8 ms·

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

133 points by kneath 16y ago

seiji 16y ago
It's a joke parodying http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMFJA032/en/US 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.
- blutonium 16y 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/ http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/
  - recoil 16y 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 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).
- klochner 16y ago
  Speaking of wikipedia, I'd be perfectly content if the "urgent appeal" banner were replaced with an ad.
  - bajsejohannes 16y ago
    I find it particularly bad that the banner is there even after you donate.
    - sjs 16y ago
      On top of that, a few weeks after donating I got an "urgent" request from Jimmy Wales looking for a recurring monthly donation.
  - beoba 16y 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
    - moe 16y ago
      I don't think anything would happen. They should just get one big sponsor per year to cover their costs and be done with it. Why not have a McDonalds or Pepsi banner somewhere in the corner? Bargain branding for them, free wikipedia for us. And to limit the influence they could make it a rule to switch sponsor once a year. Why not auction the ad-spot and donate the overflow to charity?
      - dantheman 16y ago
        or just keep the extra as an endowment and eventually just run off that
    - mseebach 16y ago
      If an advertiser is dissatisfied, he withdraws his ads and is replaced. If noone wants to advertise on controversial topics, wikipedia has more than enough uncontroversial content to pay the bills. They might even just disable ads on controversial pages, which would go a long way towards avoiding even percieved conflicts of interest.
    - tyree732 16y ago
      What happens when Google says they won't donate to Wikipedia unless the Google article represents them more favorably?
  - rl1987 16y ago
    Same here, I could take care of it with AdBlock...
  - juanefren 16y ago
    I had to put the following with chrome scripts. $("#siteNotice").hide();
  - jdp23 16y ago
    The urgent appeal banner is an ad.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      It is, but it's not bad in the way that an outside advertisement is bad: there's no conflict of interest.
  - ghshephard 16y 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.
    - stevvooe 16y ago
      I'll write you some JavaScript to get rid of it for small one time fee of $100.
    - Zev 16y ago
      If you have a custom CSS sheet, you can add the following to it to remove the banner: div#siteNotice { display: none !important; }
  - lambda 16y 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?
    - storborg 16y ago
      Why would they lose credibility? It seems like an ad could be much more profitable than the donation banner, because ads can be targeted, even with zero behavioral history. For example, if I'm visiting a page on the new Tron movie, show me ads for the Daft Punk album! Odds are I might buy it. Also, all of the things you said about ads could be said about in-house donation banners. * Manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money * Tend to be animated... etc * Could provide vectors for malicious...
      - lambda 16y ago
        They would lose credibility because there would be a conflict of interest. Advertisers would be able to manipulate Wikipedia by threatening to remove ads unless they received favorable coverage, or negative coverage were removed. Yes, I'm sure that ads could be more profitable than a donation banner. This is why most websites have ads instead of donation banners. However, Wikipedia is not a for-profit enterprise. It is an educational non-profit. If it were a for-profit enterprise, people would trust it much less, not as many people would contribute to it since they'd wonder why they were donating time and effort to a for-profit enterprise, etc. And none of those things you list are true of a donation banner. Donating to an educational non-profit is not a "baser desire." I have never seen an animated banner asking for donations on Wikipedia, nor anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head. And donation banners are coming straight from Wikipedia, not a third party; if they wanted to send malicious code, they could do so directly. The point is that ad networks are notorious vectors to allow malicious code to be injected by third parties into other people's sites.
- jroes 16y ago
  I knew something was up when he said it costs >1mil/year to host the git-scm site.
gnok 16y ago
The footnote mentions this is a parody. And quote "Donations made will actually go to the Git project under the Software Freedom Conservancy.".
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- getsat 16y ago
  Though this is (apparently?) a joke, I would donate if there were other options besides Google Checkout. Git is one piece of software that I can unequivocally say has changed my life for the better.
  - schacon 16y ago
    You can donate in several ways here: http://git-scm.com/sfc http://git-scm.com/sfc
    - getsat 16y ago
      Great, thanks for the link!
famousactress 16y ago
The hosting of this incredibly high-traffic site costs in the millions of dollars a year. Love it.
js2 16y ago
Background: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/163845/focus=163846 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/16384...
Groxx 16y 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 16y ago
They just joined the SFC - http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/dec/16/git-joins/ http://sfconservancy.org/news/2010/dec/16/git-joins/
ztan 16y 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:NoticeTemplate/view&template=2010_JA1_Banner7_US 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_testing http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testi...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 16y 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 16y 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
- cookiecaper 16y 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 16y ago
    > Wikipedia should find a way to become more useful I find wikipedia very useful in its current form.
mkramlich 16y ago
Can someone tell me which link leads to their high-end brothel?
ludwigvan 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago
Not everybody can donate money. Is there any other way we can contribute?
schacon 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018992

133 points by kneath 16y ago

seiji 16y ago

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

blutonium 16y 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/ http://sfconservancy.org/members/current/
- recoil 16y 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 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).
klochner 16y ago
Speaking of wikipedia, I'd be perfectly content if the "urgent appeal" banner were replaced with an ad.
- bajsejohannes 16y ago
  I find it particularly bad that the banner is there even after you donate.
  - sjs 16y ago
    On top of that, a few weeks after donating I got an "urgent" request from Jimmy Wales looking for a recurring monthly donation.
- beoba 16y 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
  - moe 16y ago
    I don't think anything would happen. They should just get one big sponsor per year to cover their costs and be done with it. Why not have a McDonalds or Pepsi banner somewhere in the corner? Bargain branding for them, free wikipedia for us. And to limit the influence they could make it a rule to switch sponsor once a year. Why not auction the ad-spot and donate the overflow to charity?
    - dantheman 16y ago
      or just keep the extra as an endowment and eventually just run off that
  - mseebach 16y ago
    If an advertiser is dissatisfied, he withdraws his ads and is replaced. If noone wants to advertise on controversial topics, wikipedia has more than enough uncontroversial content to pay the bills. They might even just disable ads on controversial pages, which would go a long way towards avoiding even percieved conflicts of interest.
  - tyree732 16y ago
    What happens when Google says they won't donate to Wikipedia unless the Google article represents them more favorably?
- rl1987 16y ago
  Same here, I could take care of it with AdBlock...
- juanefren 16y ago
  I had to put the following with chrome scripts. $("#siteNotice").hide();
- jdp23 16y ago
  The urgent appeal banner is an ad.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    It is, but it's not bad in the way that an outside advertisement is bad: there's no conflict of interest.
- ghshephard 16y 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.
  - stevvooe 16y ago
    I'll write you some JavaScript to get rid of it for small one time fee of $100.
  - Zev 16y ago
    If you have a custom CSS sheet, you can add the following to it to remove the banner: div#siteNotice { display: none !important; }
- lambda 16y 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?
  - storborg 16y ago
    Why would they lose credibility? It seems like an ad could be much more profitable than the donation banner, because ads can be targeted, even with zero behavioral history. For example, if I'm visiting a page on the new Tron movie, show me ads for the Daft Punk album! Odds are I might buy it. Also, all of the things you said about ads could be said about in-house donation banners. * Manipulate your baser desires to get you to part with your money * Tend to be animated... etc * Could provide vectors for malicious...
    - lambda 16y ago
      They would lose credibility because there would be a conflict of interest. Advertisers would be able to manipulate Wikipedia by threatening to remove ads unless they received favorable coverage, or negative coverage were removed. Yes, I'm sure that ads could be more profitable than a donation banner. This is why most websites have ads instead of donation banners. However, Wikipedia is not a for-profit enterprise. It is an educational non-profit. If it were a for-profit enterprise, people would trust it much less, not as many people would contribute to it since they'd wonder why they were donating time and effort to a for-profit enterprise, etc. And none of those things you list are true of a donation banner. Donating to an educational non-profit is not a "baser desire." I have never seen an animated banner asking for donations on Wikipedia, nor anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head. And donation banners are coming straight from Wikipedia, not a third party; if they wanted to send malicious code, they could do so directly. The point is that ad networks are notorious vectors to allow malicious code to be injected by third parties into other people's sites.
jroes 16y ago
I knew something was up when he said it costs >1mil/year to host the git-scm site.

gnok 16y ago

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

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

getsat 16y ago
Though this is (apparently?) a joke, I would donate if there were other options besides Google Checkout. Git is one piece of software that I can unequivocally say has changed my life for the better.
- schacon 16y ago
  You can donate in several ways here: http://git-scm.com/sfc http://git-scm.com/sfc
  - getsat 16y ago
    Great, thanks for the link!

famousactress 16y ago

The hosting of this incredibly high-traffic site costs in the millions of dollars a year. Love it.

js2 16y ago

Background: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/163845/focus=163846 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/16384...

Groxx 16y 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 16y ago

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

ztan 16y 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:NoticeTemplate/view&template=2010_JA1_Banner7_US 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_testing http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Banner_testi...

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jrockway 16y 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 16y 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
cookiecaper 16y 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 16y ago
  > Wikipedia should find a way to become more useful I find wikipedia very useful in its current form.

mkramlich 16y ago

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

ludwigvan 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago

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

schacon 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018992