servers are we buying that cost a few million dollars? Who is "we" who would like to fund these special projects?

Not all of us are onboard with the "Wikipedia: the bigger and more corporate the better" strategy.

-Mark

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Bigger and more corporate? Can you please define exactly what you mean by that?

If you say "I don't really want us to get involved in projects to try to expand our work into helping less developed countries. Merely running the website is enough, let the poor people fend for themselves" then fine, I think that's a perfectly acceptable position.

I mean: "increasingly involved in partnerships with for-profit corporations, for the sole purpose of financial gain".

I also think getting involved in such projects is a bad idea, but that's a separate matter. Also, you're putting words in my mouth with the second sentence---I think there should be an organization trying to bring Wikipedia to less developed countries, but it should be separate, organizationally and monetarily, from the project of producing the encyclopedia in the first place (although the two should certainly coordinate and discuss mutual needs). It's the organizational analog of the "Unix way"---multiple small, efficient organizations each doing one thing well, rather than one big monolithic organization doing a lot of things poorly.

-Mark

--- Dori slowpoke@gmail.com wrote:

What do you mean how? They track usage. I don't trust a company that's out to make money to not abuse their position. Even if they're well intentioned now, they could be bought off.

Every website can and often do track usage. Even we log that stuff.

"Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's important.

Excuse me? What do you base that on? Are you at all involved in Wikimedia finance? Lemme check. No.

What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean that we'll be able to fund every project?

Perhaps you should visit the foundation wiki or even the donation page: "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

If we put in advertising (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?

Strawman. Nobody is proposing that.

Do we even know how much money we'll be getting out of this? Have we exhausted all other possibilities? Whatever happened to the Google donation? Has the board gone to all possible sources before going to advertising deals?

This is not an advertising deal. It is one of many partnerships we will need to enter to help keep everything running.

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

On 10/23/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Daniel Mayer wrote:

...

Excuse me? What do you base that on? Are you at all involved in Wikimedia finance? Lemme check. No.

Excuse me? When did Wikimedia finance get run in a top-down corporate manner? Are you a CEO now, and we're all your paid employees? You realize this is a volunteer encyclopedia project, don't you, and we decide what's important? If this is going to become a "Wikimedia corporate decides what's important, and you all better shut up and listen and not complain about it", then fuck this, I'm out.

Let's not get angry over this. I trust Mav and I think he's being doing a great job, and I'm certainly appreciative of his efforts. I just don't think we should go the advertising route as once you come to rely on it you're screwed. I'd hate to see Wikipedia (and to tell the truth I don't think the rest of the projects are going to get anywhere anytime soon) degenerate into ads just to stay alive. I'd much rather see it become read-only most of the time, and only allow editing like a random hour each day if necessary.

-- Dori

Delirium wrote:

I mostly objected to the suggestion that people outside of "Wikimedia finance" are not welcome to voice opinions on what sorts of steps Wikimedia should take to finance itself. Certainly mav is better-informed on certain details of the finances, but broad policy decisions, such as whether we ought to provide paid links to "partners", ought to be open to discussion amongst Wikipedians at large. This is how it was done in the past---the Amazon trial balloon was only floated with the explicit assurance that it was a trial balloon. Feedback was solicited, and it was eventually abandoned after a significant number of Wikipedians objected to that method of raising money. Perhaps a large majority of Wikipedians will support the answers.com-tool method of raising money (perhaps because answers.com is less evil than Amazon, or perhaps because it's less visibly advertised than the ISBNs are, or some other reason), but that should be up to Wikipedians to decide, not presented as a /fait accompli/.

There is a trial period, and we are discussing it now. So, I don't really get what you mean.

--Jimbo

Dori wrote:

Let's not get angry over this. I trust Mav and I think he's being doing a great job, and I'm certainly appreciative of his efforts. I just don't think we should go the advertising route as once you come to rely on it you're screwed. I'd hate to see Wikipedia (and to tell the truth I don't think the rest of the projects are going to get anywhere anytime soon) degenerate into ads just to stay alive. I'd much rather see it become read-only most of the time, and only allow editing like a random hour each day if necessary.

My view is the exact opposite. I have set for myself a single pure and simple goal in life: to distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. I think this requires a very very thoughtful and careful approach, but I will not see the project destroyed on the grounds of anti-commercialism.

This is _not_ to say that we will go down any path towards advertising on the site. I have always said, and continue to say, that decision will come from the community, not from me.

I think people need to have a little bit of a reality check. We already have a tools page. On that page, we will put a link to this particular tool. This particular tool will earn revenue for the foundation. Spinning this as come kind of horrible commercialization is just... well, a bit baffling to be honest.

--Jimbo

Dori wrote:

And your point being? That doesn't answer my questions. Will this partnership mean even one extra project being funded? Will it mean all extra projects being funded?

We are not in a position yet to know.

--Jimbo

Robin Shannon wrote:

I agree with dan, that straight forward advertising like this would be far better than stealth advertising which is what this 1-click deal really amounts to.

I don't agree that it is stealth. The page describing this will describe the revenue agreement as a _feature_, and I fully expect that a great many people who choose to download it and use it will be doing so with the explicit goal of desiring to help the Wikimedia foundation.

That's pretty much as non-stealth as it gets.

It's also 100% opt-in, that is, you can choose to download and use the tool or not, your choice. You can even go download the tool from Answers.com directly, and then they keep all the revenue.

Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?

I'll let mav answer this in detail, but suffice to say, the primary growing cost is hardware/hosting, but some administrative costs are growing as well, although at a slower pace.

--Jimbo

On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:

--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

Robin Shannon wrote:

...

Mav, for those of us not involved with finance, what are the costs assosicated with our growth? Is the only expense that is growing hardware/hosting etc, or are there other rising costs?

I'll let mav answer this in detail, but suffice to say, the primary growing cost is hardware/hosting, but some administrative costs are growing as well, although at a slower pace.

Robin, see for yourself: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005

Increases in hardware/hosting costs drive overall increases in budgeted costs. Overhead costs have been pretty much increased as a percentage on top of that by approximately 20-30%.

You know, those figures would make a lot more sense if they were done on an accrual basis rather than a cash basis. As is the figures completely ignore the fact that the expected life of the servers is more than a single quarter. Yes, the cash basis figures are needed to know how much money is required in fundraising, but they don't give a good picture of the actual costs involved in running the foundation.

PS -

Note that the large degree of uncertainty in my hardware cost projection is due to the fact that I need to update my model with new data (the last real traffic data I put into it is a year old; the same time WikiStats stopped reporting page views; yet the model has been pretty good at predicting what we needed to spend for 2005 so far).

The other big problem with my model is that is only tracks spending vs page

views from wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org. In the past the amount of traffic from the other Wikimedia domains was so small that it could safefly be ignored. This is no longer the case for wikimedia.org http://wikimedia.org thanks to Commons and will soon not be the case for wiktionary.org http://wiktionary.org and wikinews.orghttp://wikinews.org :

If you're using those cash-basis figures that's another problem with the model as well :).

Anthony

On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:

--- Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

...

You know, those figures would make a lot more sense if they were done on

an

...

accrual basis rather than a cash basis. As is the figures completely

ignore

...

the fact that the expected life of the servers is more than a single quarter.

The figures I gave assume that all the hardware we have already bought is still in operation (which surprisingly is more or less the case).

What I'm saying is that the hardware you buy today is both a current expense and an investment in the future. The budget figures make it look like it's solely a current expense.

If you're using those cash-basis figures that's another problem with the

...

model as well :).

Yet the model has closely predicted increased costs for the last year (yeah, to an extent this is self-fulfilling, but only so much so)...

-- mav

The exponential growth has probably to a large extent made the previously bought hardware negligible, though this will become less and less so as time goes on (even if growth doesn't slow). Along the same lines as the costs being largely self-fulfilling (whatever is allocated in the budget, that's what's going to be spent), I've personally noticed a fairly steadily increasing reliability in the system in the past 9 months or so. I believe it was less than a year ago that Wikipedia wasn't even able to enable search the vast majority of the time. The site is still fairly flaky, but a lot less than it was a year ago.

Anyway, I haven't looked that closely at your model and maybe you've figured out a way to capture this in some other way, or maybe it's just a coincidence that it's worked so far. How many quarters have you actually made predictions using this model (actual predictions, not backing into historical data after the fact)?

If you'd prefer I take this conversation off-list I can do that. I'm not trying to criticise, just make some helpful suggestions; preparing financial statements on a GAAP basis is a large part of what I currently do for a living, after all. The [[Wikimedia Budget]] page mentioned that "The Wikimedia budget has to follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for Not-for-Profit Organizations", and GAAP requires statements be made on an accrual basis. Even if you're going to ignore this and use a cash basis, you should at least use a modified cash basis which factors in things like depreciation.

Anthony

--- Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

What I'm saying is that the hardware you buy today is both a current expense and an investment in the future. The budget figures make it look like it's solely a current expense.

Hardware looses value so fast that it isn’t really an investment in the strictest sense of the word. But yeah, it’s a depreciating asset and is tracked as such in our accounting software.

Anyway, I haven't looked that closely at your model and maybe you've figured out a way to capture this in some other way, or maybe it's just a coincidence that it's worked so far. How many quarters have you actually made predictions using this model (actual predictions, not backing into historical data after the fact)?

Every quarter since northern winter/Q4 of 2004. All the model really does is figure out how much it cost per page view up to October 2004, chart our projected exponential traffic growth curve and slowly inflate the amount of performance we can expect per dollar value of hardware bought in the future (Moore’s Law adjustments). It is a crude tool, but has worked pretty well so far as a planning device.

If you'd prefer I take this conversation off-list I can do that.

Doing this on meta is going to have a much better chance of having lasting value. The WM budget talk page is probably the best place to continue all this.

I'm not trying to criticise, just make some helpful suggestions; preparing financial statements on a GAAP basis is a large part of what I currently do for a living, after all.

Again - the books are kept offline (and I don’t consider your questions to be criticism :). Getting as much information from the books in a publicly-accessible form is a major item on my ToDo list.

The [[Wikimedia Budget]] page mentioned that "The Wikimedia budget has to follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for Not-for-Profit Organizations", and GAAP requires statements be made on an accrual basis.

Yep - I wrote that. :)

Even if you're going to ignore this and use a cash basis, you should at least use a modified cash basis which factors in things like depreciation.

Our books are already on an accrual basis and our accountant figures out depreciation and all the foreign exchange gains and losses (thank god – doing that work is not fun). It is just that what has been reported thus far has been minimal and simplified. This will change as we work out our information flow and process issues.

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com

Daniel Mayer wrote:

--- Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:

...

You know, those figures would make a lot more sense if they were done on an accrual basis rather than a cash basis. As is the figures completely ignore the fact that the expected life of the servers is more than a single quarter.

The figures I gave assume that all the hardware we have already bought is still in operation (which surprisingly is more or less the case).

...

If you're using those cash-basis figures that's another problem with the model as well :).

Yet the model has closely predicted increased costs for the last year (yeah, to an extent this is self-fulfilling, but only so much so)...

Anthony makes a good point. Hardware does break down over time, and has to be replaced. Even more likely is that it will become obsolete before it breaks down.

The projections of increased costs that you talk about are fine as far as they go, but this has all been in a period of rapid growth. Sound accounting practice requires that we be prepared for the evebtual plateay.

Ec

On 10/25/05, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, Given that it is only a few wikipedias that can be considered to somehow cover subjects adequately, the plateau that may arise is still in the future. To suggest that we have to take the emergence of a pleateau into consideration, you have to identify why it is likely to arise. Personally I find it easier to find arguments why we are NOT going to reach this plateau in the near future..

So the best we can do with your "sound accounting practices" is to have multiple scenarios available to us. Not because of accounting practices but because they impact what we do and how we do it. Given however the many projects that need funding and the wishes we have to have an impact in the languages where we are still weak, it does not seem reasonable to expect an end to the growth that we have experienced over our first few years.

Thanks, GerardM

I've been speaking with various people off list and the data we have isn't nearly as bad as I first suspected. It's actually more a problem with communication of the data to the public that's lacking. I have my doubts that the hardware model can hold over the long run, whether there is a growth plateau or merely less exponential growth. I believe there are multiple mistakes being made which are to some extent cancelling each other out (on one end there is the fact that old hardware is being reused and on the other end there is the fact that the system is not scaling perfectly linearly). But as far as predicting the actual hardware requirements on a quarter-to-quarter basis I don't think there's a problem. Also while looking at the data I've been quite impressed at how well the system does seem to be scaling up. Maybe I was just plain wrong when I looked at the system a year or two ago, or maybe the situation has improved more than I was aware of. Probably a little of both, but either way, I think a lot of people are doing a good job.

Daniel Mayer wrote:

--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

...

Anthony makes a good point. Hardware does break down over time, and has to be replaced. Even more likely is that it will become obsolete before it breaks down.

When that becomes a significant issue, then the model will need to be updated. I've been told that, so far, pretty much all the hardware we've ever bought is still in use.

I should point out that it hasn't been that long; we started the Florida cluster in early 2004 following the Great Double Server Crash of Christmas 2003.

The oldest machine we have in service is Larousse, an 866-MHz Pentium III which does some specialized and backup services, and used to be our secondary web server in the old California location.

Everything else is less than two years old, with the oldest generation being 2.6GHz Pentium IVs. Not quite obsolete yet!

A number of machines have had to go out for repair or replacement over time (usually faulty memory, sometimes failed disks), but most are still chugging away.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Tim Starling wrote:

Brion Vibber wrote:

...

Daniel Mayer wrote:

...

--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

...

Anthony makes a good point. Hardware does break down over time, and has to be replaced. Even more likely is that it will become obsolete before it breaks down.

When that becomes a significant issue, then the model will need to be updated. I've been told that, so far, pretty much all the hardware we've ever bought is still in use.

I should point out that it hasn't been that long; we started the Florida cluster in early 2004 following the Great Double Server Crash of Christmas 2003.

The oldest machine we have in service is Larousse, an 866-MHz Pentium III which does some specialized and backup services, and used to be our secondary web server in the old California location.

Everything else is less than two years old, with the oldest generation being 2.6GHz Pentium IVs. Not quite obsolete yet!

A number of machines have had to go out for repair or replacement over time (usually faulty memory, sometimes failed disks), but most are still chugging away.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I thought it was generally agreed upon though that rising costs on hardware could be compensated for, since users are more than willing to donate for hardware costs. Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't wikimedia just adjust their donation goals to cover that and thus cover the cost of new hardware/repairs/upgrades, etc...?

-Jtkiefer

--- Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:

On 10/26/05, Jtkiefer jtkiefer@wordzen.net wrote:

...

I thought it was generally agreed upon though that rising costs on hardware could be compensated for, since users are more than willing to donate for hardware costs. Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't wikimedia just adjust their donation goals to cover that and thus cover the cost of new hardware/repairs/upgrades, etc...?

So far, that is pretty much all we have been doing (although the foundation also wants to do much, much more than that). But buying more hardware and serving lots more people also increases overhead/administrative costs. So while the percentage that overhead takes from the budget has been in the 20-30% range, the total amount has grown in proportion to hardware and hosting costs.

Daniel made it clear, the curve for donations won't follow the curve for costs. Since our costs are growing so fast (I won't go back to all the explanations given here and elsewhere), I don't think that fundraising drives will be near enough to cover those costs.

Actually, I just said my gut feeling was that the donation curve would not follow the cost curve forever. What is needed is a statistical assessment of the two. However, looking *only* at two fund drive data points and two traffic data points gives some reason to be optimistic.

Q3 2004 Fund Drive grand total: $44,863.95 USD September 2004 unique visitors to wikipedia.org: 3.2 million

Q4 2005 Fund Drive grand total: $243,930 USD September 2005 unique visitors to wikipedia.org: 12.8 million

So, there has been a 533% increase in donations for a 400% increase in traffic. Throw in Moore’s Law and things look even better. However, the traffic numbers are only for wikipedia.org and this only tracks unique visitors; those visitors likely use Wikipedia more often today than they did last year. The other projects, esp Commons, Wiktionary and Wikinews are starting to become popular as well. So I’ll tend to be pessimistic until I’m able to analyze some hard data for every one of our domains (data with consistent standards - esp for the non-wikipedia.org domains - has been difficult to come by).

Small donations originated by fundraising drives are something we should *count* on, but not something we should *rely* on. We're not the only ones out there asking for money, and I believe that it is also our job to be looking elsewhere for hard cash.

Well, we kinda do have to rely on small donations. Small donations, not big ones or grants, make up the vast majority of our income. Relying too much on any one or select few big donors, grants or income from partnership agreements puts us in jeopardy if any one or several of them pull their funding. But the answer to that is to have *lots* of big donors, grants, and income streams from partnerships. However, I think your point was that we should not simply rely on donations in general as our sole income stream. Yep - I agree with that 100%. We also need to diversity our income in general - we can’t be too reliant any one source

In our case, I would say that all editors, by spending the time they spend providing content and making Wikimedia projects what they are, are already donating. I would not blame anyone who'd argue that they "don't have cash, but already give some time and knowledge". Except that time and knowledge, although they are indispensable, don't buy servers or cover operating costs.

I get several emails in the ORTS donation queue each week from people who either don’t have cash or who want to donate in a currency that we don’t accept. I tell each that their donation of time in either contributing content or telling people about Wikipedia is just as important as giving money. That Wikipedia would not exist without volunteer effort.

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

--- Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:

...

On 10/26/05, Jtkiefer jtkiefer@wordzen.net wrote:

...

I thought it was generally agreed upon though that rising costs on hardware could be compensated for, since users are more than willing

to

...

...

donate for hardware costs. Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't wikimedia just adjust their donation goals to cover that and thus

cover

...

...

the cost of new hardware/repairs/upgrades, etc...?

So far, that is pretty much all we have been doing (although the foundation also wants to do much, much more than that). But buying more hardware and serving lots more people also increases overhead/administrative costs. So while the percentage that overhead takes from the budget has been in the 20-30% range, the total amount has grown in proportion to hardware and hosting costs.

...

Daniel made it clear, the curve for donations won't follow the curve for costs. Since our costs are growing so fast (I won't go back to all the explanations given here and elsewhere), I don't think that fundraising drives will be near enough to cover those costs.

Actually, I just said my gut feeling was that the donation curve would not

follow the cost curve forever. What is needed is a statistical assessment of the two. However, looking *only* at two fund drive data points and two traffic data points gives some reason to be optimistic.

Q3 2004 Fund Drive grand total: $44,863.95 USD September 2004 unique visitors to wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org/: 3.2 million

Q4 2005 Fund Drive grand total: $243,930 USD September 2005 unique visitors to wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org/: 12.8 million

So, there has been a 533% increase in donations for a 400% increase in traffic.

I know you've mentioned that this is only two data points, but let me point out an important one that's missing. How many of the people who donated in Q3 2004 also donated in Q4 2005? Are donations primarily a one-time thing for new users, or are they an ongoing thing? If the former, the biggest problems might not come until the growth slows down. Of course, at that point the need for new servers won't be as severe, but hosting costs will continue to steadily suck money out of the community.

I guess even without the growth slowing down, it's likely going to move toward people with less means to contribute. That'd be another interesting statistic, though it'd have to be approximate (we know what countries the visitors are coming from, and could look at the changing distribution by country factoring in the median income).

Throw in Moore's Law and things look even better. However, the traffic numbers are only for wikipedia.org http://wikipedia.org/ and this only tracks unique visitors; those visitors likely use Wikipedia more often today than they did last year. The other projects, esp Commons, Wiktionary and Wikinews are starting to become popular as well. So I'll tend to be pessimistic until I'm able to analyze some hard data for every one of our domains (data with consistent standards - esp for the non-wikipedia.org http://non-wikipedia.org/ domains - has been difficult to come by).

...

Small donations originated by fundraising drives are something we should *count* on, but not something we should *rely* on. We're not the only ones out there asking for money, and I believe that it is also our job to be looking elsewhere for hard cash.

Well, we kinda do have to rely on small donations. Small donations, not big ones or grants, make up the vast majority of our income. Relying too much on any one or select few big donors, grants or income from partnership agreements puts us in jeopardy if any one or several of them pull their funding. But the answer to that is to have *lots* of big donors, grants, and income streams from partnerships. However, I think your point was that we should not simply rely on donations in general as our sole income stream. Yep - I agree with that 100%. We also need to diversity our income in general - we can't be too reliant any one source

Not just practically, but legally. The difference between a public charity and a private foundation is whether the revenues come from a broad base of people or just a select few. Creative Commons just recently started its first fund drive, not just because they needed the money, but so that they could meet the IRS "public support test". See http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5661 and http://creativecommons.org/support . I'm not sure if advertising would count as public support or not. I initially thought it would (under section 509(a)(2), if you care) but I've read some IRS rulings recently which have made me reconsider.

In our case, I would say that all editors, by spending the time they

...

spend providing content and making Wikimedia projects what they are, are already donating. I would not blame anyone who'd argue that they "don't have cash, but already give some time and knowledge". Except that time and knowledge, although they are indispensable, don't buy servers or cover operating costs.

I get several emails in the ORTS donation queue each week from people who either don't have cash or who want to donate in a currency that we don't accept. I tell each that their donation of time in either contributing content or telling people about Wikipedia is just as important as giving money. That Wikipedia would not exist without volunteer effort.

-- mav

This is the reason I think a more P2P based network would be such a great solution for the long-term. People wouldn't need to donate cash to cover operating "costs".

Anthony

Hoi, When you need a forum, there is always the research network. From my perspective learning about this technology is great even when it does not help in this instance it will be useful for other applications..

So great stuff :)

Thanks, GerardM

On 10/26/05, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

...

This is the reason I think a more P2P based network would be such a great solution for the long-term. People wouldn't need to donate cash to cover operating "costs".

Anthony

I know this belongs on the technical mailing list, but I would like to get more involved with at least some experimental Wikipedia data servers that use the P2P approach for distribution of content. Are there some forums, talk pages, or developer groups that are working to develop this concept?

I found http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/P2P but there are certainly other that may be useful.

The #1 problem I see with most current P2P networks is that they are anti-wiki and are only useful for spreading content. Editing content and pushing the edits back to a central repository goes beyond the current P2P topology and would have to be a key component to a MediaWiki P2P edition. I guess I'm asking for a Wikiproject type thing to get started to discuss this issue, but realize that there are so many forums to discuss something like this that trying to pick out one place to make a discussion of this nature can be difficult.

There would still be a need to cover some basic "operating costs", but we could perhaps cut some of the server growth down quite a bit through alternative technologies, reducing bandwidth to a higher percentage of actual content instead of navigational queries. It would also help reduce effects of server overloading, and have a side benefit to transmit information to places like China where it would work around official censorship.

-- Robert Scott Horning

---

foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Daniel Mayer wrote:

When that becomes a significant issue, then the model will need to be updated. I've been told that, so far, pretty much all the hardware we've ever bought is still in use.

That's exactly right.

It might at some point pay to look at selling some of the older servers to buy newer ones. This would have two benefits:

1. we are now exclusively buying dual-opterons for apache webserving, these are significantly more powerful _in the same physical space_ than our single-pentiums -- therefore, we can save a lot of rack space at the colo by replacing. (This space is not especially expensive, though, in the grand scheme of things.)

2. In addition to saving physical space, there is a fair amount of dev time which goes into working with 124 servers (the current count, I believe, except not all of them are installed just now) which could be reduced if we were running on half the number of servers. Wikipedia traffic is growing faster than Moore's Law, but even so, Moore's Law should make it possible for us to do more with fewer boxes.

The first benefit can be quantified, the second cannot. (How much money should we be willing to spend to save the developers some time? My answer is: a LOT. Developer time is not free to us, it is infinitely expensive. What I mean by that is that it is a lot more cost effective to have volunteer devs working in a well-funded and exciting environment where they can play with cutting-edge technology, than it is to eventually be forced to hire devs to work with boring and annoying old hardware.)

----

My suspicion is that by the time we are seriously ready to get rid of some old machines, they will have minimal market value. Dunno.

--Jimbo

On 10/26/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:

--- Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

...

It might at some point pay to look at selling some of the older servers to buy newer ones. This would have two benefits:

1. we are now exclusively buying dual-opterons for apache webserving,

these are significantly more powerful _in the same physical space_ than our single-pentiums -- therefore, we can save a lot of rack space at the colo by replacing. (This space is not especially expensive, though, in the grand scheme of things.)

2. In addition to saving physical space, there is a fair amount of dev

time which goes into working with 124 servers (the current count, I believe, except not all of them are installed just now) which could be reduced if we were running on half the number of servers. Wikipedia traffic is growing faster than Moore's Law, but even so, Moore's Law should make it possible for us to do more with fewer boxes.

The first benefit can be quantified, the second cannot. (How much money should we be willing to spend to save the developers some time? My answer is: a LOT. Developer time is not free to us, it is infinitely expensive. What I mean by that is that it is a lot more cost effective to have volunteer devs working in a well-funded and exciting environment where they can play with cutting-edge technology, than it is to eventually be forced to hire devs to work with boring and annoying old hardware.)

---

My suspicion is that by the time we are seriously ready to get rid of some old machines, they will have minimal market value. Dunno.

If that is the case, then we could donate the machines to other free content/software projects that are still much, much smaller than us.

-- mav

Or to schools without internet access, with Wikipedia pre-installed. :)

By the way, I have to take issue with the statement that volunteer developer time is infinitely expensive. At the most it's slightly less expensive than the cost to hire someone to do the task (and c'mon, who wouldn't want to work for Wikimedia?). Otherwise, we're doing something wrong.

...

By the way, I have to take issue with the statement that volunteer developer time is infinitely expensive. At the most it's slightly less expensive than the cost to hire someone to do the task (and c'mon, who wouldn't want to work for Wikimedia?). Otherwise, we're doing something wrong.

Hoi, When you hire someone, you hire a "professional" he/she is a payed hack it does not mean he is good or better and it does not mean he/she does have the same involvement with what we do.

I believe that every job performed by volunteers here could be done by someone who is paid to do it, with the same exact quality, at *some* price point. Since there exists a price point, it's not *infinite*. The value of volunteer labor doing something like maintaining servers can be quantified, to a very high level of accuracy.

We do not have the resources to hire

people, developers are a rare commodity for us and therefore they are truly expensive.

The whole reason this topic came up was to bring up the question of when does it make sense to buy new servers to replace old ones. So the money to buy the new servers (minus the savings in hosting costs) is what would be used to hire those people.

Now look, labor is generally very expensive compared to servers, so the savings would have to be really tremendous. But Jimbo implied that the cost of labor was infinite, and not possible to quantify. I was just pointing out that it's not.

As to us doing something "wrong"; yes we do not have the money to

spend on development and there are several people that are of the opinion that we should not even consider paying for development.

My statement about doing something wrong was qualified with a specific scenario. I have no idea if it's actually the case, in part because I have no idea how much volunteer developer time is being spent on various things, and what those volunteers would be willing to do if they didn't have to spend that time doing whatever it is they do.

Yes, there are people of the opinion that we should not even consider paying for development, at any cost. In my opinion these extremists are potentially very detrimental to the project, and probably have a big overlap with those who feel we should never have advertising at any cost. Unless they're suggesting that Wikimedia start feeding and housing some of its volunteers (which would be kind of neat), money is a requirement for the vast majority of them.

Unfortunately there's something about money that causes people to get all up in arms. I see money as little more than a mechanism to facilitate barter. I guess some people don't even like barter, I really don't understand it though.

Jimmy Wales wrote:

I've never even been on Oprah, if you see what I mean. We've completely saturated the awareness of the tech early adopters, but there is a huge huge group of people beyond that who simply haven't heard of Wikipedia.

That's true, but many of those people are using Wikipedia anyway, because it now comes near the top of the google hits for a lot of topics people frequently search for. (Of course, not everyone yet uses google to search for information, but a pretty large proportion of internet users do.)

-Mark

Is it reasonable to believe that donations will increase in line with readers? Has anyone analysed the available data to see if this is happening?

I'd also like to hear from the dev team (Domas? Kate?) as to whether our per-user hardware/bandwidth costs go up or down with increased readership (ie does it cost more per user to server lots of users rather than a few?).

Dan

Dan Grey wrote:

Is it reasonable to believe that donations will increase in line with readers? Has anyone analysed the available data to see if this is happening?

I think it is reasonable _to an extent_, yes. It is far from certain. Mav can perhaps give you some statistics on this, but I believe he is more pessimistic than I am about this.

I'd also like to hear from the dev team (Domas? Kate?) as to whether our per-user hardware/bandwidth costs go up or down with increased readership (ie does it cost more per user to server lots of users rather than a few?).

I would like to hear this as well, but I can tell you that with our current network architecture, I believe that readership/editorship is more or less linear with traffic... that is, any "economies of scale" to moving to a large network environment have already been exploited.

To serve twice as many requests, we need twice as much hardware.

--Jimbo

Dori wrote:

"Diversify our income source" sounds horrible to me. That's not what's important.

As a primary goal, not is it not what is important. What is important to me is that while we're doing a fine job of serving the needs of people in wealthy western countries who have broadband Internet connections, (a) it is getting harder and harder to do that on our existing budget and (b) we are not doing all that we can be doing to help in less developed countries. (Actually, other than the ways in which our ordinary work are starting to be somewhat helpful there, we are doing nothing at all.)

...

BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers next year?

Sure, but only if you put in some articles saying how great I am and ban anyone saying otherwise.

Why don't you drop the sarcasm and ask the question you're hinting at, point-blank. Or make the accusation point-blank.

Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of the articles? Not as long as I'm alive, ok? Anyone who thinks otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm doing and how I spend my life.

...

And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?

What projects? If we can't fund them, we can't. Do partnerships mean that we'll be able to fund every project? If we put in advertising (flash, popups, selling user tracking), and changed the license to be restrictive I'm sure we could get in more money and fund more projects. Does that mean that's the direction we should head?

This is a valid question, although I think it would be more valid if it were asked in good faith.

I think that we desperately need to be very very thoughtful and careful about all partnerships. We have had offers of complete and total hosting from credible Internet companies, and I've turned it down because I am passionate about us maintaining our independence. We need to carefully balance the needs of the users against the legitimate needs of the people who are not *able* to use our service because they have no computers (or clean drinking water), and be serious and adult about considering the tradeoffs carefully.

I don't know of any other sensible approach.

Do we even know how much money we'll be getting out of this?

We do not. It is an experiment.

--Jimbo

--- Dori slowpoke@gmail.com wrote:

Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.

Er. Not that we'd ever do this unless *absolutely* necessary to keep us online, but do you have *any* idea how much advertising revenue would be brought in by an Internet top 50 website? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars a month for something relatively unobtrusive like Google Ads.

I'd like to see us plateau on the Internet first, and then worry about expanding off-line.

We have been waiting for this mystical plateau for years now. The slowest I imagine we will ever grow is to just keep pace with the Internet's growth, which, btw, is also exponential but not nearly as strongly exponential as our current growth. So we would need to wait for the whole Internet to plateau in growth, which is still decades in the future. We can't wait for that.

Off-line distributions will be a lot more difficult and a lot less useful. On the other hand, there is no reason why we couldn't start on Wikipedia 1.0, and I've yet to see that get off the ground.

There is no reason why we can't do both in parallel. One will benefit the other.

I can't believe that we would need to keep growing at 1-2 million dollar hardware acquisitions every year. You can't go much higher at some point.

Er - we will need to spend at least $2M next year and a lot more the year after that if our growth curve holds. See my email about our *exponentially* growing costs.

It would help to keep features from creeping in that require more hardware too. I personally never liked the big use of templates and categories. It's become a lot harder to make sense of what's going on in an articles that use 10 internested templates (some with if-else logic no less), and there is no need for categories when you can just link (and besides I hate the idea of pigeon-holeing an article into a category to begin with).

Dramatic increases in readership, not feature creep, is what is driving hardware cost increases. Again, see my other email.

-- mav

__________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - Make it your home page! http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs

--- Dan Grey dangrey@gmail.com wrote:

I'm really quite confused.

Angela said we don't need this money to pay for servers, yet Mav is apparently saying this.

Which is correct?

As you should be. :) I have been talking mostly in generalities: We can't expect reader donations to always scale as fast as our growth while also paying for other things we want to do. We therefore need to start *now* to diversify our funding channels. Yet, this whole spat has been about a specific item, which *by itself,* will likely not help that much.

My apologies.

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Dan Grey wrote:

...

I'm really quite confused.

Angela said we don't need this money to pay for servers, yet Mav is apparently saying this.

Which is correct?

I don't want to speak for either of them, but Angela was asked whether this was due to a budget shortfall, and she said no. That's correct.

Mav is talking about longterm strategy and planning, and he's also correct.

There is no emergency at the present time. There are big opportunity costs if we start to fail next year if we don't plan ahead effectively.

--Jimbo

Both are correct imho.

I'll give you a tiny example based on hardware though;

This is the planned hardware purchase listed on meta : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_budget/2005/Q4/hardware

This is the wish list though : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kate/Q4_hardware_order_proposal

Between the first and the second, you may have the difference between the site still working... and the site really working well.

This is only for hardware, but you may figure out for various items * Full time assistant : relief for Jimbo and things working so much better * No assistant : paperwork being late, board and officers screaming on each others or resigning from despair etc....

* Grant manager : a guy working full time to bring us fresh money from other very supportive organisation * No grant manager : well... how much did we gather on grants this year ?

* Wikimania : a wonderful meeting, with great community mix up, media coverage and collaboration deals boiling * No Wikimania : well...

We can shorten our budget to survival needs. And donations might be sufficient. Can we survive with only donations for Q4 ? Yes. Did we agree on the deal because we were strangled ? No. But, we can turn the issue just as much as we want, in the long term, we need more money. Best to fix deals BEFORE we get strangled, because right now, we have choice on the deal we make. When we are strangled, we have less room to negociate, accept, refuse or change a deal if the community really does not like it.

Ant

On 10/23/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:

--- Dori slowpoke@gmail.com wrote:

...

Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.

Er. Not that we'd ever do this unless *absolutely* necessary to keep us online, but do you have *any* idea how much advertising revenue would be brought in by an Internet top 50 website? At least a couple hundred thousand dollars a month for something relatively unobtrusive like Google Ads.

Don't you think for a moment that we would have this kind of traffic and growth if we had full blown advertising on the site. And my comment was only in regard to this deal.

<snip...>

...

It would help to keep features from creeping in that require more hardware too. I personally never liked the big use of templates and categories. It's become a lot harder to make sense of what's going on in an articles that use 10 internested templates (some with if-else logic no less), and there is no need for categories when you can just link (and besides I hate the idea of pigeon-holeing an article into a category to begin with).

Dramatic increases in readership, not feature creep, is what is driving hardware cost increases. Again, see my other email.

-- mav

I'll let the techs speak to that, but I can't see how additional traffic coupled with additional load-generating features can help. Cached traffic I imagine comprises most of the readership, and I doubt that's what's causing the purchase of more and more hardware.

-- Dori

On 10/23/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

Dori wrote:

...

I did ask the question, what does charter placement mean legally?

It means that we will list their tool on that page in a position of prominence. I think we should list it in a fashion which makes very explicit (as a feature, not a bug!) that using the tool brings revenue to the Foundation.

...

Yes, but when you enter into a legal contract, it's not just you that we have to worry about, it's the other party as well. I really don't think we'll be getting much revenue from this deal to justify the risk, and in general I don't think in the *long term* relying on advertising will keep Wikipedia afloat.

Please tell me more about what risks you see, because perhaps I can answer any specific concerns that you might have. What risks do you see to us?

Could they sue the foundation if they deem the placement not to be "charter" enough? If not them, how about a company purchasing them?

snip...

...

I'd like to see us plateau on the Internet first, and then worry about expanding off-line. Off-line distributions will be a lot more difficult and a lot less useful.

A lot less useful to whom and for what?

Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so.

Let me be just as blunt, I think that's a fairy tale and unlikely to happen. The vast majority of information on Wikipedia would be next to useless to them. Wikipedia is no "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" and will not be anywhere near that kind of level for another 20 years assuming things go through best case scenario. By then I would hope the UN and African countries have moved off their asses to do something about it. I seriously doubt that it's information holding back Africa; it's leadership (as in plenty of bad, and little good). You can have all the knowledge in the World and not be able to do anything against corruption, greed, and power.

...

On the other hand, there is no reason why we couldn't start on Wikipedia 1.0, and I've yet to see that get off the ground.

Indeed... if we had the resources to do it, we could do it. But we don't, so it keeps getting pushed to the back burner.

I'd much rather see the resources dedicated here, which will actually make it more useful for people everywhere.

...

I think continuing with large donations from companies and individuals is the way to go. We shouldn't take wholesale offers of course. But I don't think that we've exhausted all the donation avenues yet.

Of course we haven't, and I have at least 4 "big fish on the hook". It takes time to reel them in, of course, and part of the reason is that we have to find ways to make sure that the donation and our goals are consistent.

That's good to hear.

-- Dori

On 10/23/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

Dori wrote:

...

...

Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so.

Let me be just as blunt, I think that's a fairy tale and unlikely to happen.

Ok, but that's what I've devoted my life to doing. :-)

Jimbo et al,

If one looks at the growth of Wikipedia, it'll become very obvious that information and knowledge is very important to people: they flock to us because we give them structured knowledge.

I think that it is critical to give access to this knowledge to everyone in the world -- to eliminate at least _that_ roadblock between poverty/dependence and success/independence.

I would strongly urge the foundation to take even further, stronger steps to make this possible. If we're really passing up $1 million in revenues every month, perhaps we should let some of that in -- let us try to use some of the wealth of our readers in the industrialized world to help us with our goal of delivering knowledge to the developing world.

I can live with a few Google ads; but I'd hate myself for having an anti-advertising stance delay our ability to deliver this encyclopedia to those who might need it. Perhaps with a feature to let anonymous users see ads but to hide them from registered users we can strike a compromise?

All that said, I would suggest that "partner" vs. "advertiser" are fuzzy legal terms; when it comes to promotion of a product they seem to be interchangable. We can argue about semantics all week long, but the real argument seems to be "does Wikimedia really need money?" and I believe that Jimbo's pretty much given us the final answer here.

-ilya haykinson

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of the articles? Not as long as I'm alive, ok? Anyone who thinks otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm doing and how I spend my life.

Forgive my scepticism, but if we start accepting advertising and become reliant on it, it isn't unknown for the company who is advertising to pull their adverts, cutting Wikimedia's revenue.

A possibly apocryphal story is of a program on the BBC, I believe it was a car review program, who gave a bad review to a certain American car model. The CEO of the company found out about it, was furious and ordered the advertising team to pull all adverts to punish the TV station. The advertising team replied "sorry sir, but the BBC don't run adverts".

A lack of adverts is one of the reasons why Wikipedia can be neutral. If we become reliant on others for our existence, they can exert influence over our content. I don't want to see us go down that route.

Chris

--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

That problem has more to do with dependancy than advertising. This is why diversification is important. Just as dangerous as it might be to depend exclusively on donations, so too is it to depend on a single advertiser. One avoids exclusive arrangements so that if one advertiser fails there remain others to pick up the slack, or there is enough in contingency reserves to tide us over until a replacement can be found.

Replace 'advertiser' with 'partner' and I'd say that is very, very well put and the aim of what I want us to do.

-- mav

__________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

Forgive my scepticism, but if we start accepting advertising and become reliant on it, it isn't unknown for the company who is advertising to pull their adverts, cutting Wikimedia's revenue.

Obviously, this is a danger to be avoided.

A possibly apocryphal story is of a program on the BBC, I believe it was a car review program, who gave a bad review to a certain American car model. The CEO of the company found out about it, was furious and ordered the advertising team to pull all adverts to punish the TV station. The advertising team replied "sorry sir, but the BBC don't run adverts".

A lack of adverts is one of the reasons why Wikipedia can be neutral. If we become reliant on others for our existence, they can exert influence over our content. I don't want to see us go down that route.

It strikes me as absolutely impossible for *anyone* to exert influence over our content. Our very development model ensurees that.

--Jimbo

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

It strikes me as absolutely impossible for *anyone* to exert influence over our content. Our very development model ensurees that.

Could you clarify this point please?

I'm not sure how to clarify it but I'll try. :-)

We use wiki software for the editing of the site. This means that anyone can change any article at any time. There are some rare exceptions, of course, for example the main page of the site, and at various times, articles which are protected for the purpose of dealing with vandalism.

Because anyone can edit any article at any time, there is an in-built mechanism for dealing with inappropriate influence over articles. Of course, for a limited period of time, an organized group or a really persistent editor can push an article to a position of bias for a time, but we have constantly developing processes (3RR, Arbcom, NPOV rules, etc.) to deal with that.

--Jimbo

Jimmy Wales wrote:

We use wiki software for the editing of the site. This means that anyone can change any article at any time. There are some rare exceptions, of course, for example the main page of the site, and at various times, articles which are protected for the purpose of dealing with vandalism.

Because anyone can edit any article at any time, there is an in-built mechanism for dealing with inappropriate influence over articles. Of course, for a limited period of time, an organized group or a really persistent editor can push an article to a position of bias for a time, but we have constantly developing processes (3RR, Arbcom, NPOV rules, etc.) to deal with that.

So, what will happen if someone edits the Tools page (and any other pages which reference this 1 click thingy), and removes all references to it? Will the Board be restating the link, even if it is constantly removed by contributors?

Chris

GerardM wrote:

People who know me, now that I do almost everthing to have the things I believe in come true. They also know that i will not squander away the values of what we stand for. When some person aggresively removes these links, I will be sorry for the narrow mindedness that it demonstrates. It must also be an admin to do this, I will wonder to what extend this behaviour will be mitigated by him finding the funds that are lost to the rest of us. This is the least I would expect of someone who is this position of responibility.

I don't think it is narrow-mindedness that would cause someone to remove these links, and I think accusing someone of acting in this way is rather impolite and shows a lack of good faith. I can't think of one admin who doesn't have the best interests of Wikipedia at heart and is only doing what they think best.

The thing is, a large number of people have not been convinced that this is necessary for the Foundation's continued operations, but the partnership is going against some of the ideals on which Wikipedia was founded. At the moment, the impression I (and many others) am getting is that this deal is allowing corporations to influence how the Foundation operates. Some people do not mind; others do. It's up to the Board to demonstrate that this is a good move, not up to the community to say why it's a bad move. Saying "let's give it a trial and see what the results are" isn't good enough.

Chris

GerardM wrote:

It is one thing to disagree (simple) it is another to address the issues that I have raised. *You quote of context and therefore you lose the main point that I made that we will need money for other projects than just the English Wikipedia.

I didn't lose that at all. In fact, I didn't even mention the English Wikipedia. I said the principles on which Wikipedia is founded (which applies to all projects).

*You only rehash why you think this might be acceptable. You tell me that I must assume good faith but where is your good faith where you assume that it is only the other party that has to convince ? So far you have not convinced at all.

I don't understand what you're referring to. As far as I'm aware, the principle of "assume good faith" does not apply to corporations, but only to individuals. Since the partnership is between the Foundation and a corporation, the principle does not apply, and it is up to those proposing the deal to explain why it is needed and will be beneficial.

*You assume that it goes against the ideals of the Foundation. Which ideals are they ? As a Foundation we have objectives and it does say what we aim to do. With more funding we can do more.

The ideals I am referring to include the policy of neutral point of view. See my other email (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-October/004580.html) which explains why reliance on companies is a bad idea.

*If you cannot think of an admin who does not have the best interest of Wikipedia at heart .. Well I am not a Wikipedia admin and I am an admin. This does not mean that I do not have the best interest of Wikipedia at heart, it only shows the fallacy of your line of thinking.

I don't understand what you are talking about. You don't have the best interests of the project at heart? What exactly are you trying to say?

I do consider an admin who removes these links narrow minded. He does not consider other things than his immediate concerns (that is what narrow minded means). I also fail to see a justification for these things in your arguments. I also miss how you would make the money that allows for the growth pattern that we have seen. Please be constructive; make sure that our projects can grow as boundless as the English Wikipedia has been allowed to do untill now.

I am well aware of what narrow-minded means, which is why I said in my previous email that removing the links would not be narrow-minded. If you make an accusation, it's up to you to explain why it is so, not up to me to explain why it is not so. Why is someone who removes the link narrow-minded, and how is he only considering his immediate concerns? You are the one who must justify why, not I.

Also, it's not up to me to budget for the Foundation. I believe there is someone appointed by the Board to do this. I can give you my suggestions if you like, but I fail to see how this is relevant.

Please, explain to me why this partnership is a good move.

Chris

GerardM wrote:

As you assume that it is enough to have your own point of view and do not need to consider what others say and as you do not bring alternatives that addresses the negative side-effects of your stance. I fail to see what principles you are referring to; the primary goal is to bring good NPOV Free information to all people in all languages.. What are you referring to?

I don't assume that at all; I would be interested to know how you came by that assumption (because it is absolutely wrong). The principles I am referring to are the exact same as you have said there - free access to uninfluenced information.

Why does it not apply to corporations and, why have all individuals the moral high ground ? From my perspective organisations including corporations can do good and I hate the idea that every cooperation needs to be considered evil.

It doesn't apply to corporations because corporations are legal entities whose reason for existence is to deliver profit to shareholders. By definition, they are not required to "do good".

I don't think every corporation is evil or should be considered evil, and I never said that. Of course corporations can do good, they aren't required to - which is exactly why we shouldn't assume that they are in existence to "do good".

This is why the Board needs to explain why the partnership is good for the continued existence of the various projects.

You have to assure that you do not become beholden to one source of revenue. So let us have many corporate sponsors. Let us have many organisational sponsors. Let us get loaded with money, let us be able to do good, the good that we do not do because of lack of funds.

Yes, let's - but let's not compromise on our core beliefs.

The project as far as I am concerned is not Wikipedia. We are bigger than that. Please read what I say; I am an admin NOT a Wikipedia admin.

I still have no idea what you are talking about here. Could you try rephrasing it in a different way?

We disagree strongly. I try to explain why removing these links wrong and you do not want to know. The lack of revenue will disproportially hurt projects other than the English Wikipedia. You must be an en.wikipediaadmin, I do not see andy consideration for the other projects or languages.

Yes, I am an admin on the English language Wikipedia, but that's not relevant. I would be making the same points if it were a different language Wikipedia or one of the other projects (in any language).

I fail to see how your stance helps us get information that is NPOV, free and available in all languages to all people of this world. I only see that your stance prevents us from getting aditional funds. Funds that are needed.

My stance is that we shouldn't compromise on our key beliefs - free access to information which is not influenced by individuals, governments or corporations. If we have to scale back our operations or reject some funding because it might affect this in some way, then so be it. Money is not our goal here.

It is cheap to only consider your POV and not consider the implications. Money is needed and money from *MANY* sources prevents us from becoming reliant on any one of them. Your argument that the consequences of your POV are for someone else is inconsiderate.

I don't have the legal skills nor financial skills to budget for an organisation like this. It's not inconsiderate for me to constructively criticise the Board or the Foundation. It's not only inconsiderate but socially negligent of me not to.

You have read the arguments why this partnership is a good move. You do not accept these arguments, it does not mean that it was not explained to you and it does not mean that the reasons are not valid. It only shows that you disagree.

I have heard some arguments regarding this partnership, but not all, and not all the arguments are complete. I agree with some of what I have heard, disagree with other bits, and believe there is more information on this to come - as with anything. Please don't tell me what I do or do not believe, and let me be the judge of what I think is valid.

Chris

Anthere wrote:

I fully understand this concern, Chris, but at least in my part of the world, it is to the ones making an accusation to prove a person is wrong (or should I say guilty ?). By showing facts. Proofs. Numbers.

I'm not accusing anyone of guilt. I simply believe that the Board should make the case for putting this material on the various Wikimedia websites, as they are the ones who want to change something.

The analogy to guilt/innocence is not applicable - I think a more appropriate analogy would be "scientific proof"; in other words, if you have an idea, you should say why you believe it is correct, not just mention the idea, assume it is good, and wait for others to prove you wrong.

Right now, your fears may be understandable, and I am ready to listen to them, but your fears are words. Only words. They are suppositions. They are fears. There is no way we can *prove* or *demonstrate* to the community that this deal is NOT gonna influence how the Foundation operates, but by telling you that this is not gonna change the way we think or act.

I highlighted why I believe that advertising or reliance on corporate donations may lead to undue influence on the Foundation with my car review on the BBC story. It's not just supposition - it happens in real life.

You, as an editor, have more power in raising a riot to have editors leave the project, than Answers.com have power to influence which decisions we will take. You, as an editor, have the power to kick Angela and myself from the board if you are not happy with us at next elections (and each time editors are not happy, they are quick to remind that to both of us). Any developer has more power to put the site to a halt if they are not happy with us. Answers.com can not do this. Any admin on the english wikipedia has more power to protect an article than Bob has.

You can be sure I will never vote for anyone who believes that any corporation contributing to a non-profit organisation is a good idea. The only responsibility of a corporation is to deliver profit to its shareholders. I believe it's a fundamentally bad idea to rely on a corporation's goodwill.

The way we can demonstrate it will be a good move is precisely by giving it a trial, showing the results and showing that Answers.com does *not* make decisions for us.

The way you can demonstrate it is a good move is to make a page which clearly sets out why it is needed, why Answers is the correct corporation to have a partnership with, and what will happen if anything goes wrong. I think it would be a bad idea to jump in, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

The way *you* can demonstrate you are correct in your fear that Answers.com will be our boss from now is to provide mails where they actually tell us what to do. Can you do this ? You can't because it is only a fear. It has no reality. Are we always gonna do nothing because of *fears* ? I am sorry, but no. The very idea of having a project editable by anyone, including jerks and pov people is more dangerous and crazy than the current deal. It was good enough 4,5 years ago.

I'd prefer to be afraid and right, than unafraid and wrong.

Chris

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

I don't think it is narrow-mindedness that would cause someone to remove these links, and I think accusing someone of acting in this way is rather impolite and shows a lack of good faith. I can't think of one admin who doesn't have the best interests of Wikipedia at heart and is only doing what they think best.

I'm sorry but it is quite strange for me to imagine that someone would remove such a link, _other than_ if they were in the grip of some of the false and inflammatory rhetoric which has been thrown around here.

The thing is, a large number of people have not been convinced that this is necessary for the Foundation's continued operations, but the partnership is going against some of the ideals on which Wikipedia was founded.

Such as what? Do you really know what you're saying, or are you jumping to some false conclusions?

--Jimbo

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

I'm sorry but it is quite strange for me to imagine that someone would remove such a link, _other than_ if they were in the grip of some of the false and inflammatory rhetoric which has been thrown around here.

Possibly there is false rhetoric involved in the discussion, but this is probably due to a lack of information and clarity from the Board on this issue. To quote from the press release:

"Wikipedia will create a Tools page on its English-language site to promote useful tools that access Wikipedia, and 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition, will receive charter placement on that page."

The press release, and the text posted by Angela in various locations, was certainly not clear on the nature of the agreement, especially regarding the rules relating to placement. Accordingly, I've updated the page on Wikipedia on the subject, with some help from Jimbo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ATools%2F1-Click_Answer... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Tools/1-Click_Answers&am...

And I've retracted my opposition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Tools/1-Click_Answers#Apparently...

Redirect URLs in case of errant line breaks: http://tinyurl.com/ck9l3 http://tinyurl.com/76jxy http://tinyurl.com/cv7no#Apparently_the_community_will_be_involved

-- Tim Starling

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

Tim Starling wrote:

...

The press release, and the text posted by Angela in various locations, was certainly not clear on the nature of the agreement, especially regarding the rules relating to placement. Accordingly, I've updated the page on Wikipedia on the subject, with some help from Jimbo:

Thanks, that's a great deal clearer! As I've mentioned previously, the initial press release sounded greatly like Answers paid to get their tool prominently displayed on Wikipedia.

Now it turns out that Answers are simply making a new tool with advertising, and are giving some of the revenue to the Foundation, and are asking nicely if we'd put the tool on the Tools page.

Hopefully the lesson learnt from this is that the detail should be provided right from the beginning, rather than confusingly-worded which creates false impressions right from the start.

The new wording is still a bit confusing to me, if "asking nicely if we'd put the tool on the Tools page" is all it's supposed to mean. Simply putting the tool on the tools page was not an issue---the tools page is for listing pretty much any tool we know about, so of course it should be listed. The controversy was over an agreement to give it "charter placement" on that page.

Some people object to even having a profit relationship in the first place (and did with Amazon anyway), but I haven't generally been among them (I supported the Amazon referrer revenue way back then, so long as it was disclosed and not displayed any more prominently than other bookstores' links). The objection, from me anyway, is to displaying such partners' links in a more prominent location. Amazon referrer link: fine. Putting Amazon link at the top of the ISBN page in larger font (or otherwise highlighted uniquely): not fine. The present situation is pretty much identical, imo, and it's a bit bizarre how directly the board seems to have completely ignored the community consensus that was reached the last time this issue came up.

-Mark

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Yes, and I take full responsibility for that and apologize for the confusion.

Thanks Jimbo, it's great that we've finally cleared up what the partnership actually entails. Hopefully we won't have this situation arising in the future!

Chris

On 10/24/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

...

So, what will happen if someone edits the Tools page (and any other pages which reference this 1 click thingy), and removes all references to it? Will the Board be restating the link, even if it is constantly removed by contributors?

It is a wiki page like any other. I would find it incredibly strange and shocking if people did that, why would they?

One point that needs to be repeated over and over and over here is that the time, manner, and place of any link, even the existence of the link at all, is a matter for the wiki to decide, like any other.

Now, having said that, I think that it is pretty silly to imagine that we will have a page of "tools", some of which are proprietary, some of which are free, most of which bring us no revenue, and *1* which does bring us revenue -- from someone who has freely given to our community without asking anything in return -- from someone who proposed this idea as a way for him to give *even more* to us, and then people are going to maliciously delete any reference to us.

The message coming from that would be simply bizarre.

I think people need to slow down and think this through before jumping to strange conclusions.

--Jimbo

I agree that it'd be stupid to remove the link, but the only reason to put the link in a place of prominence (or whatever the phrase was) is the fact that we made a deal to do so. In the absense of such a deal the link would likely be put right in with all the rest. I think the question many of us are wondering is what happens if the wiki process puts the link in a place which Answers Corporation doesn't consider a position of prominence? Do we forfeit the revenue? Are we in violation of the agreement?

Hopefully all this will be moot by the time the trial period is over, because some Wikipedians will have created their own tool just like that by Answers Corporation except for the fact that it's open source and donates 100% of its net profits to Wikipedia. In that case I think it'll be clear that the board should not renew the agreement with Answers Corporation. Anthony

On 10/24/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

...

I think the question many of us are wondering is what happens if the

wiki

...

process puts the link in a place which Answers Corporation doesn't

consider

...

a position of prominence? Do we forfeit the revenue? Are we in violation

of

...

the agreement?

During the first 60 days, both they and we have the right to cancel for any reason at all. I doubt very much that will happen.

--Jimbo

The more details I learn about the deal, the more it sounds like a donation more than anything else. The only place I was really skeptical was with the link we were giving to them, but if this really is going to be handled throught the normal wiki process then I see why many are saying it's not advertising - in that case it isn't. Whoever negotiated this deal did a good job. In its essence we give them the right to call the software "Wikipedia edition", and they give us half their revenues for that software. Yeah, yeah, we add a link to Wikipedia:Tools, but that's a good idea anyway, and yeah, we add a link to the tool from that page, but if the wiki process is going to be used to add that link, then again it's something we would have done anyway. Anthony

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

Will the Wikimedia Foundation ever accept money to change the content of the articles? Not as long as I'm alive, ok? Anyone who thinks otherwise should check their premises and remember who I am and what I'm doing and how I spend my life.

Forgive my scepticism, but if we start accepting advertising and become reliant on it, it isn't unknown for the company who is advertising to pull their adverts, cutting Wikimedia's revenue.

Absolutely. Just as a huge disaster happening in an country from which we get a significant part of our donations would also cut down our revenue. Just as Yahoo could decide to stop helping with the Korea servers at the end of the deal period. We would also have to replace all those servers pretty quickly.

Overall, all it really says is that we should have various sources of money. * Individual donations certainly is our best assets * Corporate donations should be favored (but are also controversial) * Grants (again controversial depending on the Foundation giving it) * Tee-shirt and other item sales (about 200 dollars last year ?) * Government support (controversial as well) * Collaboration such as Kennisnet (might be controversial as well...) * Collaboration such as Answers.com (potentially highly controversial)

But to be sustainable, I think we need diverse sources of income.

A possibly apocryphal story is of a program on the BBC, I believe it was a car review program, who gave a bad review to a certain American car model. The CEO of the company found out about it, was furious and ordered the advertising team to pull all adverts to punish the TV station. The advertising team replied "sorry sir, but the BBC don't run adverts".

A lack of adverts is one of the reasons why Wikipedia can be neutral. If we become reliant on others for our existence, they can exert influence over our content. I don't want to see us go down that route.

Chris

You are perfectly correct. I would totally oppose an ads for a certain american car model on [[car]]• Now the question I would ask, in all honesty, is how do you perceive the current deal with Answers.com could have an impact on the neutrality of our articles ?

Ant

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

I can imagine a scenario where a company which is supplying us with significant resources of some kind can request that we remove an "unfriendly" link from their Wikipedia entry. If it isn't, or someone readds it, then we get into a potentially ugly situation.

I will never bow to any sort of pressure of that kind, and one of the reason partnerships like answers.com are so important is precisely to avoid our having to rely on a few large donors.

What is more important - that Wikipedia is online and has POV material on it, or that it's NPOV but offline due to lack of funds?

NPOV is non-negotiable.

I don't know whether Answers will do this. I simply don't trust an entity which has its sole reason for existence as "deliver maximum profit to our shareholders" to act in the best interests of the Foundation.

Of course not. This is why it is so important that we pursue many different modes of funding.

--Jimbo

On 10/24/05, Chris Jenkinson chris@starglade.org wrote:

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

I will never bow to any sort of pressure of that kind, and one of the reason partnerships like answers.com http://answers.com are so

important is precisely to

...

avoid our having to rely on a few large donors.

[...]

...

NPOV is non-negotiable.

So what happens in this hypothetical scenario where we accept a significant contribution from a corporation, and 6 months into the partnership they turn around and say "we don't like that bit on the article which criticises us, remove it or we pull the funding"?

We say no and then publicise the fact that they asked us to do so, ensuring that not only do they not get their way but if they pull funding they'll wind up getting bad publicity out of it. What would be the alternative? The board announces that they are protecting the page permanently and that any admin who unprotects it or adds criticism on company X will be deadmined immediately? Do you really think that's going to happen?

I understand the need for money for the Foundation, I just disagree with

the idea that going to a corporation for donations is the best way to do it. I am open to persuasion on this (of course), so please don't think I am arguing for argument's sake.

Chris

I agree with this to some extent, and that's why I think Wikipedia should just advertise directly. Then any single corporation is going to have a negligible effect on revenues. But it seems that answers.comhttp://answers.comis only beginning, even with them there is probably a contract in place that doesn't let them back out for such a trivial reason, and they're unlikely to put us in such a position anyway, because they'd either not get their way or get their way and destroy Wikimedia by causing the community to abandon them. The latter certainly won't happen as long as the current board is in place. I trust Angela, Anthere (sorry I don't remember your name), and Jimbo not to abandon NPOV at any cost. Anthony

Chris Jenkins writes:

So what happens in this hypothetical scenario where we accept a significant contribution from a corporation, and 6 months into the partnership they turn around and say "we don't like that bit on the article which criticises us, remove it or we pull the funding"?

Then we tell them to fuck off.

I understand the need for money for the Foundation, I just disagree with the idea that going to a corporation for donations is the best way to do it. I am open to persuasion on this (of course), so please don't think I am arguing for argument's sake.

It has been my longstanding policy to seek support for our work from a diversity of sources. We were offered complete hosting for everything from a major internet company, and I simply turned it down, even though it would have made our lives a lot easier in a lot of ways. I turned it down because it was _too much_.

--Jimbo

Chris Jenkinson wrote:

Thanks for the clarification (and to Fred Bauder and Anthony DiPierro). I think it's important that the community hears the answers to these questions. Perhaps it would be a good idea to make a FAQ based on the questions/answers discussed on the mailing list?

Yes.

Part of the problem here may be that there are many people who are new to the community who might not know me very well. I think anyone who knows me would know the answer to the question "What do we do if some donor demands that an article be changed to suit them?"

--Jimbo

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Part of the problem here may be that there are many people who are new to the community who might not know me very well. I think anyone who knows me would know the answer to the question "What do we do if some donor demands that an article be changed to suit them?"

I've met you, and I believe you.

However this is the subject of a contract ... and contract law doesn't permit of personalities that well, indeed the only way it does is compensation for breaking the contract (which wouldn't be very beneficial to WMF I suspect!)

Alison

Daniel Mayer wrote:

Explain, exactly, how this snooping would occur?

We can't expect reader donations to carry us indefinitely. We need to diversify our income sources. Partnerships like this, along with other funding strategies such as grants, are needed to ensure we stay in the black.

BTW, do you have a few extra million dollars laying around to pay for servers next year? And what about the special projects we would like to fund but can't?

According to Angela, paying for servers isn't the problem:

" I would like to know: a) Was this change necessitated by a budget shortfall? b) What will the Board do if Wikipedia users remove the answers.com link from Wikipedia:Tools or from the sidebar? -- Tim Starling 20:14, 20 October 2005 (UTC) "

" No, it wasn't necessitated by the budget. I am expecting the revenue would be regarded as something additional to what is needed to keep the site running. For example, special projects like the distribution of content in Africa and so on. As with the Amazon experiment last year, we've little idea at the moment what the revenue from this will be, whether it will be worthwhile, and whether it will be regarded as overly controversial. This is why I insisted on a trial period. We're expecting the links won't be removed, in the same way normal fundraising drive notices are not removed. Angela (disclaimer: all of my comments on this page are just my opinion and not official Board responses) 20:34, 20 October 2005 (UTC) "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Tools/1-Click_Answers

See the wiki page for my response to this.

-- Tim Starling

...

"That page will highlight the "1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition"

software"

"The Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia will create a Tools page on its English-language site to promote useful tools that access Wikipedia, and 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition, will receive charter placement on that page." <<

As long as other tools can be given placement based upon the wishes of "the crowd" (editors and contributors), then it seems aligned with the goals of wikipedia/wikimedia. If it is given placement above, or emphasis is given above some other tool that is considered by the crowd to be "free and better/more useful", and that placement is due to the partnership and revenue, then that feels like advertising and against the free and open, user-contributed goals of wikipedia/wikimedia.

If "charter placement on that page" means emphasis that other, potentially better tools cannot obtain, then it is advertising.

- MHart