Because they need money to keep running it free!
Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
151–160 of 619 posts
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!"
More like, we put the facts and knowledge in a central (mysql) db, so that instead of updating them in 300 places (Wikipedia has a lot of languages), you just update them in one place. And since the data happened to be there anyways, we added an RDF export feature, and threw that into a BlazeGraph DB so that people could do SPARQL queries if they want. The (not really federated) SPARQL queries have basically nothing…
Is there a entry point for "how to make FOSS contributions to wiki-projects". I at the very least would be interested in finding out how all the pieces fit together, and maybe browsing the big list to see if anything was in my wheelhouse.
Edit: And thank you for some insight into the back end of wikipedia - I did not know multiple languages was such a big push and it is such a sensible direction . Keep up the good work and keep pestering me for cash each year.
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#153Let'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 i…
It applies to the USA too. (Note: Wikimedia UK is an independent organization. It is associated with, but not owned/controlled by WMF)
However, often restricted donations result in people spending money on things that don't matter, because it might be earmarked for something that isn't needed. Even if not, it can distort priorities in ways that people earmarking the donations aren't aware of.
Its the sort of thing, where the bureaucracy of it clearly isn't worth it for small donations.
According to WMF's financial statement, there was about 4 million of such restricted donations in the 2018-2019 year.
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> but they are definitely doing more now then back then 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?
The side ventures aren't the thing they are doing now that they weren't back then (Other then wikidata which started in 2012, all the other side projects are really old). Things they are doing now is stuff like having a website that stays up and is speedy. Software improvements for english wikipedia
EN Wikipedia has always been where the lion share of attention was focused on (With wikidata and commons coming in second. The other projects get very little love).
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia exploded over night. The semantic web is "tomorrow technology" for 20 years now. At what point does tomorrow technology become yesterdays vaporware to you?
Wikidata gets more edits per second right now than the English wikipedia does. If that's not "exploding overnight", I don't know what is. It's just that fewer people are aware of it, because it powers sily things like search engine infoboxes and AI assistants - in addition to fostering unprecedented cooperation among knowledge producers in the Linked Data/Semantic Web ecosystem.
Ah yes, and that's not totally skewed by the fact that an "edit" in a knowledge graph is at the granulatity of a triple while an edit in an article has the granulatity of a coherent piece of structurally meaningfull information.
Piling onto the glorified garbage dump (just follow the isA edges of any concept you'll see what I mean) is a strawman metric.
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#156> 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 $10m/year.
Because all Wikipedia needs to do is to keep the website up, yes... This sounds pretty much similar with the argument on which the education system gets constantly defunded.
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#157Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. They have hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia itself, and many related "sister" projects, with perhaps the most clearly impacting being Wikimedia Commons (a huge repository of free-content media with a focus on educational use - including much media in the public domain) and Wikidata (a project that has now emerged a…
Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.
You find it disgusting that a service, which you probably use both directly and indirectly multiple times a day and costs you nothing, has the nerve to give you a suggestion of donating 10$ once?
That is a very peculiar attitude to have.
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like, we put the facts and knowledge in a central (mysql) db, so that instead of updating them in 300 places (Wikipedia has a lot of languages), you just update them in one place. And since the data happened to be there anyways, we added an RDF export feature, and threw that into a BlazeGraph DB so that people could do SPARQL queries if they want. The (not really federated) SPARQL queries have basically nothing…
Is there a entry point for "how to make FOSS contributions to wiki-projects". I at the very least would be interested in finding out how all the pieces fit together, and maybe browsing the big list to see if anything was in my wheelhouse. Edit: And thank you for some insight into the back end of wikipedia - I did not know multiple languages was such a big push and it is such a sensible direction . Keep up the good wo…
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hac... is probably what you are looking for.
There's a very old architecture doc from 2012: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_architecture its kind of outdated and missing a lot of the newer pieces.
p.s. I used to work for the Wikimedia foundation about 1.5 years ago, but don't anymore. Prior to working there I was a volunteer for the FOSS project, and in theory I still am but I honestly don't do much anymore. My opinions are my own and don't represent WMF or anyone else.
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#159Let'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…
> People want to donate to fund the thing they actually use, not a bunch of other arbitrary projects they don’t care about.
I see this argument often associated with Mozilla as well and I cannot put into words just how much I disagree.
They've both made a product that's immensely useful to me, to the point where I don't even second guess donating to these projects on a semi-regular basis (like once or twice a year, usually in the range of $50-$100 per donation, equivalent to what I pay to certain services for a yearly subscription). What they do with that money is completely not my concern. I've donated money, it's up to them to decide what to do with it. I trust them to make that decision because they've already made a product that I rely on quite frequently.
I couldn't care less if they use it to support an existing successful product (Wikipedia or Firefox), throw it into some other fringe thing that has a tiny chance of turning into another immensely useful product to me, fund advocacy projects, fellowships, CEO salaries... it doesn't matter. I trust the team behind it so I throw money at it.
Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?
#160> 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.
I would be very surprised if their spend was just $10M/year on their tech infra. That's very low. I expect it would be much higher.
PS: I work for cloud computing company and have insight on how much costs increase with scale.
edit: fixed typos.