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Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#171

Post by kayxspre »

smsm42 wrote: post #144
nickpp wrote: post #80

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 don't really bother to contribute to any prominent pages on main Wikis, because in my experience it almost always required fighting with people with huge egos following arcane rules and procedures which they certainly took a lot of time to design and develop but which don't seem like productive use of my time, especially when people who designed them are going to fight me on every step. There are some younger and l…

> in my experience it almost always required fighting with people with huge egos following arcane rules and procedures which they certainly took a lot of time to design and develop but which don't seem like productive use of my time

This echoed my experience before I left a Wikipedia project (one of its language variant). I have been vocal with the direction one of its most active admin is trying to head the project to, as well as the not-so-positive treatment of inexperienced users. Many of the legitimate complaints against this admin was pretty much ignored or stalled. Ultimately, I decided that it's not worth my efforts to try to push for a more friendly environment, and I have decided to leave. I still help with some offline activities and movement-related function, but chances for me to return to being the contributors again are slim.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#172

Post by Symbiote »

whimsicalism wrote: post #57
vorpalhex wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are welcome to, just declare it upfront.

I think you should assume that every charitable organization you are donating to might throw the occasional party for their administrative employees and will certainly throw parties to attract donations.

Having worked for both a small and a mid-size charity (~50, ~500 employees), and known people at others, in my experience an annual "staff party" or similar is usually fairly low-key. People are very aware that the money comes from donations.

Why have the party at all? Because spending €20 or whatever per employee/volunteer on an annual party has benefits beyond increasing everyone's salary by that amount: job satisfaction, employee/volunteer retention, knowledge sharing etc.

Fundraising events are parties for the guests, but work for the charity staff. (Attend the party, introduce Rich Person X to Foreign Princess Y who promotes our work and went to the same university, mention the proposed project in Country Z if she doesn't, etc.)

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#173

Post by mountainb »

nickpp wrote: post #80

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…

If you try using Wikipedia as a research aid in almost any field and try to follow footnotes a lot of the time you will wind up with broken links or a garbage source. It's not that there are not some Wikipedia pages that are not good. It is the case that it's very challenging to tell when a page is good or bad without following the footnotes. Sometimes you will find a good source, but at least in my experience most of the time you will try to follow citations and see it ends in either 404 or a trash pit.

There are also lots of situations like if you are looking for things such as statistics related to a war, if you use Wikipedia to start your research you will wind up clicking through to all kinds of trash sources that waste your time when there are compendiums of statistics through either government reports or print references that you could have just used with library access in a fraction of the time that you spent sifting through a sea of web feces.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#174

Post by mountainb »

nickpp wrote: post #126
sph wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia may have been an amazing idea in the beginning. > 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 hist…

Honestly I feel where you’re coming from, I used to think exactly like you. But I slowly came to my current sad realization. Right now I do believe that free wrong info is actually more damaging than paid correct info. But I am open to and wish for a third option or a solution which is more inclusive and less "for the privileged".

I think if you just read the articles without following the footnotes you can easily get the impression that Wikipedia is a good encyclopedia. The writing quality is often pretty good, which unfortunately makes it more deceptive as to information quality.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#175

Post by buran77 »

the_duke wrote: post #149
nickpp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I feel where you’re coming from, I used to think exactly like you. But I slowly came to my current sad realization. Right now I do believe that free wrong info is actually more damaging than paid correct info. But I am open to and wish for a third option or a solution which is more inclusive and less "for the privileged".

Could you cite specific examples of wrong or actually harmful information? That would give more credence to your arguments. Maybe also link to your rejected contributions to show that you are not just disgruntled because your edits were reverted. I do agree that there are lots of inaccuracies in articles, but having Wikipedia with at least somewhat helpful information is infinitely better than having nothing at all.

> at least somewhat helpful information is infinitely better than having nothing at all

Maybe, at least as long as we still have a good ratio between reliable and unreliable info (whatever that ratio may be). But as long as someone can piggy-back on this reputation, and most people simply take all that info for granted, the effect of a disingenuous Wiki article is far higher than your average FB "fake news". It's that implicit trust that makes a Trojan horse more dangerous.

There is no action being taken to make this process of correcting information more open and transparent, and out of the hands of a few people. Especially since it's been shown in the past that this kind of power was sold for money in PR campaigns, or used for revenge edits.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#176

Post by eitland »

gggtt wrote: post #153
eitland wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as with me and Mozilla then: I deeply dislike that these four things happens almost simultaneously : - firing the people who create their biggest contributions to the free and open web ab also their main source of income - supporting other efforts all over the place - begging for money from the "community" - while brushing me of in tje comments when I ask about progress on a 4 year old bug

- and the boss paying herself massive salary while Mozilla is dying You can support Servo Project independently now : https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo While it doesn't directly contribute to Firefox itself (for now) I think this is worth supporting

> You can support Servo Project independently now :

Already do :-)

As for her salary, I won't make a point out of that: she has already negotiated orders of magnitude more than that in income to Mozilla.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#177

Post by m3at »

Clewza313 wrote: post #165
fastball wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most large orgs don't beg for my money after I've already given them my time for free though.

Wikimedia is free for its users and doesn't do ads, you need to pay the server bills and find development somehow.

It absolutely does, and Wikipedia gets my donation yearly for that. However there are legitimate questions about how much/few of that is dedicated to its core tasks: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#178

Post by andrepd »

nickpp wrote: post #80

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…

Every time the post title contains "wikipedia" out come the same complaints. I say what I always say: can you please point out a specific incident where you saw wrong information, tried to correct it, and were overturned?

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#179

Post by swiley »

nickpp wrote: post #80

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…

Wikipedia has always suffered from inaccuracies. IME it's gotten better, not worse, over the past few years. I don't read many of the politically interesting articles though, maybe that's what you're complaining about? Wikipedia has never been the right platform for that though.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#180

Post by seanhunter »

nickpp wrote: post #80

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, I see a tremendous value in something like that, but alas the market was killed by the free Wikipedia.

There are definitely pros and cons. My wife is a professional musician and teacher so at home we have a copy of the "New Grove" encyclopedia of music, which is the industry standard "proper encyclopedia" for music. Each article is written by a specific expert in that subject, This leads to them being tremendously detailed and informative. The downside is the process of compliation is slow and so even if you have a subscription to the electronic version it will be behind (sometimes years behind) the very latest research.

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