How Wikipedia works (part 1)
Hi, Habr!
As part of the Wikimedia RU blog, I promised to write a series of articles on how Wikipedia works, how it is managed, how it is financed, how the development process is going on, etc. Honestly, I have not yet fully understood what the whole series will look like, how many parts it will have, and what each of them will be devoted to, so I look forward to your feedback and comments.
')
I decided to dedicate the first post to the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia servers and develops the Wikimedia movement in the world.
The site wikipedia.com was registered on January 13, 2001, and on January 15 the project itself was launched by two founders - Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. If the face of the first should be familiar to many (partly, thanks to a banner asking for donations), then Larry Sanger is less known. Now Larry is 45 years old, at the time of the beginning of the collaboration with Jimmy he was a 32-year-old scientist who received a PhD from the University of Ohio.
So, in 2000, Wales hired Sanger to work as the editor in chief of Nupedia, who was the progenitor of Wikipedia. In Nupedia, only scholars who filled out it on a voluntary basis had the right to edit articles: as a result, only 12 articles were created in the first year of the project. Understanding that nothing serious would come of it, Larry suggested using wiki technology to speed up the filling of the project.
UseModWiki was chosen as the engine, and Wikipedia (that is the name Sanger invented for the new project) began its rapid growth. In July 2001, there were already 6,000 articles on Wikipedia, although the site itself was extremely unpretentious .
In August 2002, Wales announced that Wikipedia would never show ads, and the site moved from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org. Initially, funds from the project were provided by another Wales company, Bomis , which paid for traffic, server work, but Wikipedia soon outgrew Bomis in popularity, and on June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded to support Wikipedia. After that, the Foundation received the rights to the Wikipedia trademark, passed the necessary coordination with the US tax authorities and recruited staff.
The first official representatives of the Foundation in 2004 were Tim Starling (lead developer of MediaWiki, still on staff), Daniel Mayer (CFO) and Eric Moeller (hired to work on content development partnership programs, today - Deputy Director and Vice president of development, leading all technical direction). After that, people were attracted to the positions of lawyers, press secretaries, etc., but the majority worked on a voluntary basis: in 2005 only two were paid, in 2006 five were paid.
Today, the Fund employs about 200 people, most of the staff are developers. The faces of almost all employees can be seen on a separate page of the Fund’s website : as you can see, these are representatives of various countries, cultures and nations. Total salary costs amounted to about $ 16 million in the 2012-2013 fiscal year, which is approximately 45% of the total expenditures of the Fund.
At the same time, there is a constant search for new employees , but many positions remain open for quite a long time, therefore, if someone from Habrazhitel lives in the USA (or is going to move there) and shares the idea of ​​free and accessible knowledge, you can safely send a resume :)
The Foundation’s executive director today is Laila Tretikov (pictured above), and you shouldn’t be embarrassed by the Slavic surname — she really hails from Moscow, but moved to the USA when she was 16. She took office just recently, replacing Sue Gardner . Sue played a huge role in the development of the Foundation and the entire Wikimedia movement: over the past seven years, it has transformed a small non-profit foundation from Florida into a large and self-sufficient organization, earning about $ 50 million a year from donations and not dependent on large contributions from individual donors. The process of finding a new director was also not easy: a year ago, Sue announced her desire to leave the post of director, after that she helped to find and select new candidates, fulfilling all this time as a director, and now she switched to the position of adviser to help Laila enter In the course of the case and settle into a new position. Sue herself wants to concentrate on the development of the Internet, its protection from censorship from bills like SOPA and CISPA.
The supreme governing body of the Foundation is the Board of Trustees. The council consists of 10 people:
The current chairman of the Council is Jan-Barth de Friede (pictured), who has served on the Council since 2006.
The Council has several committees dedicated to specific functions:
One of the tasks of the Board of Trustees is to prioritize the development of Wikimedia projects and to endorse a strategic plan. In February 2011, a development plan was approved up to 2015. Those interested can read it by reference, but a brief excerpt of the objectives is as follows:
As a result of achieving these goals, it is planned to bring 25% of the content to high or very high quality, increase the number of readers to 1 billion, the number of articles to 50 million, the number of active editors to 200 thousand, the proportion of women participants to 25%, and participants from the southern hemisphere - up to 37%.
I will not dwell on how these goals will be achieved: this includes the construction of new data centers, the improvement of documentation for MediaWiki, the development of a WYSIWYG editor, and the introduction of quality assessment systems for existing articles. Much of the planned improvements are tied to technical innovations, and I want to devote a separate post to the details of the development.
Local Wikimedia offices have the same tasks as the Foundation itself (see above). Currently, 40 Wikimedia offices are officially operating, including the Russian Wikimedia RU.
Local branches are not legally subject to the Wikimedia Foundation and are not managed by it, in addition, they organize independent donation collections. It is important to clarify that through banners in Wikipedia itself and other Wikimedia projects, funds are transferred only to the Wikimedia Foundation, this fundraising channel is reserved for the Foundation and cannot be used by branches, therefore each of the branches comes up with their own ways to find funds for existence.
At the same time, there are exceptions - through banners in Wikimedia projects, funds are collected by the German and Swiss branches. The Fund’s position is that collecting donations directly by the branch requires considerable efforts from the local organization — you need to ensure transparency of fundraising, organize the transfer of part of the funds to the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Foundation spends additional funds to control the entire process.
In addition, most of the local branches are small non-profit organizations that find it difficult to maintain a full-fledged and operational financial accounting, so the trend is that the Fund “closes” the collection of funds for itself with rare exceptions. The German branch, for example, is one of the oldest and largest; it has more than 6,000 participants, and the organization’s budget is approaching 20 million euros per year; The Swiss branch has a similar opportunity due to the peculiarities of Swiss law, which does not allow the Fund to collect donations in this country on its own.
One of the ways out is to receive grants for specific projects or for the annual development plan from the Committee for the Distribution of Funds, but for example, for a Russian NPO, receiving a large amount of money transfer from abroad is quite risky (let's remember the “foreign agents”), therefore we do not use it.
On the other hand, you need to be honest - we managed to get under donations in 2010-2011, when we collected about 5 million rubles , which is still enough to finance our projects and initiatives.
Since we started talking about fundraising, then let's dwell on it in more detail. Recently, the approach to fundraising has changed dramatically, and its success, determined by the time for which the necessary funds were collected, has increased significantly.
The way the fundraising method has changed is easiest to track by studying the history.
As we see, by increasing the conversion rate and the effectiveness of banners, more donors were attracted, which, despite the decreasing size of the average donation, make it possible to collect large amounts in much shorter terms. In addition, there was a change in emphasis in fundraising - banners began to appear mostly to anonymous readers, and not to registered participants; fundraising itself has become more targeted - i.e. First of all, English-speaking banners are “polished”, which are launched for the widest possible audience - English-speaking users from the USA, Britain, Canada, etc., who bring most of the revenue. After that, based on the conversion data, English-language banners are translated into dozens of other languages ​​and run in other regions.
Test launches of hundreds of different banners on a limited audience also play a role - this makes it possible to understand which banners are more effective and use them in large-scale campaigns: for example, it turned out that banners against a white background bring more money than stylized and multi-color ones; and banners against a background of green leaves and vegetation are even more effective than banners with a white background.
I didn’t mention in this article about the features of the development of MediaWiki and other technical kitchen of Wikipedia, the next post of our blog will be devoted to this, if this article and the proposed topic seem interesting to readers.
As part of the Wikimedia RU blog, I promised to write a series of articles on how Wikipedia works, how it is managed, how it is financed, how the development process is going on, etc. Honestly, I have not yet fully understood what the whole series will look like, how many parts it will have, and what each of them will be devoted to, so I look forward to your feedback and comments.
')
I decided to dedicate the first post to the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia servers and develops the Wikimedia movement in the world.
A bit of history
The site wikipedia.com was registered on January 13, 2001, and on January 15 the project itself was launched by two founders - Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. If the face of the first should be familiar to many (partly, thanks to a banner asking for donations), then Larry Sanger is less known. Now Larry is 45 years old, at the time of the beginning of the collaboration with Jimmy he was a 32-year-old scientist who received a PhD from the University of Ohio.
So, in 2000, Wales hired Sanger to work as the editor in chief of Nupedia, who was the progenitor of Wikipedia. In Nupedia, only scholars who filled out it on a voluntary basis had the right to edit articles: as a result, only 12 articles were created in the first year of the project. Understanding that nothing serious would come of it, Larry suggested using wiki technology to speed up the filling of the project.
UseModWiki was chosen as the engine, and Wikipedia (that is the name Sanger invented for the new project) began its rapid growth. In July 2001, there were already 6,000 articles on Wikipedia, although the site itself was extremely unpretentious .
In August 2002, Wales announced that Wikipedia would never show ads, and the site moved from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org. Initially, funds from the project were provided by another Wales company, Bomis , which paid for traffic, server work, but Wikipedia soon outgrew Bomis in popularity, and on June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded to support Wikipedia. After that, the Foundation received the rights to the Wikipedia trademark, passed the necessary coordination with the US tax authorities and recruited staff.
Foundation staff
The first official representatives of the Foundation in 2004 were Tim Starling (lead developer of MediaWiki, still on staff), Daniel Mayer (CFO) and Eric Moeller (hired to work on content development partnership programs, today - Deputy Director and Vice president of development, leading all technical direction). After that, people were attracted to the positions of lawyers, press secretaries, etc., but the majority worked on a voluntary basis: in 2005 only two were paid, in 2006 five were paid.
Today, the Fund employs about 200 people, most of the staff are developers. The faces of almost all employees can be seen on a separate page of the Fund’s website : as you can see, these are representatives of various countries, cultures and nations. Total salary costs amounted to about $ 16 million in the 2012-2013 fiscal year, which is approximately 45% of the total expenditures of the Fund.
At the same time, there is a constant search for new employees , but many positions remain open for quite a long time, therefore, if someone from Habrazhitel lives in the USA (or is going to move there) and shares the idea of ​​free and accessible knowledge, you can safely send a resume :)
The Foundation’s executive director today is Laila Tretikov (pictured above), and you shouldn’t be embarrassed by the Slavic surname — she really hails from Moscow, but moved to the USA when she was 16. She took office just recently, replacing Sue Gardner . Sue played a huge role in the development of the Foundation and the entire Wikimedia movement: over the past seven years, it has transformed a small non-profit foundation from Florida into a large and self-sufficient organization, earning about $ 50 million a year from donations and not dependent on large contributions from individual donors. The process of finding a new director was also not easy: a year ago, Sue announced her desire to leave the post of director, after that she helped to find and select new candidates, fulfilling all this time as a director, and now she switched to the position of adviser to help Laila enter In the course of the case and settle into a new position. Sue herself wants to concentrate on the development of the Internet, its protection from censorship from bills like SOPA and CISPA.
Board of trustees
The supreme governing body of the Foundation is the Board of Trustees. The council consists of 10 people:
- founder is Jimmy Wales;
- two representatives are selected by local Wikimedia offices, such as, for example, Wikimedia RU;
- three representatives are selected by the participants in the Wikimedia projects;
- four representatives are chosen by the other members of the Council, based on their specific knowledge and experience.
The current chairman of the Council is Jan-Barth de Friede (pictured), who has served on the Council since 2006.
The Council has several committees dedicated to specific functions:
- An accession committee that deals with the approval of new Wikimedia offices and assists in their development.
For example, when someone wants to organize a local branch in his country, he first needs to gather a group of active participants, define his goals and create a wiki page with a description, contacts and objectives of the association, so that other participants can also join and help in their work. After that, you need to contact the Committee, which will help to move towards the creation of a valid legal entity, signing an agreement with the Fund and official recognition of the local branch.
Small moment: the Foundation does not recognize the new organization operating in the same territory where the recognized Wikimedia branch is already operating. - Audit Committee. The Wikimedia Foundation reports are audited annually by an external auditor, and the Audit Committee is in charge of selecting an auditor, internal audits of the company's financial activities and internal controls.
Any Wikimedia member can become a member of the Committee; elections are held annually. - Committee for the allocation of funds. In a nutshell, this Committee, consisting of past Wikimedia members, distributes part of the Foundation’s funds to projects, grants or offices. In the 2012-2013 fiscal year, the Committee, for example, distributed over $ 9 million among 15 organizations. The work of this Committee is a recent innovation, and I will devote a separate post to its work.
- The Corporate Governance Committee, which ensures that the Board of Trustees performs its functions, and helps to improve the efficiency and transparency of work.
- Personnel Committee, which controls the amount of wages and the current procedures for working with employees.
Where is Wikipedia going?
One of the tasks of the Board of Trustees is to prioritize the development of Wikimedia projects and to endorse a strategic plan. In February 2011, a development plan was approved up to 2015. Those interested can read it by reference, but a brief excerpt of the objectives is as follows:
- Infrastructure development
- Growth in the number of participants
- Improving the quality of information
- Increase Wikimedia penetration in the world
- Innovation support
As a result of achieving these goals, it is planned to bring 25% of the content to high or very high quality, increase the number of readers to 1 billion, the number of articles to 50 million, the number of active editors to 200 thousand, the proportion of women participants to 25%, and participants from the southern hemisphere - up to 37%.
I will not dwell on how these goals will be achieved: this includes the construction of new data centers, the improvement of documentation for MediaWiki, the development of a WYSIWYG editor, and the introduction of quality assessment systems for existing articles. Much of the planned improvements are tied to technical innovations, and I want to devote a separate post to the details of the development.
Local branches
Local Wikimedia offices have the same tasks as the Foundation itself (see above). Currently, 40 Wikimedia offices are officially operating, including the Russian Wikimedia RU.
Local branches are not legally subject to the Wikimedia Foundation and are not managed by it, in addition, they organize independent donation collections. It is important to clarify that through banners in Wikipedia itself and other Wikimedia projects, funds are transferred only to the Wikimedia Foundation, this fundraising channel is reserved for the Foundation and cannot be used by branches, therefore each of the branches comes up with their own ways to find funds for existence.
At the same time, there are exceptions - through banners in Wikimedia projects, funds are collected by the German and Swiss branches. The Fund’s position is that collecting donations directly by the branch requires considerable efforts from the local organization — you need to ensure transparency of fundraising, organize the transfer of part of the funds to the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Foundation spends additional funds to control the entire process.
In addition, most of the local branches are small non-profit organizations that find it difficult to maintain a full-fledged and operational financial accounting, so the trend is that the Fund “closes” the collection of funds for itself with rare exceptions. The German branch, for example, is one of the oldest and largest; it has more than 6,000 participants, and the organization’s budget is approaching 20 million euros per year; The Swiss branch has a similar opportunity due to the peculiarities of Swiss law, which does not allow the Fund to collect donations in this country on its own.
One of the ways out is to receive grants for specific projects or for the annual development plan from the Committee for the Distribution of Funds, but for example, for a Russian NPO, receiving a large amount of money transfer from abroad is quite risky (let's remember the “foreign agents”), therefore we do not use it.
On the other hand, you need to be honest - we managed to get under donations in 2010-2011, when we collected about 5 million rubles , which is still enough to finance our projects and initiatives.
Fundraising
Since we started talking about fundraising, then let's dwell on it in more detail. Recently, the approach to fundraising has changed dramatically, and its success, determined by the time for which the necessary funds were collected, has increased significantly.
The way the fundraising method has changed is easiest to track by studying the history.
- 2011
- $ 24 million from 1.1 million donors
- collection lasted 46 days
- registered users have seen banners for 18 days
- The average donation was $ 21
- the most successful banner - with the face of Jimmy (right) - year 2012
- $ 35 million from 2 million donors
- collection lasted 9 days
- registered users have not seen banners
- The average donation was $ 17
- the most effective banner was a text message, which brought three times more donations than Jimbo’s personal appeal:
- year 2013
The main report is being prepared so far, but in 2 weeks about $ 32 million was collected, fees have so far passed only in the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in the rest of the countries the collection will be launched in late summer-autumn 2014.
The text appeal was again the most effective, various text changes were tested, and banners began to appear on the mobile version of the site.
As we see, by increasing the conversion rate and the effectiveness of banners, more donors were attracted, which, despite the decreasing size of the average donation, make it possible to collect large amounts in much shorter terms. In addition, there was a change in emphasis in fundraising - banners began to appear mostly to anonymous readers, and not to registered participants; fundraising itself has become more targeted - i.e. First of all, English-speaking banners are “polished”, which are launched for the widest possible audience - English-speaking users from the USA, Britain, Canada, etc., who bring most of the revenue. After that, based on the conversion data, English-language banners are translated into dozens of other languages ​​and run in other regions.
Test launches of hundreds of different banners on a limited audience also play a role - this makes it possible to understand which banners are more effective and use them in large-scale campaigns: for example, it turned out that banners against a white background bring more money than stylized and multi-color ones; and banners against a background of green leaves and vegetation are even more effective than banners with a white background.
Conclusion
I didn’t mention in this article about the features of the development of MediaWiki and other technical kitchen of Wikipedia, the next post of our blog will be devoted to this, if this article and the proposed topic seem interesting to readers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/224379/
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