Wikipedia Needs $16 Million to Remain Ad Free

REUTERS

Not many of us click on the plea from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales that always sits on the top of each page, but it seems this time the need for money is serious. The Wikimedia Foundation told Techland that they need $16 million to remain ad free.

Last years wikipediathon raised $8 million, mostly from user donations and some larger gifts from corporations including Google, of their operating budget $10 million, according to Wikimedia. This year, they are saying they need $20.4 million to stay ad free due to increased costs and are hoping to raise $16 million, so the effort to ask for contributions has been doubled. The “Personal Appeal” banner that we see was the collective effort of the Wikipedia community. The creators of the site reached out and asked users to help create an ad that would actually get people to donate. Wales sad, Don Draper-esque expression was the most effective at getting people to give up a couple bucks.

The Wikipedia ad reads:

“Over the past 10 years, Wikipedia has become a vital public resource for hundreds of millions of people. We’ve come to depend on it being there for us — free to use, without any bias or interference, and without advertising. If you can afford to make even a small donation, that’s important. You’re helping to keep Wikipedia available not just for yourself, but for others–kids, people in poor countries–who themselves can’t afford to donate.”

Don’t forget those college students who are cramming to write 20 page papers during finals week. What has Wikipedia done for you lately?

Editor’s Note: This article was amended to clarify an earlier version that stated that Wikimedia’s budget was $20 million each year. This year’s budget is $20 million due to increased operating costs; last year’s was only $10 million.

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thekohser2

I wonder when the media and blogosphere will figure out that the Wikimedia Foundation spends on program services only 41 cents of every dollar they scam from donors, which earns them ONE STAR (out of four!) from Charity Navigator in organizational efficiency.

I also wonder why the news media never thought to cover the 2009 story of how the Wikimedia Foundation needed extra office space, and as if by magic, they hand-picked Jimmy Wales’ for-profit corporation to be their landlord, THEN obtained competitive bids, THEN asked Wales’ for-profit company to match the average of the competitive bids.

I too wonder why the media don’t seem to care that the 2010 market research study of past Wikimedia Foundation donors was awarded to the former employer of the WMF staffer running the project, without any competitive bidding whatsoever. And when the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation was asked how much the project cost, the guy asking the question was banned from the online discussion.

Ms. Castillo, do you watch the shells in a street-corner shell game, thinking that this time you’ll finally get it right?
http://www.mikepeel.net/ mikepeel

It’s not worth paying thekohser2′s comment any attention – he’s a well-known internet troll, and he freely distorts the facts to suit his argument.

Note that the Wikimedia Foundation has 3/4 stars overall on Charity Navigator. It’s also a unique charity, which makes it difficult to assess on these sort of metrics.

With the next point: the amount of money spent was competitive, as Kohs admits, and temporarily hosting a team working on usability in the same office as an organisation that works on the same software and has developed a lot of knowledge about its usability kinda makes a large degree of sense…

It’s also worth noting that in the third paragraph ‘the guy asking the question’ was Kohs, and he was banned from the online discussion (a mailing list) due to a long history of trolling (both on that mailing list and off it, such as here), not for asking this specific question.

No organisation is perfect – there’s always flaws in the way any organisation does things, particularly when it’s an incredibly small team doing a huge amount of work – but Kohs’ description of it is blatantly inaccurate.
w00diee

Nothing worthwhile is free. So if they can’t figure out how to get funds, they will fold. Everyone learned this lesson about internet companies back in 2000. I think the sooner the foolish companies fold, the quicker the tech industry will rebound. Information has value. Attempting to ignore this only drags on the industry.
healthservices2

Maybe I’m missing something but what’s wrong with having ads?

To me as long as they don’t go popping out in your face it should be ok.
http://crichton007.wordpress.com crichton007

I really wish that I could find the name of the company that Wikipeida sued because the name was too similar or something like that. It happened right around the time that they asked for a cash infusion of donations the first time around (that I knew of).

Anyway, I was turned off by what seemed like a frivolous lawsuit coupled with a request for money. It just rubbed me the wrong way and ever since then I’ve decided that despite how useful I find Wikipedia I’m not interested in giving them money when they appear to spend it in a wasteful manner.
http://www.mikepeel.net/ mikepeel

healthservices2: Adverts would affect the neutrality of the content on Wikipedia, either directly or indirectly. Also, the community that write Wikipedia would never accept adverts (the last time it was seriously proposed, the community that wrote the Spanish Wikipedia at the time went an started a new encyclopaedia elsewhere). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Advertising

chrichton007: Interesting, I’ve not heard about that before at all. I’d love to know more about it if you can find a reference for it – presumably it would have been back in 2003? The Wikimedia Foundation’s changed a lot since then (it’s grown considerably, and matured a lot); it’s worth taking another look.