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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?

#241

Post by jpxw »

saurik wrote: post #231
soco wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Funding Wikipedia's side projects--like wiktionary--doesn't seem particularly valuable; Wikipedia doesn't spend much money actually improving Wikipedia, and what effort they have put in was spent on things like the "visual editor" project that both their own surveys and studies showed wouldn't actually improve editing.

Wiktionary is an incredibly useful resource

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

#242

Post by mschuster91 »

xenator wrote: post #178
zozbot234 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects.

For the smaller ones, that is warranted - for example, the Croatian Wikipedia is infamous for its bias towards nationalist positions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia), something that's only made worse by the aftermath of the Balkan wars decades ago... as a half-Croat myself, I can only say: let's keep it at "the situation is complex and sucks all around, Wikipedia is just one symptom of a much deeper problem".

For bigger projects such as English and German Wikipedia, sheer numbers make outright disinformation spreading much more difficult - there the problem is different: what you see is usually factually correct and neutral-ish, but there is a widespread consensus that Wikipedia editors skew towards white, male and somewhat privileged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_a...).

Personally, I trust scientific and pop culture related articles in most if not all versions of Wikipedia - but keep a healthy skepticism for everything political, since there it is the hardest to judge completeness and accuracy of any subject.

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

#243

Post by beaunative »

Clewza313 wrote: post #180
taurath wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I think an organization can change its goal (in the same direction as the original one).

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

#245

Post by [deleted] »

EvanDotPro wrote: post #49

After reading the article and the comments here so far, I'm legitimately struggling to decide how I should feel about this as a long-time WMF donor. I can understand the upset and deceit people are feeling, but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind, their endowment fund usage is strictly controlled from what I understand, and as a business owner, I also deeply sympathize with the idea of having "rainy…

[deleted]

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

#246

Post by saurik »

EvanDotPro wrote: post #49

After reading the article and the comments here so far, I'm legitimately struggling to decide how I should feel about this as a long-time WMF donor. I can understand the upset and deceit people are feeling, but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind, their endowment fund usage is strictly controlled from what I understand, and as a business owner, I also deeply sympathize with the idea of having "rainy…

> but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind

It is unethical to use the money people are giving to Wikimedia in response to a banner on Wikipedia--the only "initiative" Wikimedia runs that they know exists--which claims Wikipedia is going to fail without more money to fund any of their other "many initiatives". If they want to fund other things, the banner should say "don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but we want to do other things similar to it, and need money from people like you to accomplish those new goals!"... I can't imagine, however, that this honest banner would raise anywhere near as much money.

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

#247

Post by AmericanChopper »

hugi wrote: post #235
croes wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If WMF would only run the website, the content would only be advertisment and propaganda.

That's what some people want. They're horrified there's a free platform providing useful content, where they can't profit off people's work.

Your comment would make sense if moderating wikipedia cost that extra $102,000,000 we’re talking about. But it doesn’t.

Wikimedia has one project I’m slightly interested in, and spends most of their money on other projects that I’m completely uninterested in, and would personally consider to be largely a useless waste of time. They aggressively fundraise with a message that implies their single product that everybody cares about is financially imperilled. In reality, if they’d been run responsibly, the one valuable thing they produce could have already been financially secured for decades into the future.

I really just don’t care about what they spend most of their money on, I think they’re deceitful in the way that they fundraise, and all I hope is when all of their side projects eventually fail, that their core product survives in some form.

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

#248

Post by saurik »

bawolff wrote: post #33
checkerscaptian wrote: post #17

i think that this was very interesting, i think that if wikipedia had that sort of funding then it could surely hire more editors/moderators to make sure the info is reliable. i also found it quite ironic that the first thing that popped up was 'please subscribe to daily dot'

They currently don't hire any moderators. According to the article, they got 142 million in donations so far this fiscal year. Assuming they spent that entirely on hiring editors, had no other expenses (including no other fundraising expenses), had no server costs, etc they could hire 4500 people at min wage. According to https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/... there's been 39 thousand editors…

Right: because you shifted the argument to editors from moderators; what they need are not people to edit articles, but instead to do community management that reduces the toxicity of the current de facto bureaucracy that is designed to prevent arguments but instead seems to cause them.

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

#249

Post by ectopod »

croes wrote: post #192
colonwqbang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's their budget for 2020 https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Mediu... They budgeted $5M for "data centre expenses". We cannot know for sure how much it would really cost if WMF only focused on running their website. But $10M doesn't sound implausible to me.

If WMF would only run the website, the content would only be advertisment and propaganda.

Are you sure? There are about 1100 unpaid administrators.

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

#250

Post by saurik »

jpxw wrote: post #241
saurik wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding Wikipedia's side projects--like wiktionary--doesn't seem particularly valuable; Wikipedia doesn't spend much money actually improving Wikipedia, and what effort they have put in was spent on things like the "visual editor" project that both their own surveys and studies showed wouldn't actually improve editing.

Wiktionary is an incredibly useful resource

Well, get this: I agree! As someone who studies linguistics, I find Wiktionary really useful... and yet, it frankly isn't what any of the people who are donating to Wikipedia think their money is being used on, given the banner on their site. It is unethical to ask for money to run Wikipedia and then spend that money on other projects, no matter how useful they might be. If you want to do that, the banner should say "we are so glad you are getting value out of Wikipedia! don't worry: Wikipedia is safe; but... we have so many other ideas for how to improve the world, and would love you forever if you helped us achieve those dreams by donating money to our parent foundation, Wikimedia, to spend on others initiatives!". Of course, I bet almost no one would donate then.
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