William Beutler on Wikipedia

Posts Tagged ‘Fundraising’

The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2017

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on January 3, 2018 at 6:16 pm

Every year since 2010, The Wikipedian has delivered a roundup of the most interesting events, trends, situations, occasions, and general goings-on that marked the foregoing year on Wikipedia and in the broader Wikimedia community. Last year’s edition remarked upon the head-spinning series of events that made 2016 the “worst year ever”—or so we thought at the time—and now, looking ahead to 2018, we have a stronger sense that the most realistic expectation is more of the same.

Where does Wikipedia fit into that? Following the U.S. presidential election, it became briefly fashionable to see Wikipedia as a bulwark against “fake news”, but in a year where the new American president suffered vanishingly few consequences for his constant issuance of falsehoods, 2017 very much felt like a year when truth was under constant attack. These ten stories depict a Wikipedia editorial community and readership not necessarily in the midst of a crisis, but of life during informational wartime. Let’s go:

10. In the Wikimedia Year 2030…

Wikimedia 2030, photo by Avery JensenLast year’s list was dominated by a metastasizing organizational breakdown culminating in a change of leadership at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Among many complaints about the non-profit’s former executive director, two of the most important were vision and communication, which is to say their lack. Katherine Maher, WMF’s current chief, seems determined not to let the same be said of her. In August 2017, a little over a year into her tenure, she announced an initiative called “Wikimedia 2030”, starting with a high-minded re-articulation of the Wikimedia movement’s mission statement and a series of commitments to (paraphrasing from the document itself) advancing the world through knowledge. It’s obviously operating on a very long time frame, and a lot depends on its implementation, which is yet to come. But the document received overwhelming support by community members in October, which is at least a positive sign in this otherwise fractured age.

9. The Daily Mail and Governance

Daily Mail clock, photo by Alex Muller / WikideaWikipedia’s quality is highly dependent on the sources it allows to verify its information. In February Wikipedia’s community decided it was fed up with the website of UK tabloid The Daily Mail for its mendacious unreliability, and so “voted” to “ban” its use. This apparent decision was widely reported, including by this blog. And yet, that’s not quite what happened. Rather than an official blacklisting, the Daily Mail was simply added to a list of potentially unreliable sources, and it’s possible to find instances of the website being used as a reference since, perhaps by contributors entirely unaware there was a controversy in the first place. This is how Wikipedia works: it has very few rules that cannot be overcome by editorial clout, determined obstinacy, continued evasion, or blithe disregard. On the whole, Wikipedia works pretty well, but breaks down at the edges: and that is still where the Daily Mail remains.

8. “Monkey Selfie” Reckoning

First, a mea culpa: as far as I can tell, The Wikipedian has never written a word about the Monkey selfie copyright dispute, as Wikipedia’s own article on the subject calls it.

Monkey selfie by David SlaterWikipedia played only a small role in the legal case, which primarily involved nature photographer David Slater being sued by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals on behalf of a Celebes crested macaque who had no idea any of this was taking place. The legal matter isn’t quite settled, but as of September it seems close: Slater keeps the copyright, with concessions. Yet Wikipedia played a much larger role in the sense that there may never have been a case at all, or it would have remained quite obscure, had the WMF not refused to abide by Slater’s request to delete the photo from Wikimedia Commons. By virtue of its high profile, Wikipedia magnifies everything.

What’s more, the enthusiasm of its community also obscures: I remember the photo being everywhere at Wikimania 2014 in London and, being charmed like everyone else, I played along and used it in a slide presentation without looking into it further. I’m more regretful of this than my own non-coverage, and consider it still unresolved whether WMF is on the side of virtue in this matter. (Why am I using the photo here, then? For the same reason Wikipedia uses copyrighted logos: for identification.)

It seems indisputable to me that the copyright should belong with the human who went to considerable lengths at personal cost to facilitate its creation, regardless of which bipedal mammal clicked the button, and if the law is unclear on this, then the law should be clarified. If you haven’t listened to This American Life’s episode about the case from November, it’s worth your time—and Wikipedia doesn’t come across terribly well.

7. Burger King’s Way

Burger KingRemember this? In April, Burger King announced a television ad for the U.S. and UK markets featuring dialogue intended to activate Google Home and read out Wikipedia’s entry for the Whopper. Almost immediately, The Verge noticed that Burger King’s ad team had surreptitiously edited the Whopper entry from Wikipedia’s typical dispassionate summary “…signature hamburger product sold by the international fast-food restaurant chain…” to unambiguous marketing-speak “…flame-grilled patty made with 100 percent beef with no preservatives or fillers…” Then, predictably, unidentified randos joined in and hijacked the entry to disparage the mass-market burger, producing head-scratching headlines like this one from BBC: “Burger King advert sabotaged on Wikipedia”.

Although Burger King was probably unaware of Wikipedia’s policy “Wikipedia is not a soapbox or means of promotion” and practically guaranteed ignorant of the guideline “Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point” that should hardly matter; Burger King knew what it was doing, and figured the ensuing coverage was worth the cost. They were probably right. But I can’t not play the schoolmarm, and tsk-tsk: it’s one thing for a high-school student to vandalize Wikipedia for fun, but quite another for a multinational corporation.

6. Wikipedia Vandalism is Fun for All

Last year’s version of this column decried the phenomenon of lazy sports-bloggers leaning on blink-and-you-missed-it vandalism of sports-related Wikipedia articles for amusement and clicks, and this continued unabated throughout 2017. Most of these stories came from minor sports websites and local news teams, but just as Wikipedia’s prominence owes to its high Google search ranking, so too are these time-wasters afforded visibility by Google News. But this year, we got something else: ostensibly serious news publications marveling over a pattern of self-aware edits coming from U.S. congressional computers.

US CSince 2014, the automated Twitter account @CongressEdits has tracked and reposted every edit made from House and Senate offices; in October, BuzzFeed and CNN both noticed that someone on the Hill was editing articles from Carly Rae Jepsen to Chuck E. Cheese, and on subjects as ubiquitous as Star Wars to obscure as indie band The Mountain Goats. In December, a college student and former congressional aide claimed credit in The Daily Beast, which led to other former interns and anonymous persons crying out for recognition as well. Whether for the lulz, or as part of “the resistance”, these edits at least proved that curiosity about Wikipedia’s willful vulnerability to nonsense appeals to journalists and readers who should probably be focused on something else.

5. Signpost of the Times

WikipediaSignpostIcon.svgA year ago, this list bemoaned the decline of Wikipedia criticism, largely based on the departure of critical thinkers (or at least decent writers) from forums such as Wikipediocracy. This year, I find myself concerned with Wikipedia’s own community news source, The Signpost. A bi-weekly online “newspaper”, The Signpost has been around since 2005, written and edited by volunteers much as Wikipedia itself is. In early 2016 a new editor-in-chief took the reins, led with an ambitious and hopeful editor’s note, produced three issues by the end of February, and then simply stopped.

The editor, a longtime community veteran and onetime WMF staffer, in fact ceased editing Wikipedia almost entirely. I thought about investigating it at the time, but figured I already knew the basics: burnout is a natural occurrence and all but inevitable, although it’s less typical for a project leader to step away without so much as a “gone fishin'” sign. By June, a skeleton crew of former contributors had banded together to put out an edition on at least a once-per-month basis, with a new permanent editor named as of September. Here’s hoping they can return the Signpost to its former schedule and retain its high quality.

In the meantime, I’ll say again what I’ve said many times before: The Signpost is hard work and is a crucial service for the core Wikipedia community; its health is in some ways a measure of the health of the community itself. Its editorship should be a stipended position, funded by but free from oversight of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia does not depend upon volunteer developers, nor should it depend on volunteer reporters.

4. Everipedia Stalking

What’s Everipedia? Oh, it’s just the latest upstart challenging Wikipedia, this time an actual startup: a rival wiki-based online encyclopedia launched in 2014 by a couple of UCLA students, which later attracted investment from excommunicated Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam, and in December also the involvement of expatriate Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger.

195px-L_SangerEveripedia is certainly audacious, calling itself the world’s biggest encyclopedia (for having exported all of Wikipedia’s entries and then adding more Wikipedia wouldn’t accept) and it projects a certain braggadocio not typically found in online knowledge repositories (at one time, its founders liked to call it “Thug Wikipedia”). It’s also not Sanger’s first attempt at a do-over, having left Wikipedia citing philosophical differences early on; his decidedly more staid Citizendium effort is itself now more than 10 years old, but with only a handful of active editors, is all but a dead project.

The most interesting thing about Everipedia, though, is its pivot to using blockchain technology and announced development of a cyrptocurrency with which to pay contributors. I’m curious to be sure, but even more sure of my skepticism. No question, Wikipedia is built on a relatively ancient software framework, and there is a case to be made that blockchain’s public ledger could represent an advancement in recording all “transactions”. But this is what Harvard’s Clayton Christensen would call a “sustaining innovation”, not a “disruptive innovation”—there’s no reason Wikipedia couldn’t adopt a blockchain ledger should the idea prove meritorious, meanwhile there’s very little chance that Everipedia can replace the day-to-day deliberations of an editorial community more than 15 years old. Culture is impossible to replicate, and extremely difficult to develop. I can’t promise an assortment of brogrammers and Wikipedia’s kooky uncle won’t pull it off, but I have my doubts.

3. Hey, Big Spenders

Wikimedia_Foundation_financial_development_multilanguage.svgWikipedia’s fundraising prowess, ever-growing expenses, and nevertheless-expanding bank account are a matter of interest year in and year out. From about $56,000 in the bank at the end of the 2004 fiscal year to more than $90 million by 2016, Wikipedia’s financial situation is still growing in a way that’s entirely divorced from the number of volunteers actively participating. In February, a 12-year veteran editor published an alarming (or alarmist) op-ed at the then-functioning Signpost with the unfortunate headline “Wikipedia Has Cancer”.

The controversial connotation (which I realize I’ve also made in #10) was very much intended: Wikipedia’s financial position has far exceeded what is necessary for the running of this non-profit, volunteer-driven project. What happens if (and presumably when) revenues slow—will the Wikimedia Foundation adjust spending downward, or start taking on debt? Pointing to recent failures in WMF software development initiatives as a reason to worry about Wikipedia’s leadership, the op-ed called for a spending freeze and greater transparency in financial matters. With some fiscal discipline, and Wikipedia’s newly-established endowment, Wikipedia could live comfortably off its prior fundraising indefinitely. Although the rhetoric was probably excessive, it struck a nerve, attracting an overwhelming number of comments in a discussion that continued for months. Soon after, an article in Quartz called the resulting frenzy “nuts”, and published a chart comparing Wikipedia favorably to similar institutions, including the New York Public Library and even the British Museum.

2. Slow Wiki Movement

Given the lack of high-impact news events surrounding Wikipedia, here is a new one: nothing really happened this year. That’s probably good news, but it doesn’t make for an exciting story. And for an avowed non-story, it’s relatively high-positioned as well. But as I contemplated the mood around Wikipedia over the past twelve months, I found it rather fitting.

320px-Wikidatacon_ux_participatorydesignworkshop_11Two items that just missed the cut: the WMF’s 2015 lawsuit against the NSA, dismissed by one court, was reinstated by another, and this could well be a standalone entry next year. And Wikipedia’s open database, Wikidata, continued to develop and grow, but all of this happened behind the scenes, without any single inflection point (though attendees of the first-ever Wikidatacon are free to disagree with me).

Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s edit wars and paid editing scuffles continued, but few made actual news. Trolls, especially of the GamerGate variety, continued to be a nuisance, but (for now) are not an existential threat. Wikipedia’s gender imbalance barely registered a blip, Wikipedia’s editorship numbers again ticked upward, and Wikimania Montreal went off without a hitch. Other topics this year-end report card series has discussed before were also ho-hum: no major sock puppet networks detected, no major article-creation milestones (we’re just over halfway to 6 million), the detente between Wikipedia and education continues, and the Visual Editor continues to work even as most veterans ignore it. Yes, Turkey blocked Wikipedia, but following China and Russia having done so in previous years, it hardly made a dent.

This is what maturity looks like: Wikipedia is Wikipedia, and seems likely to continue doing what it does for a long time to come. So, does it feel like we’re celebrating?

1. WikiTribune’s Rocky Start

wikitribuneIn keeping with the somnolence of the previous item, this year’s top story isn’t even about Wikipedia: it’s about WikiTribune, the other new initiative from Wikipedia’s other co-founder, Jimmy Wales. Announced to great fanfare and no little skepticism in April, Wales’ long-dreamed wiki-based online news site finally launched at the end of October. Early reviews were not enthusiastic, and it has been little remarked-upon since. As of this writing, it has continued publishing a few stories a day, none with any apparent impact. WikiTribune offers little more than what other news operations are doing, and less of it.

In May, this blog offered advice about how it might stand out in a crowded online world: by focusing on developing news teams at the local level, and trial-run innovations that might be ported back Wikipedia. But WikiTribune seems determined to cover international news with no discernible viewpoint or special access, and has no connection to Wikipedia besides its name and famous founder. Why would anyone visit WikiTribune for news over any other publication? I have no idea. Alas, WikiTribune looks like just another much-heralded effort to reinvent news by doing the exact same thing that other news publications were already struggling to keep doing in seemingly impossible circumstances. Whether WikiTribune survives to see the end of 2018, or makes this list a year from now, I have no idea either.

Photo credits, in order: Avery Jensen; Alex Muller / Wikidea; David Slater; Restaurant Brands International; Public domain; Kjoonlee; Larry Sanger; Sameboat; Jan Dittrich; WikiTribune.

The Top Ten Wikipedia Stories of 2016

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on January 3, 2017 at 1:30 pm

2016 was a hell of a year. In matters of war and peace, politics and governance, arts and celebrity culture—not to mention unexpected crossovers among them—it was a year that seemed to come off the swivel. Was this true on Wikipedia as well? In this post The Wikipedian will attempt, as it has done each year since 2010, to summarize the year in the Wikimedia movement by itemizing and ranking ten of the biggest trends and events.

The list this time may be noteworthy less for what is included than what is not: in 2016 there was no major sock puppet or COI scandal (hopefully that’s because there weren’t any, not just that they weren’t called out), no major milestone (Wikipedia turned 15 in 2016, but it felt less consequential than the 5 millionth article last year), no mention of perennial fears about a declining editor base (is it still actually declining?) and nothing about last year’s number one, the implementation of HTTPS (it’s a done deal, and China hasn’t changed its mind about unblocking Wikipedia on the mainland).

That said, in 2016 Wikipedia still had more than its share of turmoil, more ominous signs than one ever really wants to see, plus the occasional inspiring story that makes for much more pleasant anecdotes. In this post, we’ll attempt to do justice to them all, or at least the ten that made the biggest impressions on this blogger. Ready? Let’s go:

♦     ♦     ♦

10. Women Scientists Revolt

emily_temple-woodAmong Wikipedia’s more problematic systemic biases, the gender gap in participation and representation is one of the more frustrating. This year it was momentarily a bright spot, when Emily Temple-Wood, one of Wikipedia’s best known female editors, became a minor media sensation for a project with an irresistible hook: for every instance of online sexual harassment she experienced, she would create another Wikipedia article about a woman scientist. The story was picked up by the BBC, Washington Post, Guardian, New York, and Huffington Post, among many other outlets. The sudden micro-celebrity placed her in the unique category of Wikipedia editors with a Wikipedia biography earned as a result of their editing activities. Jimmy Wales also named her Wikipedian of the Year (along with Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight). And then she started med school.

9. Wikipedia Vandalism, Spectator Sport

lebron_jamesIf you’re the kind of person who searches Google News for “wikipedia” with any frequency, you have undoubtedly seen headlines like “Denver Broncos ‘own’ Carolina Panthers, according to Wikipedia edit”. Seriously, search “wikipedia sports owned” and you’ll find the same combination for Chase Utley and the Mets, LeBron James and the Bulls, Jürgen Klopp and Manchester City. And that’s just one gratingly common construction. Yes, sometimes it can actually be funny. Occasionally, even heartwarming. But no sport is safe, and the phenomenon is familiar enough for Fox Sports (a frequent offender) to have once created a list of “most entertaining” examples. In early 2016, former WSJ reporter and Wikimedia staffer Jeff Elder called out the trend, spotlighting the tedious extra work it creates for Wikipedia volunteers. VentureBeat followed up by making the argument it was time for sportswriters to move on. And so that put an end to it? Yeah, right. It’s not clear what will ever kill this “story”; there is almost certainly nothing within anyone’s actual control. While individual writers or readers may tire of it, the thing about sports is that every big win is a moment without precedent, that obliterates all reason, and naturally seeks a good, mean-spirited to laugh top it off. All things considered, better to vandalize Wikipedia than light a car on fire.

8. The Business of Wikipedia is Fundraising

wmf-fundraisingWikipedia is alone among the top 50 global websites (give or take) for the lack of advertising to be found on its pages. As a consequence, its funding model is the focus of fascination and frustration for both the editorial community and news media alike. And as you’re certainly well aware, every year the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) launches a fundraising drive featuring very prominent and slightly annoying banners—which look a lot like advertisements for Wikipedia itself—to raise money from its millions of readers. To be sure, Wikipedia also raises money via grants and gifts from wealthy donors, but the vast majority comes from the annual campaign.

Beginning in mid-November, the WMF stepped up its annual efforts with a persistent email campaign fronted by Wikipedia’s founder-mascot Jimmy Wales, using sophisticated techniques—variation, highlighting, boldfacing, talky subject lines, and more. WMF fundraising has been A/B tested for awhile, but this was undoubtedly the slickest incarnation yet. And what do you know, it worked: this year Wikipedia reached its annual goal faster than ever before. Such success cannot come sans scrutiny. An op-ed in The Wikipedia Signpost called for greater transparency, The Register needled Wikipedia about this as it does about pretty much everything, and philanthropic publications have second-guessed the WMF’s fundraising strategy writ large.[1]Update: This link previously went to an article on a different subject; this one is from late 2015 but illustrates the same point.

All of which is fair, and one should be so lucky as to have to answer for this kind of success. As The Wikipedian sees it, the question of how much money WMF raises should be secondary to how it is spent, a topic historically less-well reported.

7. ArbCom and the Alt-Right

feels_good_manWikipedia’s Arbitration Committees (ArbComs) are elected panels of dedicated volunteer Wikipedia editors who agree to take up the often unpleasant and always time-consuming task of reviewing disputes involving the behavior of fellow editors. About a dozen of the most-active Wikipedia language editions have one, and it is by its nature the locus of controversy, year in and year out (said fundamental dysfunction last made this list in 2013). Lucky us, now we get to merge that with the rise of an international right-wing movement represented on last year’s list by Gamergate, and which in 2016 we learned to call the “alt-right”.

This is based on two separate incidents on the two most prominent Wikipedias. Worse between them, the German ArbCom saw eight of its ten members resign in the last third of the year. The reasons are too complicated to recite here, but it concerns a single member who IRL is actively involved with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party but had previously hidden his offline political activities from fellow editors. The decimated German ArbCom now lacks a quorum to act, and seems likely to remain inactive at least until new elections are held in May. Second was the near-election to the English ArbCom of a Canadian editor with a troubling Reddit history that included activity on the Gamergate-affiliated WikiInAction subreddit, dedicated to promoting alt-right views on Wikipedia. This candidacy was not successful, but it was a nail-biter, and close ArbCom observers are not reassured about future elections.

Wikipedia has always had obnoxious contributors with noxious views, but their dispersal across the vast expanse of topics meant the problem areas were fairly isolated, and usually avoidable. But ArbCom is one of the few places on Wikipedia where actual power is concentrated. In a U.S. presidential election year (about which more later) in which anti-semitic tropes were promoted by the winning candidate, has there also been a concurrent rise in such views on Wikipedia? Some think so. And will ArbCom face an organized assault like the one the Hugo Awards has faced in recent years? It seems unlikely—but it’s definitely not impossible.

6. Wikipedia Needs Better Critics

Wikipediocracy_logoOur 2013 installment listed the rise of Wikipediocracy, a website devoted to criticism of the Wikimedia movement. This time we’re here not to praise it, but to bury it. The site’s multi-contributor blog has published exactly once in the second half of the year, while its once-lively (and sometimes disreputable) discussion forum has slowed to a crawl. What happened? The biggest factor was the departure of its most serious contributor, Andreas Kolbe, who took his talents to The Signpost. Second was an apparent falling out between mainstays Greg Kohs and Eric Barbour. The latter went on to create an alternative site named, hysterically, Wikipedia Sucks! (And So Do Its Critics.).

The decline of Wikipediocracy highlights the dearth of effective Wikipedia criticism. What have we got? There’s the UK IT news site The Register, which harps on a few recurring themes of narrow appeal. There’s WikiInAction, affiliated with Gamergate, focused even more narrowly. Wikipedia Sucks is a joke, itself barely registering a pulse. For what it’s worth, The Wikipedian does not consider itself to be among their ranks. This site offers Wikipedia criticism, but will admit to being pro-Wikipedia in most ways; The Wikipedian is an apologist, if also a realist. And to drop the pretense for a moment, I don’t post often enough for it to matter but a few times a year.

There is something about Wikipedia criticism that attracts people with fringe views, who are not always the most stable personalities, and whose obsessions tend toward the arcane. Of course this is generally true of the gadfly profession, but when you consider that Wikipedia owes its very existence to freaks and geeks, it shouldn’t be any wonder that participants who hold themselves apart from mainstream Wikipedia may be stranger still.

As of late, the best criticism happens at The Signpost, especially under former editor Kolbe, and now under Pete Forsyth. Given the competition, however, that isn’t necessarily saying much.

5. The Brief, Less Than Wondrous Board Membership of Arnnon Geshuri

Arnnon_GeshuriWe now arrive at the first of a few related topics which dominated the early months of the year, a series of interrelated controversies far greater than this annual list has previously contemplated. The least-related among them was the early January appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the WMF board of trustees. Geshuri received no public vetting, as most appointed board members do not. However, other board appointees also had not played a public role in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest recent scandals.

To wit: Apple, Google, Intel and others secretly agreed (until, of course, it was found out) not to recruit each others’ employees, thereby holding back the careers, and holding down the salaries, of thousands of employees. As a Google executive, Geshuri had taken the initiative to fire a recruiter after then-CEO Eric Schmidt received an unhappy email from Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs. In his note back to Schmidt, Geshuri added: “Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs.” The U.S. Department of Justice eventually forced the firms to pay $415 million to settle class action claims.

Geshuri’s membership on the Wikimedia board proved to be short-lived. Facing public criticism by former board members, a debate over what to say about it on his own Wikipedia entry, a no-confidence petition signed by more than 200 editors, and probably his own realization that this just wasn’t worth all the trouble, Geshuri stepped aside only two weeks after accepting the position. In another year, this could have been a top story. But 2016 had only just begun.

4. Wikimedia’s New Leader

katherine_maherAnother contender for top story in a less eventful year: the Wikimedia Foundation got a new leader. Katherine Maher was named interim executive director (ED for short) in March, and was made permanent in June. She is the third person to hold the title—the third woman, in fact—and brings experience in global governance, international institutions, and even the Arabic language.[2]Yes, I’m looking at her Wikipedia entry as I write this. Maher also brings something her predecessor lacked: a great deal of experience with Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement.

I am burying the lede, of course: she was previously the WMF’s chief communications officer, a position she had held since 2014. Oh yeah, and about that predecessor… as Wikimedians have already realized, I’m leaving out a lot of back story, and it’s because there is more coming further down this list. All that said, the advent of a new ED is big news in any year, and that’s true this year as well. The fact that Maher’s ascendancy falls outside the top three stories of 2016 owes as much to the public drama leading to her promotion as the absence of drama characterizing the start of her tenure.

3. Fake News and the U.S. Presidential Election

donald_trumpThe U.S. presidential election was literally the biggest story on Wikipedia this year, if we mean the topic that received the most edits across multiple entries. The biographical entry for president-elect Donald Trump, plus articles about Hillary Clinton’s endorsements, the general election, and GOP primary occupy four of the top five slots on the list of most-edited articles.[3]Number one was Deaths in 2016, but that’s pretty much always the case. But there’s a lot more to be said about Wikipedia’s relationship to the craziest and most surprising U.S. election in living memory.

A chief attribute of Trumpism is, well, bullshit—in the Harry Frankfurt sense of the word—and anti-intellectualism as a virtue. As it became clear Trump’s victory was owed in part to falsehoods propagated on social media, the phrase “fake news” gained widespread currency among news commentators. With the mainstream[4]OK, fine, liberal media casting about for a better model, what better exemplar of valuing real facts over imagined realities than Wikipedia? Even before the election, Wikipedia’s model of requiring verification of information and allowing anyone to question received wisdom had garnered positive press attention. Afterward, Wikipedia’s commitment to veracity was held up as a kind of antidote to Facebook’s hands-off attitude toward the truth or falsity of claims shared by its users.[5]Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was initially dismissive of “fake news” concerns, only to do an abrupt about-face and announce plans for a fact-checking feature. The Wikimedia comms team took something of a victory lap in an early December post, declaring:

We are not in a post-fact world. Facts matter, and we are committed to this now more than ever.

Still, it would be a mistake to think that Wikipedia is free of falsehoods. It is only as good as its contributors and the reliability of the news sources they rely upon. Long-persisting hoaxes are not unheard of. Therein lie the biggest threats to Wikipedia: it must maintain an editorial community to uphold its own standards, and the media must keep up its end of the bargain with good reporting. Not unlike democracy, eternal vigilance is the price of an encyclopedia anyone can edit.

2. Lila Tretikov Resigns as Wikimedia ED

Right, so about Katherine Maher’s predecessor as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation…

Lila_TretikovLast year, The Wikipedian included “Exodus from New Montgomery Street” at number nine in the top-stories list—i.e., the large number of staff departures from the organization since the appointment of Lila Tretikov in 2014. In retrospect, this should have been higher, but in my defense the whispers were rather quiet until the emergence of a matter that we’ll explain better in the next entry.[6]Yes, this year was largely dominated by one very big story at the beginning of the year which had enough distinct elements to be treated separately, making for a confusing narrative. Alas. Tretikov, whose tenure got off to a rocky start for reasons not entirely her own fault and not worth going into again here,[7]if you must, you can go here was eventually forced to resign after losing the confidence of Foundation staff. Morale fell to such depths, and management became so unresponsive that, once the dam burst, virtually the whole thing played out in public, online.

Low-level staffers came out of the woodwork to say what managers would or could not, and community observers filled in the gaps. Most persuasively, ArbCom member Molly White created a detailed timeline of Tretikov’s WMF leadership that presented the sequence of events without commentary—selectively perhaps, but damningly for sure. This very blog took the highly unusual step of actually calling for her ouster, a position this blogger never imagined when launching this site late last decade. Nobody wanted things to arrive at this dire situation, but once they had, Tretikov could no longer effectively lead the organization, and resign is what she did.

Anyway, we’re not quite done with this topic.

1. The Knowledge Engine and its Discontents

Dr._James_HeilmanThe biggest story of 2016 actually began unfolding in the waning days of 2015, when just-elected community board trustee James Heilman announced his resignation with a cryptic message on a community email list. Subsequent comments from other board members failed to resolve the ambiguity. Thus began the most tumultuous period in recent Wikimedia history, ultimately leading to Lila Tretikov’s jumped-before-she-could-be-pushed departure and the elevation of Katherine Maher to the executive director role.

Honestly, I’m kind of dreading the idea of recapping it all here. This blog expended 7,000 words[8]a conservative estimate on the topic earlier this year, and it’s a chore just to summarize. But let’s give it a try:

Heilman’s departure owed to a disagreement about how to handle sensitive information related to the secretive development (and eventual abandonment) of a misbegotten “Manhattan Project” to create a search engine intended to preserve Wikipedia’s prominence if Google ever stopped sending it traffic on its historically massive level. In its most ambitious form, it was called the Knowledge Engine, and Tretikov’s WMF sought a grant for it from the Knight Foundation, with which it previously had enjoyed a good relationship, without disclosing the precise nature of the project. When scaled back, it was called Discovery and was limited to Wikipedia’s on-site search, which isn’t a bad idea by itself but wasn’t clearly a top priority for the volunteer community at large, let alone the foundation staff. The lack of public discussion was echoed in the catastrophic appointment of Geshuri to the board, establishing a pattern that could no longer be overlooked.

knowledge-engine-rocketThe seriousness of the Knowledge Engine fiasco itself may have been overstated in terms of time and money allocated to it (and away from other projects) but it became emblematic of Tretikov’s ineffective leadership. More important probably was the botched Knight request, which contradicted good sense, and was seen to have damaged an important outside relationship. It wasn’t a crime, but it was covered up nonetheless, and Tretikov’s failure to communicate effectively—with external stakeholders, internal managers, staff throughout the organization—was what really did her in.

If you really must have the whole story, and you have a few hours to spare, I recommend the following links:

The regrettable history of the Knowledge Engine, the wasteful exit of Heilman from the board of trustees, the ill-advised appointment of Geshuri to same, the calamitous leadership of Lila Tretikov, the unfortunate departure of so many valuable foundation staffers, were separately and collectively the biggest story on Wikipedia this past year. Here’s hoping 2017 is just a bit less eventful.

All images via Wikipedia, and the copyrights held by their respective contributors.

Notes

Notes
1 Update: This link previously went to an article on a different subject; this one is from late 2015 but illustrates the same point.
2 Yes, I’m looking at her Wikipedia entry as I write this.
3 Number one was Deaths in 2016, but that’s pretty much always the case.
4 OK, fine, liberal
5 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was initially dismissive of “fake news” concerns, only to do an abrupt about-face and announce plans for a fact-checking feature.
6 Yes, this year was largely dominated by one very big story at the beginning of the year which had enough distinct elements to be treated separately, making for a confusing narrative. Alas.
7 if you must, you can go here
8 a conservative estimate

A Modest Proposal for Wikimedia’s Future

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on March 11, 2016 at 3:30 pm

On February 25, Lila Tretikov, the embattled executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), finally tendered her resignation. Though an interim successor would not be named until March 10,[1]it is Katherine Maher, previously WMF’s head of communications the Wikimedia movement breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Tretikov’s twenty-two month tenure produced the greatest organizational crisis in Wikimedia’s history.[2]For background, see: an exhaustive timeline by Molly White (User:Gorilla Warfare) with, as she writes, “immense help from many other people”; The Wikipedia Signpost‘s examination of the key issues, “The WMF’s age of discontent” (January 6); and two posts on this blog, “The Crisis at New Montgomery Street” (January 11) and “Search and Destroy: The Knowledge Engine and the Undoing of Lila Tretikov” (February 19). The full story is still the subject of intense disagreement, which later I will argue should be the focus of an official outside audit. Her leadership will be remembered for poor communication, worse management, rapid and unannounced changes in strategy, and a lack of transparency that produced an atmosphere of mistrust and anxiety, one which finally overwhelmed and brought the Tretikov era to an acrimonious end.

Most of all, Lila Tretikov will be remembered for the precipitous decline in staff morale that sent more than two dozen key employees and executives for the exits. The loss of talent, relationships, and institutional memory is devastating, and it is not something the Wikimedia Foundation will recover from soon.

I suggest maybe the WMF should not recover and rebuild itself, at least not exactly like it was. Acknowledging this modest proposal stands to be controversial,[3]possibly just ignored I believe in this tragedy lies an opportunity for the Wikimedia Foundation to reconstitute itself in a way better suited for the challenges facing it at this point in its history.

This would be a WMF that recognizes its primary mission is educational, one that is willing to reconsider what responsibilities it keeps for itself vs. what works better distributed among its affiliates. I argue in this post that it should split its executive leadership into two roles and spin off certain core functions into standalone organizations. Doing so would allow for better transparency, create more opportunities for “WMF-Community” cooperation, and perhaps offer a chance for volunteers to seek a career path within the movement.

The Wikimedia Foundation does not need to do big things. It needs to create an environment for big things to happen.

♦     ♦     ♦

If the WMF is going to reconsider its organizational structure, this is certainly the time to do it. The forest fire of Tretikov’s tenure creates a unique and unexpected opportunity to plant anew. Other questions are already being explored: what will Wikimedia’s next five-year-plan say?[4]The current draft is available for review, and is mostly interesting for its differences from the last version: gone are mentions of “innovation” and “infrastructure”—two things the ill-fated Knowledge Engine could plausibly be accused of representing—while notions of growing the user base and improving quality have been downplayed. Should Jimmy Wales continue to hold his semi-permanent seat on the Board? Are the processes for selecting and vetting the three groups of Board trustees still adequate, the underlying assumptions still operative? How can the Board be induced to act transparently? The Wikimedia Conference coming up in April should be interesting, if not explosive.

All of these are very difficult and important questions, and yet I strongly suggest opening another conversation about the size and scope of WMF responsibilities going forward.[5]I also think five years is too narrow a scope to best plan for the Wikimedia movement’s future, although the current draft says nothing about time frames. Why should the WMF consider radically re-envisioning its organizational structure? Because the WMF as it exists was created to solve a different problem than the one we have now.

When the WMF was launched in 2003, two years after Wikipedia’s creation, “Wikimedia” was a retconned neologism coined to describe a wide-ranging movement not yet fully baked. The WMF was needed to create a backbone for these efforts and give its global volunteer base a strong sense of direction. Under Sue Gardner, the WMF was successful in fulfilling this role.

The present WMF has become, in the pithiest description possible, a fundraising organization in support of a nonprofit web development company and a small-grant issuing organization. To a lesser degree, it has also funded community outreach and the development of membership chapters around the world.

Wikipedia, in its many languages and numerous sister projects—the larger Wikimedia movement with which this post is really concerned—has succeeded in becoming the world’s free resource for knowledge, however imperfect it can be. Maintaining this is a different kind of challenge, and it is inherently a defensive one. Indeed, there is much to defend, and the threats are not imagined.

The first challenge is the changing Internet: Wikipedia’s software and culture came from an Internet dominated by desktop computers accessing the World Wide Web. Today, Internet activity has moved to mobile devices, increasingly inside of apps, which are of course closed platforms. Though WMF’s mobile efforts have come a long way, they are fighting upstream against several currents no one imagined in 2001. The idea of collaboration is as strong as ever, but its tools become weaker all the time.

The second challenge is WMF culture. The Tretikov disaster reveals weaknesses in two of the WMF’s most important functions: the raising of money[6]Knight Foundation and the allocating of money.[7]Knowledge Engine In addition, as described in varying degrees of detail by former staffers, under Tretikov the Foundation had become a toxic workplace environment—but the truth is it had structural issues even before that. Finally, the edifice of a nearly 300-person staff created a kind of intrigue—“Montgomerology”[8]hat tip: Liam Wyatt—that plays out daily on Wikimedia-l,[9]for the uninitiated: a semi-public mailing list populated by Wikimedians; lately the semi-private Wikipedia Weekly Facebook group has formed another locus of discussion and which this blog is frankly obsessed with. Which, I acknowledge, isn’t exactly healthy.

The third challenge, not unrelated, is Wikimedia culture. The English Wikipedia’s volunteer community, the movement’s largest and most influential bloc, is deeply set in its ways. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s extraordinarily high profile contributes to a reluctance to tinker with, let alone radically rethink, how it conducts its business. And several bold initiatives developed within the WMF—including good ideas like the Visual Editor, debatable ideas like the Media Viewer, and bad ideas like the Knowledge Engine—have been received poorly by the community.

In all three cases, solving these problems are more than any one executive can handle alone.

♦     ♦     ♦

So what should happen? First, an apology from the Board of Trustees is definitely in order. Tretikov’s failure is entirely on them as Wikimedia’s ultimate corporate authority. Second, an audit / accounting of the failures of recent years. Wikimedia UK was required to do one following the Gibraltarpedia controversy; what’s good for the chapter is even better for the foundation.

Third, the Board of Trustees should split the role of executive director into two positions: a president and provost, like universities do.[10]Being an educational project, WMF should look to similar institutions for guidance. One becomes the “head of state”, handling the public and fundraising efforts, while the other handles administration and operations. Wikipedia’s high profile means that representing its value and values to the outside world is a full-time job. Regardless of whether Jimmy Wales remains a trustee, Wikipedia needs a new mascot, and it should identify a charismatic leader for this role, who may or may not come from the Wikimedia community. The provost position would be focused on grantmaking, community outreach, and long-term strategy. They must be a good manager and internal communicator, but need not be a big personality. And this person absolutely must come from the Wikimedia movement.

Fourth, and the really hard part, would be the voluntary dispossession of core Wikimedia movement functions from the central organization. The WMF should keep only what is mission critical—fundraising and grantmaking[11]legal and communications, too, of course—and spin off the rest.[12]It has done this once before: that’s the origin story of the Wiki Education Foundation. WMF grants should fund these newly independent foundations, encouraging a reinvigorated support for community-driven organizations.

What is the basis for considering smaller organization sizes? From a theoretical perspective, there’s Dunbar’s number. The larger an organization becomes, the harder it is for everyone to know everyone else and understand what they’re doing. In the business world, this has been seen in the arrested development of agglomeration, once large corporations realized they had become slow and bureaucracy-laden.[13]Anyone else remember The Onion‘s “Just Six Corporations Remain”? Critics of corporate consolidation were caught as flat-footed as the conglomerates they disdained when spin-offs became ever more popular. This is also an operating principle at Amazon, where they call it the “two-pizza rule”.[14]“Never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.”

From a practical perspective, the WMF’s behemoth status suits neither its day-to-day operations nor its perceptions by the wider community. As detailed by recently departed veteran staffer Oliver Keyes in The Wikipedia Signpost last month, systemic problems with hiring, promotions, and HR in general were an issue at the WMF well before Tretikov’s arrival. Meanwhile, the WMF itself seems unapproachable, simply too much for anyone to wrap their heads around. Indeed the WMF itself is a conglomerate, of a kind. Creating more community space around its current departments would make each more accessible, generating more “WMF-Community” interactions. This would help greatly with transparency, and make it far easier to start new initiatives.

It all sounds pretty radical—and I’m not saying it isn’t!—but there are good reasons to think a new organizational structure could work. The argument against ultimately relies on an appeal to familiarity, bolstered by inertia.

♦     ♦     ♦

With the caveat that I have never worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, nor in non-profit governance even for a minute, I won’t let that stop me from taking a crack at some specifics. What I write below is merely one way to go about it, and I encourage others—especially those with real WMF experience—to offer their view in the comments. Let’s go:

Among the WMF’s first major grants should be to the new Wikimedia Technology Foundation, containing the current Technology and Product teams. There is no critical reason why it needs to live in the same house as fundraising, and it would benefit from a strong leader with community ties—which it has not had for a long time. After all, even as we’re now sure Discovery is working not on a Google-killer but merely improved site search, it still ranks very low compared to other community-enumerated goals. Doing so would make its efforts more useful to everyday editors, and give it the latitude to develop for the next generation of Wikipedia editors. An early initiative of this spinoff should be to think about how to position Wikipedia for the mobile web and even to consider partnerships with today’s media orgs—not so much the New York Times and CNN, but Facebook and Snapchat.

More complex would be the evolution of Community Engagement, encompassing grantmaking and outreach. WMF grantmaking has nearly always been hampered by thinking too small and funding projects too dispersed and under-staffed to be effective. Through its chapters, user groups, and various grantmaking committees it funds projects for not quite enough money which are basically nights-and-weekends projects, from which very few can draw compensation, thereby limiting their ambitions and achievements.

So while the core function of grantmaking should stay with the provost at the slimmed down WMF, the bulk of its activity should happen outside its walls. And the way this would happen is by the creation of a more ambitious grantmaking operation whose mission is to nurture and develop mini-foundations modeled on GLAM-Wiki US, the Wiki Education Foundation, and WikiProject Med Foundation. Rather than there being one new foundation for community outreach, this needs to be a core capability of every mini-foundation that receives WMF funding.

Among the key projects necessary to a healthy and functioning Wikimedia movement that could benefit from a devolved organization and dedicated funding: The Wikipedia Signpost, which is heroically staffed entirely by volunteers; the Wikimania conference, the locus of numerous organizational failures in recent years; Wikimedia chapter management: the model of volunteer support currently practiced focuses too much on geographic concerns at the expense of thematic topics, with considerable overlap.

Another might be content development: if you look at Wikipedia’s complete list of featured articles, it is arguable the only article categories supported by existing foundations are “art and architecture”, “education” and “health and medicine”, served, respectively, by the three model organizations listed above. Adapting from the list, this leaves dozens of top-level categories unserved by a formal organization, and decreasingly supported as the informal “wikiproject” has withered in recent years.[15]Very few wikiprojects continue to thrive, and the ones that do—Military history and Video games—inadvertently perpetuate Wikipedia’s problems with systemic bias. By creating formal structures with specific outreach to associations and universities along these lines, Wikipedia can create more opportunities for outreach and collaboration.

What’s more, it would create opportunities for Wikimedians, particularly its younger cohort, to choose a career within the movement. Presently, there are too few jobs at libraries and museums to make use of all this talent. While conflict of interest (COI) issues will be justifiably considered, these fears are generally overblown. Nowhere in Wikipedia’s policies or guidelines—and certainly not in the Five Pillars—does it say that Wikipedia must be volunteer-only, and creating staff positions will actually reduce the likelihood editors will “sell out”. Wikimedia has long passed a point of diminishing returns on the volunteer-only model. And you know what? It isn’t entirely that now. We already live in a “mixed economy”, and we owe it to our community members to expand their opportunities. There’s no reason software programmers should be the only ones to earn a living working on Wikimedia projects.

♦     ♦     ♦

Can I summarize all this in a paragraph? I think so: a small constellation of well-funded Wikimedia Foundation spinoffs, each with a strong sense of mission, focused narrowly on the movement’s needs stands a better chance of working more efficiently among themselves and offers many more touch points for the community itself to be involved. Through that, transparency can be improved, both at the WMF parent org and within a reinvigorated movement organized around professionally staffed, standalone foundations doing what each does best. In the gaps between them and the WMF, new opportunities for community involvement would arise for the benefit of all.

Wikimedia is vast, with an incredible diversity of talents and resources. It contains multitudes, and its organizational structure should reflect that.

Notes

Notes
1 it is Katherine Maher, previously WMF’s head of communications
2 For background, see: an exhaustive timeline by Molly White (User:Gorilla Warfare) with, as she writes, “immense help from many other people”; The Wikipedia Signpost‘s examination of the key issues, “The WMF’s age of discontent” (January 6); and two posts on this blog, “The Crisis at New Montgomery Street” (January 11) and “Search and Destroy: The Knowledge Engine and the Undoing of Lila Tretikov” (February 19). The full story is still the subject of intense disagreement, which later I will argue should be the focus of an official outside audit.
3 possibly just ignored
4 The current draft is available for review, and is mostly interesting for its differences from the last version: gone are mentions of “innovation” and “infrastructure”—two things the ill-fated Knowledge Engine could plausibly be accused of representing—while notions of growing the user base and improving quality have been downplayed.
5 I also think five years is too narrow a scope to best plan for the Wikimedia movement’s future, although the current draft says nothing about time frames.
6 Knight Foundation
7 Knowledge Engine
8 hat tip: Liam Wyatt
9 for the uninitiated: a semi-public mailing list populated by Wikimedians; lately the semi-private Wikipedia Weekly Facebook group has formed another locus of discussion
10 Being an educational project, WMF should look to similar institutions for guidance.
11 legal and communications, too, of course
12 It has done this once before: that’s the origin story of the Wiki Education Foundation.
13 Anyone else remember The Onion‘s “Just Six Corporations Remain”?
14 “Never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.”
15 Very few wikiprojects continue to thrive, and the ones that do—Military history and Video games—inadvertently perpetuate Wikipedia’s problems with systemic bias.

The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2013 (Part 1)

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on December 31, 2013 at 4:20 pm

In late December for each of the past few years—2010, 2011, 2012A, 2012BThe Wikipedian has published a list of the most important, impactful, and memorable events concerning Wikipedia in the 12 months preceding, according to no one besides me.

Let’s make it four in a row, although like last year I failed to rein the list in, so I’ve again split it into two parts. The first is the post you are reading now; the second will go up on Thursday.

Compared to recent years, 2013 was arguably more eventful, which also sort of implies that that it was a more troubled year. Indeed, I think Wikipedia’s near term future is certain to include its greatest uncertainty yet. The list will show why.

For returning readers: Two stories which repeated in previous years are absent this time: Wikipedia’s role in education (where the situation seemed to get better) and Wikipedia’s gender imbalance (where it didn’t). In both cases, the exclusion simply reflects a lack of any singular newsworthy related event, especially compared with what did make the list. Other issues, relating to conflict of interest and community infighting, are more than represented in specific incidents, which you shall read (much) more about shortly.

Another important acknowledgment: Following the far-flung domains and disciplines Wikipedia contains, I’ve endeavored to research and provide useful information and links, but if I get anything wrong, just drop me a line; I’ll correct and annotate post haste.

♦     ♦     ♦

10. Losing Aaron Swartz

Aaron_Swartz-by-RagesossWe start with the year’s saddest event: Aaron Swartz, a widely-admired, long-contributing Wikipedian and a key member of many other important Internet communities from the early 2000s onward, took his own life at the age of 26 in January. I can’t do any better than his own Wikipedia article to give you an idea of how much he accomplished in his short time, but the big media profiles all mentioned his hand in developing RSS, Creative Commons, and even Reddit. Few will approach that over a significantly longer lifespan.

His prodigious intellect could put one in mind of David Foster Wallace with different interests and avocations. It may come as no surprise that Swartz was a DFW fan, and I actually consider Swartz’s early classic of Wikipedia commentary (written while running for the Wikimedia Board in 2006) to be arguably less important overall than his extraordinarily persuasive explanation of what happens at the end of Infinite Jest. Often, it can take a genius to understand one.

Meanwhile, Swartz’s strong belief in the free availability of information led him to a legally risky brand of non-violent direct action: downloading and releasing electronic archives for public consumption. At the time of his death, Swartz was facing prosecution, and potentially many years in prison, for “liberating” academic papers from the JSTOR archive via an MIT closet. Some close to Swartz even blamed his suicide on overzealous persecution. However, like his literary hero—who hanged himself in 2008—Swartz had earlier written of suffering from depression. The case itself was dropped, too late in any case.

What led Aaron Swartz to take his own life will always remain unknowable, but his legacy is secure.

♦     ♦     ♦

9. Wiki Trek Into Darkness

If, sometime in the last decade, you have visited a website called Wikitravel, you might’ve imagined it to be another Wikipedia sister project. After all, it has a similar name, it uses the same software, and anyone is invited to edit. This would be a fair assumption. It would also be wrong. Wikitravel is actually a commercial site with absolutely no connection to the Wikimedia Foundation; the most obvious tell is that it runs ads, which Wikimedia projects emphatically do not.

Some back story is in order: in 2006 Wikitravel was acquired by Internet Brands, a California-based web development company (think Barry Diller’s IAC, minus the websites you’ve heard of). Some community members were unhappy about it, and created a “fork” of the project under the name Wikivoyage. In 2012, the English-language Wikitravel community also said “enough” and decided to reconnect with Wikivoyage, which meanwhile decided to join forces with the WMF and make Wikivoyage the very thing you probably thought Wikitravel was all along. This is how, in January 2013, Wikivoyage was relaunched as the 12th official Wikimedia project.

The break was not a clean one. Internet Brands was already suing two Wikitravel contributors who supported the fork, a case the WMF settled in February 2013. Only then it turned out the new logo (which was pretty cool if you ask me) was too similar to the World Trade Organization’s logo (which was not nearly as cool if you ask me) and it was duly changed.

And yet, if Alexa is to be believed, Wikitravel remains the more popular website by far; Wikivoyage briefly enjoyed an impressive traffic spike upon relaunch, but it didn’t last. (Here is one rare occasion where a Wikimedia website has less SEO mojo than a rival site.) While Wikivoyage hasn’t become one of the community’s more successful projects, it still faces some of the same problems as its more popular siblings (see #7).

♦     ♦     ♦

8. Wikipediocracy rising

Wikipediocracy_logoWikipediocracy is a website dedicated to Wikipedia criticism, launched in early 2012 by a collection of current and former Wikipedia editors, some exiled and some in good standing. It’s not the first website of its kind; Wikipedia has attracted critics for years, and for most of that time an independent forum called Wikipedia Review played host to the cranks’ most fervent complaints. Wikipedia Review was all but persona non grata on Wikipedia, where it was considered the prototypical “WP:BADSITE”.

Yet Wikipediocracy has proved to be much more relevant. One reason may be structural: whereas its predecessor was merely a message board, Wikipediocracy puts its blog front and center, spotlighting its best arguments while making it easier for outsiders to follow. The net effect is a more insightful—if not always less hostile—critics’ forum, and perhaps this has led more who genuinely like Wikipedia to participate. Whether most Wikipediocracy members think they can make Wikipedia better is questionable, but it seems quite likely that Wikipedia has made Wikipediocracy better.

In just the past calendar year, Wikipediocracy’s distributed network of well-placed, often anonymous, usually pseudonymous observers have played an influential role moving several conflicts into mainstream view. Exposés from Salon about a fiction writer tormenting rivals with malicious edits (the Qworty case) and from Daily Dot about a clever hoax article (the Bicholim Conflict)—to say nothing of some controversies discussed elsewhere in this list—had their roots on Wikipediocracy.

♦     ♦     ♦

7. The tragicomedy of Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons is the archive where anyone can upload media files, the more-than-text counterpart to Wikipedia, and is the home to some 20 million images, moving pictures and sounds. As variously detailed by BuzzFeed and Daily Dot, the WikiCommons community’s tolerance of exhibitionists and avant-garde artists has tested Wikimedia’s dedication to freedom of expression. In 2010, this very list included estranged Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s call to the FBI about the site’s “lolicon” collection.

This year, an Australian editor who had tangled with Wikipedia’s remaining co-founder Jimmy Wales worked out a deal with an Australian artist calling himself “Pricasso” to paint a portrait of none other than Jimmy Wales using only his… yep, you guessed it. This was uploaded to Commons, along with: a video depicting Pricasso’s full frontal artistic process.

Wales called foul and begged for the deletion of both; after an exhaustive but not atypical debate in two parts, the video was eventually removed. The completely SFW—albeit still WTF—painting survived, and can still be found on Commons. In November, the Wikimedia board updated its strict guidance for biographies of living persons to include “media” and “images”. This was probably not a coincidence.

♦     ♦     ♦

6. Where the money is

Wikimedia_motivational_posterIn 2013 I’m still kind of surprised to meet people who don’t know that “anyone can edit” Wikipedia or that it’s operated by a non-profit called the Wikimedia Foundation. But I’m not at all surprised when I meet people who have no idea how much money the Foundation actually has. It’s a lot! According to its latest KPMG-audited financial report, the WMF will earn almost $51 million for the current period, spend $38.5 million, and have $37.8 million left over. Nearly all of the money comes from Wikipedia’s annual fundraising drive, probably the most effective in Internet history.

That’s incredible—everyone who is afraid Wikipedia will one day deploy banner ads, please take note—but it’s also a huge target for critics of the non-profit organization (you know, like those at Wikipediocracy). This year the Foundation has changed how it allocates those funds, allowing community members to join the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) for the first time, while discontinuing its centrally-chosen fellowship program in favor of an even more open process called Independent Engagement Grants (IEG).

Criticism also came from less expected quarters: outgoing Wikimedia executive director Sue Gardner, who in October made waves for warning that the current FDC process “does not as currently constructed offer sufficient protection against log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices.” Specifically, most FDC money goes to “chapters” representing countries or cities around the world, and FDC is heavily influenced by said chapters. Gardner did not call anyone out by name or group, and no one has leveled any kind of serious charges, but one can certainly entertain the possibility that her comment will have more than a slight ring of Ike’s “military-industrial complex” speech to it in years to come.

♦     ♦     ♦

The second half of this list followed on Thursday, January 2, 2014.

Photo credits: Aaron Swartz via User:Ragesoss; Wikipediocracy logo via Wikipediocracy; motivational poster via User:Hannibal.

What’s With All Those Banners

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on November 20, 2010 at 5:36 pm

If you’ve visited Wikipedia during the second week of November 2010 (and I’ll wager you have) you’ve no doubt seen the bearded mug of one Jimmy Wales staring back at you from one of several banners placed across the top of the article you wanted to read.

Not everyone is happy to see them:

Do you feel violated but can’t quite figure out why? Perhaps it’s the gargantuan banner atop all Wikipedia articles these past few days that feature the mug of none other than Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales pleading for some money.

Yes, they are a little annoying and, if you really hate them, there is the little [X] box in the corner you can click to make them go away. But in this fourth year of fundraising by the Wikimedia Foundation (which oversees Wikipedia and its sister projects) this kind of reaction is nothing new. Even in 2008, Gawker covered that year’s campaign with a characteristically unfriendly tone. This year, some of the complaints are more amusing. Here are two of the family-friendlier screen shots of actual Wikipedia articles going around Facebook and other parts of the Internets:

wiki-fundraiser-scopophobia-600

wiki-fundraiser-begging-600

On the other hand, if you absolutely love seeing Jimmy Wales at the top of every Wikipedia page, well, now you can see him on every page on the entire Internet.

While the fundraiser formally launched on November 15, the banners started running on some pages since the 12th, and even before that, for reasons of testing. You might find being stared at by Jimmy Wales a little disconcerting, but there’s a reason Wikipedia is using them—they tested better than the other options.

Billed as “the fundraiser you can edit”, for this year’s campaign the Wikipedia community was invited to come up with banner ideas, and these were tested alongside the “Jimmy” banner. Volunteers were challenged to “Beat Jimmy” and produce a banner that would have a higher clickthrough rate. Almost 900 people got involved in the process.

In the banner message testing itself, four contenders rolled out onto Wikipedia for limited testing:

  • The Jimmy banner which had 1537 individual donations
  • Thanks for the brain massage which received just 19 donations
  • You depend on Wikipedia for information. Now it depends on you which received 99 donations
  • Admit it: without Wikipedia you never could have finished that report which had 140 donations

As you can see, it wasn’t much of a contest. That negative reaction some people have when they see Jimmy Wales? Well, at least it’s a reaction. For better or worse, Jimmy Wales is the unofficial mascot of Wikipedia, and that means he’s its biggest fundraising mascot.

For further details on how the banner featuring Wales stacked up against other tested options, check out the Banner testing project page. For a visual representation, see this David “Information is Beautiful” McCandless infographic (which seems to be better than his last one (update: per the comments, apparently not)).

This year the goal is to raise $16 million, the Foundation’s biggest target to date. That’s roughly the same amount of money the Foundation spent last year, of which $1 million alone went to web hosting. It’s also far less than the budget of the other top 10 global websites, as Wikipedians have pointed out. In the coming year, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to expand operations—including a new office in India—and hire 44 new staffers (there are 40 now). That’s a pretty incredible growth rate, one more like that of the other top 10 global websites. Whether that is a good idea at all has been the subject of debate on the blog of a Wikipedia contributor.

So, you should expect those fundraising banners to last through December, at least. But once the fundraising goal has been met, they won’t necessarily go away—they’ll just refocus. Once that happens, the banner space will start asking readers to contribute to Wikipedia with their knowledge, i.e. to start editing themselves. While the money is important, it’s the time and effort of volunteers that really makes Wikipedia work. Yes, you can click that [X] box anytime you want, and Jimmy will go away. But it’s probably worth leaving them up for now, to see what comes next.