The architect of the latest highly aggressive funding drive is Sue Gardner, executive director of the WMF. Described by one insider as "very savvy politically and excessively diplomatic", Gardner has been lauded as one of the Most Powerful Women by Forbes. Only a small fraction of this is required to keep the site alive.
No matter how many edits enthusiasts make, they don't get a penny for their hard work. So where's the cash going? Primarily, it's being spent on new research and development programmes. These are outlined in the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategic Plan - and the next year's installment is outlined in detail here.
Some projects appear to be eminently sensible. For example, the number of editors has been in decline since , and the gender ratio is heavily tipped towards men. The foundation wants to make participation easier, so much so that one major project is the development of a visual editing kit, so contributors do not need to learn the arcane technical Wiki syntax.
This is running behind schedule - rollout was supposed to be a year ago, but it will be mid before it's ready, according to the project page. But some of the spending has raised eyebrows. The UK foundation also found itself under close scrutiny after approving projects that personally benefited board members - which imperilled the foundation's hard-won charity status. Some other funding is highly questionable.
Nice work if you can get it. The budget includes travel to and from the gigs for the budding snappers. It's all a stark contrast to the unpaid volunteer ethos.
Once upon a time, Wikimedia listed every donation, but now only a few of the largest are made public. Only a few of these are highlighted. Earlier this year Wikipedia attracted criticism for its new-found enthusiasm for political campaigning - not a traditional activity for encyclopedias, where fairness and objectivity is part of the "brand". The substantial contributions from Google leave the foundation open to the charge that it's lobbying for the agenda of large corporations by proxy.
On Wikipedia's own donations page we learn of a moving story of a student in Agnam-Goly, a Sahelian village in north-eastern Senegal with a population of 3, inhabitants, who expresses how he'd love to give money to the foundation.
Does he know wealthy Westerners are using the donations to buy cameras and travel to pop concerts? Or that the foundation has more cash than it knows what to do with? Wikipedia's aggressive annual fundraising drives have been phenomenally successful, transforming the organisation and creating a powerful new political lobbying force. Few politicians or media figures now dare criticise Wikipedia, where derogatory material can appear overnight and remain unchanged for years. But the organisation does seem to be presenting an incomplete picture.
A freshly discovered train-sized rock that tags along with Earth as a constant companion orbiting the Sun is most likely a fragment of the Moon resulting from an ancient lunar impact. Kamo'oalewa — discovered by observers in Hawaii in — is about 41 meters in diameter and orbits the Sun in a trajectory not dissimilar from our own blue planet. Although the nearest of Earth's quasi-satellites don't worry, it's still a good 5,, km away , very little is known about the rock's origins owing to its tiny size and habit of dwelling in the darkness of space.
Customers of BT tentacle Plusnet are still finding themselves without email after issues with the service entered a third day. Problems kicked off on 10 November, according to the status page , when the internet service provider said: "Some customers may be experiencing difficulties when logging into their Plusnet email account. It took much of the day, but by mid-afternoon the company proudly told customers: "We've identified what the problem is and are now completing work to fix this as quickly as possible.
An explosion in workplace monitoring during the pandemic — in part supported by common software tools from global vendors — threatens to erode trust in employers and employees' commitment to work, according to a European Commission research paper. The study from the Joint Research Councils warns that excessive monitoring has negative psycho-social consequences including increased labour resistance, stress and turnover propensity, along with decreased job satisfaction and organisational commitment.
Meanwhile, a report published today from the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Future of Work said that "use of algorithmic surveillance, management and monitoring technologies that undertake new advisory functions, as well as traditional ones, has significantly increased during the pandemic.
F designer Don Syme said this week that the new version, 6. There was a telling moment in the. A developer asked: "What is the best way to do optional values in records in F?
NET evangelist Scott Hanselman, with commendable honesty, acknowledged that "I know how to say the words but I don't know what they mean," while even Dollard was uncertain how to answer. Autonomy's former chief financial officer has alleged the firm collapsed partly because two financial analysts agreed to badmouth it in the hope of making a profit from its demise, according to US court filings.
He accused former JP Morgan analyst Daud Khan and industry colleague Paul Morland, once of analyst firm Peel Hunt, of carrying out "concerted and improper efforts to depress Autonomy's share price for their and their short-selling clients' benefit" and being "vehemently antagonistic towards Autonomy and its management. If you struggled to get into your Gmail this morning, it wasn't just you.
Unhappy users from Europe all the way to South Africa reported a significant outage. The issues kicked off at around 8.
Interview New Zealand's Rocket Lab is set to launch another Electron rocket - a precursor to the rocketeer's first attempt at catching a descending booster. The launch, dubbed "Love at First Insight", is currently scheduled for no earlier than 16 November owing to an "out of family ground sensor reading" when the launch window opened yesterday morning and has the primary objective of popping a pair of Earth-observation satellites into orbit for Black Sky.
Also featuring on the launch is Rocket Lab's latest evolution of its recovery technology. Unlike SpaceX's crowd-pleasing propulsive antics, the first stage of the Rocket Lab Electron will descend by parachute and attempt a controlled splashdown into the ocean, making it the third ocean recovery if all goes well.
The eventual plan is for a helicopter to snag the stage as it descends. This time, however, everything will be done except an attempt to catch the rocket.
Facing rising demand for high-end Linux boxes but also issues supporting the software on its high-end kit, HP is trying solve the problem for customers by using Windows as a universal shim.
This feature extends to Redmond's WSL2. HP is using this to enable customers who want to do fancy GPU-accelerated stuff with Linux apps on the more familiar familiar to HP, that is basis of Windows.
On Call A reader takes us back to a bygone era, when Blighty's brass inhabited wood-panelled offices, and the air was thick with pipe smoke and WW2 anecdotes.
Welcome to On Call. Our story takes place in the s as the era of officers that served in the Second World War was coming to an end and computerisation was slithering into departments that had been hitherto resolutely manual. According to a brief from analyst firm Gartner, it's "an emerging networking solution that provides services for computational tasks by sharing computing resources from multiple edge sites" and "a new type of decentralized computing solution that optimizes the efficiency of edge computing.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing. It could be truly decentralized. I pitched Theodor, Sam, and Travis the co-founders this idea because I did not have anyone to work on it and I wanted to work with some people. They were hard at work building the basic infrastructure of Everipedia so we went our separate ways.
Last September, Sam contacted me and said, "We were thinking of putting Everipedia on the blockchain. I had followed blockchain a little but not in-depth. I knew it was something interesting and that I should investigate it more, but I never did.
Once Sam explained their initial plan I could immediately see how this technology could implement the idea that I had. Moreover, the co-founders were enthusiastically on board with implementing the idea.
The first step which the co-founders are working on now is putting the contents of Everipedia on the blockchain. This entails putting all Everipedia on the blockchain, which is exciting because it means people can start working on Everipedia articles and be compensated for doing so.
People complain about cryptocurrencies being based on nothing. The contents of Wikipedia and Everipedia are not nothing. It is very credible as a source of value. High: Theodor, you developed a cryptocurrency token called IQ. Can you describe IQ, how it differs from perhaps more popular versions of cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, and the utility that it provides?
Forselius: The way the IQ tokens work is that when you edit the site and you curate content, you earn these IQ tokens for helping to contribute to the knowledge base. These tokens represent votes in the actual knowledge base.
The more tokens you earn, the more good contents you put up, the more tokens you have and then more voting power you get in the system. The way the token mechanism works is when you edit articles, you have to stake a small amount of tokens to propose an edit on the site. Other editors then must approve the edit for you to get your staked tokens back.
Then you get some more as a reward. If the rest of the community dismiss your proposed edit, then the tokens that you staked get burned. This is an exciting example of how blockchain technology enables us to use financial incentives as an automatic quality mechanism for controlling what content gets added to the knowledge base and what does not.
High: How do you see Everipedia democratizing information in countries that have historically censored it? Forselius: The aforementioned Interplanetary File System IPFS allows the community to collectively host the site and its information on nodes instead of on centralized servers. What is revolutionary about this is that there is no central hosting cost for us as a company, which means that if the Everipedia team disappeared or went bankrupt tomorrow, all the information that our community has contributed will continue to live on, peer-to-peer on the knowledge base through these IPFS nodes.
Another exciting side effect of doing that is that it makes it incredibly difficult for regimes to censor the information. There is no central IP that they can block for people accessing this information because it is completely stored peer-to-peer just like Bitcoin or Ethereum. High: Larry, I read a quote from you in which you said, "In an era of misinformation, the world tends to benefit enormously from transparent and decentralized protocols for ensuring access to knowledge.
Sanger: Absolutely. It is extremely important that it be decentralized. If you can contribute to the same knowledge database from a bunch of different sources, then somebody who wants to participate in the knowledge marketplace does not have to use Wikipedia. They can use any source that is connected to what will be called the Everipedia Network.
That makes a huge difference because if you had a chance to author the top-ranked article or the top result on Google, you would not just assume that it would be Wikipedia if Wikipedia has an article about it. Because Wikipedia has all the mindshare and they are just one website, it cuts off the motivation for other people to participate in cataloging the world's knowledge.
By decentralizing the means whereby knowledge is collected, by not having it via one domain i. High: There are many companies now that are exploring if and how to leverage blockchain. This is certainly true in the services space, but the interest is spreading across a variety of industries.
As somebody who is immersed in it, what lessons can you draw regarding the broader implications and the broader value that enterprises can derive from leveraging blockchain technology?
The reason for that is decentralization and immutability, or the fact that it is all open and cannot be changed. The essential features of blockchain technology enable a new kind of economic system. For those who have not studied blockchain, I recommend doing so, it will blow your mind, it blew mine.
I have become a true believer. Forselius: Yes, I think there is way too much focus in the space right now on the price of Bitcoin. All the headlines focus on the price and there is too little focus on the revolutionary aspect of blockchain technology and how the decentralization of the Internet is going to create the whole new era of financial inclusion in places where people did not previously have access.
I think that is exciting, and Everipedia is just one of many examples that I am sure will be making progress over the next couple of years as the technology keeps improving. High: Theodor, as you think about the next few years, how do you see Everipedia developing? What is your vision for the next five years in the development of the company? What do you hope it will be? Forselius: Well I hope that the Everipedia network will become the de facto decentralized, peer-to-peer knowledge base on the Internet that any platform or application can tap into and utilize.
I think that in this era of misinformation, fake news, and a general distrust of centralized entities like governments and corporations, the need for a decentralized, transparent, and immutable knowledge base is more relevant than ever before in history. I hope that we can help create that over the next couple of years.
High: What is the pathway to gaining more mindshare of would-be users and developing your brand further? You are going up against one of the most well-known brands on the Internet.
What is the pathway to taking away mindshare and taking away market share? Forselius: Creating a completely open source protocol that is peer-to-peer is a great value proposition for a lot of people.
Not to mention, there is huge value in the financial incentives of being able to become a stakeholder of the knowledge base that you are contributing to and earn back financial value that you create. With traditional models that companies like Facebook or non-profits like Wikipedia use, there are millions or even billions of users creating value every day, and these organizations extract all that value.
Tokenizing helps align the incentives of the value creators and the value extractors through the token so that all the value that users create comes directly back to them. I think that is a massive value proposition, especially for people in developing countries where Wikipedia has a large user base like in India.
Considering we already have all of Wikipedia on Everipedia, contributing to our protocol is a no-brainer for a lot of people. Sanger: There are so many reasons one would be motivated to contribute to Everipedia rather than Wikipedia, the story just needs to be told.
It is easier to contribute to because it has an easy-to-use editing interface. I also believe that Everipedia will be easier to change and improve. If you want to change the way that the community is governed, the tokens that you hold by working for the project will give you voting rights to do that. You will also be able to submit competing articles either via Everipedia.
That alone may attract people who feel their work is not sufficiently respected by Wikipedia. Google's Knol projects tried something similar but it was Google, so if you were writing for Knol you are writing for Google.
Everipedia is very different. We are going to enable people to compete to write the best articles on essentially any subject.
Imagine all of the articles on the Everipedia network being rated, including all the articles in Wikipedia, Britannica, and any number of other academic and popular sources. They all have ratings, and we have information because people offer it to the network about the ratios. I would be able to say that I have a Ph. I get to talk about my religion, my politics, my civic associations, professional associations, and certificates.
All of that information and then you think well that's just a lot of information about people, what does that matter? Once you have the ratings of the articles, then you can slice and dice that rating information. You can say, what are the best articles according to the Democrats versus the Republicans? What are the best articles according to men versus women? How about Americans versus French people, and so forth. If this is truly decentralized, this will be the first time where people have the motive to participate in something like that.
The ratings are not going to be controlled centrally by anyone, and anyone would be able to use that information. The best article will be the one that is shown first. You will be able to compare points of view a lot more easily.
That could be important. We need to understand where other people are coming from. High: That is very interesting. It means that people will search for those things that they are most interested in. Instead of people getting their information from an echo chamber like many do today, you are suggesting that perhaps the best way is for liberals get to know the conservatives and vice versa, or people of different religions begin to have a greater common understanding of differences and embrace those, and the like.
Sanger: Yes. Let us say we are confused about how Muslims around the world really think about Sharia law or about Jihad. There has been a lot of debate about this. This system would give you a way to read and find out. It would not be filtered by media sources or experts. You can look at the expert views in aggregate, not by anyone expert, but all the experts.
If you can look at the views according to the people who live in Saudi Arabia, imagine the perforated article about Jihad according to Saudis written in English.
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