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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?

#81

Post by trothamel »

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…

That's not completely true, as it seems like the number of editors on English wikipedia hit a low point around 2013 and has been steady or going up since then.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/...

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

#82

Post by bawolff »

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.

Wikipedia (Like all encyclopedias) is a tertiary source. Its goal is not to provide the capital-T Truth, but to summarize as best it can contemporary knowledge. It aims to do that as neutrally as possible, but perfect neutrality doesn't exist, so all it can do is always try and get closer and closer to that ideal.

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

#83

Post by marcan_42 »

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…

Did you read their article? They mention how money they funnel into the fund is counted as "expenses", as is stuff like hiring 40 people just for fundraising. I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year.

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

#84

Post by barelyusable »

The author linked the report: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200...

I know it's from 2018 and maybe something changed, but: they took $115M. They paid $90M in costs, including $38M in salaries and Imagine you just hire a techy support staff. Let's assume you only need 50 people, each making $100k to operate a global website in all timezones. That's probably like $140k total costs per employee (healthcare, benefits, payroll, all sorts of taxes). You need 50*140k=$7M/yr. Assume you buy AT&T stock with 6% dividend. You need $120M of assets to get $7M. There is no safety here, and also my calculation doesn't include maybe like 5% increase in costs per year.

I often wonder how could I create a fully self-sustainable non-profit: the one, that doesn't require begging for money and wasting time every year. Instead, the one that could operate independently. To make this happen, you pretty much have to invest the money very, very well, and diversify to the point where the yield is low, yet high enough to hire staff etc. (an example of sustainable donation is present in the Thorp's "A man of all markets" wrt. his endowment to UCI math department) For this you must have a pile of money, if you do the math, and it'd make perfect sense for Wikipedia.

Unless they shrink, lay people off and optimize, they'll need $2B to be fully self-sufficient and sustainable. Otherwise, the fundraiser will need to bring $100M/yr at least.

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

#85

Post by bawolff »

mnouquet wrote: post #56
MattGaiser wrote: post #23

This notion that non-profits should be run on fumes by people who are paid less than market is ridiculous.

So is the notion that non-profit should pay their execs millions.

Whose getting paid millions? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

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

#86

Post by corin_ »

drdeca wrote: post #80
corin_ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree.

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

#87

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

furi wrote: post #43
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 Is this true? I've heard a counter-argument to this in the past that Wikipedia works much like other encyclopedias do, a large number of domain specialists contribute large blocks of text about their respective fields (perhaps in just one edit) and then a core group of "editors" go around adjusting style, adding "[citation needed]" and making it all…

See http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/whowriteswikipedia/

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

#88

Post by kqr »

j-pb wrote: post #74
zozbot234 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Every long-term successful operation needs to sustain a few wild bets that look pointless today, with great probability will turn out to have been pointless tomorrow, but has just a tiny chance of becoming really important.

If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow.

Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides.

If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival.

Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.

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

#90

Post by modo_mario »

furi wrote: post #55
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 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…

>Now the money's drying up (because Firefox's market share is dwindling) and Mozilla are having to cut staff, including staff who work on Firefox development, to survive.

I think Mozilla did some good or at least had the right intentions with some of their sideprojects and think they should keep trying.

On the other hand I have to contain myself from insulting their current CEO in this context given she made her wage shoot up whilst their marketshare was shrinking so much, laid of so many from the servo team among many others which i think could have been very important for firefox's future whilst at the same time running projects like giving half a million to artists to look into the potential intersection of AI and racism if I understood it well. I wonder it's a project by one their new board members the addition of which i don't exactly see the point of either.

I don't think they should keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff but if they do fine... If they keep themselves busy with this kind of stuff they should try to make an impact but if they want to analyse and highlight fine. If they want to analyse and highlight i feel like they should give this money to researchers or a study or so. But then they give the money to some bloody artists. If it works i'd like em to fix world hunger with a painting next. And what's worse.... They do it whilst they're laying of the staff of the ship they're sinking.

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