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Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

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Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#31

Post by ramraj07 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #21

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 a…

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.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#32

Post by Asymmetryk »

op03 wrote: post #30

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 ove…

Exactly.

Then the Wikipedia Foundation should calibrate their appeals accordingly and the problem is solved.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#33

Post by bawolff »

checkerscaptian wrote: post #17

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'

They currently don't hire any moderators.

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.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#34

Post by ramraj07 »

op03 wrote: post #30

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 ove…

If their run rate is a few mill a year and they already have an endowment for hundreds of millions more why do they need to ask for more?

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#35

Post by olivermarks »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #25
olivermarks wrote: post #7

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 https://www.vice.com/en/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-eli... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody

>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 becaus…

@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

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#36

Post by jonahbenton »

zozbot234 wrote: post #21

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 a…

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.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#37

Post by bawolff »

swores wrote: post #28
bawolff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice and all, but short of a communist revolution, how do we do that?

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.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#38

Post by zozbot234 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #31
zozbot234 wrote: post #21

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 a…

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.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#40

Post by bawolff »

xwolfi wrote: post #22
bawolff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice and all, but short of a communist revolution, how do we do that?

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 re…

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.

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