We need to start fundraising again, and at least for today, we should have a link up on the 'wikipedia is dead' page to the donations page on the wikimedia website. I am sure people will contribute at a time like this.
Going forward, I think that we need a constant message on every page of the site, most likely at the bottom of each article, saying something like "If you have found Wikipedia helpful, remember that we are a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from users like you."
We have now a total of approximately $12,000-$14,000 in the bank... we are going to need to use that to buy additional apaches and probably additional squids. Other than the fact that we're currently in the middle of a database fiasco, we likely have enough DB power for right now... although we should try to be ahead of the curve.
Last week, before I left, traffic had approximately doubled in a single week. This is staggering, because traffic was already huge.
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
But to raise money, we have to ask. People won't give unless they know that we need it, and unless they know how incredibly efficient we are with the resources that are given to us.
--Jimbo
Jimmy-
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
Yes. A $100K fundraising drive makes sense, but at least *some* content should be up - at least the squids serving pages in offline mode. That's because many of our visitors come from Google, and if fundraising is the first thing they see - and no content - they will be turned away.
We should also have realtime updates of funds coming in, this can dramatically increase participation. This isn't that hard to do as PayPal provides an interface for it: https://www.paypal.com/en/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/ipn-intro
Lastly, I think hardware alone is not enough. We need a fulltime professional systems administrator with direct access to the machines. Within a $100K budget that is certainly viable. If Brion wants a new job, I'd say he should be immediately offered this opportunity.
Regards,
Erik
On 7 Jun 2004, Erik Moeller wrote:
Lastly, I think hardware alone is not enough. We need a fulltime professional systems administrator with direct access to the machines. Within a $100K budget that is certainly viable. If Brion wants a new job, I'd say he should be immediately offered this opportunity.
I agree. It should be full time, because an event based model would cause the conspiracy heads to suspect the paid admins to manufacture problems. :)
I also think there should be a part time position for someone doing some of the work Jimbo is doing today. The routine part of coordination.
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
Jimmy-
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
Yes. A $100K fundraising drive makes sense, but at least *some* content should be up - at least the squids serving pages in offline mode. That's because many of our visitors come from Google, and if fundraising is the first thing they see - and no content - they will be turned away.
I completely agree with that. People need to see the goods before they pony up the dough (sorry, needless Americanisms).
We should also have realtime updates of funds coming in, this can dramatically increase participation. This isn't that hard to do as PayPal provides an interface for it: https://www.paypal.com/en/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/ipn-intro
That's neat! Although in the meantime I could update the numbers a few times a day during a fund drive.
Lastly, I think hardware alone is not enough. We need a fulltime professional systems administrator with direct access to the machines. Within a $100K budget that is certainly viable. If Brion wants a new job, I'd say he should be immediately offered this opportunity.
Yes - I think we have reached a point where throwing more hardware at the problem will not be as productive as having somebody on site (at least part time) managing the machines. Brion seems to be the obvious choice but that would require him to move to Florida, which is a lot for us to ask.
Another idea I've been toying with is establishing a 'tip jar' for every active developer in the form of links to their PayPal accounts at the bottom of the donations page. Brion already has one but that was for his notebook computer fund - something he bought a while ago. This would be more of an ongoing thing.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/
Erik Moeller wrote:
[cut]
dramatically increase participation. This isn't that hard to do as PayPal provides an interface for it: https://www.paypal.com/en/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/ipn-intro
[cut]
Do not forget that by using PayPal WikiMedia is wasting a lot of money.
Befor asking even more money a cheaper donation channel should be explored.
Please see http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Fundraising_page#MoneyBookers
Walter Vermeir wrote:
Do not forget that by using PayPal WikiMedia is wasting a lot of money.
Befor asking even more money a cheaper donation channel should be explored.
Please see http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Fundraising_page#MoneyBookers
Is it actually cheaper in all cases though? Remember that the plurality of our donations come from the United States, and from my reading of their fees page it seems that MoneyBookers in some cases takes a higher cut of US donations than PayPal does.
The only options listed for payment in the US are SWIFT (free) and Credit card (3% surcharge), plus a 1% Moneybookers fee (up to EUR0.50). SWIFT (basically a bank transfer, if I understand correctly) is not typically used by Americans, and not even available through all banks. With credit cards, therefore the most common US payment option that MoneyBookers supports, the fees total 4% to send money via credit card (3% cc processing fee and a 1% moneybookers transfer fee).
PayPal charges 2.9% (for USD donations) plus a $0.30 flat fee, which makes MoneyBookers better for donations $27 and under, and PayPal better for donations over $27. Thus it seems MoneyBookers would be a worse option for medium to large credit-card donations from the US.
Of course, we might have very few of those. Perhaps we could just give a simplified version of this information to people and let them choose which payment option would be most appropriate for their particular donation.
-Mark
--- Walter Vermeir walter@wikipedia.be wrote:
Do not forget that by using PayPal WikiMedia is wasting a lot of money.
When you consider the fact that so many people already know about and use PayPal, then 4.5% to 7.6% overall charges don't seem that bad (much less than sales tax in most places). But yes, MoneyBookers is cheaper (and in 4 languages).
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_PayPal_donations_for_2003
Befor asking even more money a cheaper donation channel should be explored.
Please see http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Fundraising_page#MoneyBookers
We already have a MoneyBookers account. I simply have not looked into how to set up an easy way for people to donate using it yet (like I've already done for PayPal). But I just added the single button - donors will have to copy/paste or type our account name in order to donate.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/
On Mon, 7 Jun 2004, Jimmy Wales wrote:
But to raise money, we have to ask. People won't give unless they know that we need it, and unless they know how incredibly efficient we are with the resources that are given to us.
I think it's important to bundle the plea for money with an short FAQ on resource use and plans for the future.
Last time round, I know a lot of people thought Wikipedia was doing the "we're taking our toys and leaving"-stunt, semi-blackmailing the public for money.
Once it was pointed out that Wikipedia would struggle on no matter what, that the servers were realistic in relation to the traffic (the sums are already quite a bit larger than what most Free Software projects dabble with), etc. people emptied their pockets.
It's also probably wise to tell the Slashdot editors not to post anything about it until you ask them too, or we become subject to any odd angle, not to mention timing.
But you already know this. :)
Am Montag, 7. Juni 2004 14:10 schrieb Jimmy Wales:
We need to start fundraising again, and at least for today, we should have a link up on the 'wikipedia is dead' page to the donations page on the wikimedia website. I am sure people will contribute at a time like this.
Sorry, but I believe this is a very bad idea. We had a similar action last christmas and that generated very bad feelings. It has an haugut of "Wikipedia is putting there servers down to raise money". That isn't the case of course, but people will think it is.
Furthermore our problem shouldn't be the hardware any more. When we are not able to get a simple second database server to work since a half year now, it's not the hardware. The server wasn't brought down by too much traffic. Either we by the wrong hardware, or it's badly configured, or we have the wrong software because it doesn't scale. Then we should think about software, not about hardware. The bottlenecks is not the hardware. Sorry to say this, but there was enough money to get this thing running. Probably we spent it the wrong way.
Uli
On Jun 7, 2004, at 9:08 AM, Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
Furthermore our problem shouldn't be the hardware any more. When we are not able to get a simple second database server to work since a half year now, it's not the hardware. The server wasn't brought down by too much traffic. Either we by the wrong hardware, or it's badly configured, or we have the wrong software because it doesn't scale. Then we should think about software, not about hardware. The bottlenecks is not the hardware. Sorry to say this, but there was enough money to get this thing running. Probably we spent it the wrong way.
Maybe the money was spent in the right way, but contingency planning failed us. Unlike most of my work in private sector doing failure recovery planning, I haven't seen a clear set of plans, goals, triggers, and timelines for bringing up cold spares, for deciding how much data loss is acceptable, for mirroring data for fastest recovery, for adding new hardware, etc.
If suda (literally) caught on fire, was there an understood, written plan for recovery? What was considered the acceptable downtime? Was the scenario tested? What software/hardware systems exist to handle rack fires? How about explosions at data centers? 300% surges in traffic over 24 hours? What is the planned, formal, command chain for decision making during crisis? Have all the decisions been made already, so the command chain is not a problem? Has a much more expensive 15 minutes of total downtime per catastrophic event been budgeted for, rather than a much cheaper 16 hours per event?
Maybe I'm wrong, and this multi-hour outage is exactly the planned for, and expected, result from recent events, and once we started having problems, the policy and procedures kicked in. I kind of doubt it, though.
-Bop
Jimmy Wales wrote:
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure everyone understands why we need the money and what we're going to do with it. $100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least some people will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have to give them at least some plausible reason to believe that it's really not possible to run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000 worth of equipment instead (which would still be a lot of equipment!). At the very least a proposed parts list with some explanation of why we need the various parts (and can't do with cheaper replacement for the very-expensive ones) would help---even non-techie people who aren't going to read it all the way through will be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that we've taken the time to put something like that up.
-Mark
Hi all, It's a little bit strange to me to ask people money before to know exactly what we need. I think we first need to design the network we need to face the exponential progression of Mediawiki projects. Then we can think what hardware/software we need to make it (thus, know about how much we need). Then we can ask people to donate to buy this hardware. Personnaly, instead of hear "we need $100,000" I prefer to hear "we need to buy X, Y and Z that may cost around $100,000". Just my POV.
By the way, do we have professional/competent people to design the complex network we need? How much may cost a network analysis by a professional company? May it help?
Aoineko
----- Original Message ----- From: "Delirium" delirium@hackish.org To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 7:03 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising
Jimmy Wales wrote:
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure everyone understands why we need the money and what we're going to do with it. $100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least some people will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have to give them at least some plausible reason to believe that it's really not possible to run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000 worth of equipment instead (which would still be a lot of equipment!). At the very least a proposed parts list with some explanation of why we need the various parts (and can't do with cheaper replacement for the very-expensive ones) would help---even non-techie people who aren't going to read it all the way through will be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that we've taken the time to put something like that up.
-Mark
On Jun 7, 2004, at 6:45 PM, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
By the way, do we have professional/competent people to design the complex network we need? How much may cost a network analysis by a professional company? May it help?
I'm new here, so my information is spotty, so I hope I'm not overstepping any bounds by commenting, however I will add in my two cents any way :)
From what I've been able to gather by looking at the graphs available online, and briefly talking to a few people on IRC, It looks to me like the network it's self is not a problem and may not be for a long time to come. From what I can tell most of the wikimedia sites are not huge bandwidth hogs. Although I have zero visibility into how much NFS traffic there is or how much bandwidth DB downloads eat up.
The places that do seem of most concern seem to be keeping up with demand placed on the webservers and the databases. Which may be a matter of adding more and more boxes, ironing out some bottlenecks in the code/database or both.
Of course if there are network issues, I'm sure some reasonably competent network engineers around. (I might qualify as that, at least it's a big part of my day job...)
Just some thoughts.
Just an idea so people can actually *see* what their money is used for: Someone go to the server farm with a digital camera and take a picture of our assorted hardware, with Jimbo in the middle, or Brion :-)
Then put it up on the fundraising page, saying "that's all we have, we need a lot more to make wikipedia really fast and reliable".
Magnus
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure everyone understands why we need the money and what we're going to do with it. $100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least some people will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have to give them at least some plausible reason to believe that it's really not possible to run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000 worth of equipment instead (which would still be a lot of equipment!). At the very least a proposed parts list with some explanation of why we need the various parts (and can't do with cheaper replacement for the very-expensive ones) would help---even non-techie people who aren't going to read it all the way through will be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that we've taken the time to put something like that up.
-Mark
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