Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:30 AM UTC

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…

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

On the contrary, Wikipedia itself has a lot of reliance on the other projects. For example, Wikidata solves the problem of interlinking Wikipedia languages and other projects when they're hosting content about the same real-world entity. In fact, this was Wikidata's MVP - the reason it got funded in the first place. It then took off from there.

Wikimedia Commons is a similar story - in addition to the obvious languages issue, there are a lot of concerns about media (such as licensing. enhancement etc.) that really are best addressed in a dedicated venue, with its own committed contributors. This has been very beneficial to Wikipedia itself.

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

#92

Post by bawolff » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:31 AM UTC

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #47

I'd be more interesting in knowing why Wikipedia is cutting off so many "<1%" users like narrow desktop screens, older browsers, no-JS users, mobile users with unsteady connections.

How are no-js users cut off? At least the desktop site should definitely work fine (I never use the mobile so i don't know).

Hell, last i checked, wikipedia even worked if cookies were disabled (and you weren't logged in).

I'm also not sure what the unsteady connections thing is about? Wikipedia doesn't modify the TCP stack.

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

#93

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:34 AM UTC

gspr wrote: post #71

bawolff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the standards for what counts as "good" Wikipedia editing have gotten a lot higher as well, at least wrt. mainstream topics.

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

#94

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #67

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 about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. This is the very source of the complaint though. People want to donate to fund the thing they actually use, not a bunch of other arbitrary projects they don’t care about. I mean take a look at the donation page under “Where your donation goes”. It does technically mention a “wide variety of projects” but the whole thing i…

The encyclopedia wouldn't be what it is, absent these "sister" projects. It's all interconnected. (I have tried to address this in a sibling comment.)

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

#95

Post by harikb » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #29

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…

What a ridiculous criticism of a valid article with a lot of facts. I have donated to Wikipedia several times and feel violated now. They might have not lied outright but acting as if you’re a poor Non profit when you are most definitely not poor is outrageous. I don’t know if Jimmy Wales is part of this entire charade but this is exactly what you expect to happen when you employ a CEO who charges north of half a mil…

That is a ridiculous and ugly accusation to make. If you don’t know what it takes to run a globally available top site, it is better not throw stones at people.

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

#96

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:39 AM UTC

Clewza313 wrote: post #78

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.

10 years ago would've been 2011 or so. I'd say it's very much in the ballpark wrt. global impact, considering everything that Wikimedia does and the way the projects have grown. Of course, much of it has to be credited to growth in Internet and Web access since then.

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

#97

Post by belorn » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:40 AM UTC

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…

One of the major argument I have seen why the retention graph has gone down is that English Wikipedia is much more complete in 2021 than 2007. Writing about esoteric topics is by itself limiting to fewer editors, and the bar of notability is more restrictive. Non-English articles is easier in that sense, but much of that work seems to become a translation of the English version. Writing a non-English article from scratch is an alternative but can feel a bit less interesting when the English version is already of high quality.

I could be wrong but today it seems that most editor efforts in the English Wikipedia goes towards news, politics and media. It would not surprise me if those have a natural lower retention rate than other form of articles.

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

#98

Post by mlang23 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:41 AM UTC

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…

Maybe maybe. But most of the large organisations you are refering to make the money they pay their waste^Wmanagers with not from donations, and are typically also not relying on so much volunteer work. In my book, it is totally fine to demand that organisations that are largely based on volunteer work and dontations dont pay the typical manager salaries. Why should we look away if a mostly-volunteer driven project gets cancer? Why should we ignore the cancer? Just because other companies have cancer too?

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

#99

Post by IshKebab » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:42 AM UTC

I think this is a really valid point. If you look at their list of staff (salaries are their main expense) there are clearly a lot of people that aren't necessary to run Wikipedia.

But I think it's weird to complain about the endowment. That's exactly what they should be doing. If I ran Wikipedia I would have kept it to a core team of engineers - they could have built up a $1bn endowment by now if they had done that, and then they could run it indefinitely without asking for donations again.

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

#100

Post by harikb » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:43 AM UTC

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.

Your response sounds like Wikipedia is putting a paywall!