Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#191

Post by eru » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

goodside wrote: post #157

eru wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mathematical curiosity: an exponential decreasing price means that the total expense to store a Gigabyte forever is finite. Eg a 10% decrease a year, means that storing forever costs approximately ten times the first year's storage cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series#Sum has the math.

A stream of perpetual future payments does not need to be decrease exponentially (or decrease at all) to have finite present value. A contract to receive $1/year forever (which you can resell or leave as inheritance etc.) is worth 1/r, where r is the risk-free rate of return at the time the contract is sold. At 1% interest a $1 perpetuity is worth $100 — the amount of money you’d have to put in a bank today to expect…

Yes, the exponential decrease is sufficient, but not necessary.

Of course, you are putting an exponential decrease into the present value calculation.

To give a truly non-exponential example: summing up 1/n^2 also only gives you a finite value.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#192

Post by hrasyid » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 11:44 PM UTC

closetohome wrote: post #189

hrasyid wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the donation goes to the foundation while its gender bias comes from its editors - who already don't get paid so stopping donations will not matter. If anything, the Foundation will need to run programs to fix the status quo (e.g. outreach programs to potential authors who come from underrepresented groups or likely to write about underrepresented topic), so donating money (in addition to volunteering for outreach…

The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work. Diversity and equality don't cost money.

>> The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work.

I don't think this is correct. Policy and culture are mostly bottom-up from the editors, and the foundation has no hard power except for extreme cases like banning outright harassers.

In addition, withholding money from the foundation does not cause any pressure at all to editors because they never get paid from that money anyway.

>> Diversity and equality don't cost money

Sure, but so far most of the efforts to improve diversity seem to come from the foundation rather than the editors, so punishing the foundation seems like the wrong option.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#193

Post by hrasyid » Wed, Jan 29, 2020, 8:56 PM UTC

hrasyid wrote: post #192

closetohome wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work. Diversity and equality don't cost money.

>> The editors and the organization are the same thing. The organization sets policy and culture, and editors do all of the actual work. I don't think this is correct. Policy and culture are mostly bottom-up from the editors, and the foundation has no hard power except for extreme cases like banning outright harassers. In addition, withholding money from the foundation does not cause any pressure at all to editors be…

See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_Foundation about the role of the foundation