Jimmy Wales on net neutrality—"It's complicated"—and his $100m fundraising challenge

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Jimmy Wales on net neutrality—"It's complicated"—and his $100m fundraising challenge

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Jimmy Wales speaking last year at the Bengali Wikipedia's 10th anniversary gala event in Dhaka, Bangladesh

The Economic Times, part of the Indian Times Group, features an interview with Jimmy Wales (also available in video format) on the topic of net neutrality and zero-rated Internet offerings (May 30).

Net neutrality has been a highly controversial issue in India for the past two years. In 2015, a pro-net neutrality Save the Internet campaign arose that vehemently criticised Indian telecom companies along with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's Internet.org initiative.

Indian comedy collective All India Bakchod played a major part in India's popular campaign for net neutrality, releasing a series of influential YouTube videos (1, 2, 3) that urged Indian citizens to oppose Free Basics and other zero-rated services.

Internet.org, more recently re-branded Free Basics, is designed to provide mobile phone users in developing countries with zero-rated access to Facebook and a small number of other websites, including Wikipedia, while accessing anything else on the Internet would mean that the user incurs data charges.

The campaign against Free Basics was spearheaded by lawyers, IT experts, and cultural figures like the All India Bakchod comedy collective, which made three influential YouTube videos urging people to write to the Indian Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) in support of net neutrality, and to express their opposition to zero-rating schemes like Free Basics on the grounds that they mainly serve to cement existing monopolies, to the detriment of smaller and local competitors.

In February 2016, TRAI upheld the net neutrality principle and banned Free Basics and similar zero-rated services in India, a decision widely attributed to the popular campaign.

The Economic Times asked Wales for his opinion about these developments (time code 6:14 in the video), given that the Wikimedia Foundation has its own zero-rated offering, Wikipedia Zero. Wales defended Wikipedia Zero:

Our Wikipedia Zero offering follows a very strict set of principles such as no money is ever exchanged and so on. Net neutrality is such a very, very complicated topic. It's something that I am very passionate about; I think net neutrality is incredibly important. And at the same time I think that getting access to knowledge for the poorest people in the world is also very important.
Sometimes those two things can be to some degree in tension and we have to be really careful about it. I think the most fundamental thing is that it's really important that we maintain a very open and free Internet and a free flow of information. So the detailed policy options ... well, it gets very subtle ... but net neutrality is very important.

Wales has in the past commented favourably on Facebook's Internet.org project, saying in 2014 that the Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Zero people were in contact with the Internet.org team and that "In my personal capacity, I am a big fan of what they are trying to do and support it fully".

In the Economic Times interview, however, Wales remained non-committal about the recent developments in India outlawing zero-rated services, saying he lacked the knowledge to give an opinion on whether the Indian government had done the right thing in clamping down on Free Basics:

I am not an expert on the specific legislation, the specific details of the Indian case. What I do say is I encourage people on all sides to come together and really think about all of the different competing values and how to best balance them. Was this the best balancing act? I'm not really in a position to say.

Wales also commented on a number of other issues in the video interview, such as the importance of getting enough good sleep, the spread of smartphones in India, the development of Wikipedias in India's regional languages and Wikimedia Foundation fundraising.

On the latter topic, Wales said that in order to fund the Wikimedia Foundation's recently started endowment, he would be approaching tech billionaires this year and ask them to "chip in" (time code 5:30 in the video). He affirmed this intent in an interview (May 30) with Austrian business magazine Trend as well, saying his main fundraising job this year is to "raise 100 million dollars".

In brief

Hollywood actress Amber Heard, whose Wikipedia article was vandalised on Friday

Wrong venue: The Courier Mail reports that the venues listed in Wikipedia's article for the 2017 Rugby League World Cup were wrong and "not even close" to organisers' actual plans. The article has now been protected.
Wikipedia vs. textbooks: In The Indian Express, Nishant Shah, a professor of new media and co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, celebrates Wikipedia's successes while criticising the editing of Indian textbooks. (June 5)
Timeline of the far future: In its "Wiki Wormhole" series focusing on Wikipedia oddities, The A.V. Club reviews the Wikipedia article Timeline of the far future. (June 5)
Racism accusation removed: The Daily Caller reports that accusations by a black Washington Post employee that the paper's owner "is responsible for 'systemic' racism at the paper, including white managers shrieking at her and other African-American subordinates with impunity, were ... removed from his Wikipedia page by an anonymous user on Wednesday" who cited possible "vandalism". The Daily Caller opines that "the only 'vandalism' here was the removal of the information, which damages the whole purpose of Wikipedia: make crucial factual information, particularly about powerful public figures, available to the public." (June 4)
Depp–Heard divorce sparks BLP violation on Wikipedia: The Daily Mail reports that Amber Heard's Wikipedia biography was edited on Friday to say that she was a "gold digger" who "married the super talented and respected actor Johnny Depp to take advantage of his kind nature. She feels she no longer needed him therefore began blackmailing him with abuse allegations." The edit, made by single-edit account Hillstar523, was reverted 11 minutes later and its content is no longer visible in the Wikipedia article's edit history. The Daily Mail illustrates its story with before-and-after images of Google's Knowledge Graph panel for Heard quoting the Wikipedia wording. Heard's biography has been subject to pending changes protection since January 2014 because of persistent vandalism. As noted in this Signpost issue's traffic report, both Depp's and Heard's biographies were among the ten most viewed Wikipedia articles this week. (June 4)
Gender gap: Nicole Torres asks in the Harvard Business Review, "Why do so few women edit Wikipedia?" Her article reviews academic research on the matter that has highlighted factors such as women's inclination to avoid conflict (resulting in a greater reluctance to edit other people's work), men's tendency to be overconfident in their own abilities even in the face of negative feedback, and a tendency for women to be punished more severely for expressions of anger than men are. The article concludes with a discussion of recent initiatives by the Wikimedia Foundation to identify and curb online harassment. A brief summary of Torres' piece also appears on the website of The Economic Times. (June 2, 4)
Improving the coverage of Jewish women on Wikipedia: The Forward reports on efforts by the Center for Jewish History to expand Wikipedia's offerings on Jewish women. (June 3)
Year of Science: The Daily Bruin reports on programs at the UCLA and other universities that involve students in writing Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. The article quotes the Wiki Education Foundation's Eryk Salvaggio. (June 2)
Sebastian Bach: On Loudwire, Sebastian Bach plays "Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction?", resulting in "a memorable episode filled with correcting falsehoods about his life and career." (June 1)
Wikiversity Journal of Medicine: The Conversation reports on the Wikiversity Journal of Medicine, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. (May 24)

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5 June 2016 (all comments)

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Gender gap If my memory serves me (and it does) research showed that women edited more contentious articles on Wikipedia than men. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:20, 5 June 2016 (UTC).[reply]

@Rich Farmbrough: does the effect survive removal of outliers? Link, please? EllenCT (talk) 21:24, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I have dug a little into where the "avoiding conflict" came from: the article says "less comfortable with editing others’ work (a process which often involves conflict)," and the abstract of the study says "expressed greater discomfort with editing (which typically involves conflict)" - while Signpost says " factors such as women's inclination to avoid conflict (resulting in a greater reluctance to edit other people's work). In other words it appears (subject to reading the study itself) that chain of interpretation has moved a posited motivation into being an observed phenomenon. This type of re-writing is not unusual with social sciences, and not unheard of with hard sciences.

The paper with the "more contentious" result is Lam, et al.

We found that 5.20% of the “female” articles described in section 4.2 are protected, while just 2.39% of the “male” articles are protected, c2(1,N =23989)=129.1, p<0.001. Thus, articles that have a higher concentration of female editorship are actually more likely to be contentious than those with more males.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:35, 6 June 2016 (UTC).[reply]

100 million dollars is far too low, unless endowment fundraising is planned for multiple years. Please see e.g. [1] and meta:Talk:Endowment#Goal proposal. EllenCT (talk) 22:03, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- An endowment isn't going to free WMF from needing to go hat-in-hand on a regular basis, as much as we'd like to believe. Some years ago that question came up concerning our local public library (which at the time was a private non-profit), & it was revealed that endowment revenue produce somewhere between 5-10% of the revenue needed by a non-profit. (And when the library was taken over by the county, there was a brief struggle over control of the endowment -- one of the former trustees believed he could spend it better than the county could.) -- llywrch (talk) 17:29, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Why are we perpetuating BLP violations here? Just because The Daily Mail wants to talk about it doesn't mean we should as well. It doesn't matter if we put the BLP violation in quotation marks, we are still perpetuating it (twice in the same article), which is potentially damaging the reputation of the person under discussion. Kaldari (talk) 23:19, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- I went ahead and removed the specific attacks from the image caption. They are still in the article, however. Perhaps they should be removed there as well. Kaldari (talk) 23:27, 5 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@EllenCT: I'll suggest that the WMF *not* try to use the endowment to fund itself in perpetuity. What that would do is insulate it from performing services beneficial to the public and potential donors. It could then become a self-perpetuating, self-indulgent monster over the next few decades. This type of thing has happened often with long-lived foundations. Also, we do not really know what society's needs will be in 30 years. Perhaps something like Wikipedia will not be needed - something better and cheaper may have replaced it. Let me give you an example of a foundation that started with a good purpose and lots of money, has had to change over time. In 1905 Milton Hershey founded the Hershey Trust Company to fund a school for white orphan boys from Pennsylvania who would be trained for basic mechanical and farming jobs. Wonderful as far as it goes, and I won't blame MH for limiting it to whites and boys - back then it would likely have been impossible to include blacks and girls in an overall program like this. Over time the Hershey Chocolate Company expanded rapidly, becoming huge. The trust owned the whole company at one time. They also ran out of Pennsylvania orphans. Today, they recruit single-parent children from the whole east coast (great as far as it goes), and spend more on each one than the best private schools. Then they fund 4 years of any US university for them. They also argue and occasionally get into trouble on how to split up the rest of the money. (In the 60s and 70s, blacks and girls were finally let in).
My point is not that Hershey Trust is good or bad, only that, even 40 years in the future you never know how the goals of the foundation will be changed - or should be changed.
I propose that the interest on the endowment should be able to "keep the lights on" for several decades in the future. We owe it to past editors to keep their work on the internet for at least 10 years. We also may lose potential partners (GLAMs, universities, etc.) unless they know that we have the resources to stay open for several decades.
But other than that, the WMF should be able to go to the public each year with accomplishments and a program that will convince the public to keep on funding it. That will keep the WMF lean and relevant.
The principal of the endowment should only be used in cases of ultimate emergency - I believe the word in charity circles is exigency - the near equivalent of bankruptcy in the corporate world. If the WMF shows that it can't come up with accomplishments and a program that will convince the public to fund it, then it will be time to change the management and use part of the endowment to give the new management a fair start.
If it looks like the foundation won't have any prospects of being useful or relevant (remember - large changes occur over decades), then the endowment can be used to keep the then current text up on the internet for another 10 years.
$100-150 million should be able to accomplish all of that. I assume something like a 3% return over inflation which will likely be the case in the long term from a basic, no-brainer, index strategy. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:36, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Heh, Smallbones, you could have used the example of endowments set up to fight tuberculosis. There was a point in the 1950s where the disease was considered extinct & non-profits were stuck with all of this money they couldn't re-allocate to other worthy causes. Anyway, for reasons I mention above I doubt an endowment could provide more than 10% (at most). Good for funding special projects or covering short-term shortfalls, & an endowment would provide a place to put interest earned on unspent donations. (IIRC, the Foundation currently has tens of millions sitting idle for months; their current practice to keep onhand one year's budget against donation shortfalls.) Otherwise, your points make a lot of sense Smallbones. -- llywrch (talk) 17:44, 6 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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