111–120 of 252 posts
> For now, I want to share with you why I’m moving on, and what comes next. I read this twice just to make sure I didn't miss something, and I don't actually see a reason why.
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Everytime Wikipedia comes up on hacker news there's always comments about how they're wasteful and incompetent. What is this self righteous anger for? They're incompetent but somehow Wikipedia exists. Is it jealousy?
It is anger at the collapse of every institution of our society, most of which have transformed away from their original purpose, and into sinecures for well-educated and well-connected professionals, who, under false pretenses, skim the surplus by lying about what they do, and shaming the productive masses into supporting them. I admit that I'm also full of wishful thinking. I said that once they go bankrupt, someon…
Thanks for that eye-opener.
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> I read this twice just to make sure I didn't miss something, and I don't actually see a reason why. I don't actually see a reason why. (Stated right in the sixth paragraph.) I’m going to take a break, and a research fellowship, as a place to think about what’s next. It’s hard to think about your future when you’re fully in your present, and for the past seven years, I’ve been fully present for this movement. But as…
That's not really a reason why, it's the (vague) plan going forward.
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That’s okay, if they go bankrupt, someone more competent could take over, and easily run Wikipedia on less than a tenth of their current budget. Look at their financials: Wikimedia Foundation is part jobs program, part grift.
I don't know why you're calling it grift. According to the definition a non-profit is not conducted or maintained to make a profit. I'm guessing most of us agree that Wikipedia is an asset to society and I'm hoping the people that work there get paid well. Why would I not want more people working at Wikimedia compared to something more detrimental to society like Facebook?
Imagine you have a city, which has a non-profit foundation dedicated to maintaining and improving the city parks. The foundation has 20 people on payroll, $2M in annual spending on wages and materials, and is generally though to do exemplary job. In fact, people like it so much that they keep donating money to it, while the new directors of the park foundation use that money to advertise everywhere that they are starved for cash, and if every park goer donates just $10, they can meet their fundraising budget. After a few years, the revenue of the park foundation is $120M/year, they are still doing pretty good job maintaining and improving the park for $2M/year, and the rest is spent on C-level executive salaries, analyst reports, conferences, travel expenses, shovel R&D, and all kinds of stuff that the parks foundation doesn’t need to do, and which provides little benefit to the actual parks or park goers beyond the $2M they have always been spending, while enriching the employees and executives in the nominally non-profit organization. That’s roughly where the Wikimedia Foundation is today. I see this as profoundly bad state of affairs. I also find it pretty ironic that the goal of the nominally non-profit organization apparently seems to be to maximize the donations and the spend.
> compared to something more detrimental to society like Facebook?
Why would you compare it to Facebook? The choice is not better Wikimedia and Facebook. There are plenty of other projects that could use money better than either Wikimedia or Facebook.
Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information. Today I can see mistakes and inaccurate info in every niche I am familiar with. Because of that, I cannot trust it on subjects I know nothing about. I tried contributing and fixing but nothing got through. Even worse, the leve…
> I would gladly pay for an encyclopedia written by actual experts.
While you're entitled to your opinion, this is a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side".
I'm not a fan of the Wikipedia internal politics, but as a user, Wikipedia is one of the best showcases of the Internet and in my opinion the greatest collaboration project in human history.
For the first time we have knowledge available to all, for (almost) free. You want to pay because you're privileged, but that's not the way of improving humanity as a whole, rich and poor, privileged and stuck in a mud hut with a crappy phone.
Of course we can do better, but I find it incredibly dismissive not to recognise the incredible achievement Wikipedia is.
Blame the fact that as a species we're quite tribalistic and selfish, not the collective effort we're making while trying the hardest limit our biases and shortcomings as much as (humanly) possible.
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That's not really a reason why, it's the (vague) plan going forward.
They want a break from their present situation so they can concentrate on planning for their future plans since it's hard to plan for the future when they are fully involved in the present. That's why. Not vague at all.
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> Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. Then it got taken over by a bunch of entrenched editors more interested in their own power than the accuracy of the pages' information. Then there are also the people with ideological axes to grind, and the community's seeming belief that it's fine to merely reform a problematic user to just the barest level of acceptability. Unless you find some forgotten c…
Wikipedia also has the Stack Overflow problem of 'deletionists' (who mark everything as already described somewhere else, or not notable).
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I think they are running a charity on hard mode. If I were feeding homeless people (any year except last year), I have a pretty good idea of what I have to accomplish and for how many people. I could run a pretty lean operation. Meanwhile RC “has to” stash supplies 12 hours from everywhere in the world and then let most of them rot. Their overheads are huge, even before you get into any discussion of mismanagement.
You can Google to quickly get a bunch of different articles about how ineffective the Red Cross is; we don't need to recapitulate them all here, it's just a little funny that they were your example of an obvious recurring charity donation. If I have a real point here, it's that people all have different definitions of what important charities are.
Do you have a particular one in mind? I found [0] but as far as I can see, GiveWell.org doesn't advise against donating to them in general.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/05/red-cross-hait...
> We have a deep and stable financial position that will help us grow and protect us from any storm, and the trust in our projects has never been higher. They earned 9 millions more than last year, from 120 millions to 129 millions, and spent 21 millions more, from 91 millions to 112 millions [1], with an increase of 10 millions in "awards and grants". The donations grew by 10 millions. If I read the financial statem…
No law of physics says they must continue pouring tens of millions into outreach programs if all revenue ceases. Hosting wikipedia is their one true cost and is relatively tiny compared to everything else they spend money on.
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They want a break from their present situation so they can concentrate on planning for their future plans since it's hard to plan for the future when they are fully involved in the present. That's why. Not vague at all.
That may be what you think is going on, but isn't necessarily true. They might have been forced out, or quit because of stress or interpersonal conflict. There is no 'because' in the former CEO's statement.