221–230 of 619 posts
This notion that non-profits should be run on fumes by people who are paid less than market is ridiculous.
So is the notion that non-profit should pay their execs millions.
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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.
Have I run a site comparable to Wikipedia? No. Do I know nothing about that topic? Debatable. Leaving that aside, Wikipedia was live and ticking when it had 1% of today’s coffers, so it’s hard to substantiate why they need money approaching a billion dollars for a non profit running a website all things considered.
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Yes, I also notice the coverage dedicated to women vs men is extremely imbalanced. I know they have a separate team working on the issue and big advert banners about it... but the issue remains: Much more is written about men (living or dead) than women.
Aren't there far more prominent men than women though? Especially when you count the whole of patriarchal history.
So far this doesn’t seem egregious but there are examples of non-profits cough Red Cross cough where their operational costs outweigh the good that they are able to provide. Definitely something to continue to watch to see if Wikipedia continues to serve the public good.
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Wikipedia is hosted on ordinary rackmount servers at a handful of colocation facilities: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers It does not significantly use cloud services, and as you can see by the picture of their racks, they use standard 1 RU pizzaboxes. Their workload is highly scalable horizontally, and doesn't even need much in the way of expensive "enterprise" hardware such a SAN arrays: https://up…
> It does not significantly use cloud services They do host their own private "cloud", mostly used for research and project development. > English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! Nitpicking, page views from outside users are not supposed to hit PHP at all…
Postgres is great and all, but there’s really nothing wrong with relying on MariaDB or MySQL for what Wikipedia is doing.
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One should expect that with improvements in software and hosting, the cost-value-ratio improves. Does not seem to be the case here, which is strange.
More users, links, more languages more articles etc.
Well, side ventures which burn money would explain factor 10, but yeah...
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The problem is that there is nothing done about people with bad intentions on organisational level.
Wikipedia folks are aware of the problem and there have been many changes over the years to better protect neutrality. I agree the situation is still far from perfect but Wikipedia is still one of the bastions of free information out there. They could have commercialized it but it became a non-profit relying on donations from users (as opposed to corporations) for a good reason. What will happen when Wikimedia is gon…
Have you actually looked at where most of the donations come from? They come from DEEP POCKETS.
In 2019, Google made $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment and another $1.1 million to the Wikimedia Foundation:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
Amazon, Google.org, Musk Foundation, George Soros, Facebook all donating $2 million+
https://wikimediaendowment.org/#benefactors
Look at who their benefactors were in 2019 apart from 7 "Major benefactors" who were anonymous:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/benefactors/
Wikipedia folks have done the exact opposite to "protect neutrality" and "bastions of free information". They openly block any edits of articles even when the said article is slandering someone as long as it fits the political narrative. And if one simply looked at their co-founder and other admin's twitter feed, one would realize that they don't care about "neutrality".
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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 a…
Actually phrased like that, the second is more interesting. The first version is about centralizing all informations so it can be consumed . It's the traditional view of knowledge dissemination, scaled to the whole world instantaneously. The second version is about giving people the tool to produce knowledge so it can be shared with the whole world. Just like the printing press spread authoring power from a select fe…
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…
Interestingly there was no mention of sister projects or the inflated activity in adjacent areas in the begging for money banner presented to me last time, did I miss something?! It was asking for keeping the Wikipedia we use operational for a long time to come. No mention of educating the world or 'broader development goals'. A Wikipedia that is created by volunteers (including the hundreds of language versions) for…
"Imagine a world where every single person on the planet can freely share in the sum of human knowledge: this is our commitment." They could hardly be any clearer about it. And even if your goal is to keep Wikipedia thriving, you need these sister projects.
> 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…