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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?

#171

Post by Dylan16807 »

sharken wrote: post #150
zozbot234 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's fair to say that server costs and global reach of Wikipedia is up, and factor in some ambitious goals the current expenditure is not too unreasonable. Money is a funny thing, in Denmark about $320 million is spent on Covid testing a month. So from January to July that would be the equivalent of Wikipedia funding for 20 years.

> I think it's fair to say that server costs and global reach of Wikipedia is up, and factor in some ambitious goals the current expenditure is not too unreasonable.

I'd definitely want an analysis on the server costs. Compared to ten years ago you can get vastly better servers per dollar and about ten times the bandwidth per dollar.

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

#172

Post by bawolff »

j-pb wrote: post #161
bawolff wrote: post #121

Earlier 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…

As if thowing the messy complexities of MySQL queries into the serene simplicity of static hypertext is somehow better. How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated? How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies? How much effort is the code maintenance of the specialised editing system? How much effort is maintainance of the centralised inf…

> How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated?

Numerical knowledge is not the only knowledge that is stored there.

I'm going to go with update rate of often. It has a higher edit rate than english wikipedia does.

> How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies?

Sometimes that is true, other times it isn't. The system is used where it makes sense, and not used where it doesn't.

> How much effort is the code maintenance of the specialised editing system? How much effort is maintainance of the centralised infrastructure.

There is certainly some. I wouldn't say its dominating, but it certainly exists. There is plenty of centralized infrastructure for other things too.

Prior to the introduction of wikidata, more complex fragile systems existed to try and keep things in sync in a more manual fashion. They also had a cost.

> How much effort is it really to change the data in multiple places, given that enough eyes every bug is shallow?

A lot. And we don't have that many eyes in lots of languages. There's a lot after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix

> What are the oppirtunity costs of not being able to properly distribute and share articles because they are suddenly tied to a very specific codebase

Not sure what this has to do with it. Articles are written in a custom markup language. That's already tying it to a specific code base quite heavily. The wikidata dependency is pretty trivial, and there are open apis to get info out of wikidata, and regularly made dumps of all the data in wikidata if you want to copy it. If that's not good enough, just copy the rendered version instead of the source.

> How much infrastructure cost do I have because I can't get volunteers to host my data

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation where it is likely to be hosted that way. The goals of (near) instant update time, as well as some central quality control and user blocking, makes distributed hosting pretty impossible.

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

#175

Post by Clewza313 »

paxys wrote: post #148
Clewza313 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

19/20 expenses were $112M. Per the 09/10 annual report below, 10 years earlier expenses were $10.27M. What exactly am I pulling out of my ass? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/AR_web_a...

09-10 - $10M 10-11 - $18M 11-12 - $29M I guess now we have to fight over what 10 years ago means.

2019/2020 is the latest released annual report, so I'm not sure how you'd compare against unreleased figures.

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

#176

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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.

It's also debatable if managing to stay basically at the same point given developments in the rest of the internet for the past ten years isn't far better than people have a right to expect.

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

#177

Post by kubb »

furi wrote: post #77
zozbot234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of which ever achieved anything like the success of Firefox Hi, let me introduce you to this weird newfangled language called Rust... /s

Rust is definitely a significant and important project. That said, Firefox's peak market share was a little over 30% of desktop browsers (in 2009 so they weren't yet a sideshow), while Rust isn't even currently in the TIOBE Index top 20 (can't find any easy way to see a peak position sadly). More importantly though, we have other Rusts. Rust has half a dozen competitors and essentially nobody thinks that making a rob…

Could you name these six Rust competitors please?

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

#178

Post by xenator »

zozbot234 wrote: post #38
ramraj07 wrote: post #31

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…

Very solid point. I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects. There are many proofs that Russian Wikipedia have paid by government editors solving its own propaganda. I think +/- the same situation for other countries.

Also, I know companies or celebrities who pay for their Wikipedia pages. You can find this service in 5 minutes by googling.

"Profit-seeking and mindless consumption" can be a motto for the current WMF.

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

#179

Post by dalbasal »

I daresay Facebook could manage on Is Twitter's current product so much more complicated than it was circa 2012, that it needs 100X as many employees, resources and such?

If Wikipedia had been founded later, it probably would have been a startup. A unicorn, considering how popular it is. It would be burning through far more resources. Comparing it to any commercial site of comparable size, it is orders of magnitude more efficient. Meanwhile, it makes its money by asking. It doesn't snoop, sell your data, or participate in creepy ad-tech.

So... when a person like me, who gets tremendous value and enjoyment from wikipedia is asked to kick in, we do. I do it gladly. They have, in my estimation, every right to ask me.

The donation banners that seem to upset people are far less annoying than any commercial site's cookie/privacy popups.

Tangentially, think of all the truth wars of the last few years. Notice that wikipedia, even though it deals directly with the hard part of this problem, has fared much better than most other websites/organisations. This is not a coincidence.

Can wikipedia operate on $10m? Maybe, plausibly. Why should they have to?

Wikipedia is a shining beacon, in many ways, including resource efficiency. They successfully bridged the gap between OSS, and non distributed organisational elements... allowing them to own servers and such. Few have.

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

#180

Post by Clewza313 »

taurath wrote: post #162
Clewza313 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find it sad that this is a debate given how much of a public good it is. $10m is absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

I don't think anybody is begrudging them $10M/year, or even $100M/year for that matter. My concern is that the way their expenses keep spiralling upwards is a) not sustainable and b) introducing serious scope creep into their original mission.

Here's the OG version by Jimmy Wales: "The sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world."

Here's what it currently looks like: "Empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/mission/

Which one is more inspiring on all counts?

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