You might have seen it mentioned on various news sites.

I am very proud of our accomplishment. I want to write a bit how this went down, behind the scenes, and how I came up with the “black out” design, something I am extremely proud of.

On the afternoon of Friday the 13th, I attended my first “SOPA War Room” meeting. At this point in time, it was clear that the community wanted to do something about SOPA and PIPA. We (the Foundation) felt that it was time to start the gears turning about enacting whatever the protest action was going to be.

I was brought into the discussion because the screens needed to be designed and implemented, and, well, my title is “Senior Designer.” I was tasked with coming up with two design variants and to publish them before midnight that evening (which gave me roughly three hours time, once I was able to work on them).

During this meeting, I walked everyone though the ramifications of the design so that we were all on the same page. I knew that since time was tight I was going to have to “get it in one” and we weren’t going to be able to do a lot of futzing with it.

I recommended that we go with something that was simple and had a “statesman” like feel to it rather than something over-the-top (which I referred to as the “dragonslayer” approach).

It was about an hour after this that I got nervous. “Jellyfish in my belly” nervous, because I realized that this was going to be an historic event, and really, how often does anyone design something specifically to be historic?

So. I armed myself with the following thoughts:

1. The screen must be iconic. This image will be used in screen shots in the media and elsewhere.
2. The screen must be simple. While the issues presented are complex, they must be boiled down to easy-to-understand concepts, with room for expansion.
3. The screen must be symbolic. This is potentially a historical event.

And the following design considerations:

1. The Wikipedia “puzzle globe” image is a “busy” icon, and not appropriate for the type of statement required.
2. Simplicity over complexity.
3. Seriousness over frivolity.
4. The Wikipedia wordmark was deemed important to include.

My design philosophy is summed up as “More Kirk, less Spock.” I felt that, for this image, anything that could be deleted from the design should be.

The first image I came up with was a “white” version. It was really just a really large “W” logo, in a dark grey, and a block of text on a translucent white box set to overlay it. It didn’t feel right, though, and in a fit of inspiration I added the shadow to it.

I then sent the images around to the team for comments. We played around with the sample language a bit and I published them to the discussion on the English Wikipedia around 11:30 pm, about two and a half hours after I started.

We figured that the community would come to a vague consensus as to which direction they wanted to go within about twelve hours: do we want to go with a “light” theme or a “dark” theme was the real question.

The next morning I woke up to see that the “dark” image was leading in the polls by a factor of around 50 to 1. So, that answered that question pretty clearly, and we (Ryan Kaldari and I) began the technical implementation.

The black out screen was actually implemented through the technology we use for our fundraising banners (it’s called “CentralNotice”). We chose this method because at the time we were still assuming that it was going to be an interstitial image (so we had to load the “real” Wikipedia behind the scenes) and that it was going to be targeted to the USA (the banner system has some sophisticated Geolocation technology).

I did most of the initial html and css coding on a static page (Neil Kandalgaonkar would later do the implementation inside of CentralNotice entirely in Javascript) while Ryan worked on creating an extension to handle congressional representative lookups. We had a passable prototype by the end of day, Sunday.

I made some tweaks to the image design along the way – tweaks that I thought were minor at the time but ended up having a massive impact to the overall mood. I raised the W logo from its shadow, so that it floated, and I changed the gradient to be radial rather than linear.

Monday was a work holiday, but the Anti-SOPA team came into the office anyway. This was when the bulk of the congressional lookup feature was coded (though the superheroes I work with were coding it right up to the launch on Tuesday evening).

At four o’clock in the afternoon on Monday the consensus discussion regarding the protest was closed and we were given our marching orders: a global, “hard” blackout, 24 hours, beginning at midnight EST on Wednesday the 18th (which meant we had to launch at 9 PM local on Tuesday evening).

Monday evening’s war room time was spent on messaging: Sue Gardner wrote a blog post explaining what we were going to do and why. It was published and linked from a banner on Wikipedia and. . . instantly crashed the blog server.

Ryan Lane spent an hour heroically battling the performance issues on that server, upgrading it, adding caches, and generally hyperdriving its performance. This was a weird thing: no blog post had ever gotten more than a few hundred comments before but this one picked up a couple thousand within an hour. It took four of us operating at once to moderate the comments they were coming in so fast (as of this writing, there are almost 13,000 comments on that post).

The decision for the black out to be global and “hard” were problems for us. At the time that the decision was handed down, we had been committed to our technology choices (the train had actually left the station on Friday, to be honest). Blacking out the mobile gateway was a non-starter: that technology doesn’t do CentralNotice at all and the development time required was deemed too much.

We also made a call that there should be ways for people to get at the data if they absolutely needed to, which is why we designed in some ways to get around the black out screen (disabling Javascript, pressed ESC before it loaded, and appending ?banner=none were all ways to do this).

I’ve been asked a lot why we didn’t just point a redirect to a single “black out” screen and the answer to that is, frankly, it would have annihilated our search rankings. We felt that doing so would actually be a disservice to The Mission. Google suggested that most sites just return “503” error codes to avoid this, but Wikipedia isn’t “most sites”: we are indexed differently (Google polls the recent changes feed). We were specifically told not to do the “503” trick.

Tuesday was a blur of meetings. Meetings about messaging. Meetings about press coverage. We wrote and rewrote the text of the landing page about fifty times. Everyone who could program was working on getting the congressional lookup system working. We ran into problem after problem and worked through them. Text was being edited all the way up to the launch moment.

I was plugged into the projector. At nine pm I hit “refresh”, and this is what happened.

I work with some superheroes.

In the end, we managed to change minds. We flooded the internet with our message and people listened. We melted the phone lines on Capitol Hill. We struck a blow for the free and open internet.

And that’s something, I think.

The entire event was exhausting, exhilarating, and elating. I felt closer to The Mission in those hours than I ever have.

I had lunch today with a friend of mine who used to work for the Foundation and she told me that she’d never been prouder of us and what we do than that moment. It was a good thing to hear, and a good thing to feel.

I absolutely love this job. I want to say thank you to everyone on the planet for giving me the opportunity to do the Good Work. I am filled with gratitude, knowing that this work makes a difference.

Last week, Wikipedia tested a banner ad using my image and words to see how well it would work come our annual fundraiser. You may have seen it. You may have seen comments about it.

(Note that this testing is ongoing; there will be further tests, so don’t be surprised to see me there in the future.)

I have a lot of words I want to say about this but really there are two subjects: the process as to how banner ads are chosen, and my personal feelings as to why you should, like, donate a fucking dollar to Wikipedia.

Today, I’m going to explain the process.

Every year, a small team of kick-ass people get together and formulate a plan to raise enough money to keep the fires at the Wikimedia Foundation burning. It’s an important task and one I most certainly do not envy: it is an extremely stressful job, composed of long-in-the-tooth days and punctuated by lots of armchair criticism.

It’s also very scientific.

Many non-profits are funded through “large gift” systems. That is, they subsist via donations and grants from wealthy philanthropists or organizations. Typically the amounts involved are in the tens of thousands of dollars but can reach into the millions (such as large trusts). Obviously, a smart charity with an agile team of large-donation fundraisers can quickly make some serious cake with this model.

However.

The problem with the “large gift” model is that it opens the charity to being hamstrung or possibly being perceived as biased. Large grants often have strings attached: “Here is a million dollars, but you have to spend it building this feature.” Conditions like this aren’t flexible: you can’t take some of that money and spend it to keep the site running.

The more insidious problem is one of bias. If the Foundation accepts a multi-million dollar donation from a shady oil company, even if there are no strings attached, what does that say? Is there an implication that Wikipedia will be “soft” on the articles written about said shady oil company?

What happens next year, when shady oil company says, “So, we’d like to double our gift this year, but there’s some rather. . . unfortunate. . . words about us in your Wikipedia?”

Can’t do it. Won’t do it.

Enter the “small donation” model. The Foundation is fueled by thousands and thousands of “small” donations from “normal” people – the people who use it every day, me and you. The information in Wikipedia is crowd-sourced. Why not its funding, as well? In this way we avoid both the strings and the bias.

We obtain our small donations via banner ads. These banners are handled with science and undergo some rigorous A/B testing. The fundraising team creates a banner and writes (or handles) the landing page “appeal”. Multiple versions of these combinations and wordings are then run against each other in a kind of “Fundraising Thunderdome”: Two banners enter, one banner leaves.

The banner and appeal that has the highest monetary gain is the winner – until a new banner is created that tests better.

Enter the “Personal Appeal from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales.” These banners – we call them “Jimmy Banners” – make an incredible amount of money compared to any other banners that are tested. So much more that it’s frankly ridiculous and irresponsible to not use them almost exclusively. There’s been a lot of exploration into exactly why this is true and various theories have been brought forth and played around with.

This year, the Fundraising team is playing around with “personal appeals” from other people associated with the Foundation. The other week, several members of the staff were interviewed (on camera) by the Foundation’s “storytellers” so that they could better write appeals in our own words. Why were we here, and why was this important.

I am, apparently, a “walking sound bite,” which is why I was first in the chamber. And that’s why my face is on Wikipedia.

For the curious, my two appeals and the results of my banner tests versus Jimmy Wales are available.

(Spoiler: I made more money.)

I also took some photos.

For some weeks now I have been meaning to write about why I work at the Wikimedia Foundation and today seems as good a day as any.

Why do I work at the Foundation? It’s simple.

The future.

I am a reasonably intelligent man. Few paths of study would have been beyond my reach but I knew, somehow, that I would find the stereotypical “success” paths of medicine or law or politics unsatisfying. For a time I dabbled in the creative arts but in many ways that felt hollow because my motivations were hollow.

Greatness does not come from superficiality.

Say what you will about Wikipedia. Its community is fickle bunch, drama-laden, often harsh and hidebound. The projects have flaws, inconsistencies, and errors. It’s bureaucratic to a degree that Sam Lowry would find comforting. We are often wrong.

However, Wikipedia is not superficial.

A year ago I was working at Electronic Arts and becoming increasingly unhappy with my work there. I wrote two kinds of software: programs that made it easier to hire people and programs that made it easier to fire those same people six months later. It was a bit depressing (but certainly not as depressing as working on artificial intelligence systems for the military). The office politics were becoming toxic and I felt little agency to control my own destiny.

Then one day, out of the blue, my friend Danese Cooper initiated a Facebook chat with me. I’d known Danese for over a decade, having worked with her husband on and off (first at Sun Microsystems, where I was a “webmaster” in the late 1990s and then at Elemental Security, where I was the User Interface Lead).

She had taken the position of Chief Technical Officer at the Foundation a few months prior and was looking for a designer. While the Foundation had a few people with smatterings of design talent, they didn’t have anyone with my skill set, and would I be interested in taking a massive pay cut in order to make the world a better place?

Well now. That had a nice ring to it.

I figured that at the worst case, I’d be able to walk away in a year or two with a nice, fat top-five property on my resume. The commute was a big draw as well: I was spending upwards of two hours in the car every morning and a 15 minute train ride was very attractive. I wanted to get back into writing games, which I couldn’t do while working for a game company. And so forth.

I was focused on how this job would benefit me. I was focused on the superficialities of work.

But then, a few weeks into working at the Foundation, something wonderful happened.

I understood The Mission. I became fully aware that I was living the first line of my obituary.

The Mission can be summed thusly:

“To provide the sum of human knowledge to everyone in the world for free.”

That’s easy enough to say and easy enough to understand. But that easy understanding is feeble and, honestly, superficial. It expresses an immediacy that really isn’t there.

The power of The Mission lies in its implications.

You see, The Mission isn’t just about giving you a quick lookups for lists of Pokemon or the history of Hull, England. Those are superficialities.

The Mission is about enabling children in Pune, India learn about the world in a way that just simply would never be available to them. The Mission is about helping developmentally disabled learn for themselves. The Mission is about providing laptops to the poor in South America.

The Mission is about helping people learn another language. The Mission is about exposing people to new ideas. It’s about consensus. It’s about opening eyes and changing minds – forever.

The Mission is about telling people that there is a great big world out there, and you can learn all you want to about it. The Mission is thinking outside of the box – forever.

The Mission is about preserving our history and culture throughout time. Years from now, our descendants will be able to look back through the history and discussion pages for every article and be able to know how we understood the universe at that time.

The Mission is about giving to the future.

Wikipedia is the promise of the internet. It’s here, you know. Right now. The future. You’ve already got it, and I want to say thank you for giving it to me.

You can actually hear the capitals when people say “The Mission” when someone understands it.

All the bullshit in our lives is transient and superficial. Economic downturns, poor political schemes, bad housing investments, trends in movies, tastes in fashion, life, love, sadness and joy: they are all temporary.

The Mission is not. The Mission remains and always will. It may come to pass that Wikipedia will cease to be, but that’s okay: Wikipedia is simply part of The Mission, one way of attempting to realize it.

I’ve got The Mission now. It can’t be taken away from me.

If this were . . . a normal site we might choose to punt on the bugs. Your technology is out of date, we can’t support you, your browser has reached end-of-life years ago, etc.

We got this message. Every now and then I pull it out and re-dedicate myself to The Mission.

Hello Wikipedia,

Up until you made these changes my husband was learning a ton! He had seizures growing up and as a result he has a very low IQ. I was so thrilled when I showed him your site and he would go to it just like a child, hungry for knowledge! He searched for answers like I never thought he could. He was learning and talking passionately about things he read here. I’ve been searching for an alternative but unless we can pay the $14.99 for the app, we’re lost. Could you please bring back the functionality for Blackberry users? It would open the world to a 38 year old man like you can’t imagine.

Just a plea from his loving wife.

Thanks for reading.

[redacted]

That is why I do what I do.

Many things may not make sense out of context. Let me break down some weird-ass events for you.

• A bunch of us trespassed into a part of the old town that had been bombed into oblivion 60+ years ago and took photos. We pretended to not know what the signs meant even though one of us spoke the language and was actually born in Gdansk.
• While out to dinner, an unexpected parade passed us. A parade of pirates. Pirates on stilts.
• Several of us went to a museum. A museum of amber (a local precious “gemstone”) and torture.
• I met a dog with one eye.