The Huge Fight Behind Those Pop-Up Fundraising Banners on Wikipedia

The Wikimedia Foundation wants a few bucks from you. But does Wikipedia need it?

You have likely encountered them before: the banner ads on English Wikipedia that encourage you to donate. Typically, they run for about a month at the end of the year. As one of the proposed December ads puts it, “If you donate just $2.75, or whatever you can this [whatever day of the week it is], Wikipedia could keep thriving for years. The price of a cup of coffee is all we need.” Many people see the banner ads on Wikipedia as something like the site’s version of a PBS fundraising drive—a bit annoying because they distract you from your regularly scheduled wiki browsing, but not particularly painful. If you’re not interested, just scroll away.

But for many of Wikipedia’s most dedicated contributors, this year’s proposed banner ads presented something like a moral crisis. The Wikipedia editing community recently held a poll rejecting the proposed banner ads, pressuring the foundation that supports the site into drafting alternative ads with softer language. “The wiki community is challenging the Wikimedia Foundation’s right or ability to run fundraising ads on English Wikipedia,” said Lane Rasberry, a long-term Wikipedian and data scientist at the University of Virginia.  “I can’t imagine the Facebook or Twitter communities organizing a protest like this, attacking hundreds of millions of dollars for the parent tech company. It’s unprecedented. Could not happen anywhere other than Wikipedia.” Over the course of a messy monthlong debate, participating Wikipedia editors protested that the proposed ads were misleading and unethical, while raising the specter of what would happen if the site’s contributors and the foundation failed to come to an agreement before the start of the annual fundraising season.   

Since then, the noise appears to have died down somewhat, according to Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales. “When the foundation responded with a set of proposed banners that fit some of the things that people were asking for, I found that dialogue to be incredibly constructive,” Wales said.

To understand what happened, it helps to know a little about wiki politics…

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Tweets of Note

Nathan Law 羅冠聰 @nathanlawkc

Students from the elite school Tsinghua University protested with Friedmann equation. I have no idea what this equation means, but it does not matter. It's the pronunciation: it's similar to "free的man" (free man)—a spectacular and creative way to express, with intelligence.

Tiffany C. Li @tiffanycli

People often make fun of the U.S. for overvaluing free speech at the cost of other civil liberties. But look at how hard people in other nations must fight for the right to protest and to speak freely, even against the government. If we don’t have this, we have nothing.

William MacAskill @willmacaskill

If FTX misused customer funds, then I personally will have much to reflect on. Sam and FTX had a lot of goodwill – and some of that goodwill was the result of association with ideas I have spent my career promoting. If that goodwill laundered fraud, I am ashamed.

William MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher and ethicist at Oxford and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement.

Stephen Harrison @harrisonstephen

I wrote about the "DHSLeaks" conspiracy theory: what actually happened when the Dept of Homeland Security met with the Wikimedia Foundation and other tech orgs & why it’s insulting to accuse Wikipedia editors of being controlled by the federal govt.

slate.comNo, Wikipedia Is Not Colluding With DHSA conspiracy theory, fueled by a recent article, is alarmingly wrong.

bioRxiv @biorxivpreprint

Wikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPR biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #bioRxiv

biorxiv.orgWikipedia as a tool for contemporary history of science: A case study on CRISPRRapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source regarding contemporary science. We chose the high-profile…

Best,
Stephen