I'm not American so I'm not familiar with donations in general - I always felt it was better for society to build self-sustainable systems via tax and votes or companies to build self-sustainable products via investments and profits, rather than have some shady in between - useful enough for us to want to pay but useless enough for us not to want to pay for real.
It would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I think this needs to die for something more profitable and sustainable to rise in its place, organized by people who make their money input not dependent on charity but a recognized social utility.
StackOverflow seems to handle the fine line well, Reddit as well. They both provide volunteer-heavy knowledge sharing while not appealing to charitable emotions that are disingenuous (if wiki is dying, fine: say it, but if it's not then their only way of growing budget is to pretend it is - it's the sign of an issue for me)
Communist revolutions are just anger and frustration making heads roll all around for a big reset, but the phoenix rising in the ashes of the revolution surprisingly often has the same face as it had before. I live in China, my friends always tell me "we've always had an emperor in Beijing, this is the same thing with another name, why make such a fuss about it", proving that not only did the revolution change nothing for them, but worst: they don't even see there was some sort of point to it. So a communist revolution will change nothing to Wikipedia's governance.
I don't think Wikipedia can be state-sponsored, or even UN-sponsored: it doesn't matter enough. But a corporate entity with a product vision and a clear statement of profit would reduce the tearful aspect of their marketing campaign, appeal to its utility rather than our sobbing hearts and maybe shed a bit (a lot?) of the volunteering to welcome people like me who edit wiki for stuff they need rather than to "offer the world a knowledge sharing platform" in itself ?
They both rely on advertisements (And reddit gold, which is kind of like a donation).
That's generally been very unpalatable to the people who write wikipedia. Even the mere rumour of something like that being considered resulted in a fork of the spanish wikipedia into Enciclopedia Libre back in 2002.
Why would that require communism or a revolution? The American state already gives tax breaks and/or funding to charities, research organisations, public messaging initiatives, school systems, public services etc... there's a huge range of options that involve tweaking the rules of current systems before even getting anywhere near needing to change the entire political system.
I mean the parent suggested not relying on charity. School systems are essentially an arm of the government. I just don't see what the options are for something like wikipedia (Or even say something like a critical open source project like openssl) that doesn't involve relying on charity or advertisments, short of a major change to how our society is structured.
Well for example, and I'm not advocating for these ideas other than pointing out that they'd be much simpler than changing the structure of society: the Government could either buy, or forcefully take control of, Wikipedia, or they could create a competitor with enough funding to take over. They could do it creating a gov department to run it, or they could set it up as an organisation fully owned by the state. They wouldn't even have to go that far, they could just pass a bill that would send however much money from taxpayers to Wikipedia every year, or as a one-off to create a new taxpayer-funded endowment.
There's lots of changes to society that I think would be good, but "ability for government to decide to spend taxpayer money on a charity like Wikipedia, or to create their own version in-house" isn't exactly lacking from the current system.
I think why it needs to start selling data services should also be asked. At the very least everyone should have equal access to Wikipedia. Using "Big Tech" as an excuse to charge is not relevant in my humble opinion.
Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams of edit data to financial organisations.
I'm concerned by WMF's cancerous growth, but this particular initiative makes sense to me. Wikipedia already provides free APIs for everybody to use, and they work fine for typical users who want to grab a page or a hundred, but the Googles of the world are essentially scraping the entire site multiple times a day. This imposes a real cost on WMF, and it's a win-win for both sides if companies pay for support and get better service in return.
“ the WMF is launching a for-profit company named Wikimedia, LLC. This will sell API services to big tech companies, making it easier for them to process Wikimedia content, which powers voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as well as Google’s infoboxes.”
“ The WMF emphasizes time and again that Wikipedia never tries to sell the public anything.”
Those can’t both be true. Selling to google is just indirectly selling to the general public.
The alternative is search engines and bots hammering on the doors of Wikipedia and costing huge infrastructure dollars. Their Enterprise API AFAICT is a value-add, and does not prevent scraping.
The other great mystery is that despite Clay Shirkey's romantic web 2.0 book 'Here Comes Everybody' nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors.
It's becoming hard to know who and what Wikipedia actually is
>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors
Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits.
Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important.
Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.
@thrdbndndn Encyclopedia Britannica was peer reviewed and written by accredited experts for decades. For all I know spooks are writing Wikipedia's more sensitive articles
>nearly all of Wikipedia is written by just 1 percent of its editors
Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).
Wow. $300 million and still the need to beg.
I have edited Wikipedia in the past, sometimes it felt like the troll army was too powerful because in a "poll" they quickly Mount an offensive and your words dont mean much it seems.
Havent edited in like a year, that includes osm.
Maybe they should share their funds with volunteers who are essentially working for the benefit of "managers".... like you would get funding based on number of edits, age of accounts, quality of edits, if any reversals you had, on and on. Would that not convince people to contribute and also keep leeches out because the funding would be manually given out, not automated.
Ridiculous question and even more ridiculous factoids.
The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please.
Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in the US and often around the world.
I've donated to Wikipedia and contributed content as well but now I've decided not to anymore for the time being. Any kind of controversial article is decided more by the amount of time which side has to push their agenda rather than any kind of objective Neutral Point of View. There is a lot of astroturfing as well.
With respect, think about what you are saying. You are not going to contribute with good intentions to a public service because there are people with bad intentions contributing to it...
Wikipedia folks are aware of the problem and there have been many changes over the years to better protect neutrality. I agree the situation is still far from perfect but Wikipedia is still one of the bastions of free information out there. They could have commercialized it but it became a non-profit relying on donations from users (as opposed to corporations) for a good reason.
What will happen when Wikimedia is gone?
There's a reason there's such a relentless smear campaign against it. Instead of turning our backs we have to think of ways we can support Wikipedia and protect it from shills with deep pockets. If you have any ideas on how this can be done more effectively try bringing them up! Anyone can sign up and participate. That's Wikipedia's strength and weakness.
Wikipedia folks have done the exact opposite to "protect neutrality" and "bastions of free information". They openly block any edits of articles even when the said article is slandering someone as long as it fits the political narrative. And if one simply looked at their co-founder and other admin's twitter feed, one would realize that they don't care about "neutrality".
What a ridiculous criticism of a valid article with a lot of facts.
I have donated to Wikipedia several times and feel violated now. They might have not lied outright but acting as if you’re a poor Non profit when you are most definitely not poor is outrageous. I don’t know if Jimmy Wales is part of this entire charade but this is exactly what you expect to happen when you employ a CEO who charges north of half a mill to run a non profit - their intention is to just increase their coffers with no clear plan on WHAT they are going to use it.
There might have been a time when the banner was genuine and a donation from the user was needed to plan their budget a year in the future, but if they’re showing the same banner now after making hundreds of millions (and if this article is accurate, willfully hiding it as much as legally possible) they’re disgusting. I feel less disgust interacting with entities like apple and google, at the least their intentions seem far more honest than this bs.
I'm sorry, but your worldview is completely out of line with reality.
The banner IS genuine.
Non-profit funding IS scarce.
Funding streams are fickle and Wikipedia has none of the monopolistic advantages that keep Apple and Google and FB and MSFT owners vastly vastly richer than any Wikipedia staff will ever be.
By volunteering you ARE doing something so much more valuable than any post to any for profit social media platform, INCLUDING this one.
The reason you think "intentions" are "honest"? Advertising.
> “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”
You think "really needs you" IS genuine?
And what does "volunteering" have to do with the question being raised in the article or by the OP you are responding to?
FWIW, Jimmy is on the board but hasn't been involved with the day-to-day for a very long time (Although I'm sure as a board member he would be involved with major decisions like budget).
What wikipedia does with their banner ads is hardly worse than what NPR does or any other nonprofit for that matter. It doesn't surprise me that they are well funded. Have you ever heard of wikipedia going down?
That is a ridiculous and ugly accusation to make. If you don’t know what it takes to run a globally available top site, it is better not throw stones at people.
Have I run a site comparable to Wikipedia? No. Do I know nothing about that topic? Debatable. Leaving that aside, Wikipedia was live and ticking when it had 1% of today’s coffers, so it’s hard to substantiate why they need money approaching a billion dollars for a non profit running a website all things considered.
Then their donation banner should reflect the true purpose of the donation, rather than misleading readers into thinking it’s necessary for Wikipedia.com.
I am not the original commentator but all the replies to this seem like attacking the individual (for a lack of better term) than providing a counter argument. They clearly state that they have been donating and assume that "their intention is to just increase their coffers with no clear plan on WHAT they are going to use it."
Is that wrong ? Far from reality? Help them (and readers like me) get a clear understanding.
OKAY, it is an ugly accusation considering "don’t know what it takes to run a globally available top site", but why? How much does it cost to run a Wiki like site on that high traffic using some modified form of mediawiki platform?
I am just trying to get a clearer understanding than attacking / siding anyone
Or hosting all the images? Or paying developers, devops, managers? Like sure, some middle manager may be unnecessary but a big company will have inefficiencies. Also, it is a good decision to not stop accepting funds once a monthly quota is reached since donations are fickle. An article like this may suddenly cause an outage in donations, they have to have reserves for such cases.
> What about running a freely query-able database [link to Wikidata]
When someone goes to Wikipedia and feels "this was awesome; I want to support this... and OMG, they say they might fail if they don't get money from people like me!" it is absolutely unethical to take their money and spend it on Wikidata, a product this user might have no clue exists and may or may not care at all about. Maybe Wikidata is a great thing, but then the pitch should be "we are glad you enjoyed Wikipedia! don't worry: Wikipedia is safe, as we have more than enough money to fund it! however, we have other projects we think might make a similarly positive impact on the world... maybe you would want to donate to one of them?".
Wikipedia actively builds both on Wikidata and their media hosting solution. But if you feel like using wikipedia without any media or a significant part of the factoid tables, go on..
It wasn't north of half a mil, though that does sound nice. It was $300k when I started and just over $400k when I left five years later, which is all data that is entirely accessible through the organization's public 990 filings.
To inform this conversation a bit, the biggest driver of salaries is the market cost of domain expertise and leadership. Wikimedia's salaries are pegged to a basket average of leading US non-profits, but (particularly for more experienced staff) dramatically below market rates for technology organizations.
You cannot run something at the technical and social scale and complexity of Wikimedia without exceptionally talented people, and you can't compete for talent without some degree of competitive salary. Although Wikimedia employees leave a lot on the table in order to work for a mission-driven non-profit (comparative compensation but zero upside equity), it isn't sustainable (or arguably ethical) to ask people to work for significantly less than the value of their labor.
IMHO, the Wikimedia ecosystem organizations could (and perhaps should) be significantly better resourced than they currently are in order to serve the mission of the organization. Currently most of the funding goes into servicing the existing infrastructure, much of which is dominated by the scale of the largest, largely European-language, Wikipedias.
To truly serve the world free knowledge, and serve it well, Wikimedia would need to continue to invest in increasing its global competences, often in regions/languages/markets where operations are more challenging, with commensurate cost. That would mean scaling up that expertise, whether language engineering or legal. All that costs money, which is why so much of the world is so poorly served by businesses with ROI models.
Fortunately, that's not Wikimedia, and will never be. And hopefully, it will also never be the case that some loud people on the internet dissuade the projects, movement, and organization from investing in the necessary capacity to sustain the remarkable good it does for so many hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions yet to come.
What is not ethical is to create the impression that you struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running, when in fact you are three or four times richer than just five years ago, and are building a $100M endowment in half the time anticipated.
What is not ethical is not to correct that mistaken impression – that you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running – when you are asked directly, on TV, whether it is true that you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running:
Global plans for knowledge equity are well and good. But then you (or now, your successors) should TELL readers about these plans when asking them for money. Instead, under your watch the WMF has scared people – including millions in third-world countries like India, where it takes 200,000 people donating the recommended $2 to pay just one year of your annual compensation – into thinking that Wikipedia is about to go under, or may have to raise a paywall.
Telling prospective donors about your plans for global expansion, including the plans for machine-translated Wikidata-based articles in hundreds of languages via the new Wikifunctions project, the building of regional hubs, etc., has several objective advantages, over and above just being a simple question of honesty.
Among these advantages are:
1. People can decide whether or not you are the right organization for the job, and the best organization to support for this.
2. People can compare actual progress made to the rhetoric, and demand to see results for their money. How much money is stockpiled, used to fund WMF salaries rising to even greater levels, and how much actually finds its way to Africa, India, etc.? How much free content is created? Is the work cost-effective?
Raising funds by pretending you are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running relieves you of that scrutiny and accountability – because then the mere continued existence of Wikipedia will appear to have justified the money demands, and the money donations.
Avoiding scrutiny and accountability is a slippery slope. It is not good for an organization. You don't just want cheerleaders.
Moreover, consistently pretending to be poor also makes you vulnerable (deservedly so!) to backlashes like this one:
This Twitter thread, with 1.6K Likes and nearing 1K re-tweets at the time of writing, describes your banners as "deceitful", "manipulative", designed to "guilt people into donating money they would've otherwise spent elsewhere." The author goes on to describe your fundraising practices as "predatory, misleading, malicious and downright evil," saying you've been "preying on poorer folks from less well-off countries" to give you money you absolutely didn't need.
When people learn about the actual state of WMF finances they feel fooled, had. You can see this from the comments of past donors here on this very page. Why do that to them? The German fundraising banners (the only ones authored by a local chapter rather than the WMF, I believe) don't pretend there is an emergency. Germans still donate millions each year, because people love Wikipedia. Why overegg the WMF banners in this way, when volunteers have told you, year after year, that they feel disgusted and ashamed by them?
Andreas, you do realize interviews are edited, right? The editorial POV of that interview you link to was that WMF is a nonprofit and deserves support. They appear to have cut directly to my answer about the value of being a nonprofit. Whatever is left on the cutting room floor is a decision of the production team.
I agree that there were some problems with the fundraising messaging in India. It's an example of where the initial message testing worked, but when it went to a full campaign, the press ran with stories that were misleading and alarmist. In fact, WMF staff then worked extensively with the communities in India and did a significant amount of press, including television interviews, to clarify the purpose of the fundraiser and dispel concerns.
You continue to push for messaging that you personally believe to be more truthful to your belief about how fundraising works. Okay. That's fair, and you are entirely welcome to continue to do that. However, years of research and focus groups and testing has continuously demonstrated that the primary reason people donate to Wikipedia isn't a fear it will go away, nor is it a strategic interest in the future. The overwhelming reason is gratitude that it exists, and the opportunity to have contribute in their own way.
Would I personally respond to a message about mission and strategy? Yes, I would. But most people do not. Instead, millions of people find the donation banners acceptable and even inspirational -- far more so than messages about product and feature improvements. So despite the loyal opposition of you and others, I'm fairly certain that the WMF will continue to fundraise with messages that work on the level of what people care the most about, which is what Wikipedia means to them in their own lives.
Moving on, the WMF has been entirely clear that $4.2m of that $8.7m is going to affiliates for this year's APG funding. I would have wanted to get information about the $4.5m set aside for knowledge equity out the door faster, but I am no longer at the organization, so cannot speak to your concerns.
> the primary reason people donate to Wikipedia isn't a fear it will go away
> I'm fairly certain that the WMF will continue to fundraise with messages that work on the level of what people care the most about, which is what Wikipedia means to them in their own lives.
Those two are obviously contradictory. WMF's messaging is clearly, blatantly aimed at presenting the Foundation as having a problem staying afloat. If you didn't think the primary reason people donate to Wikipedia was a fear of it going away, you wouldn't be pushing messaging that is designed to cause people to have precisely that fear.
Quite frankly, your messaging reads like typical corporate doublespeak, and does nothing but further make me lose trust in the foundation.
I've lost count of the number of donors who've said they felt stung by learning just how well off the WMF is financially, felt they'd been lied to, wished they had donated to someone else, said they'd now cancelled their monthly donation, etc.
The implication is that for them, the sense of urgency was precisely the reason they donated. They believed they were helping "a friend in need". That's what made them feel good. Being used, not so much.
Minassian Media are the WMF's PR consultants. Mr Minassian's wife is a producer on The Daily Show. This being so, it seems highy unlikely to me that the interview would have been cut in any way that would have run counter to your and your PR company's wishes.
Still: Do you recall what you said in response to Trevor Noah, when he asked you, "The downside of it means you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running. So ... is that true and how does it affect you?"? Would you mind sharing it here?
People who donate to Wikipedia are indeed generally motivated by gratitude. They would feel this gratitude whether the banners evoke a sense of financial emergency or not. The Germans (the only ones, I believe, who do their own banner wordings rather than translating the WMF's) have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve adequate results without evoking this sort of threat.
Now to evoke such an illusory sense of threat to Wikipedia's independence in Latin America in the middle of a pandemic, when the WMF was already nearly $50M ahead of its overall year goal with three months to spare, seems unconscionable to me, whatever the focus groups say.
Do you not think that people reading this exchange will find your attitude towards readers disrespectful and exploitative? Are you not saying, in so many words, that they're not capable of understanding what you would: that they, unlike you, need to be manipulated?
You appear to be saying that as long as readers, donors, don't know they've been tricked, but rather feel inspired, enriched by having given, everyone's needs have been served: theirs to feel good about themselves, yours (the WMF's) to have more money.
This may all be true: but it's manipulative. The idea that this sort of thinking should guide the management of such a widely used source of information as Wikipedia, which purports to be about informing people about reality, is unpalatable.
Like the other reply, this is flat-out gaslighting.
First, it's a fallacy that executive rates for nonprofits should be set by the market based on others. Who would say their nonprofit CEO is in the bottom half? Nobody, or they wouldn't want that person to be CEO. Therefore, everybody reevaluates and pushes salaries up, up, up to the sky ... exactly like they do in for-profit businesses, an endless cycle of greed. Would you have done the job for $200K? If so, you should have. If not, you shouldn't have been at Wikimedia. It's really that simple. Interestingly, the techies do work for significantly less than market rates but the suits don't. You are (or were) very well paid.
As for the fundraising, the messages are self-evident and dishonest to the point they're arguably fraudulent. Like Jimmy Wales using the term "bankruptcy" when he said well, we'd never want that. Sure - it's like a mobster saying "it'd be shame if..." then denying the threat. Both of you know exactly what those messages were meant to and did imply. Stop gaslighting.
I'm sure the WMF will continue to fundraise because, let's face it, that's all the organization actually does. They fundraise and nothing else. Wikipedia is 100% volunteers. Have you even edited anything on Wikipedia? You were/are the PR person before your higher role.
As for the final piece, moving on... no. Absolutely not. Wikimedia exists to make money. You're/they're working on a project right now to charge Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest (who, oh yeah, are colluding to support Wikipedia as a single-source of truth ... which is exactly a long-term goal. of the CFR - but I'm sure that's a total coincidence). This is a fundraising organization, barely tied to Wikipedia.
Wikimedia exists to pull in money. Nothing else. The messaging is questionable enough I believe it should be investigated by various consumer agencies. At most, 1/3rd of the money raised goes to support what people know of as Wikipedia - those are Lisa's numbers. I doubt the figure is even that high.
People: Wikipedia's server costs are about $2.5M per year. That's it. Figure admin fees about 3x that, $10M per year give or take. The rest ... you can sit until you're blue in the face wondering where the money goes because they're not saying.
Wikipedia in my experience doesn't "take on" anyone. They have a list of sources of large information outlets that are marked, mostly arbitrarily, "reliable". With the media landscape being as skewed as it is (largely reflecting interests of media owners and advertisers, see Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model), Wikipedia has set itself up to reflect those same biases by relying on the same sources.
You'll note that (eg) Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, The Economist and Al Jazeera are all considered "reliable" (green), while Fox News is yellow (OK except for politics).
Or maybe they're marked "reliable" because they're less likely to make stuff up. I know that it is problematic when all the most obvious sources are slanted towards one political point of view, but citing the Daily Mail and other tabloids for stuff that the viewer's supposed to trust is even worse.
Wikipedia (Like all encyclopedias) is a tertiary source. Its goal is not to provide the capital-T Truth, but to summarize as best it can contemporary knowledge. It aims to do that as neutrally as possible, but perfect neutrality doesn't exist, so all it can do is always try and get closer and closer to that ideal.
I feel like we've already seen this pan out once. Mozilla received a large payment from Google for many years for making Google Search the primary search engine in Firefox. They used that money to pay large salaries, launch a dozen side projects (none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox) and aim for lofty goals much like Wikimedia is doing here. Now the money's drying up (because Firefox's market share is dwindling) and Mozilla are having to cut staff, including staff who work on Firefox development, to survive.
It's less obvious what would cause Wikipedia's money to dry up, but in light of Mozilla's example the only part of this I disagree with is the article's negative angle on the endowment. Creating an endowment like that is exactly what Mozilla should have done.
Rust is definitely a significant and important project. That said, Firefox's peak market share was a little over 30% of desktop browsers (in 2009 so they weren't yet a sideshow), while Rust isn't even currently in the TIOBE Index top 20 (can't find any easy way to see a peak position sadly).
More importantly though, we have other Rusts. Rust has half a dozen competitors and essentially nobody thinks that making a robust new systems programming language is an unachievable goal. Firefox is the only non-profit browser engine we have and most people consider it an impossible undertaking to develop a new one from scratch at this stage. Indeed, Microsoft recently tried before conceding defeat and switching Edge over to Chromium's Blink.
I'm thinking of Crystal, Nim, Zig, Odin and (ignoring that the topic at hand is avoiding Google having unnecessary control over things) Go. I'm aware they may not share Rust's exact feature set; Crystal is the only one I've used, including Rust itself. That comment was intended to illustrate that this is a field where attempts are made regularly and manage to achieve some measure of success, relative to browser rendering engines where I am only aware of a single (proprietary, incomplete) attempt in recent years: Flow.
Rust was supposed to be the basis of servo, a truly awesome engine that should have been under the hood of Firefox long ago. That should have been the best thing to come out of Mozilla.
We got some of it: the Rust language and Quantum. I would say the only two good things that Mozilla did in the last 10 years.
Finally, in 2020, the Servo and Rust team got the recognition they deserved, they got laid off...
It is almost like the old joke with the rower, where on a boat race, a team of eight people rowing and one steering beats a team with one person rowing and 8 steering. The losing team change its structure, now with a complex hierarchy but still a single rower, who eventually gets fired.
>Now the money's drying up (because Firefox's market share is dwindling) and Mozilla are having to cut staff, including staff who work on Firefox development, to survive.
I think Mozilla did some good or at least had the right intentions with some of their sideprojects and think they should keep trying.
On the other hand I have to contain myself from insulting their current CEO in this context given she made her wage shoot up whilst their marketshare was shrinking so much, laid of so many from the servo team among many others which i think could have been very important for firefox's future whilst at the same time running projects like giving half a million to artists to look into the potential intersection of AI and racism if I understood it well.
I wonder it's a project by one their new board members the addition of which i don't exactly see the point of either.
I don't think they should keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff but if they do fine...
If they keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff they should try to make an impact but if they want to analyse and highlight fine.
If they want to analyse and highlight i feel like they should give this money to researchers or a study or so.
But then they give the money to some bloody artists.
If it works i'd like em to fix world hunger with a painting next.
And what's worse....
They do it whilst they're laying of the staff of the ship they're sinking.
Lemme know when you've outcompeted a free product advertised on Google home page that Google considers a strategic priority, then I'll listen to everything you have to say about how it's Mozilla's mismanagement that caused the decline of Firefox. Once Chrome was a priority for Google, Firefox stood no chance no matter the funding.
You misunderstand me. I don't think Mozilla's mismanagement was responsible for Firefox's decline in market share, although it probably can't have helped. My concern is that now that that decline has happened, for one reason or another, Mozilla's mismanagement of their finances means the entire existence of Firefox is at risk, along with the seat at the web standards table that it represents.
If Mozilla didn't obtain and spend all that funding, Firefox would have been obsolete years ago. Google spends bazillions on Chrome, you can't compete with that on a shoestring budget.
They downsized because they have less money coming in now. So? They might well be overspending on execs or whatever, but that doesn't make much difference in the face of the existential threat they're facing from Google.
I'm with you. Wikipedia has revolutionized access to information. I can't imagine where we would be without it today. I'd much rather they be more than ready to weather a few storms than about to pull the plug before people feel the need to donate.
I think this article rubs me the wrong way because it leans a little heavily on vagueness to take you from the facts to how you should feel about them. Some volunteers are not amused? How many? A majority? A vocal few? "Wikipedians who have made hundreds of thousands of edits may well feel someone else is enjoying the fruit of their labor." Well, do they or don't they? Did you ask them?
I'll even admit that my initial reaction to this article was why do they need more of my money? But I gave $10 last year (basically nothing for my current income), and I'll do the same this year. Don't give so much money that you get bent out of shape about where it goes. If everyone gave an amount that meant relatively little to them, they would be in great shape. That's also basically what the donation banners say, too, but the article doesn't mention that.
Wikimedia foundation spends over 55M to pay for 400 staff. That’s 137k a year in payroll costs per employee. Are they all top management and or US based engineers?!
Yes, most of them are. And most of them work on "Advancement" (begging, fund raising, and schmoozing rich people and organisations for future fund raising) and "communication" (PR and brand building).[1] And of course with the obligatory diversity and inclusion staff, also on six digit salaries, also based in the swanky skyscraper in central San Francisco.[2]
> pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages
My opinion is that basically no-one needs to have an income above a couple of times median in the country they're in [it's hard to normalise across countries]. Just because CEOs, etc., think they're worth $millions doesn't mean that charitable organisations should adopt that model.
You're panhandling effectively, you beg people to give money but you already have it, you're only distributing it to wealthy people instead of favouring the aims of your charity.
Sure, pay your staff for a median income in your/their country; much higher in a poor or developing country is fine. But I don't donate to any charity that thinks one person needs to be paid >£120k (that's >4x median graduate wage in UK). Some people are awesome at what they do, but they're using the same proportion of their lives to do it as the people who are awesome and getting paid a pittance, it's wrong to beg people and then fritter it away on luxuries for a limited set of staff.
If a person wants to beg for money for themselves then they can, "I have an income of >$500,000 per year and work $days a week for $charity, please pay me money", sure, but don't hide that support of someone's ludicrously income (compared to ordinary people, not SV programmers) by fronting it through a charity.
First enforce your (valid) criticism in other companies. If a person could make 10x what he/she currently makes with the same work, why would he/she settle for less? Even with very strong morals, this failing of capitalism should not be dealt with at Wikipedia’s level. Comparatively to US companies, wikipedia’s salaries are hardly extreme.
Fair, but those other conscious aren't begging me to contribute to them paying their execs. And yes, as a consumer I do try and take note of the companies who have the most egregious pay disparities. Charities that spend a lot on donation acquisution, or who use immoral techniques (doorstep pressure, 'gift' giving to create psychological compulsion, ...) should not be supported.
This seems to be about the endowment - That's not the same as normal donations, and they can't just "use it", they can basically only use the interest of that money, from what i understand.
Disclaimer: Used to work for wikimedia, once upon a time, don't anymore.
The article mentions both the endowment ($100M) and also WMF's funds on hand ($300M?). So the main point is still valid.
Wikipedia's fundraising strongly implies that they need your $3 to keep the site online.
WMF has $400M which would be enough to keep the site online for up to 40 years with no further donations.
Thus, their fundraising is misleading and deceptive. I bet 9 in 10 donators won't donate if they knew WMF has $400 million in the bank -- isn't it morally wrong if you paint a deceptive picture of your finances?
I think you have those numbers reversed. According to the article (I presume its accurate), the endowment total is $300M [including funds from multiple years], and the fundraising total so far this fiscal year is $142M (I assume that's gross, fundraising has costs).
The majority of Wikimedia's money goes to software development, not keeping the lights on. I think there are definitely reasonable criticisms that could be made about WMF's priorities and efficiencies (Not to mention how its situation is conveyed in the fundraising campaign), but I struggle to see a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success.
> The majority of Wikimedia's money goes to software development, not keeping the lights on
The majority of the money goes to grants (because they don't even know what to do with it internally), followed by fundraising and brand building ("advancement" and "communications") which has the largest staff numbers.
Then lawyers, and technology staff and contractors are a distant fourth...
> a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success
I 'member back in 2005-2008 that was the state of the world. WMF paid Brion Vibber and the bandwidth bills and Brion kept the lights on. It was the most successful time for Wikipedia with massive growth and recognition.
2005-2008 was extraordinary from this standpoint, no question. A reminder of what a small group can accomplish with a vision that brings together a community ready to rewrite the world, from the ground up if need be.
The WMF has refused to state how the endowment is stuctured, so we have no proof that they cannot dip into the principle whenever they feel the need/want.
I dont think your link really supports what you're saying. One user speculating on a user space page (what amounts to essentially a personal blog) is not the same as actually asking for clarification, and it definitely isn't a large group of users asking for such, as your use of plural would imply.
Which isn't to say nobody has ever asked, im sure someone has at some point, just that's not supported by your link.
I use the plural because I know there is more than one editor (Guy) who cares about this, if only because there is also myself. I know there is more than that, however, because of the discussion pages (a sampling of which is linked below) regarding this.
The page itself is a starting point. If you want the meat of the community discussion, here's direct links:
i think that this was very interesting, i think that if wikipedia had that sort of funding then it could surely hire more editors/moderators to make sure the info is reliable.
i also found it quite ironic that the first thing that popped up was 'please subscribe to daily dot'
According to the article, they got 142 million in donations so far this fiscal year. Assuming they spent that entirely on hiring editors, had no other expenses (including no other fundraising expenses), had no server costs, etc they could hire 4500 people at min wage. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/... there's been 39 thousand editors who have made 5+ edits last month to just english wikipedia [not counting other languages] (Unfortunately I could not find any stats for overall active editors from all languages, nor could I find any stats for "very" active editors). That stat isn't very good for the argument I'm trying to make, but I suspect there's in the neighbourhood of 4500 existing editors/moderators who treat it as effectively a full time job, once you combine all the languages. Thus I doubt this budget would be sufficient to hire the existing editors, let alone hire more.
Right: because you shifted the argument to editors from moderators; what they need are not people to edit articles, but instead to do community management that reduces the toxicity of the current de facto bureaucracy that is designed to prevent arguments but instead seems to cause them.
The parent literally used the phrase "editors/moderators".
The current bureaucracy is not designed to prevent arguments, its designed to make sure such arguments are productive. Whether it succedes is debatable. Its certainly not without issue.
both of your comments are very interesting, i feel like there should be a way that Wikipedia could auto check facts using an algorithm to flag anything incorrect by referencing up to date reputable sources like NASA, Britannica ect.then use the editors/moderators to pick up anything that was flagged.
The Wikimedia Foundation plays absolutely no role in editing or moderating Wikipedia content. I employs no editors/moderators. All that work is done exclusively by unpaid volunteers.
Going the same way as many other non-profits (like colleges and universities), which pursue for-profit incentives while building bloat. After all, what could go wrong with spending $50 million to build out marketing that can increase revenue by $55 million?
Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. They have hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia itself, and many related "sister" projects, with perhaps the most clearly impacting being Wikimedia Commons (a huge repository of free-content media with a focus on educational use - including much media in the public domain) and Wikidata (a project that has now emerged as the closest thing to a 'hub' in the still-developing Semantic Web ecosystem). Quite a bit of their funding also enables growth in least-developed countries, where access to high-quality educational content in local languages is going to be especially impactful wrt. broader development goals.
People like to focus on the excess growth of management roles within the foundation and call it "cancer", but all large organizations have some possible waste within them. It might just be one of the many costs of doing business and pursuing what are in reality some very ambitious and perhaps worthwhile goals. And building a long-term endowment only looks like the prudent thing to do, since the results of fundraising can be quite volatile and uncertain.
Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.
What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just about hosting a bunch of articles.
Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now then it was in 2007 so more distractions, community being mean/troll-filled now, everyone using mobile phones which are crap for writing long form content, all the easy to write articles are written, etc (Probably missed some).
Can't it just be that since 2007 most of the obvious topics for an encyclopedia to cover have been covered?
It's probably less satisfying to change the wording in one sentence in an article about an Australian cheese than it is to write that article. So fewer people care.
No it is not. Some areas are perfectly describes, others basically empty. I remember dabbing into sewing a while ago and finding out wiki is basically empty.
Yes, I also notice the coverage dedicated to women vs men is extremely imbalanced. I know they have a separate team working on the issue and big advert banners about it... but the issue remains: Much more is written about men (living or dead) than women.
History is always written by the victors, and due to patriarchy most of the victors in recorded history have been men. This has consequences if you want your encyclopedia to rely on existing sources.
I cannot personally agree with the first sentence from a modern context, but the second sentence is reasonable. I'm most bothered with I see articles about important ministers of a country and the women have either just a stub or a few measly paragraphs, and the men have flowing pages. I see the same for business leaders.
Until some jackass with more authority than he should ever have had decides your article isn't "notable" enough to deserve existence and has it nuked on those grounds.
I mean, it may be because the coverage dedicated to women vs men was even more imbalanced in the past, fewer textual sources having been written about women so less to reference.
The barrier to entry is often that more articles exist now, it's likely the random thing you know enough about to start an article about already has one.
Having 10% of new editors stick around seems amazingly high.
That's not completely true, as it seems like the number of editors on English wikipedia hit a low point around 2013 and has been steady or going up since then.
One of the major argument I have seen why the retention graph has gone down is that English Wikipedia is much more complete in 2021 than 2007. Writing about esoteric topics is by itself limiting to fewer editors, and the bar of notability is more restrictive. Non-English articles is easier in that sense, but much of that work seems to become a translation of the English version. Writing a non-English article from scratch is an alternative but can feel a bit less interesting when the English version is already of high quality.
I could be wrong but today it seems that most editor efforts in the English Wikipedia goes towards news, politics and media. It would not surprise me if those have a natural lower retention rate than other form of articles.
On one hand, Wikipedia has become more “complete” in the last 10 years (though information never is, really).
On the other hand, the grown amount of content means there is proportionately more content to maintain—which might take even more effort and attention to detail than writing new content.
That, as well as the reputation and pervasiveness of links to Wikipedia, together make it more vulnerable to and a more compelling target for instances of blatant or stealthy misinformation, censorship and vandalism.
On that topic, I suspect a resource that tracks change histories for sensitive Wikipedia articles[0], aggregating and correlating changes by IPs and usernames along with some smart NLP analysis on text contents of the diffs, could end up being insightful.
[0] Many of us know a certain date coming up, publicly remembering which starting this year is already punishable by a prison sentence in Hong Kong. Maintaining the article covering this one is hopefully taken care of for now as it is pretty conspicuous—but for how long, and how many lesser known articles are there…
Then let those projects fight and advertise for themselves.
People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does.
Those projects would crash and burn though, because frankly, no one cares about them. Stuff like wikidata and SPARQL endpoints are an academic curiosity with no real value.
The semantic web won't happen, articles do and will.
In addition to that, the whole deletion first and no primary information attitude makes sentences like "ecosystem of free knowledge" laughable.
Every long-term successful operation needs to sustain a few wild bets that look pointless today, with great probability will turn out to have been pointless tomorrow, but has just a tiny chance of becoming really important.
If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow.
Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides.
If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival.
Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.
Wikidata gets more edits per second right now than the English wikipedia does. If that's not "exploding overnight", I don't know what is. It's just that fewer people are aware of it, because it powers sily things like search engine infoboxes and AI assistants - in addition to fostering unprecedented cooperation among knowledge producers in the Linked Data/Semantic Web ecosystem.
Ah yes, and that's not totally skewed by the fact that an "edit" in a knowledge graph is at the granulatity of a triple while an edit in an article has the granulatity of a coherent piece of structurally meaningfull information.
Piling onto the glorified garbage dump (just follow the isA edges of any concept you'll see what I mean) is a strawman metric.
It might be a "garbage dump", but it's one that large pieces of the Web are increasingly relying on. The pre-existing alternatives (mainly DBpedia - incidentally, based on scraping Wikipedia articles) were pretty disgusting hacks compared to what we have now.
> People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does.
On the contrary, Wikipedia itself has a lot of reliance on the other projects. For example, Wikidata solves the problem of interlinking Wikipedia languages and other projects when they're hosting content about the same real-world entity. In fact, this was Wikidata's MVP - the reason it got funded in the first place. It then took off from there.
Wikimedia Commons is a similar story - in addition to the obvious languages issue, there are a lot of concerns about media (such as licensing. enhancement etc.) that really are best addressed in a dedicated venue, with its own committed contributors. This has been very beneficial to Wikipedia itself.
Using RDF to store multiple languages of the same article is gross overengineering. Interlinking with other projects isn't nessecary when there are no other projects.
It isn't stored as RDF. RDF is provided as an export format. The language contents also aren't stored in wikidata, its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y.
Wikidata isn't just used for interlanguage linking. Its also used to keep infoboxes synced across different languages, and a way to easily query that data (Depends a bit on the language, english wikipedia isn't fully on board with the system, but its been a big boon to smaller languages).
As a result, people can update these "facts" independently of language, keeping them altogether more up to date, and it allows the data to be queried independently (via https://query.wikidata.org - try some of the example queries (button top left) if you haven't, the level of power SPARQL gives for querying this type of data set really is very cool).
Part of Wikimedia's mission is to spread knowledge. Allowing querying of factual data with a query language like sparql helps advance that goal by letting people use extract the knowledge for new purposes.
More like, we put the facts and knowledge in a central (mysql) db, so that instead of updating them in 300 places (Wikipedia has a lot of languages), you just update them in one place.
And since the data happened to be there anyways, we added an RDF export feature, and threw that into a BlazeGraph DB so that people could do SPARQL queries if they want. The (not really federated) SPARQL queries have basically nothing to do with the central-place-to-store-facts that are used in multiple places, feature, but it was pretty cheap to do once everything was in a central place.
Is there a entry point for "how to make FOSS contributions to wiki-projects". I at the very least would be interested in finding out how all the pieces fit together, and maybe browsing the big list to see if anything was in my wheelhouse.
Edit: And thank you for some insight into the back end of wikipedia - I did not know multiple languages was such a big push and it is such a sensible direction . Keep up the good work and keep pestering me for cash each year.
p.s. I used to work for the Wikimedia foundation about 1.5 years ago, but don't anymore. Prior to working there I was a volunteer for the FOSS project, and in theory I still am but I honestly don't do much anymore. My opinions are my own and don't represent WMF or anyone else.
As if thowing the messy complexities of MySQL queries into the serene simplicity of static hypertext is somehow better.
How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated? How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies? How much effort is the code maintenance of the specialised editing system? How much effort is maintainance of the centralised infrastructure. How much effort is it really to change the data in multiple places, given that enough eyes every bug is shallow? What are the oppirtunity costs of not being able to properly distribute and share articles because they are suddenly tied to a very specific codebase? How much infrastructure cost do I have because I can't get volunteers to host my data?
Overengineering solving the wrong problems at it's finest, no wonder the software has stayed this bad for decades now.
> How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated?
Numerical knowledge is not the only knowledge that is stored there.
I'm going to go with update rate of often. It has a higher edit rate than english wikipedia does.
> How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies?
Sometimes that is true, other times it isn't. The system is used where it makes sense, and not used where it doesn't.
> How much effort is the code maintenance of the specialised editing system? How much effort is maintainance of the centralised infrastructure.
There is certainly some. I wouldn't say its dominating, but it certainly exists. There is plenty of centralized infrastructure for other things too.
Prior to the introduction of wikidata, more complex fragile systems existed to try and keep things in sync in a more manual fashion. They also had a cost.
> How much effort is it really to change the data in multiple places, given that enough eyes every bug is shallow?
> What are the oppirtunity costs of not being able to properly distribute and share articles because they are suddenly tied to a very specific codebase
Not sure what this has to do with it. Articles are written in a custom markup language. That's already tying it to a specific code base quite heavily. The wikidata dependency is pretty trivial, and there are open apis to get info out of wikidata, and regularly made dumps of all the data in wikidata if you want to copy it. If that's not good enough, just copy the rendered version instead of the source.
> How much infrastructure cost do I have because I can't get volunteers to host my data
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation where it is likely to be hosted that way. The goals of (near) instant update time, as well as some central quality control and user blocking, makes distributed hosting pretty impossible.
> I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation where it is likely to be hosted that way. The goals of (near) instant update time, as well as some central quality control and user blocking, makes distributed hosting pretty impossible.
Everything wrong with wikipedia summed up in one paragraph, nice!
I mean, if you want to make a website with different goals and properties than wikipedia, by all means go make one. Wikipedia is just one way of doing things. Its hardly the last word on how to make an online encyclopedia, and quite frankly, some competition in this space would probably be good for everyone.
But disagreing with wikipedia's goals as a product is very different from a claim that the solution intended to meet those product goals is over-engineered.
> Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a free widely accessible encyclopedia;
How are centralization, real time editing, and user blocking properties toward the above goal?
You probably know full well that network effects are prohibiting any other collaborative knowledge base from from ever croping up again.
All big companies link against wikipedia because the network effect, all funding and donations go to wikipedia due to the network effect, all editors spend their time on wikipedia due to the network effect.
Wikipedia is eating it's own childen, and if we ever want to get something better, it either needs to grow up and start acting like a responsible adult (which we know it won't because at it's core is the failed web equivalent of the stanford prison expetiment), or die and make space for a new genration of tools.
As somebody who has used these facilities I highly disagree. They are really awesome.
And if you have some magically technical solution that is much better and much easier, then please share it. And don't just complain that everybody else is doing everything wrong.
I use Wikidata data (in a non-academic capacity) shrug
It's not that easy to work with, but there aren't any good alternatives in my case. Freebase died. DBpedia doesn't compare. Domain-specific databases don't have the data I'm looking for (or it's woefully incomplete and/or hard to link to external entities) because it straddles multiple domains, not to mention they're usually not free. I for one am very thankful for Wikidata existing and seeing good activity.
They do, particularly in educational contexts - getting students interested in Wiki projects and having them write review articles with good sources as "homework" that can then be posted to Wikipedia. But supporting that takes money as well!
Very solid point. I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects. There are many proofs that Russian Wikipedia have paid by government editors solving its own propaganda. I think +/- the same situation for other countries.
Also, I know companies or celebrities who pay for their Wikipedia pages. You can find this service in 5 minutes by googling.
"Profit-seeking and mindless consumption" can be a motto for the current WMF.
> I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects.
For the smaller ones, that is warranted - for example, the Croatian Wikipedia is infamous for its bias towards nationalist positions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia), something that's only made worse by the aftermath of the Balkan wars decades ago... as a half-Croat myself, I can only say: let's keep it at "the situation is complex and sucks all around, Wikipedia is just one symptom of a much deeper problem".
For bigger projects such as English and German Wikipedia, sheer numbers make outright disinformation spreading much more difficult - there the problem is different: what you see is usually factually correct and neutral-ish, but there is a widespread consensus that Wikipedia editors skew towards white, male and somewhat privileged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_a...).
Personally, I trust scientific and pop culture related articles in most if not all versions of Wikipedia - but keep a healthy skepticism for everything political, since there it is the hardest to judge completeness and accuracy of any subject.
Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon.
This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.
> Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon.
"Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github.
Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.
Because the easier it is the the more people are involved. That was the original idea of the WikiWay, to make editing simple [1]
Second if this is the way to go - and I don't agree [2] - the UI should reflect this workflow and not propose a different one that mostly fails.
[Edit] PRs also assume some kind of owner and committer relationship, which might be right for open source projects but is not the case of Wikipedia - even if many editors on Wikipedia consider the content "their own".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb - "Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, [...] . The usefulness of Wiki is in the freedom, simplicity, and power it offers."
[2] Wrote a quite successfull wiki 20y ago called SnipSnap, the engine of which started Atlassian Confluence, and did several years of research in using Wikis back then.
naw - I took three paragraphs of an important but obscure 20th century news event, rewrote using 8th grade English principles for clarity and order of facts, specifically and purposefully not changing any statement in the content, and it was immediately reverted with no recourse. The original was demonstrably awful writing -- total gatekeeping.
.. that should be discussed by whom, exactly? That article had not seen but three edits in the last five years. You are implying that the self-appointed gatekeepers need to review it.. you are describing the gatekeeping literally right now.
People familiar with the article and the topic area, obviously. The way you prevent gatekeeping is by proactively showing good faith and giving people an opportunity to raise any real, actionable concerns they might have.
There’s a mental mismatch in here. The pull request workflow works on GitHub because 1. every piece of code has a clear owner that is in charge to gate-keep the changes, and 2. if the gatekeepers fail at their job, contributors have a reasonable recourse (forking).
Neither is true for Wikipedia. There are no clear owners for each article so the editors are more or less hidden in the shadows (from the readers and casual contributors, at least), instead of being front-and-center of an article and explicitly taking responsibilities. It is also very unclear why they get to “own” the article like a GitHub repository; are they the initial author? Major contributors that took the baton from the original author? In many cases they are, but Wikipedia does not make that relation clear, so the editors look like self-appointed to an outside eye, which is why people have issues with gate-keeping (not the gate-keeping itself).
Making things worse, an “outside” contributor also has no chance but to work with those (seemingly) self-proclaimed maintainers; only one article can be under an entry on Wikipedia, your own modified copy has no chance competing with the original, even if you managed to make other people aware of it and agree it’s objectively better. That’s competitive imbalance, another trait of undesired gate-keeping.
I’m not saying what the Wikipedia community is doing is wrong. But if that’s how they want to do things, they need to fix Wikipedia to reflect what they want the process to work. The current system is broken.
They bleed editors because they keep censoring and shunning people for not having the same monolithical point of views with regards to politics and social issues.
In the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd article, they mention an event where he "held a pistol to a woman's stomach", but leave out that she was pregnant so it doesn't look as bad.
In the Boulder shooting, all victims where white and the shooter was targeting white people but they don't mention any of that.
In the Atlanta shootings, the article goes out of its way to mention 6 of 8 victims where asian (asian-hate narrative). In reality, many spa owners are asian.
yes, I was misinformed, the report says there was a young child at home, but NOT that she was pregnant. The child being there is not mentioned in the wiki, my original point was wrong, but I think the bias still stands.
Short term it does kind of look like they have now money than they need and it may seem a little disingenuous, but I'm not sure that they amassing a large pool of money to ensure for their survival for the long term is all bad. They provide an invaluable tool to the world that allows anyone from anywhere to easily learn about anything. I would say that they are doing a great service to the world by ensuring their existence in perpetuity and that only focusing on securing funding for the short term would be incredibly short sighted and negligent.
Yea, that could probably happen as well. Hopefully they are more judicious with their spending on current projects. But I guess aggressively spending in the short term to share more knowledge with a larger portion of the world could be a worthy cause as well. Hopefully those in power understand the gravity of the responsibility they have and they don't trend towards something like the leadership of the NRA (assuming reported corruption was true and not politically biased).
The main value of wikipedia has been provided not by the wikipedia foundation, but by the volunteers who write the articles on wikipedia.
My work on wikipedia articles is for the benefit of my fellow humans, not to allow some organisation to start implying that everyone has a moral obligation to give them money. That was never part of the deal when I contributed my work.
After the whole Fram situation, my trust in the WMF's direction and leadership is pretty much non-existent. That told me all I need to know about their priorities and ethics.
You find it disgusting that a service, which you probably use both directly and indirectly multiple times a day and costs you nothing, has the nerve to give you a suggestion of donating 10$ once?
The editors who provided all that value will get $0.
It's like buying an album where $9.92 goes to the label and yet the label still complains about freeloaders depriving the poor musicians of income if they don't pay the $10.
And who exactly gets the money? Because as I see, there is no corruption in the system at all. There are a few inefficiencies, but it’s incomparable to the bleeding out of musicians.
Making music is the livelyhood of musicians. Making edits on Wikipedia is for most a hobby, and they do not get paid for it and thus do not rely on it (I would know, I have made many edits on my language wiki and look at it mostly as something positive to give back). They have the option of stopping making edits and walk away without any hit to their income or professional growth.
That is not to say that those who make certain amount of quality edits shouldn't receive something for it, or even be hired in to be on staff editors (potentially there are these kinds of positions within Wikimedia and I just don't know about it).
Comparing the practice of asking consumers for an optional donation once in a while, without any access restriction to the content, versus being (legally) forced to buy the album (also taking into account streaming here) where the funds go mostly to the label doesn't make any sense.
>> (money) amassed and still hiding it? Asking for money is disgusting?
Disgusting?!! They ask for money. They don't sell your data, which is what most sites/apps you use do. They don't abuse their position, as an important information source. Disgusting compared to what?
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some of the most accessible financial information of any comparably sized organisation on the planet. This is why the get so much heat. The financials are easily understandable, which means a financially literate journalist or commentator can understand what's going on and take a cheap swipe in under a minute.
You can literally understand wikimedia's finances better in 10 minutes than you could after weeks of studying any other non profit, publicly listed company, NGO or government organisation. There is no attempt to hide any controversial element... Asset accumulation, clearly and deliberately highlighted. Expense growth, ditto.
100% this. Furthermore, in a non-profit, reporting requirements let you see what the money is being spent on, what people are making exactly what salaries, what vendors are involved, etc.
> Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online.
This is the very source of the complaint though. People want to donate to fund the thing they actually use, not a bunch of other arbitrary projects they don’t care about.
I mean take a look at the donation page under “Where your donation goes”.
It does technically mention a “wide variety of projects” but the whole thing is written to make you feel like you are donating to the encyclopedia that is barely scraping by. And it certainly doesn’t mention anything about an endowment.
> People want to donate to fund the thing they actually use, not a bunch of other arbitrary projects they don’t care about.
I see this argument often associated with Mozilla as well and I cannot put into words just how much I disagree.
They've both made a product that's immensely useful to me, to the point where I don't even second guess donating to these projects on a semi-regular basis (like once or twice a year, usually in the range of $50-$100 per donation, equivalent to what I pay to certain services for a yearly subscription). What they do with that money is completely not my concern. I've donated money, it's up to them to decide what to do with it. I trust them to make that decision because they've already made a product that I rely on quite frequently.
I couldn't care less if they use it to support an existing successful product (Wikipedia or Firefox), throw it into some other fringe thing that has a tiny chance of turning into another immensely useful product to me, fund advocacy projects, fellowships, CEO salaries... it doesn't matter. I trust the team behind it so I throw money at it.
So which one would you cut out? The hosted pictures, media? Or the database syncing factual data across languages so that a smaller language’s article won’t get factually wrong information because a data was spotted to be incorrect only in the large English version?
How about the 20 million they spend on awards and grants? It doubled between 2019 and 2020, isn't it weird that they spend 10x as much in awards and grants than they spend on hosting everything?
So you'd want them to cut the item in their budget that most directly rewards and supports their volunteer editors' work on the projects? That would seem to be unwise.
First off, how much of this is going to wikipedia editors and how much is going to other stuff? Honest question, I tried looking and I couldn't figure out which grants actually get approved.
Secondly, the number of editors peaked in 2007, as far as I know. Why does the money spent on grants and awards keep going up if the number of editors keeps going down?
Maybe maybe. But most of the large organisations you are refering to make the money they pay their waste^Wmanagers with not from donations, and are typically also not relying on so much volunteer work. In my book, it is totally fine to demand that organisations that are largely based on volunteer work and dontations dont pay the typical manager salaries. Why should we look away if a mostly-volunteer driven project gets cancer? Why should we ignore the cancer? Just because other companies have cancer too?
Profit seeking organizations have residual claimants who are directly incented to cut the waste, and they still get cancer. This ought to suggest to us how hard the problem really is.
ISTM that the only viable solution is federation, where multiple, independent, small, tightly-knit organizations cooperate on the shared goal of hosting content, media, etc. on real-world entities and topics. But, ironically enough, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects are the closest thing we have to something that might actually enable this development! (The former in its de-facto role as a semantically-enhanced "web directory" of entity identifiers; the latter via the "right to fork" that's inherent in all free-content licenses.)
Okay, your computer is far from 100% efficiency, nor any appliance in your home, nor for-profit companies, nothing is. Why are we so outraged when a non-profit company doing great work is also inefficient a bit?
Because it is strictly unfair to volunteers. Volunteers do most of the important work, and usually get no pay at all. So why should managers get paid and everyone should look away and just call it an inefficientcy?
In the UK your donations can be for a specified purpose, and must be earmarked for it. Is there no equivalent in the rest of the world?
And perhaps more to the point, Wikipedia has legal personality in the UK, so one assumes the above applies.
But really it would be pointless: I'm not going to tell Wikipedia what their strategy should be when I donate. So even if you do, they can put my donation to whatever purpose it is that yours precluded.
It applies to the USA too. (Note: Wikimedia UK is an independent organization. It is associated with, but not owned/controlled by WMF)
However, often restricted donations result in people spending money on things that don't matter, because it might be earmarked for something that isn't needed. Even if not, it can distort priorities in ways that people earmarking the donations aren't aware of.
Its the sort of thing, where the bureaucracy of it clearly isn't worth it for small donations.
According to WMF's financial statement, there was about 4 million of such restricted donations in the 2018-2019 year.
Interestingly there was no mention of sister projects or the inflated activity in adjacent areas in the begging for money banner presented to me last time, did I miss something?!
It was asking for keeping the Wikipedia we use operational for a long time to come. No mention of educating the world or 'broader development goals'.
A Wikipedia that is created by volunteers (including the hundreds of language versions) for free, managed and promoted by sometimes high paid employees with expansion ambitions.
Are they risking the future of the Wikipedia we like and use today by the costly ambitions and the costly organization required to realize the big ambitions?!? Are they overstreching their means?!
The begging for money banners only talk about keeping it operational. Not about 'sister projects' or other ambitions, they do not ask money for those!
(not to mention that some of the banners condemn being commercial, saying 'it would be a great loss', exactly what Wikimedia LLC aspires to do)
"Imagine a world where every single person on the planet can freely share in the sum of human knowledge: this is our commitment." They could hardly be any clearer about it. And even if your goal is to keep Wikipedia thriving, you need these sister projects.
That quote is about sharing knowledge not about educating people. Different things with different requirements, a different (related) activity.
Sharing knowledge is a well understood long lasting profile, education is not.
Also the 'need' for sister projects is an unfunded claim, a mere opinion. Actually the "bring you unlimited access to reliable information" that is explicitly mentioned in fundraisers already thrives for long without sister projects.
Libraries and schools/universities are not the same thing, you should know that.
Allowing access to information is essential part of the education but is not the education itself!
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Chek out its home page, top left corner! ; ))
If they have big ambitions, want to be more than 'mere' sharers of information that is fine, having huge organizations with high paid managers and PR campaigns for the education of the world and the future or whatever big words they pick, it is fine. But then please communicate that when begging for money to keep "Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" running.
Sounds good but Wikipedia asks money with pitch ”help keep Wikipedia running”. It’s a lie if the money is diverted to other, how ever commendable, pursuits.
That's not what I got from the article or even the headline. It's talking about why they are using "tearful-sounding messages like: “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”"
"really needs you"? Really? That too in India during COVID? With millions in the bank and salaries of everyone over $130k?
So the gist seems to be when people are willing to donate to you dont raise cash. Instead wait for god knows what situation in this unpredictable world to strike and then start your fund raising.
The only reason Fuckerberg or Ellison or Murdoch or Google dont already own Wikipedia is Wikipedia has enough cash to tell them to fuck off. Not to mention dealing with all kinds of orgs, govt beauracrats, politicans all over the globe exerting pressures.
In this world if you dont have Financial Independence what path you chart out will never be under your control.
This article would have been useful if there were suggestions about how to go about fund raising better.
I'd be more interesting in knowing why Wikipedia is cutting off so many "<1%" users like narrow desktop screens, older browsers, no-JS users, mobile users with unsteady connections.
By "unsteady connections", I meant inconsistent or unreliable connections, where you may not be able to stay online reliably.
On mobile, there is a new "feature" where each section is lazy-loaded, so if you do not expand them while you are online, you cannot read them once you're offline. Also, if the browser reloads the page from cache while offline, sections are also inaccessible.
The desktop site is inaccessible to mobile because the left column stays visible and floats over or squeezes the actual text.
Fair enough. I'm personally not a fan of the mobile site, even on mobile. https://en.wikipedia.org/?useskin=timeless is another option (for that link to work on mobile, you have to first click the use desktop button to have desktop cookies)
Thanks, I like the idea of Gemini, but haven't found the time to try any of the clients yet.
In my eyes it has a few shortcomings straight out of the gates by requiring TLS and also by being relatively new tech, so there's not much established knowledge base, and the "early problems" are still being solved.
It's much less accessible than Web in many different scenarios, such as when I can't install software on my device, when I'm using an older device, etc.
After reading the article and the comments here so far, I'm legitimately struggling to decide how I should feel about this as a long-time WMF donor. I can understand the upset and deceit people are feeling, but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind, their endowment fund usage is strictly controlled from what I understand, and as a business owner, I also deeply sympathize with the idea of having "rainy day" money but continuing to behave as if you don't.
You could donate to a local Wikimedia chapter or a thematic organization, they are doing a lot of great work in various areas and many of them are small enough for one to have an impact.
> but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind
It is unethical to use the money people are giving to Wikimedia in response to a banner on Wikipedia--the only "initiative" Wikimedia runs that they know exists--which claims Wikipedia is going to fail without more money to fund any of their other "many initiatives". If they want to fund other things, the banner should say "don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but we want to do other things similar to it, and need money from people like you to accomplish those new goals!"... I can't imagine, however, that this honest banner would raise anywhere near as much money.
wiki profits are all time high. what a impressive business model, the entire planet can be added to Wikipedia and the best part about all this, its user generated content that Wikipedia uses to get millions around the world.
618 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadIt would be very hard to live without wikipedia, but I think this needs to die for something more profitable and sustainable to rise in its place, organized by people who make their money input not dependent on charity but a recognized social utility.
Communist revolutions are just anger and frustration making heads roll all around for a big reset, but the phoenix rising in the ashes of the revolution surprisingly often has the same face as it had before. I live in China, my friends always tell me "we've always had an emperor in Beijing, this is the same thing with another name, why make such a fuss about it", proving that not only did the revolution change nothing for them, but worst: they don't even see there was some sort of point to it. So a communist revolution will change nothing to Wikipedia's governance.
I don't think Wikipedia can be state-sponsored, or even UN-sponsored: it doesn't matter enough. But a corporate entity with a product vision and a clear statement of profit would reduce the tearful aspect of their marketing campaign, appeal to its utility rather than our sobbing hearts and maybe shed a bit (a lot?) of the volunteering to welcome people like me who edit wiki for stuff they need rather than to "offer the world a knowledge sharing platform" in itself ?
That's generally been very unpalatable to the people who write wikipedia. Even the mere rumour of something like that being considered resulted in a fork of the spanish wikipedia into Enciclopedia Libre back in 2002.
There's lots of changes to society that I think would be good, but "ability for government to decide to spend taxpayer money on a charity like Wikipedia, or to create their own version in-house" isn't exactly lacking from the current system.
Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699011
Wikipedia doesn't need your money (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4946912
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...
Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams of edit data to financial organisations.
“ The WMF emphasizes time and again that Wikipedia never tries to sell the public anything.”
Those can’t both be true. Selling to google is just indirectly selling to the general public.
Google & co are very clearly monetizing (either directly or indirectly) their integration, WMF might as well get something out of it.
Though, this discussion might be going the "BSD vs GPL" direction...
I would not be.
It's becoming hard to know who and what Wikipedia actually is
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody
Does it matter much? I assume it is considered bad because these "power editors" may have their agenda or whatever to control the way Wikipedia is written. From my experience as a frequent editor (on other language version of Wikipedia), this rarely happens. Power users edit a lot simply because it's their hobby. Or in other words, it happens because most of people just don't do any edits.
Not to mention, this kind of data is misleading. The influence of each edit is very hard to compare. I surely won't measure it by just editing times or word count. A simple edit that corrected a number on an article can be just as useful and important.
Also IMHO, the biggest strength of Wikipedia is not its quality, but its completeness. It's the fact you can have a central place to glance at the basic info about any subject. It shines in these stub articles about random animal, random town in Africa, random mid-size company. Even if all the "hot" articles become garbage or overly political, it doesn't affect the 99% value of Wikipedia.
Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all fit together (many many edits).
Havent edited in like a year, that includes osm.
Maybe they should share their funds with volunteers who are essentially working for the benefit of "managers".... like you would get funding based on number of edits, age of accounts, quality of edits, if any reversals you had, on and on. Would that not convince people to contribute and also keep leeches out because the funding would be manually given out, not automated.
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Main_Page
OpenStreetMap is a separate org and not part of the Wikimedia family
Machine readability, especially of Wiktionary, seems that it will never be improved.
The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please.
Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in the US and often around the world.
What will happen when Wikimedia is gone?
There's a reason there's such a relentless smear campaign against it. Instead of turning our backs we have to think of ways we can support Wikipedia and protect it from shills with deep pockets. If you have any ideas on how this can be done more effectively try bringing them up! Anyone can sign up and participate. That's Wikipedia's strength and weakness.
Have you actually looked at where most of the donations come from? They come from DEEP POCKETS.
In 2019, Google made $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment and another $1.1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
Amazon, Google.org, Musk Foundation, George Soros, Facebook all donating $2 million+
https://wikimediaendowment.org/#benefactors
Look at who their benefactors were in 2019 apart from 7 "Major benefactors" who were anonymous:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/benefactors/
Wikipedia folks have done the exact opposite to "protect neutrality" and "bastions of free information". They openly block any edits of articles even when the said article is slandering someone as long as it fits the political narrative. And if one simply looked at their co-founder and other admin's twitter feed, one would realize that they don't care about "neutrality".
Better than any other site where the pov is decided by who has the most money
I have donated to Wikipedia several times and feel violated now. They might have not lied outright but acting as if you’re a poor Non profit when you are most definitely not poor is outrageous. I don’t know if Jimmy Wales is part of this entire charade but this is exactly what you expect to happen when you employ a CEO who charges north of half a mill to run a non profit - their intention is to just increase their coffers with no clear plan on WHAT they are going to use it.
There might have been a time when the banner was genuine and a donation from the user was needed to plan their budget a year in the future, but if they’re showing the same banner now after making hundreds of millions (and if this article is accurate, willfully hiding it as much as legally possible) they’re disgusting. I feel less disgust interacting with entities like apple and google, at the least their intentions seem far more honest than this bs.
The banner IS genuine.
Non-profit funding IS scarce.
Funding streams are fickle and Wikipedia has none of the monopolistic advantages that keep Apple and Google and FB and MSFT owners vastly vastly richer than any Wikipedia staff will ever be.
By volunteering you ARE doing something so much more valuable than any post to any for profit social media platform, INCLUDING this one.
The reason you think "intentions" are "honest"? Advertising.
Please revisit your assumptions.
Best wishes, sincerely. Cheers.
> “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”
You think "really needs you" IS genuine?
And what does "volunteering" have to do with the question being raised in the article or by the OP you are responding to?
I don't think its fair to call this willful hiding. I mean, they've written blog posts about this subject - https://diff.wikimedia.org/2016/01/14/wikipedia-15-foundatio... you don't write blog posts about things you're trying to hide.
Disclaimer: used to work for them, don't anymore.
Is that wrong ? Far from reality? Help them (and readers like me) get a clear understanding.
OKAY, it is an ugly accusation considering "don’t know what it takes to run a globally available top site", but why? How much does it cost to run a Wiki like site on that high traffic using some modified form of mediawiki platform?
I am just trying to get a clearer understanding than attacking / siding anyone
Or hosting all the images? Or paying developers, devops, managers? Like sure, some middle manager may be unnecessary but a big company will have inefficiencies. Also, it is a good decision to not stop accepting funds once a monthly quota is reached since donations are fickle. An article like this may suddenly cause an outage in donations, they have to have reserves for such cases.
When someone goes to Wikipedia and feels "this was awesome; I want to support this... and OMG, they say they might fail if they don't get money from people like me!" it is absolutely unethical to take their money and spend it on Wikidata, a product this user might have no clue exists and may or may not care at all about. Maybe Wikidata is a great thing, but then the pitch should be "we are glad you enjoyed Wikipedia! don't worry: Wikipedia is safe, as we have more than enough money to fund it! however, we have other projects we think might make a similarly positive impact on the world... maybe you would want to donate to one of them?".
You need some perspective.
Sadly, the banner has only gotten bigger and more dire over the years.
To inform this conversation a bit, the biggest driver of salaries is the market cost of domain expertise and leadership. Wikimedia's salaries are pegged to a basket average of leading US non-profits, but (particularly for more experienced staff) dramatically below market rates for technology organizations.
You cannot run something at the technical and social scale and complexity of Wikimedia without exceptionally talented people, and you can't compete for talent without some degree of competitive salary. Although Wikimedia employees leave a lot on the table in order to work for a mission-driven non-profit (comparative compensation but zero upside equity), it isn't sustainable (or arguably ethical) to ask people to work for significantly less than the value of their labor.
IMHO, the Wikimedia ecosystem organizations could (and perhaps should) be significantly better resourced than they currently are in order to serve the mission of the organization. Currently most of the funding goes into servicing the existing infrastructure, much of which is dominated by the scale of the largest, largely European-language, Wikipedias.
To truly serve the world free knowledge, and serve it well, Wikimedia would need to continue to invest in increasing its global competences, often in regions/languages/markets where operations are more challenging, with commensurate cost. That would mean scaling up that expertise, whether language engineering or legal. All that costs money, which is why so much of the world is so poorly served by businesses with ROI models.
Fortunately, that's not Wikimedia, and will never be. And hopefully, it will also never be the case that some loud people on the internet dissuade the projects, movement, and organization from investing in the necessary capacity to sustain the remarkable good it does for so many hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions yet to come.
What is not ethical is to create the impression that you struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running, when in fact you are three or four times richer than just five years ago, and are building a $100M endowment in half the time anticipated.
What is not ethical is not to correct that mistaken impression – that you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running – when you are asked directly, on TV, whether it is true that you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKdn1s9Sjfo&t=270s
Global plans for knowledge equity are well and good. But then you (or now, your successors) should TELL readers about these plans when asking them for money. Instead, under your watch the WMF has scared people – including millions in third-world countries like India, where it takes 200,000 people donating the recommended $2 to pay just one year of your annual compensation – into thinking that Wikipedia is about to go under, or may have to raise a paywall.
https://www.freepressjournal.in/technology/is-wikipedia-dyin...
Telling prospective donors about your plans for global expansion, including the plans for machine-translated Wikidata-based articles in hundreds of languages via the new Wikifunctions project, the building of regional hubs, etc., has several objective advantages, over and above just being a simple question of honesty.
Among these advantages are:
1. People can decide whether or not you are the right organization for the job, and the best organization to support for this.
2. People can compare actual progress made to the rhetoric, and demand to see results for their money. How much money is stockpiled, used to fund WMF salaries rising to even greater levels, and how much actually finds its way to Africa, India, etc.? How much free content is created? Is the work cost-effective?
Raising funds by pretending you are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running relieves you of that scrutiny and accountability – because then the mere continued existence of Wikipedia will appear to have justified the money demands, and the money donations.
Avoiding scrutiny and accountability is a slippery slope. It is not good for an organization. You don't just want cheerleaders.
Moreover, consistently pretending to be poor also makes you vulnerable (deservedly so!) to backlashes like this one:
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1399236909495328771
This Twitter thread, with 1.6K Likes and nearing 1K re-tweets at the time of writing, describes your banners as "deceitful", "manipulative", designed to "guilt people into donating money they would've otherwise spent elsewhere." The author goes on to describe your fundraising practices as "predatory, misleading, malicious and downright evil," saying you've been "preying on poorer folks from less well-off countries" to give you money you absolutely didn't need.
When people learn about the actual state of WMF finances they feel fooled, had. You can see this from the comments of past donors here on this very page. Why do that to them? The German fundraising banners (the only ones authored by a local chapter rather than the WMF, I believe) don't pretend there is an emergency. Germans still donate millions each year, because people love Wikipedia. Why overegg the WMF banners in this way, when volunteers have told you, year after year, that they feel disgusted and ashamed by them?
This is my view of the ethics of the situ...
I agree that there were some problems with the fundraising messaging in India. It's an example of where the initial message testing worked, but when it went to a full campaign, the press ran with stories that were misleading and alarmist. In fact, WMF staff then worked extensively with the communities in India and did a significant amount of press, including television interviews, to clarify the purpose of the fundraiser and dispel concerns.
You continue to push for messaging that you personally believe to be more truthful to your belief about how fundraising works. Okay. That's fair, and you are entirely welcome to continue to do that. However, years of research and focus groups and testing has continuously demonstrated that the primary reason people donate to Wikipedia isn't a fear it will go away, nor is it a strategic interest in the future. The overwhelming reason is gratitude that it exists, and the opportunity to have contribute in their own way.
Would I personally respond to a message about mission and strategy? Yes, I would. But most people do not. Instead, millions of people find the donation banners acceptable and even inspirational -- far more so than messages about product and feature improvements. So despite the loyal opposition of you and others, I'm fairly certain that the WMF will continue to fundraise with messages that work on the level of what people care the most about, which is what Wikipedia means to them in their own lives.
Moving on, the WMF has been entirely clear that $4.2m of that $8.7m is going to affiliates for this year's APG funding. I would have wanted to get information about the $4.5m set aside for knowledge equity out the door faster, but I am no longer at the organization, so cannot speak to your concerns.
> I'm fairly certain that the WMF will continue to fundraise with messages that work on the level of what people care the most about, which is what Wikipedia means to them in their own lives.
Those two are obviously contradictory. WMF's messaging is clearly, blatantly aimed at presenting the Foundation as having a problem staying afloat. If you didn't think the primary reason people donate to Wikipedia was a fear of it going away, you wouldn't be pushing messaging that is designed to cause people to have precisely that fear.
Quite frankly, your messaging reads like typical corporate doublespeak, and does nothing but further make me lose trust in the foundation.
The implication is that for them, the sense of urgency was precisely the reason they donated. They believed they were helping "a friend in need". That's what made them feel good. Being used, not so much.
Still: Do you recall what you said in response to Trevor Noah, when he asked you, "The downside of it means you often struggle to have enough money to keep Wikipedia up and running. So ... is that true and how does it affect you?"? Would you mind sharing it here?
People who donate to Wikipedia are indeed generally motivated by gratitude. They would feel this gratitude whether the banners evoke a sense of financial emergency or not. The Germans (the only ones, I believe, who do their own banner wordings rather than translating the WMF's) have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve adequate results without evoking this sort of threat.
Now to evoke such an illusory sense of threat to Wikipedia's independence in Latin America in the middle of a pandemic, when the WMF was already nearly $50M ahead of its overall year goal with three months to spare, seems unconscionable to me, whatever the focus groups say.
Do you not think that people reading this exchange will find your attitude towards readers disrespectful and exploitative? Are you not saying, in so many words, that they're not capable of understanding what you would: that they, unlike you, need to be manipulated?
You appear to be saying that as long as readers, donors, don't know they've been tricked, but rather feel inspired, enriched by having given, everyone's needs have been served: theirs to feel good about themselves, yours (the WMF's) to have more money.
This may all be true: but it's manipulative. The idea that this sort of thinking should guide the management of such a widely used source of information as Wikipedia, which purports to be about informing people about reality, is unpalatable.
First, it's a fallacy that executive rates for nonprofits should be set by the market based on others. Who would say their nonprofit CEO is in the bottom half? Nobody, or they wouldn't want that person to be CEO. Therefore, everybody reevaluates and pushes salaries up, up, up to the sky ... exactly like they do in for-profit businesses, an endless cycle of greed. Would you have done the job for $200K? If so, you should have. If not, you shouldn't have been at Wikimedia. It's really that simple. Interestingly, the techies do work for significantly less than market rates but the suits don't. You are (or were) very well paid.
As for the fundraising, the messages are self-evident and dishonest to the point they're arguably fraudulent. Like Jimmy Wales using the term "bankruptcy" when he said well, we'd never want that. Sure - it's like a mobster saying "it'd be shame if..." then denying the threat. Both of you know exactly what those messages were meant to and did imply. Stop gaslighting.
I'm sure the WMF will continue to fundraise because, let's face it, that's all the organization actually does. They fundraise and nothing else. Wikipedia is 100% volunteers. Have you even edited anything on Wikipedia? You were/are the PR person before your higher role.
As for the final piece, moving on... no. Absolutely not. Wikimedia exists to make money. You're/they're working on a project right now to charge Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest (who, oh yeah, are colluding to support Wikipedia as a single-source of truth ... which is exactly a long-term goal. of the CFR - but I'm sure that's a total coincidence). This is a fundraising organization, barely tied to Wikipedia.
Wikimedia exists to pull in money. Nothing else. The messaging is questionable enough I believe it should be investigated by various consumer agencies. At most, 1/3rd of the money raised goes to support what people know of as Wikipedia - those are Lisa's numbers. I doubt the figure is even that high.
People: Wikipedia's server costs are about $2.5M per year. That's it. Figure admin fees about 3x that, $10M per year give or take. The rest ... you can sit until you're blue in the face wondering where the money goes because they're not saying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
You'll note that (eg) Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, The Economist and Al Jazeera are all considered "reliable" (green), while Fox News is yellow (OK except for politics).
It's less obvious what would cause Wikipedia's money to dry up, but in light of Mozilla's example the only part of this I disagree with is the article's negative angle on the endowment. Creating an endowment like that is exactly what Mozilla should have done.
Hi, let me introduce you to this weird newfangled language called Rust... /s
More importantly though, we have other Rusts. Rust has half a dozen competitors and essentially nobody thinks that making a robust new systems programming language is an unachievable goal. Firefox is the only non-profit browser engine we have and most people consider it an impossible undertaking to develop a new one from scratch at this stage. Indeed, Microsoft recently tried before conceding defeat and switching Edge over to Chromium's Blink.
We got some of it: the Rust language and Quantum. I would say the only two good things that Mozilla did in the last 10 years.
Finally, in 2020, the Servo and Rust team got the recognition they deserved, they got laid off...
It is almost like the old joke with the rower, where on a boat race, a team of eight people rowing and one steering beats a team with one person rowing and 8 steering. The losing team change its structure, now with a complex hierarchy but still a single rower, who eventually gets fired.
I think Mozilla did some good or at least had the right intentions with some of their sideprojects and think they should keep trying.
On the other hand I have to contain myself from insulting their current CEO in this context given she made her wage shoot up whilst their marketshare was shrinking so much, laid of so many from the servo team among many others which i think could have been very important for firefox's future whilst at the same time running projects like giving half a million to artists to look into the potential intersection of AI and racism if I understood it well. I wonder it's a project by one their new board members the addition of which i don't exactly see the point of either.
I don't think they should keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff but if they do fine... If they keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff they should try to make an impact but if they want to analyse and highlight fine. If they want to analyse and highlight i feel like they should give this money to researchers or a study or so. But then they give the money to some bloody artists. If it works i'd like em to fix world hunger with a painting next. And what's worse.... They do it whilst they're laying of the staff of the ship they're sinking.
I think this article rubs me the wrong way because it leans a little heavily on vagueness to take you from the facts to how you should feel about them. Some volunteers are not amused? How many? A majority? A vocal few? "Wikipedians who have made hundreds of thousands of edits may well feel someone else is enjoying the fruit of their labor." Well, do they or don't they? Did you ask them?
I'll even admit that my initial reaction to this article was why do they need more of my money? But I gave $10 last year (basically nothing for my current income), and I'll do the same this year. Don't give so much money that you get bent out of shape about where it goes. If everyone gave an amount that meant relatively little to them, they would be in great shape. That's also basically what the donation banners say, too, but the article doesn't mention that.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/
[2] And the rent for the swanky office is another million and a half per year, because it's not their money after all...
My opinion is that basically no-one needs to have an income above a couple of times median in the country they're in [it's hard to normalise across countries]. Just because CEOs, etc., think they're worth $millions doesn't mean that charitable organisations should adopt that model.
You're panhandling effectively, you beg people to give money but you already have it, you're only distributing it to wealthy people instead of favouring the aims of your charity.
Sure, pay your staff for a median income in your/their country; much higher in a poor or developing country is fine. But I don't donate to any charity that thinks one person needs to be paid >£120k (that's >4x median graduate wage in UK). Some people are awesome at what they do, but they're using the same proportion of their lives to do it as the people who are awesome and getting paid a pittance, it's wrong to beg people and then fritter it away on luxuries for a limited set of staff.
If a person wants to beg for money for themselves then they can, "I have an income of >$500,000 per year and work $days a week for $charity, please pay me money", sure, but don't hide that support of someone's ludicrously income (compared to ordinary people, not SV programmers) by fronting it through a charity.
Disclaimer: Used to work for wikimedia, once upon a time, don't anymore.
That's even more of a problem if you do not support such scheme to extort money from the working classes.
Wikipedia's fundraising strongly implies that they need your $3 to keep the site online.
WMF has $400M which would be enough to keep the site online for up to 40 years with no further donations.
Thus, their fundraising is misleading and deceptive. I bet 9 in 10 donators won't donate if they knew WMF has $400 million in the bank -- isn't it morally wrong if you paint a deceptive picture of your finances?
The majority of Wikimedia's money goes to software development, not keeping the lights on. I think there are definitely reasonable criticisms that could be made about WMF's priorities and efficiencies (Not to mention how its situation is conveyed in the fundraising campaign), but I struggle to see a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success.
Disclaimer: used to work there, don't anymore.
The majority of the money goes to grants (because they don't even know what to do with it internally), followed by fundraising and brand building ("advancement" and "communications") which has the largest staff numbers. Then lawyers, and technology staff and contractors are a distant fourth...
> a world where WMF spends the absolute bare minimum to keep the lights on, with no further funding to new software development, and Wikipedia is still a success
I 'member back in 2005-2008 that was the state of the world. WMF paid Brion Vibber and the bandwidth bills and Brion kept the lights on. It was the most successful time for Wikipedia with massive growth and recognition.
2005-2008 was extraordinary from this standpoint, no question. A reminder of what a small group can accomplish with a vision that brings together a community ready to rewrite the world, from the ground up if need be.
Users have tried asking for clarification. Multiple times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Which isn't to say nobody has ever asked, im sure someone has at some point, just that's not supported by your link.
The page itself is a starting point. If you want the meat of the community discussion, here's direct links:
* The original "Signpost" op-ed, a curated meta newspaper of which the user-page is merely a constantly-updated copy of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
* Requests to the WMF for clarifcation:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_n...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_n...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Endowment#How...?
etc, etc, etc. You get the point.
This is a huge rabbit hole and I didn't want to be accused of "Gish galloping" by linking all this at the top.
According to the article, they got 142 million in donations so far this fiscal year. Assuming they spent that entirely on hiring editors, had no other expenses (including no other fundraising expenses), had no server costs, etc they could hire 4500 people at min wage. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/... there's been 39 thousand editors who have made 5+ edits last month to just english wikipedia [not counting other languages] (Unfortunately I could not find any stats for overall active editors from all languages, nor could I find any stats for "very" active editors). That stat isn't very good for the argument I'm trying to make, but I suspect there's in the neighbourhood of 4500 existing editors/moderators who treat it as effectively a full time job, once you combine all the languages. Thus I doubt this budget would be sufficient to hire the existing editors, let alone hire more.
The current bureaucracy is not designed to prevent arguments, its designed to make sure such arguments are productive. Whether it succedes is debatable. Its certainly not without issue.
People like to focus on the excess growth of management roles within the foundation and call it "cancer", but all large organizations have some possible waste within them. It might just be one of the many costs of doing business and pursuing what are in reality some very ambitious and perhaps worthwhile goals. And building a long-term endowment only looks like the prudent thing to do, since the results of fundraising can be quite volatile and uncertain.
Where can I learn about this?
Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now then it was in 2007 so more distractions, community being mean/troll-filled now, everyone using mobile phones which are crap for writing long form content, all the easy to write articles are written, etc (Probably missed some).
It's probably less satisfying to change the wording in one sentence in an article about an Australian cheese than it is to write that article. So fewer people care.
https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-weddin...
Having 10% of new editors stick around seems amazingly high.
Has anyone done the same for post 2015?
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/...
I could be wrong but today it seems that most editor efforts in the English Wikipedia goes towards news, politics and media. It would not surprise me if those have a natural lower retention rate than other form of articles.
On the other hand, the grown amount of content means there is proportionately more content to maintain—which might take even more effort and attention to detail than writing new content.
That, as well as the reputation and pervasiveness of links to Wikipedia, together make it more vulnerable to and a more compelling target for instances of blatant or stealthy misinformation, censorship and vandalism.
On that topic, I suspect a resource that tracks change histories for sensitive Wikipedia articles[0], aggregating and correlating changes by IPs and usernames along with some smart NLP analysis on text contents of the diffs, could end up being insightful.
[0] Many of us know a certain date coming up, publicly remembering which starting this year is already punishable by a prison sentence in Hong Kong. Maintaining the article covering this one is hopefully taken care of for now as it is pretty conspicuous—but for how long, and how many lesser known articles are there…
It's a very sharp peak. What happened in 2007?
People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does.
Those projects would crash and burn though, because frankly, no one cares about them. Stuff like wikidata and SPARQL endpoints are an academic curiosity with no real value.
The semantic web won't happen, articles do and will.
In addition to that, the whole deletion first and no primary information attitude makes sentences like "ecosystem of free knowledge" laughable.
If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow.
Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides.
If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival.
Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.
The semantic web is "tomorrow technology" for 20 years now. At what point does tomorrow technology become yesterdays vaporware to you?
Piling onto the glorified garbage dump (just follow the isA edges of any concept you'll see what I mean) is a strawman metric.
On the contrary, Wikipedia itself has a lot of reliance on the other projects. For example, Wikidata solves the problem of interlinking Wikipedia languages and other projects when they're hosting content about the same real-world entity. In fact, this was Wikidata's MVP - the reason it got funded in the first place. It then took off from there.
Wikimedia Commons is a similar story - in addition to the obvious languages issue, there are a lot of concerns about media (such as licensing. enhancement etc.) that really are best addressed in a dedicated venue, with its own committed contributors. This has been very beneficial to Wikipedia itself.
Wikidata isn't just used for interlanguage linking. Its also used to keep infoboxes synced across different languages, and a way to easily query that data (Depends a bit on the language, english wikipedia isn't fully on board with the system, but its been a big boon to smaller languages).
As a result, people can update these "facts" independently of language, keeping them altogether more up to date, and it allows the data to be queried independently (via https://query.wikidata.org - try some of the example queries (button top left) if you haven't, the level of power SPARQL gives for querying this type of data set really is very cool).
Part of Wikimedia's mission is to spread knowledge. Allowing querying of factual data with a query language like sparql helps advance that goal by letting people use extract the knowledge for new purposes.
Like I said, gross overengineering.
"You can save cents and seconds of time updating knowledge boxes, by spending millions and hours developing federated SPARQL query capabilities!"
And since the data happened to be there anyways, we added an RDF export feature, and threw that into a BlazeGraph DB so that people could do SPARQL queries if they want. The (not really federated) SPARQL queries have basically nothing to do with the central-place-to-store-facts that are used in multiple places, feature, but it was pretty cheap to do once everything was in a central place.
Edit: And thank you for some insight into the back end of wikipedia - I did not know multiple languages was such a big push and it is such a sensible direction . Keep up the good work and keep pestering me for cash each year.
There's a very old architecture doc from 2012: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_architecture its kind of outdated and missing a lot of the newer pieces.
p.s. I used to work for the Wikimedia foundation about 1.5 years ago, but don't anymore. Prior to working there I was a volunteer for the FOSS project, and in theory I still am but I honestly don't do much anymore. My opinions are my own and don't represent WMF or anyone else.
How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated? How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies? How much effort is the code maintenance of the specialised editing system? How much effort is maintainance of the centralised infrastructure. How much effort is it really to change the data in multiple places, given that enough eyes every bug is shallow? What are the oppirtunity costs of not being able to properly distribute and share articles because they are suddenly tied to a very specific codebase? How much infrastructure cost do I have because I can't get volunteers to host my data?
Overengineering solving the wrong problems at it's finest, no wonder the software has stayed this bad for decades now.
Numerical knowledge is not the only knowledge that is stored there.
I'm going to go with update rate of often. It has a higher edit rate than english wikipedia does.
> How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies?
Sometimes that is true, other times it isn't. The system is used where it makes sense, and not used where it doesn't.
> How much effort is the code maintenance of the specialised editing system? How much effort is maintainance of the centralised infrastructure.
There is certainly some. I wouldn't say its dominating, but it certainly exists. There is plenty of centralized infrastructure for other things too.
Prior to the introduction of wikidata, more complex fragile systems existed to try and keep things in sync in a more manual fashion. They also had a cost.
> How much effort is it really to change the data in multiple places, given that enough eyes every bug is shallow?
A lot. And we don't have that many eyes in lots of languages. There's a lot after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix
> What are the oppirtunity costs of not being able to properly distribute and share articles because they are suddenly tied to a very specific codebase
Not sure what this has to do with it. Articles are written in a custom markup language. That's already tying it to a specific code base quite heavily. The wikidata dependency is pretty trivial, and there are open apis to get info out of wikidata, and regularly made dumps of all the data in wikidata if you want to copy it. If that's not good enough, just copy the rendered version instead of the source.
> How much infrastructure cost do I have because I can't get volunteers to host my data
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation where it is likely to be hosted that way. The goals of (near) instant update time, as well as some central quality control and user blocking, makes distributed hosting pretty impossible.
Everything wrong with wikipedia summed up in one paragraph, nice!
But disagreing with wikipedia's goals as a product is very different from a claim that the solution intended to meet those product goals is over-engineered.
How are centralization, real time editing, and user blocking properties toward the above goal?
You probably know full well that network effects are prohibiting any other collaborative knowledge base from from ever croping up again.
All big companies link against wikipedia because the network effect, all funding and donations go to wikipedia due to the network effect, all editors spend their time on wikipedia due to the network effect.
Wikipedia is eating it's own childen, and if we ever want to get something better, it either needs to grow up and start acting like a responsible adult (which we know it won't because at it's core is the failed web equivalent of the stanford prison expetiment), or die and make space for a new genration of tools.
And if you have some magically technical solution that is much better and much easier, then please share it. And don't just complain that everybody else is doing everything wrong.
It's not that easy to work with, but there aren't any good alternatives in my case. Freebase died. DBpedia doesn't compare. Domain-specific databases don't have the data I'm looking for (or it's woefully incomplete and/or hard to link to external entities) because it straddles multiple domains, not to mention they're usually not free. I for one am very thankful for Wikidata existing and seeing good activity.
They do, particularly in educational contexts - getting students interested in Wiki projects and having them write review articles with good sources as "homework" that can then be posted to Wikipedia. But supporting that takes money as well!
Also, I know companies or celebrities who pay for their Wikipedia pages. You can find this service in 5 minutes by googling.
"Profit-seeking and mindless consumption" can be a motto for the current WMF.
For the smaller ones, that is warranted - for example, the Croatian Wikipedia is infamous for its bias towards nationalist positions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia), something that's only made worse by the aftermath of the Balkan wars decades ago... as a half-Croat myself, I can only say: let's keep it at "the situation is complex and sucks all around, Wikipedia is just one symptom of a much deeper problem".
For bigger projects such as English and German Wikipedia, sheer numbers make outright disinformation spreading much more difficult - there the problem is different: what you see is usually factually correct and neutral-ish, but there is a widespread consensus that Wikipedia editors skew towards white, male and somewhat privileged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_a...).
Personally, I trust scientific and pop culture related articles in most if not all versions of Wikipedia - but keep a healthy skepticism for everything political, since there it is the hardest to judge completeness and accuracy of any subject.
This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.
"Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github.
Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.
Second if this is the way to go - and I don't agree [2] - the UI should reflect this workflow and not propose a different one that mostly fails.
[Edit] PRs also assume some kind of owner and committer relationship, which might be right for open source projects but is not the case of Wikipedia - even if many editors on Wikipedia consider the content "their own".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb - "Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, [...] . The usefulness of Wiki is in the freedom, simplicity, and power it offers."
[2] Wrote a quite successfull wiki 20y ago called SnipSnap, the engine of which started Atlassian Confluence, and did several years of research in using Wikis back then.
That's absolutely not how it's been presented for the last couple decades, though.
Wikipedia recommends doing things, not talking.
Articles are also graded, I don't know what article GP is talking about but I'd say anything below "good article" is fair game.
Neither is true for Wikipedia. There are no clear owners for each article so the editors are more or less hidden in the shadows (from the readers and casual contributors, at least), instead of being front-and-center of an article and explicitly taking responsibilities. It is also very unclear why they get to “own” the article like a GitHub repository; are they the initial author? Major contributors that took the baton from the original author? In many cases they are, but Wikipedia does not make that relation clear, so the editors look like self-appointed to an outside eye, which is why people have issues with gate-keeping (not the gate-keeping itself).
Making things worse, an “outside” contributor also has no chance but to work with those (seemingly) self-proclaimed maintainers; only one article can be under an entry on Wikipedia, your own modified copy has no chance competing with the original, even if you managed to make other people aware of it and agree it’s objectively better. That’s competitive imbalance, another trait of undesired gate-keeping.
I’m not saying what the Wikipedia community is doing is wrong. But if that’s how they want to do things, they need to fix Wikipedia to reflect what they want the process to work. The current system is broken.
Money won't change that.
Example 2, there was two mass shooting in March:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings
In the Boulder shooting, all victims where white and the shooter was targeting white people but they don't mention any of that.
In the Atlanta shootings, the article goes out of its way to mention 6 of 8 victims where asian (asian-hate narrative). In reality, many spa owners are asian.
Theres is definitely a bias in their editing.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/15/fac...
This will make it more financially tenuous, not more.
Added to which, once the insitution is addicted to money it becomes that much easier to corrupt.
And the organization will grow? (More people)
How can one stop such things, generally, in an organization? (If it was large enough already)
Please.
My work on wikipedia articles is for the benefit of my fellow humans, not to allow some organisation to start implying that everyone has a moral obligation to give them money. That was never part of the deal when I contributed my work.
That is a very peculiar attitude to have.
The editors who provided all that value will get $0.
It's like buying an album where $9.92 goes to the label and yet the label still complains about freeloaders depriving the poor musicians of income if they don't pay the $10.
That is not to say that those who make certain amount of quality edits shouldn't receive something for it, or even be hired in to be on staff editors (potentially there are these kinds of positions within Wikimedia and I just don't know about it).
Comparing the practice of asking consumers for an optional donation once in a while, without any access restriction to the content, versus being (legally) forced to buy the album (also taking into account streaming here) where the funds go mostly to the label doesn't make any sense.
Disgusting?!! They ask for money. They don't sell your data, which is what most sites/apps you use do. They don't abuse their position, as an important information source. Disgusting compared to what?
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some of the most accessible financial information of any comparably sized organisation on the planet. This is why the get so much heat. The financials are easily understandable, which means a financially literate journalist or commentator can understand what's going on and take a cheap swipe in under a minute.
You can literally understand wikimedia's finances better in 10 minutes than you could after weeks of studying any other non profit, publicly listed company, NGO or government organisation. There is no attempt to hide any controversial element... Asset accumulation, clearly and deliberately highlighted. Expense growth, ditto.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...
This is the very source of the complaint though. People want to donate to fund the thing they actually use, not a bunch of other arbitrary projects they don’t care about.
I mean take a look at the donation page under “Where your donation goes”.
It does technically mention a “wide variety of projects” but the whole thing is written to make you feel like you are donating to the encyclopedia that is barely scraping by. And it certainly doesn’t mention anything about an endowment.
I see this argument often associated with Mozilla as well and I cannot put into words just how much I disagree.
They've both made a product that's immensely useful to me, to the point where I don't even second guess donating to these projects on a semi-regular basis (like once or twice a year, usually in the range of $50-$100 per donation, equivalent to what I pay to certain services for a yearly subscription). What they do with that money is completely not my concern. I've donated money, it's up to them to decide what to do with it. I trust them to make that decision because they've already made a product that I rely on quite frequently.
I couldn't care less if they use it to support an existing successful product (Wikipedia or Firefox), throw it into some other fringe thing that has a tiny chance of turning into another immensely useful product to me, fund advocacy projects, fellowships, CEO salaries... it doesn't matter. I trust the team behind it so I throw money at it.
First off, how much of this is going to wikipedia editors and how much is going to other stuff? Honest question, I tried looking and I couldn't figure out which grants actually get approved.
Secondly, the number of editors peaked in 2007, as far as I know. Why does the money spent on grants and awards keep going up if the number of editors keeps going down?
ISTM that the only viable solution is federation, where multiple, independent, small, tightly-knit organizations cooperate on the shared goal of hosting content, media, etc. on real-world entities and topics. But, ironically enough, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects are the closest thing we have to something that might actually enable this development! (The former in its de-facto role as a semantically-enhanced "web directory" of entity identifiers; the latter via the "right to fork" that's inherent in all free-content licenses.)
And perhaps more to the point, Wikipedia has legal personality in the UK, so one assumes the above applies.
But really it would be pointless: I'm not going to tell Wikipedia what their strategy should be when I donate. So even if you do, they can put my donation to whatever purpose it is that yours precluded.
However, often restricted donations result in people spending money on things that don't matter, because it might be earmarked for something that isn't needed. Even if not, it can distort priorities in ways that people earmarking the donations aren't aware of.
Its the sort of thing, where the bureaucracy of it clearly isn't worth it for small donations.
According to WMF's financial statement, there was about 4 million of such restricted donations in the 2018-2019 year.
That said, I think we are all getting tired of 501c3's begging for money when they seem to be doing fantastic on paper.
I once heard that St. Judes Childrens hospital has 20 years of funding in the bank, and that's taking into account of new procedures, and inflation.
Cars for Kids has one house in the Sierra foothills that benefits children. (This was true around 5 years ago when I looked into the nonprofit.)
My point is the charities we all know through endless advertising/begging might not need money.
It was asking for keeping the Wikipedia we use operational for a long time to come. No mention of educating the world or 'broader development goals'.
A Wikipedia that is created by volunteers (including the hundreds of language versions) for free, managed and promoted by sometimes high paid employees with expansion ambitions.
Are they risking the future of the Wikipedia we like and use today by the costly ambitions and the costly organization required to realize the big ambitions?!? Are they overstreching their means?!
The begging for money banners only talk about keeping it operational. Not about 'sister projects' or other ambitions, they do not ask money for those!
(not to mention that some of the banners condemn being commercial, saying 'it would be a great loss', exactly what Wikimedia LLC aspires to do)
"Imagine a world where every single person on the planet can freely share in the sum of human knowledge: this is our commitment." They could hardly be any clearer about it. And even if your goal is to keep Wikipedia thriving, you need these sister projects.
Sharing knowledge is a well understood long lasting profile, education is not.
Also the 'need' for sister projects is an unfunded claim, a mere opinion. Actually the "bring you unlimited access to reliable information" that is explicitly mentioned in fundraisers already thrives for long without sister projects.
So what is educating people, if not sharing knowledge?
> Different things with different requirements, a different (related) activity.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is: Just different words for the same thing.
Allowing access to information is essential part of the education but is not the education itself!
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Chek out its home page, top left corner! ; ))
If they have big ambitions, want to be more than 'mere' sharers of information that is fine, having huge organizations with high paid managers and PR campaigns for the education of the world and the future or whatever big words they pick, it is fine. But then please communicate that when begging for money to keep "Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" running.
They should not misinform us....
That's not what I got from the article or even the headline. It's talking about why they are using "tearful-sounding messages like: “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”"
"really needs you"? Really? That too in India during COVID? With millions in the bank and salaries of everyone over $130k?
The only reason Fuckerberg or Ellison or Murdoch or Google dont already own Wikipedia is Wikipedia has enough cash to tell them to fuck off. Not to mention dealing with all kinds of orgs, govt beauracrats, politicans all over the globe exerting pressures.
In this world if you dont have Financial Independence what path you chart out will never be under your control.
This article would have been useful if there were suggestions about how to go about fund raising better.
Then the Wikipedia Foundation should calibrate their appeals accordingly and the problem is solved.
Hell, last i checked, wikipedia even worked if cookies were disabled (and you weren't logged in).
I'm also not sure what the unsteady connections thing is about? Wikipedia doesn't modify the TCP stack.
On mobile, there is a new "feature" where each section is lazy-loaded, so if you do not expand them while you are online, you cannot read them once you're offline. Also, if the browser reloads the page from cache while offline, sections are also inaccessible.
The desktop site is inaccessible to mobile because the left column stays visible and floats over or squeezes the actual text.
In my eyes it has a few shortcomings straight out of the gates by requiring TLS and also by being relatively new tech, so there's not much established knowledge base, and the "early problems" are still being solved.
It's much less accessible than Web in many different scenarios, such as when I can't install software on my device, when I'm using an older device, etc.
Is there some middle ground here?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizat...
It is unethical to use the money people are giving to Wikimedia in response to a banner on Wikipedia--the only "initiative" Wikimedia runs that they know exists--which claims Wikipedia is going to fail without more money to fund any of their other "many initiatives". If they want to fund other things, the banner should say "don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but we want to do other things similar to it, and need money from people like you to accomplish those new goals!"... I can't imagine, however, that this honest banner would raise anywhere near as much money.