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

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

dailydot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 619 posts

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

#71

Post by gspr »

bawolff wrote: post #59
neolog wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time Where can I learn about this?

A lot of fuss has been made about this graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Upd... Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now th…

Can't it just be that since 2007 most of the obvious topics for an encyclopedia to cover have been covered?

It's probably less satisfying to change the wording in one sentence in an article about an Australian cheese than it is to write that article. So fewer people care.

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

#72

Post by Clewza313 »

k1m wrote: post #44
jonahbenton wrote: post #14

Ridiculous question and even more ridiculous factoids. The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please. Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in t…

Wikipedia in my experience doesn't "take on" anyone. They have a list of sources of large information outlets that are marked, mostly arbitrarily, "reliable". With the media landscape being as skewed as it is (largely reflecting interests of media owners and advertisers, see Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model), Wikipedia has set itself up to reflect those same biases by relying on the same sources.

Here's the list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

You'll note that (eg) Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, The Economist and Al Jazeera are all considered "reliable" (green), while Fox News is yellow (OK except for politics).

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

#73

Post by zozbot234 »

k1m wrote: post #44
jonahbenton wrote: post #14

Ridiculous question and even more ridiculous factoids. The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please. Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in t…

Wikipedia in my experience doesn't "take on" anyone. They have a list of sources of large information outlets that are marked, mostly arbitrarily, "reliable". With the media landscape being as skewed as it is (largely reflecting interests of media owners and advertisers, see Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model), Wikipedia has set itself up to reflect those same biases by relying on the same sources.

Or maybe they're marked "reliable" because they're less likely to make stuff up. I know that it is problematic when all the most obvious sources are slanted towards one political point of view, but citing the Daily Mail and other tabloids for stuff that the viewer's supposed to trust is even worse.

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

#74

Post by j-pb »

zozbot234 wrote: post #38
ramraj07 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then let those projects fight and advertise for themselves.

People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does.

Those projects would crash and burn though, because frankly, no one cares about them. Stuff like wikidata and SPARQL endpoints are an academic curiosity with no real value.

The semantic web won't happen, articles do and will.

In addition to that, the whole deletion first and no primary information attitude makes sentences like "ecosystem of free knowledge" laughable.

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

#75

Post by paxys »

> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year

This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email (https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March...) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade ago.

Wikimedia's finances are audited and published every year. Here's the latest one from 2019-2020 - https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu.... They had $120M in donations and $9M in other revenue for the year. Expenses were $112M. That isn't even close to the buffer that the article implies. The foundation's total current assets (~$160M) would keep their sites running for shouldn't they fundraise more?

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

#76

Post by mavhc »

bawolff wrote: post #59
neolog wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time Where can I learn about this?

A lot of fuss has been made about this graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Upd... Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now th…

The barrier to entry is often that more articles exist now, it's likely the random thing you know enough about to start an article about already has one.

Having 10% of new editors stick around seems amazingly high.

Has anyone done the same for post 2015?

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

#77

Post by furi »

zozbot234 wrote: post #60
furi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we've already seen this pan out once. Mozilla received a large payment from Google for many years for making Google Search the primary search engine in Firefox. They used that money to pay large salaries, launch a dozen side projects (none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox) and aim for lofty goals much like Wikimedia is doing here. Now the money's drying up (because Firefox's mar…

> none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox Hi, let me introduce you to this weird newfangled language called Rust... /s

Rust is definitely a significant and important project. That said, Firefox's peak market share was a little over 30% of desktop browsers (in 2009 so they weren't yet a sideshow), while Rust isn't even currently in the TIOBE Index top 20 (can't find any easy way to see a peak position sadly).

More importantly though, we have other Rusts. Rust has half a dozen competitors and essentially nobody thinks that making a robust new systems programming language is an unachievable goal. Firefox is the only non-profit browser engine we have and most people consider it an impossible undertaking to develop a new one from scratch at this stage. Indeed, Microsoft recently tried before conceding defeat and switching Edge over to Chromium's Blink.

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

#78

Post by Clewza313 »

paxys wrote: post #75

> But keeping Wikipedia online is a task that the WMF could comfortably manage on $10 million a year This part is disingenuous and bordering on malicious. The linked email ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March... ) has so much more nuance, and in typical fashion a single number from it is taken completely out of context to push a certain narrative. It is also an estimate from almost a decade…

Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.

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

#79

Post by brittonsmith »

jonahbenton wrote: post #14

Ridiculous question and even more ridiculous factoids. The assumption that operating as a non-profit implies an entity should stop asking its audience for help advancing the mission, or that it should pay its necessary staff less than competitive wages...please. Give wikipedia more so they can take on the MUCH more well-endowed and entirely opaque private capital taking over nearly every other information outlet in t…

I'm with you. Wikipedia has revolutionized access to information. I can't imagine where we would be without it today. I'd much rather they be more than ready to weather a few storms than about to pull the plug before people feel the need to donate.

I think this article rubs me the wrong way because it leans a little heavily on vagueness to take you from the facts to how you should feel about them. Some volunteers are not amused? How many? A majority? A vocal few? "Wikipedians who have made hundreds of thousands of edits may well feel someone else is enjoying the fruit of their labor." Well, do they or don't they? Did you ask them?

I'll even admit that my initial reaction to this article was why do they need more of my money? But I gave $10 last year (basically nothing for my current income), and I'll do the same this year. Don't give so much money that you get bent out of shape about where it goes. If everyone gave an amount that meant relatively little to them, they would be in great shape. That's also basically what the donation banners say, too, but the article doesn't mention that.

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

#80

Post by drdeca »

corin_ wrote: post #41
bawolff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well for example, and I'm not advocating for these ideas other than pointing out that they'd be much simpler than changing the structure of society: the Government could either buy, or forcefully take control of, Wikipedia, or they could create a competitor with enough funding to take over. They could do it creating a gov department to run it, or they could set it up as an organisation fully owned by the state. They…

Man, I do not trust any government to run Wikipedia.
Post reply on HN