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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#91

Post by handrous »

djbusby wrote: post #19
voz_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPR has become a race baiting mouthpiece, sadly. The quality of the overall programming has sharply declined over the last 10 years. No more driveway moments for me.

Car Talk tho.

The loss of Car Talk and the changes to A Prairie Home Companion all but eliminated my weekend listening. Wait, Wait... is OK but I usually don't tune in without the other stuff to draw me. The other new comedy show (with Coulton and Eisenberg[?], I forget the name of it) isn't very good. Maybe they'll find their footing, but it's been years at this point, and it's still not good. On the Media is really good, but plays at a time when I'm almost never driving, so I rarely catch it.

Their weekday news shows are too corporate-friendly and consist mostly of the same horse-race and monday-morning-quarterbacking campaign strategy garbage that everything else does, when the US is in national political campaign mode, which is like 60+% of the time now. The best US and international coverage on the whole damn station is when they just re-broadcast the BBC.

[EDIT] Oh and there's the huge amount of time they spend either advertising or promoting other NPR shows or podcasts. God damn, it's so much. It's at least as much time as "commercial" radio devotes to that kind of thing. Donate? You fucking play corporate ads! All the time!

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#92

Post by btilly »

For another good article on Wikipedia's aggressive soliciting, see https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... which was previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27339887.

In 2016 a prominent Wikipedian saw the exponential trend and wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2..., aka "Wikipedia has Cancer".

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#93

Post by btilly »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #3

As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million. https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/09/22/wikimedia-fo... (sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation )

It is worth noting that the endowment is about half of Wikimedia's assets, and is not included in that tally. See https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais... for more.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#94

Post by myself248 »

loeg wrote: post #79
andrewstuart wrote: post #53

I don't resent them doing what they need to do. Wikipedia is one of the few things on the Internet that feels right. If they need to play the same shit game as everyone else, so be it. The tone of resentment here from the commenters is disappointing - it's like Wikipedia needing money is somehow not OK.

Wiki pedia doesn't need money. Wiki media wants an even bigger pile of money to light on fire, and trades on wiki pedia 's good name to solicit that money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

You've now posted this link in four threads, I think the point is made.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#95

Post by dmurray »

rich_sasha wrote: post #18

What are their expenses btw? Are their hosting costs so high? Do they have paid staff beyond some fairly trivial admin? Do they curate articles for cash?

Hosting is a trivial cost for them. Bandwidth costs to serve text are super cheap these days, and they can do quite a bit of caching. You might be surprised what the money is actually spent on, but they're reasonably transparent about it

Their complete audited accounts for 2019-20, page 3 [0]

Total expenses: $129 million, of which

- Salaries (~500 staff): $55 million

- Awards and Grants (I suppose this is them donating to other causes?): $23 million

- Hosting: $2.5 million

- Professional Services (mostly lawyers?): $11 million

- Donation processing: $4 million (3% seems reasonable here)

- Other operating expenses: $10 million

[0] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#a1-...

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#96

Post by dr_dshiv »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #28
dr_dshiv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yale University has an endowment of $30 billion. That’s an endowment 300 times bigger than Wikipedia. https://investments.yale.edu/ Apple, in comparison, has $200 billion in cash reserves. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-companies-most-cash-reserv...

What’s a hardware manufacturing private company have to do with the Wikipedia foundation?

If Wikipedia is the most successful non-profit tech organization, Apple is the most successful for-profit tech organization.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#97

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

8260337551 wrote: post #14

Infrastructure isn’t free. Happy to donate to Wikipedia on a yearly basis. And the emails are only once a year.

That's part of the problem - they have way more money than needed to run the infrastructure, but when they beg for more, they make it sound like they might not have enough to keep the lights on.

They're very firmly on my "do not give money to" list, together with Mozilla (donations go to everything EXCEPT Firefox development, which isn't made particularly clear when you donate, and much of their other stuff isn't worth supporting IMO).

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#98

Post by ff317 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #18

What are their expenses btw? Are their hosting costs so high? Do they have paid staff beyond some fairly trivial admin? Do they curate articles for cash?

Choosing this of the many similar replies to answer to:

Full disclosure: I work for the Foundation in an engineering capacity.

The foundation has over 500 staff members. No organization is perfectly efficient, but by and large the money does go to good use.

Running a high-volume site like Wikipedia requires quite a lot of hard and soft infrastructure and supporting functions. The tech stack runs on its own bare metal (on the scale of a couple thousand servers) and its own CDN (to better protect against censorship and surveillance for the global audience, among many reasons), the total network currently has some physical presence in 7 different datacenter locations around the world, and there's all the redundant transport, transit, and peering network requirements that come with that. The live codebase gets new releases to production multiple times a week. There are many other side-services that run alongside the core MediaWiki codebase. There's constant network attacks on our infrastructure. There's all the infrastructure layer metrics and monitoring stuff. I could go on and on...

On top of all that (which implies reasonably robust techie staffing): there's a Legal department that has to defend against threats to the org from businesses and governments around the world and in general does a ton of amazing work in many different directions (my favorite example was our past lawsuit against the NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_v._NSA). There's all the usual corporate supporting functions, including finance, travel, talent and culture, etc. Can't fail to mention the Fundraising team itself, of course! :)

The foundation has a big job keeping the soft and hard infrastructure of the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia going. The budget really isn't that unreasonable, and the endowment also isn't anywhere near big enough to replace our annual donation budget and ensure the org remains financially stable in the long run, yet. Usually when one of us goes to a conference and talks about our infrastructure, others are shocked to learn just how small our tech teams are for the jobs they're doing.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#99

Post by caymanjim »

None of these things are egregious violations of any ethical standard. Wikipedia is not a source of excessive spam, and their beg banners on the website, while mildly annoying (especially if you already donated), aren't so frequent that they bother me. The site has no ads and provides tremendous value to the world. Nitpicking some minor marketing annoyances (which are probably handled by hired guns) comes off as petty.

One could make an argument that Wikipedia already has enough money that they could beg less and possibly survive indefinitely by just managing their current endowment well. One could make an argument that Google and others benefit so much from Wikipedia's high-quality search results that Google should help support them (although I wouldn't want Wikipedia to rely on corporate money). There are plenty of reasons why Wikipedia might not need to beg as often or at all.

None of that makes these minor issues a problem.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#100

Post by jfrunyon »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #73

Wikipedia is a wonderful project built on the back of highly qualified unpaid staff. Management is milking the cow and has been for years. This is tricky because they rightfully have a stellar brand value, I am not sure that will last forever. As you know, the fish always rot from the head, this is a good example.

That's my biggest problem with it. They raise all this money, and yes, a bunch of it goes to infrastructure. But the thing is, they always seem to find ways to spend whatever money they have, and none of it ever seems to make its way to their most critical and valuable staff: editors, admins, etc.
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