It was a very good conference, but my experience this year was very different from last year’s, in Poland. Mostly this was because my profile as an employee of the Foundation has elevated significantly (people know to come talk to me about things) but also there is some minor celebrity from my banner ad being successful.

I gave two talks (“Encouraging Participation”, “Identity, Reputation, and Gratitude”) and sat on a panel (“Ask the Developers”). All were well-received.

I was particularly nervous about my solo talk, “Identity, Reputation, and Gratitude” (slides). This talk was (in my opinion) an important one, since it focused on the why we are going to add social features to Wikipedia and why that will not turn us into Facebook. It’s a delicate line but the changes are essential to the long-term survival of the projects.

I made a metric boatload of new friends. I am continually astonished at the work we as a collective are actually doing and how many people in the world are dedicated to The Mission. There is a visceral thrill involved with it, with recognizing those of like-minds, and how our shared enthusiasms bridge language gaps.

We did a lot of partying together. In a way, that’s a lot of what this conference is about: strengthening our ties to each other, reinforcing trust and friendships that can last thousands of miles apart.

Several of us were “boots on the ground” in Haifa a couple days before the conference started itself, so we were able to suss out local bars. Surprisingly, Haifa has a thing for Irish bars and whiskeys, which, if you know me, is right up my alley. I’m even the mayor of one of them on Foursquare.

A great memory for me was this:

On the first night of the conference, I and my immediate crew descended on one of the bars we liked. There were maybe fifteen of us. I told them that we’d need several tables and the manager was concerned: he had a group of 40 college students coming, so he wasn’t sure where he could put us. Also, he wanted to “open tables” (single tabs) for us.

I told him that the single tab thing wasn’t happening. If you’ve ever been to dinner where one guy buys 50 dollars in drinks and then only drops twenty into the pot, you’ll know why. I said we’d just buy drinks from the bar, individually. He was (rightly) concerned about tips for the waitresses, and I told him that we’d take care of that.

He wasn’t having any of it. I’m not a big guy on haggling, but the Israelis are, so I set to. Here’s what I did:

First, I told everyone, loudly, “hold on! We might be leaving!”

Then I said to the manager: “Listen, I’ve got maybe 150 people about to show up here. They’ll be spending thousands of shekels. Thousands. Now, if your establishment can’t help us, we can just go across the street.” At that point, another group of about twenty people walked in, and I got to say “Hold on, guys! We may not be staying.”

He spent exactly 60 seconds on the phone with the owner before telling me that they absolutely could do business with us, and that we could basically take over the bar. I guess that the idea of having 40 college students who nurse one beer and eat all the peanuts was less attractive than a plethora of adult conference goers who like expensive whiskey.

Conservative estimates put us as having dropped over 30,000 shekels that night, so they were very happy. I then went about making sure that everyone dropped 5 or 10 shekels into a tip jar that we gave to the waitresses. There were probably 200 people in and out of there over the whole night.

The final night the chaps from Wikimedia Israel threw us a party on the beach. It was, in a word, epic. Immediately upon arrival I took off my shoes, rolled up my pants, and walked out into the Mediterranean Sea before spending the next half hour trying to get everyone else to do so. We watched the sun go down and reflected upon The Mission and our new friendships and how we’re all working towards Something Great.

I want to comment for a moment about the heat.

Two weeks ago I was in West Virginia to visit my family and attend my 20th high school reunion. There, it was an oppressive 106 degrees fahrenheit and 100% humidity. Haifa, by comparison, was a chilly 86 degrees and 75% humidity.

Israel felt hotter.

We found this sandwich shop near the venue that sold icee-style drinks: grape and orange. The “purple drank” flavor became a staple of our continued battle with the heat. We even made up new lyrics to Purple Rain to go along with it.

The night of the closing party, I asked one of the local bartenders, “How is it that it gets hotter at night, when the sun is down, than during the day?” She shrugged and said, “Is Israel.” This became an in-joke.

The return journey was a chore. We left the hotel at around 6:00 PM Israeli local time and then I finally got home at around 9:00 PM Israeli local time the next day. Twelve hour flight from Tel Aviv to Philadelphia? Check. Baby that cried for all twelve hours? Check.

Here’s some food for thought: Ben Gurion Internation Airport in Tel Aviv is widely regarded as the most secure airport in the world. There were no porn-o-trons. And I didn’t have to take my shoes off.

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.