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?

#111

Post by hkt » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:51 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…

In the UK your donations can be for a specified purpose, and must be earmarked for it. Is there no equivalent in the rest of the world?

And perhaps more to the point, Wikipedia has legal personality in the UK, so one assumes the above applies.

But really it would be pointless: I'm not going to tell Wikipedia what their strategy should be when I donate. So even if you do, they can put my donation to whatever purpose it is that yours precluded.

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

#112

Post by bawolff » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:55 AM UTC

j-pb wrote: post #104

zozbot234 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Using RDF to store multiple languages of the same article is gross overengineering. Interlinking with other projects isn't nessecary when there are no other projects.

It isn't stored as RDF. RDF is provided as an export format. The language contents also aren't stored in wikidata, its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y.

Wikidata isn't just used for interlanguage linking. Its also used to keep infoboxes synced across different languages, and a way to easily query that data (Depends a bit on the language, english wikipedia isn't fully on board with the system, but its been a big boon to smaller languages).

As a result, people can update these "facts" independently of language, keeping them altogether more up to date, and it allows the data to be queried independently (via https://query.wikidata.org - try some of the example queries (button top left) if you haven't, the level of power SPARQL gives for querying this type of data set really is very cool).

Part of Wikimedia's mission is to spread knowledge. Allowing querying of factual data with a query language like sparql helps advance that goal by letting people use extract the knowledge for new purposes.

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

#113

Post by zozbot234 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:56 AM UTC

mlang23 wrote: post #98

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 ge…

Profit seeking organizations have residual claimants who are directly incented to cut the waste, and they still get cancer. This ought to suggest to us how hard the problem really is.

ISTM that the only viable solution is federation, where multiple, independent, small, tightly-knit organizations cooperate on the shared goal of hosting content, media, etc. on real-world entities and topics. But, ironically enough, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects are the closest thing we have to something that might actually enable this development! (The former in its de-facto role as a semantically-enhanced "web directory" of entity identifiers; the latter via the "right to fork" that's inherent in all free-content licenses.)

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

#114

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:57 AM UTC

harikb wrote: post #95

ramraj07 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by rPlayer6554 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 6:59 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.

In June 2011 they had 11 million articles across all Wikipedias. As of now they have 55 million articles across all Wikipedias. [0]. I'd say this is pretty good even without considering any increases to viewership or size of existing pages.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons

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

#116

Post by thepangolino » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

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…

Wikimedia foundation spends over 55M to pay for 400 staff. That’s 137k a year in payroll costs per employee. Are they all top management and or US based engineers?!

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

#117

Post by strogonoff » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #97

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…

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 scr…

On one hand, Wikipedia has become more “complete” in the last 10 years (though information never is, really).

On the other hand, the grown amount of content means there is proportionately more content to maintain—which might take even more effort and attention to detail than writing new content.

That, as well as the reputation and pervasiveness of links to Wikipedia, together make it more vulnerable to and a more compelling target for instances of blatant or stealthy misinformation, censorship and vandalism.

On that topic, I suspect a resource that tracks change histories for sensitive Wikipedia articles[0], aggregating and correlating changes by IPs and usernames along with some smart NLP analysis on text contents of the diffs, could end up being insightful.

[0] Many of us know a certain date coming up, publicly remembering which starting this year is already punishable by a prison sentence in Hong Kong. Maintaining the article covering this one is hopefully taken care of for now as it is pretty conspicuous—but for how long, and how many lesser known articles are there…

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

#118

Post by j-pb » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #112

j-pb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using RDF to store multiple languages of the same article is gross overengineering. Interlinking with other projects isn't nessecary when there are no other projects.

It isn't stored as RDF. RDF is provided as an export format. The language contents also aren't stored in wikidata, its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y. Wikidata isn't just used for interlanguage linking. Its also used to keep infoboxes synced across different languages, and a way to easily query that data (Depends a bit on the language, english wikipedia isn't fully on board…

> its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y

Like I said, gross overengineering.

"You can save cents and seconds of time updating knowledge boxes, by spending millions and hours developing federated SPARQL query capabilities!"

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

#119

Post by leipert » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:04 AM UTC

Reading through the comments I think one point wasn’t really touched on. I think everyone has a limited amount of funds available for charity. Certain non-profits are more well funded than others _and_ there are more efficient charities around.

One should look at the labels with what they are buying, and articles like these (maybe it is a little disingenuous) might help people to steer their funds where they think they can do more.

If you are upset by the way WMF asks for donations, here might be some alternatives:

- https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

- https://eff.org/

Or if you are a fellow German(-Speaker):

- https://www.fiff.de/

- https://fragdenstaat.de/

- https://digitalcourage.de/

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

#120

Post by markvdb » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

Who is entitled to a say on Wikimedia's business organisation? Not me. The Wikimedia foundation can organise itself as it sees fit.

If anything, they've proven to be rather good at it, with lots and lots of value added to the commons, and a healthy financial state of affairs.