December 27, 2009
The Power of Online Fundraising
Wikipedia has proven for the sixth year that online fundraising really works if you have a foundation, cause or nonprofit that people can believe in. Wikipedia relies solely on donations to finance its operation and pay its employees. Wait, I thought they used volunteers. Anyhow, the site’s founder posted a message and the appeal drew $430,000 from about 13,000 people in the first day and $345,000 in the second. The campaign started in November and to-date has raised $6.6 million of its $7.5 million goal.
So Wikipedia is run by a foundation?
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fourth most visited website in the world. The Foundation plans to spend the money on the day to day operation. They are even looking for a Chief Development Officer for continued fundraising efforts. The Foundation list more than enough financial history, annual reports and vision/mission information that would allow any serious giver a chance to explore why their gift matters.
Why do some people hate Wikipedia?
Conversely, academia and serious researchers, including my very own graduate program at West Virginia, sneer at using Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. The reason quite simply – Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, at anytime. This leads to numerous problems, including some pages that are changed to suit a particular bias. Apart from this, Wikipedia has served the internet community, since 2000. A decade later, Wikipedia is still a place where information seekers can discover information. For example, if a person wants to know or verify something, then they can visit Wikipedia and find out more on their own. They can add information on a page, create a new page if the information doesn’t exist, and comment on the nature of the writing or structure. For informal purposes, Wikipedia seems to have its place. What I use it for, on occasion, is as a secondary source to find primary resources and verifiable information that can be used in my research. So, is this still direct use of Wikipedia? I also allow my son to use it when looking for basic information for class projects. Then we verify it in the 20 year old encyclopedia that I had as a teen. So what source is better?
Wikipedia suffers from other problems, such as edit wars. It also suffers from the problem that pages are not routinely monitored, so that someone could create false information and never have it cross-referenced. This leads to what drives academia crazy – Wikipedia is largely information without citations. This means that many statements do not have proper sources to back up claims and therefore rely on a writer’s memory, opinion, judgment or other misinformation.
So how can an unreliable source raise over $6 million? The world may never know why. But I think the money should be used to hire better researchers and editors to validate this online tool, so that academia as well as other serious researchers can use it for what it was designed for –a true online encyclopedia.
laurenv813 said,
December 27, 2009 at 9:34 am
I have to agree. Why is it that this Web site is the largest user-generated site but there is no accountability unless it is to raise funds? I think some of the inserts are valid, especially those with blog links to actual sourced information, but the majority of the inserts are vastly incorrect.
The Power of Online Fundraising « Boy, am I opinionated! Wikipedian said,
December 27, 2009 at 10:55 pm
[...] The Power of Online Fundraising « Boy, am I opinionated! By admin | category: online wiki, wikipedia | tags: cause-or-nonprofit, finance-its, [...]
Jessica said,
December 28, 2009 at 8:11 pm
I’ve always found Wikipedia to be a good starting point for information. It gives you enough to help get ideas started for the ‘real’ research on any given topic. In addition, anything (online or off) should be read with a grain of salt and be read for bias or inaccuracies in one direction or another (think Fox, NPR, etc.) To gather true data it is best to check multiple places for the same information and hope they all correspond.
On a side note, I’ve had a friend go in and change a page on Wikipedia to win a bet – “Its true, look it up on Wikipedia!” – and I’m pretty sure he changed it back to the original information afterwards.