The Wikimedia Foundation, which controls Wikipedia and other popular MediaWiki projects, has met its "December sprint" fundraising target:
This week the Wikimedia Foundation smashed through the $25m target it had set for its "December sprint" – with a full 15 days of the month left. On December 3, Wiki's globetrotting figurehead Jimmy Wales promised that as soon as the Wikimedia Foundation met the target it had set for its traditional year-end fundraising drive, it would cease making the intrusive appeals. "We would still stop the fundraiser if enough money were raised in shorter than the planned time," Jimmy Wales promised on December 2. But there's no sign of the Foundation doing that, yet.
The WMF has now raised $25,530,943.01 in December, and $51,182,044.37 this year. That means it's on course to smash 2015's fundraising record of $53,756,012.58. [...] "It's important here to remember that the Wikimedia Foundation has nothing to do with writing or checking the content of Wikipedia. All that is done by unpaid volunteers," writes former Wikipedia Signpost co-editor Andreas Kolbe in a detailed analysis of the WMF finances.
Although the fundraising appeal states alarmingly that your cash is urgently required to "keep Wikipedia online", this is not the full picture. (As a WMF staff member admitted in 2014: "The urgency and alarm of the copy is not commensurate with my [admittedly limited] understanding of our financial situation".) Each year, the Foundation raises far more than it costs to operate the site, estimated at $3m a year. The clue comes in the full quote from the WMF, that cash is needed to "keep Wikipedia online and growing". The Foundation's own reports reveal what exactly it is that's growing.
That is one rich beggar.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday December 18 2016, @04:56PM
First off, game designers are designing it. if anyone understands what players can do to the best thought out rule systems....
Second they admit the problem up front. They also realize that simply changing the faction in control is no solution. Read their design documents, they have some good ideas cooking to deal with a problem Jimmy won't even admit exists.
Third they reject the premise behind the 'no original content' rule, where everything on Wikipedia is, in theory at least, sourced, footnoted and backed up by some legacy media source. But if the legacy media is part of the problem that doesn't work.
The bottom line rule for Infogalactic is facts must in fact be factual, opinion and analysis marked as such and the plan is to provide multiple perspectives on the same facts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:09PM
onion address can haz?