Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

diff.wikimedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 252 posts

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#211

Post by dlubarov »

pwinnski wrote: post #205
dlubarov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, Wikipedia is 20 years old, and has been a top 20 site for the past 15 years. At this point, they don't have much serious competition. Britannica stopped printing physical encyclopedias in 2012. The WMF can certainly make their case and answer criticisms, but there are cost-efficient ways of doing that. I don't see much value in funding parties, conferences, etc. for a product that has already dominated in most ma…

Yes, in the US at least, wikimedia has been very effective. That doesn't seem like "most markets" to me. In fact, not so much the rest of the world at all, and even in the US, now does not seem like the time to stop and let that decline.

Maybe my wording was a bit strong, but the US is a pretty small minority of Wikipedia's usage. If we look at article counts, about 12% of articles are in English (5.8M of 49.3M): https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#212

Post by pwinnski »

dlubarov wrote: post #211
pwinnski wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in the US at least, wikimedia has been very effective. That doesn't seem like "most markets" to me. In fact, not so much the rest of the world at all, and even in the US, now does not seem like the time to stop and let that decline.

Maybe my wording was a bit strong, but the US is a pretty small minority of Wikipedia's usage. If we look at article counts, about 12% of articles are in English (5.8M of 49.3M): https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesTotal.htm

Right, so more than twice as much as #2 (2.3M), at least in December 18.

And more recently, the US has more than four times as many pageviews as #2 (4B to Japan's 1B)[0].

So no, I don't think the work is done outside the US, and I think maintaining a leading position doesn't happen automatically, so I don't think the work is entirely done inside the US, either.

0. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/page-view...

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#213

Post by cwyers »

natex wrote: post #45
cwyers wrote: post #25

> 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.

> 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…

To me, that is "what comes next." If she didn't leave, she wouldn't need to think about her future, because her future would be "keep doing this."

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#214

Post by 8bitsrule »

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…

> I don't really bother to contribute to any prominent pages

That's one of the secrets for being left alone. Improving jealously-guarded pages - or bio pages that are overseen by PR folk - is like walking on thin ice.

Stay away from politics and celebs. There are lots (millions!) of pages in hundreds of topics that have been rated as high-importance and need lots of TLC ... and don't attract turf-guarders. There are lots of pages where people have added 'citation needed' (so easy) ... when they could have just added a good citation instead. Correct a spelling. Clarify a passage. Add a high-quality external link ... might save someone some research and let them spend that time improving the article. Might be better than the article will ever be. None of those are likely to attract attention, all improve the article.

Start small, build over time. You can draft something in a sandbox, then ask for an opinion before you invest hours. Yep, there are (many, many) rules - and they change over time. There are pages where you can ask for help. If someone reverts something, calmly discuss it. A copy of your work is never gone, it's in the history. Come back in a year and try it again!

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#215

Post by dlubarov »

ckoerner wrote: post #200
dlubarov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, Wikipedia is 20 years old, and has been a top 20 site for the past 15 years. At this point, they don't have much serious competition. Britannica stopped printing physical encyclopedias in 2012. The WMF can certainly make their case and answer criticisms, but there are cost-efficient ways of doing that. I don't see much value in funding parties, conferences, etc. for a product that has already dominated in most ma…

Most markets? That’s a very privileged view. Research by the WMF in 2019 shows incredibly low rates of awareness in large parts of the world. I doubly you will read it, nor to I seek to argue this with you, but here are the findings: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers/Awareness#Awaren...

> That’s a very privileged view

> I doubly you will read it

Why do you feel the need to use ad hominems rather than simply making your point?

> Research by the WMF in 2019 shows incredibly low rates of awareness in large parts of the world

I wasn't claiming that Wikipedia is near peak global usage. My point was that there is no meaningful competition left, so usage should grow organically, as it did for EN-WP back when the WMF had a shoestring budget.

Can you identify some markets where Wikipedia is losing ground to an inferior competitor with more aggressive marketing? I'm not sure there are any.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#216

Post by bzbarsky »

ptero wrote: post #192
bzbarsky wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that I've ever seen anything strictly _wrong_ in an article about mathematics, but I've certainly seen articles giving equations without defining what any of the variables are and using using very field-specific notation without defining or referencing it, making them impossible to read unless you know enough about the topic to reverse-engineer what they're talking about. And I'm not talking something li…

Can you point to a few examples just to make sure we are talking about the same thing? I use wikipedia for math, physics and engineering topics frequently and generally do not have too much trouble understanding it, possibly with a few cross-referenced articles. I have seen occasional weird writing, but this is usually either some esoteric subject or just an initial writeup on a narrow topic -- that is, an inexperien…

If I had examples off the top of my head, I would have cited them. I'll see if I can find time to do some digging through my browser history, but this is a multi-hour endeavor that you're asking for here, so I might not be able to get to it.

And to be clear, I am not talking about people staking out territory or looking for recognition. I am talking about articles being so badly written they are functionally indistinguishable from being "wrong". Yes, you can decipher them with enough outside knowledge and some other references, but it's pretty tough. And this is not a majority of mathematics articles by any means. But the problem is that if you don't know enough you can't tell whether you're looking at such an article or not, unfortunately...

P.S. I just took a quick look at just my recent-ish Wikipedia edits, and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Limit_superior_an... was correcting a small but obviously wrong claim. Which is, to be clear, not the sort of issue I was referring to in my comment about badly-written articles.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#217

Post by utborin »

bzbarsky wrote: post #188
iNic wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course Wikipedia has some unique problems due to its fundamental structure, but on the whole it is roughly as accurate as other Encyclopedias [1]. But not every study agrees [2]. See also [3]. It seems to be also be field dependent, and I have to say that personally, as a mathematician, I have never seen anything wrong in any article about mathematics. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a [2] https://www.re…

I don't know that I've ever seen anything strictly _wrong_ in an article about mathematics, but I've certainly seen articles giving equations without defining what any of the variables are and using using very field-specific notation without defining or referencing it, making them impossible to read unless you know enough about the topic to reverse-engineer what they're talking about. And I'm not talking something li…

I'll go ahead and admit that I'm a dummy: I find anything related to math on Wikipedia to be an incomprehensible nightmare. There's a consistent failure, in my view, to consider the audience. It's like people are writing to impress a technical in-group rather than to inform the general public.

Maybe I should try the Simple English pages instead. :-/

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#218

Post by andrekandre »

eitland wrote: post #151
umvi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I wish there were a way to support just Wikipedia. I don't really care about a lot of Wikimedia Foundation's other pet projects, but the way they phrase their banners and emails, you'd think we are always a razor's edge from Wikipedia servers shutting off...

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

i have felt the same many times... i think the "bug in the program" is: donation doesnt give you a vote/ownership.

i sort of feel like an interesting experiment might be an idea where donating above a certain amount (say 5 dollars) should give someone "a years ownership" and a vote in major policy decisions for that year, sort of like a consumer cooperative

also, in that model, a company couldnt just buy more shares and get more votes (like a stock)... that might be a better model... maybe

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#219

Post by jjk166 »

will4274 wrote: post #206
the_duke wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. The article for Bill Ayers describes him as an "elementary education theorist." That's not what he's notable for.

And the article for John Wilkes Booth describes him as an "American stage actor" even though that's not what he's known for. If you keep reading the article, however, it's almost completely about what he is known for (a statement true for both cases). That's just standard wikipedia formatting.

Re: Stepping Down as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation

#220

Post by bzbarsky »

utborin wrote: post #217
bzbarsky wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that I've ever seen anything strictly _wrong_ in an article about mathematics, but I've certainly seen articles giving equations without defining what any of the variables are and using using very field-specific notation without defining or referencing it, making them impossible to read unless you know enough about the topic to reverse-engineer what they're talking about. And I'm not talking something li…

I'll go ahead and admit that I'm a dummy: I find anything related to math on Wikipedia to be an incomprehensible nightmare. There's a consistent failure, in my view, to consider the audience. It's like people are writing to impress a technical in-group rather than to inform the general public. Maybe I should try the Simple English pages instead. :-/

I think you're spot on, for what it's worth. The context for my comment above is that I have a math PhD, and even then a lot of the articles are an unnecessarily tough read. For the general public they are pretty impenetrable...
Post reply on HN