131–140 of 619 posts
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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.
Ok but if they fired all their fundraisers how are they going to get $10m a year?
Godspeed to them in this endeavor. I think this is not the time to become absolute purists in the choice of tech overlords. The tech world is being controlled by less than a handful of trillion-dollar monopolists that crush anything that stands in their way. A few hundred million in this war is a drop in the ocean.
Yes, power corrupts, and money is power. Yes, left to their own devices, people in NGOs will maximize revenues and expand their employee empires - just like those in the for-profit sector. What matters is the strategic goals and their execution by the leadership, and there is nothing - absolutely nothing - to indicate that WMF went astray from its stated mission.
I cannot but feel this is another pissing contest like the open source world experienced, where everybody and their brother started their own distributions/forks to virtue signal their true commitment to the open source goals. This led to a massive fragmentation of the scene, the few companies that tried to use the model, like Redhat and Ubuntu, were exposed as deviationists from the party line; meanwhile big tech ate the world and put every man, woman and child on the planet in invisible jails.
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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.
Ok but if they fired all their fundraisers how are they going to get $10m a year?
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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…
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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.
They had ~30 million in expenses in the 2011-2012 financial year: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/0/09/FINAL... Whether or not its 10x better service, I don't know, but they are definitely doing more now then back then. There's been lots of software development since 2011 (Some good, some not so much). Even just site speed and stability has improved significantly since 2011.
And it's probably questionable if all side ventures are needed or if they could/should have sticked to the core project and developt it with little money.
As mentioned further down: Do you really need 40 fundraiser positions?
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I've donated to Wikipedia and contributed content as well but now I've decided not to anymore for the time being. Any kind of controversial article is decided more by the amount of time which side has to push their agenda rather than any kind of objective Neutral Point of View. There is a lot of astroturfing as well.
With respect, think about what you are saying. You are not going to contribute with good intentions to a public service because there are people with bad intentions contributing to it...
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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!"
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…