An urgent appeal from git-scm.com maintainer Scott Chacon

http://git-scm.com/appeal

by kneath • 16 years ago

133 57 16 years ago

git-scm.com

seiji• 16 years ago

It's a joke parodying http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA032/en/US

I can't imagine Scott or a tiny git website is in need of money.

Amusingly, if you try to enter an amount greater than $25000, google checkout just dies.

klochner• 16 years ago

Speaking of wikipedia, I'd be perfectly content if the "urgent appeal" banner were replaced with an ad.

beoba• 16 years ago

one potential issue there: what happens when the advertiser doesn't like what they see on the article about them?

even if such 'influence' is disallowed, just the possibility of it occurring would hurt the site

bajsejohannes• 16 years ago

I find it particularly bad that the banner is there even after you donate.

rl1987• 16 years ago

Same here, I could take care of it with AdBlock...

juanefren• 16 years ago

I had to put the following with chrome scripts.

$("#siteNotice").hide();

jdp23• 16 years ago

The urgent appeal banner is an ad.

ghshephard• 16 years ago

They got my donation, but for some reason I can't keep the ad from coming back, and, I'm now getting email asking for a monthly donation.

I just wish there was some way I could pay money to turn off the Massive Banner Ad off for a year. I'm happy to pay around $100-$150/year for WIkipedia, but the user experience is starting to degrade when a signicant chunk of my screen is a Massive "Urgent Appeal" banner.

lambda3• 16 years ago

That would be horrible. Replacing it with an ad would mean that they are now beholden to the advertiser, as opposed to being beholden to their donors. Right now Wikipedia depends on their editors to provide content, and donors to provide money. If instead they relied on advertisers to provide money, they would lose an awful lot of credibility.

Also, why would you prefer an ad to the donation banner? Ads tend to promote excessive consumption or try and manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money. They tend to be animated, or play sounds, or dance all over your content. They provide vectors for malicious code to be injected into your site.

Instead, we have the founder of a highly useful collaborative educational resource (or sometimes some editors of same) asking for donations to support that without being beholden to corporate interests. Where's the problem?

jroes• 16 years ago

I knew something was up when he said it costs >1mil/year to host the git-scm site.

blutonium• 16 years ago

Joke? Maybe you underestimate the number of us gitiots. All the same, the SFC supports great projects[1] (and Mercurial too).

[1] http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/

recoil• 16 years ago

You shouldn't be being downvoted for this comment... The content of the page has completely changed from a parody of the wikipedia appeal to a real one asking for donations for sfconservancy. This is the version everybody's talking about: http://i.min.us/idDeBk.png

(TBH I didn't actually recognise the parody myself and thought it was just a fairly crass call for donations that made a couple of silly claims. I guess I should read the small print).

gnok• 16 years ago

The footnote mentions this is a parody. And quote "Donations made will actually go to the Git project under the Software Freedom Conservancy.".

js2• 16 years ago

Background: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/16384...

Groxx• 16 years ago

Love the photo. What appears to be alcohol, an explosion in the background, and he looks like he's saying something off-camera.

Twice.

bcl• 16 years ago

They just joined the SFC - http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/dec/16/git-joins/

ztan• 16 years ago

My guess is that the floating head and staring contest with Jimmy Wales banners finally got to him.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NoticeTe...

Interestingly from what I can see in their published tests and stats for the banners, having pics of Jimmy on the banners actually had a significant positive effect. Which explains why they kept doing different variations of them despite the fact they creep some of us out.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testi...

jrockway2• 16 years ago

Man, people really hate that Wikipedia fund drive. It really worries me how people have no trouble with ads blaring music and obscuring the text of pages they are reading, or with advertisers dictating what content can and cannot be published, but everyone gets super upset when the guy who started the website puts his picture at the top and says, "hey guys, providing a free encyclopedia costs money, mind chipping in $10?".

You know you can just click the "X" and it goes away, right?

(Just out of curiosity, do people get this upset when NPR and PBS do their fund drives? Or because you are getting a lunchbox for your $100 donation, it's not as annoying? The outrage just confuses me.)

EGreg• 16 years ago

I think it's mostly because you can blame wikipedia for wanting your money, as opposed to the innocent "free" website that puts ads... at least they aren't getting your actual money LOL

it's just psychology

cookiecaper4• 16 years ago

It doesn't go away very long. I press the X and I still find myself having to press it again fairly often.

I'm probably not a good benchmark but personally I find Jimmy Wales really smug and annoying. This is due to my experience as an active WP editor back in the day. I hate the false sense of urgency that this campaign is pushing.

I'm not "outraged" by any means and haven't stopped using Wikimedia sites, but it is definitely asinine and repetitive. How long has this "urgent" fund drive been going on now? Are they just going to keep it until they hit their stated goal?

Wikipedia should find a way to become more useful, there's no need for all this crap. I wouldn't have any problem at all if WP just implemented an advanced history or page stats viewer and charged people $10/year to use it. Then they could stop with these humongous, recurring banners, the constant begging, and Jimmy Wales could quit pretending to be the saint that he definitely isn't.

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

> Wikipedia should find a way to become more useful

I find wikipedia very useful in its current form.

bradly• 16 years ago

I just think it is weird to ask people for money when there are other people(companies) willing to give them money.

andrew1• 16 years ago

I assume the reason they don't want to take money from 'people(compaines)' is that once they do they will be accused of being influenced by them. If they took a $1m donation from McDonalds, how much fuss would there be over every edit to articles about food/nutrition etc.?

philwelch• 16 years ago

Just out of curiosity, do people get this upset when NPR and PBS do their fund drives?

Yeah, actually. Most NPR listeners I keep in touch with hate fund drive season and find it highly annoying.

Frankly, I hate ads that play sound and obscure the page I'm trying to read, too. The reason I'm particularly annoyed at Wikipedia is because I hold Wikipedia to a higher standard. If Wikipedia had ads that played music or obstructed the article (even pledge drive ads featuring Jimmy Wales' goatee) I would be even more annoyed.

eli• 16 years ago

Oh yes. The worst is having to suffer through the NPR pledge drive after I've already donated.

I kinda wish the politics and technology allowed them to offer a premium version with no corporate messages or pledge drives.

lambda3• 16 years ago

Well, fund drives are annoying, whether they be for Wikipedia, NPR, or anything else. They are less annoying than ads, however, so I deal with them and don't complain. I just wish the banner would go away now that I've donated; instead, I still see the banner and have gotten an email asking me for more money.

zdw• 16 years ago

Exactly. That's the problem with old media - you can't, for example, subscribe to the "clean" version of NPR, a magazine, or a newspaper after paying for it.

With online media you can. If Wikipedia went to the "with ads for free, no ads if you subscribe or pay a one time 'founders fee'" I think it would be much more successful.

astrofinch• 16 years ago

I wouldn't donate to Wikipedia because I don't think they spend the marginal donation dollar very well. Here's a picture of the Wikimedia headquarters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_Wikimedia_Foundation_O...

I'm not convinced that having a lot of foundation employees helps make the encyclopedia better. I'd like to see Wikipedia operate on a shoestring budget and stop collecting donations once they had enough invested to run their servers off of dividends and interest indefinitely.

ecaradec• 16 years ago

very nice idea, I wonder how much money would be enough to make wikipedia run on its dividends only. Does anyone know how much wikipedia cost to operate ?

adambyrtek• 16 years ago

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit with only 27 full-time employees[1] (data for 2009) which runs, among others, the 7th most popular site on the web[2], and provides the world with an amazing source of knowledge. Of course the contents is provided by volunteers, but logistics of running a site and community of this size are far from trivial. I think that they spend the money wisely, so I donated myself and encourage you to do the same.

When it comes to the photo that you linked, what does it prove? That they work in an actual office, not a bike shed or a tent? Do you claim that it's a luxury for them to have an office?

I personally admire their spine and dedication to reject corporate money, and I'm surprised that even HN readers complain so loudly about the appeal. I guess Wikipedia already became a commodity that we got used to taking for granted. For better or worse.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

[2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org

mkramlich• 16 years ago

Can someone tell me which link leads to their high-end brothel?

ludwigvan• 16 years ago

Awesome! Has a meme on this started yet?

By the way, thanks to this, I got to read the Wales' appeal which I didn't bother to do before; but I can't take it seriously unfortunately anymore :)

Udo• 16 years ago

I think the banner asking for donations is just fine. However, I take issue with two things:

If you decide to donate, the minimum amount is 20 USD. While it is highly debatable how much access to Wikipedia is worth to a person, I believe it sends a message that they really don't care for it if you give them anything less than that.

Also, despite assurances to not use private information gathered from the Paypal transaction, once they grab a hold of an email address, they keep sending reminders intended to pressure people into signing up for a monthly subscription. This is simply not very nice.

Another minor detail: a donation to Wikimedia is handled as an ordinary PayPal payment transaction, whereas a donation to SFC (the company behind git) is properly and clearly labeled as a donation. Not that it matters much, but it probably betrays the mindset of Wikimedia to some extent.

rohitarondekar• 16 years ago

Not everybody can donate money. Is there any other way we can contribute?

schacon• 16 years ago

Though nearly everybody seemed to get the joke, a few people didn't - one in particular who seemed very upset about it, thinking that it was fraudulent in some way. I was only planning on keeping it up for one day anyhow, so I've taken the page and banner down. I thought it was an amusing parody, as did the majority of people who gave me feedback on it, I'm sorry if you did not.

If you did donate through the button, as was evident from multiple places, the donation went to the Software Freedom Conservancy for the Git project which will go to helping the Git project however the Git leaders see fit. Technically, even if you took the page seriously (which I still have a hard time understanding how that happens, the content of the appeal was simply ludicrous), I still don't think it could be considered fraudulent as the money does go to the Git project. If git-scm.com actually needed millions, which is ridiculous, it would go through the SFC. I'm also likely to transfer the domain to the SFC, so some of the donations will probably go to domain registration for git-scm.com at some point anyhow.

I apologize to anyone who took it more seriously than it was intended (except for one guy) and thank those of you who did donate because they like Git or because they like the other resources that I've put online. The money will go to the Git project and likely partially to the website for registration or transfer (the hosting of which has been donated by GitHub for a long time now and will continue to be).

spooneybarger• 16 years ago

Everytime I see a 'how could people not get that it was a parody' posts or commments, I wonder, really? How long have you been on the internet/lived in this world. Of course plenty of people aren't going to get it. If you are 'surprised' by that you are either being disingenuous or have a highly inflated idea of how critical most people are of what they read.

danielh• 16 years ago

In case you wonder what the fuzz is about: the page has been changed in the meantime.

This is how it looked: http://i.min.us/idDeBk.png

Meta: I'm reposting the link originally posted by recoil [1] because I just spent 5 minutes skimming the comments.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018992

An urgent appeal from git-scm.com maintainer Scott Chacon

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