Ethan Zuckerman (who is on the Wikimedia Advisory Board) has a post discussing Wikipedia’s recent fundraising drive, with some comparative numbers:
In the past 17 days, the [Wikimedia] Foundation has raised over $478,000 in online gifts. That’s a pretty amazing number, on the one hand, and a concerning one, on the other hand. If Global Voices could raise that much money online in a month, I’d be out of a job, as our annual budget is not much higher than that sum, and I spend far too much of my time convincing generous individuals, corporations and foundations to support our efforts.
On the other hand, it’s significantly less money than my local public radio station raised in its last fundraising drive: $801,000. Those drives are less than a week long, and there are three a year, raising a large percentage of the station’s annual income. Wikipedia reports the station’s listenerbase at 400,000 – 5,874 (1.4%) of those listeners gave $136 each on average in the most recent drive alone.
(Put another way, they raised slightly more in the last 17 days than DonorsChoose did over the month of October…)
He goes through the per-reader numbers, and they’re not pretty. He also goes on to speculate about why it is that the vast (and I do mean vast) majority of Wikipedia readers don’t give anything, brining in Radiohead, Jane Siberrry, and that FreeRice site I linked here a while back. It’s a really interesting post.
As for the Wikipedia issue, I think there are two things in play here, at least for me: First, there’s not the same personal connection with Wikipedia that most people have with, say, a favorite radio station. I do look at Wikipedia on a fairly regular basis, but it’s a drive-by sort of thing. I pop in because I’m looking for a particular fact, and then I leave again. I end up there only because they tend to rank highly on Google, but if some non-Wikipedia page came up first with the same information, I’d go there instead.
More importantly, though, I haven’t given Wikipedia any money because I’m deeply ambivalent about the whole project.
Everybody reading this has undoubtedly seen a dozen different variants of the “officious little prick with too much free time edits reasonable Wikipedia articles into oblivion through simpleminded literal application of the notability and sourcing rules.” Reading through a handful of edit wars certainly reduced my interest in taking part to zero. A lot of the physics articles are pretty sketchy, and the original article on the Davisson-Germer experiment was blatantly plagiarized from Hyperphysics (it’s since been fixed, but is now just a stub), but if I’m going to spend time writing up lengthy articles explaining great experiments in physics, I’ll do it here. I get paid for running this blog (not very much, but I get a monthly check), and nobody is going to turn up to complain that I didn’t cite enough sources to meet some arbitrary standard.
It’s not just a matter of disliking those particular rules, though, or not wanting to provide officious little pricks with too much free time a platform on which to exercise their officious prickishness. After all, if the goal was to deprive officious little pricks of an outlet, we’d need to shut down pretty much the entire Internet, and large swathes of the federal government.
The problem is a little more fundamental than that. In a recent blog discussion of a particularly silly edit war (which, of course, I can’t find now– it had to do with web comics), a Wikipedia editor argued passinately and completely correctly that they need to have the “notability” and sourcing requirements in there to keep Wikipedia from being completely overrun by kooks and cranks. Without some check on the sourcing of the articles, the site would be full of bald assertions of people’s pet theories, and without some requirement of notability, every beloved pet cat would have its own Wikipedia page. They’ve got those rules for a reason, and they’ve gone for the simplest bright-line formulation they can, because as any lawyer will tell you, that minimizes problems with the applications of the rules.
The rules they have are absolutely necessary for their project. They inevitably lead to some drama around the edge cases, but if you want to run “a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” you’ll need those rules, or something like them.
The problem I have is with the whole goal of running “a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” OK, I’m good with the “free” part, but the “anyone can edit” bit has always struck me as ultimately self-defeating, in pretty much exactly the way that Wikipedia goes wrong now.
The problem is that there’s an inherent conflict in the goals of writing an ecyclopedia, and allowing anyone to edit it. Writing an encyclopedia requires expert knowledge of the subjects to be covered– you need to know the topic well enough to know what the really essential elements are (because you’re not going to be able to cover everything), and you need to be able to evaluate the claims made in different original sources.
The “anyone can edit” goal pretty much rules out any kind of credentialing, though. In fact, in every discussion of this that I’ve seen, Wikipedia editors take pains to explicitly reject the idea of requiring any sort of certification that the people writing articles have some expertise in the subject. The utopian goal is to have web-surfing teenagers on an equal footing with Nobel laureates when it comes to editing Wikipedia, at which point the state will wither away, and– whoops, wrong utopian project.
The rules they have are there in an attempt to strike some sort of compromise between the fundamentally incompatible goals of ending up with an authoritative and accurate reference work while still allowing absolutely anyone to tweak it. In order to allow idiots to edit the encyclopedia without destroying it, you need to put some checks on the content in the form of rules that even idiots can understand. And when those rules are rigidly enforced by idiots, then, well, you get the sorry spectacle of Wikipedia edit wars. One of the effects of which is to keep people with actual expertise from wanting to have anything to do with the project.
So, as I say, I’m conflicted. I think that Wikipedia does about as good a job as can be done under the constraints that they have to operate with. As long as you’re not looking at anything terribly controversial or ephemeral, the information is reasonably good– most of the original articles were written by enthusiasts, and the edit rules keep them from being too horribly mangled. But I think the whole project is flawed at the conceptual level, so while it’s nice that it’s there, I’m not really motivated to contribute to it, financially or otherwise.
(Realistically, the chances of anybody doing a real hatchet job on an article about the Davisson-Germer experiment are pretty low, which is why a plagiarized article sat on the site for several months– nobody looked all that closely at it, or they would’ve noticed the reference to a figure that wasn’t there. The chance of any science article drawing enough attention to trigger edit wars has to be pretty small, but it’s still a disincentive.)