Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

cyounkins.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 217 posts

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#101

Post by DoctorOW »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #42
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.

I agree with this. I'm on "the left", but I don't need a media outlet confirming my biases or stroking my ego. I was originally drawn to NPR precisely because it seemed like a relatively neutral news source (still discernibly left-of-center, but not aggressively so) and because it frequently exposed me to other perspectives; however, it seems to have been dragged into the swamp of "activist journalism" just like ever…

NPR and PBS both are among the most accurate/neutral according to a media study. [1] I honestly worry that we're having a political disparity in truth that's pushing a choice between politically neutral and factually accurate.

[1]: https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#102

Post by mohanmcgeek »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #96
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay. Then why do you compare cash to endowments?

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#103

Post by BiteCode_dev »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #80
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the most visited site on the planet, and people are constantly writting on it. It's on the same scale of facebook, youtube or twitter, activity wise. And I wager those sites have more than 500 people working on them, for a lot more money. And they are for profit!

For comparison, OpenStreetMap has roughly $800k in reserves and their expenses are a couple hundred thousands dollars per year. I agree there are probably more justifiable expenses at Wikimedia than that, but that there is a middle ground between the high water mark they're targeting and what other non-profits are operating with. The Internet Archive's annual budget is ~$10 million. EDIT: @dylan604 (replying here due…

Alexa rank for wikipedia is 13, OSM is 4550. It's not on the same planet. No, not on the same galaxy.

Wikipedia is not only read and written by the entire planet of humans, including the smallest 3rd world countries, it's also a bot feast, and busy powering APIs all over the world.

It got hundreds of links in some articles, which are automatically connected to all other articles in a gigantic graph of data. Oh, each article may also exist in a hundred languages, times each version, thanks to the history of all edits ever performed or suggested.

It's not just links though, now articles have plenty of metadata that generate connections, tables, ranks, toc, indexes, hierarchies, and listings as well.

All that is edited, rollbacked, debated, diffed and rendered almost on the fly for millions of articles, while respecting the permission system, and of course, the fun part, detecting the thousands of attempt at abuses by second.

In the blink of an eye. Because wikipedia is _fast_. It's one of the fastest site around.

Of course now it is also serving billions of images, sounds and videos. And the foundation is also maintaing:

    MediaWiki

    Meta-Wiki
 
    Wikibooks

    Wikidata

    Wikinews

    Wikiquote

    Wikisource
 
    Wikispecies

    Wikiversity

    Wikivoyage

    Wiktionary
Not to mention animating workshops all around the globes, helping NGO to provide offline wikipedias for poor countries and providing and maintaining the wiki as FOSS.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#104

Post by easton »

junon wrote: post #39
petters wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is incredibly valuable, but the Wikimedia foundation is not known to spend money wisely. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12... A very small fraction of the money is going to keep the servers running. The editors of Wikipedia are unpaid. The software projects ran by Wikimedia have not been very impressive. What happened to proper discussion pages, for example? That has been going on…

The "make a book" function has been literally broken (see: non-functional, with a "sorry about that" message) for years now. It used to be my favorite part of Wikipedia and now you can't do shit with it.

Looks like it was uninstalled from the English Wikipedia a couple months ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#105

Post by lmc »

legitster wrote: post #82

> But open the email and you don’t see that text anywhere! In the email industry, we call this a "pre-header". The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense. If you put any text above the body, it won't render in the email but will still be parsed by the inbox preview function (since it ignores any html it sees). This was mostly an exploit back in the day, but clearly email clients love it because they doubled do…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#106

Post by cyounkins »

ff317 wrote: post #98
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…

OP here. Thank you for work on Wikipedia (seriously!). I can really appreciate that the Foundation has expenses and I think donations is really the best way to get the funds. My only qualm is with the aggressiveness and deception with which those donations are solicited.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#107

Post by etskinner »

legitster wrote: post #82

> But open the email and you don’t see that text anywhere! In the email industry, we call this a "pre-header". The bit about "multi-part email" is pure nonsense. If you put any text above the body, it won't render in the email but will still be parsed by the inbox preview function (since it ignores any html it sees). This was mostly an exploit back in the day, but clearly email clients love it because they doubled do…

The email doesn't have a different From and Reply To, it has an email address where the sender's name should be. The author's complaint is that the sender claims to be one email, when it's actually from another.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#108

Post by zitterbewegung »

colechristensen wrote: post #38
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 seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff. I like Wikipedia but does it really take that many people and that much money to run it? Having grown with startups from a very early stage to mid-stage, it seems pretty clear that 500 people never do 10x as much as 50 people, more like 2x if that. That much spend seems unsustainable long term.

With an Alexa rank of 13 and very real competitors that are large tech companies (every search engine now tries to answer your question instead of presenting Wikipedia anymore) seems to be quite appropriate to me.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#109

Post by andrewguenther »

I get a ton of value out of Wikipedia and I donate annually.

Fun fact: If you unsubscribe from the donation email list, you are re-subscribed the next time you donate. It's scummy and infuriating and I hate to think that this kind of crap is what my money is actually going towards.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#110

Post by joshmanders »

andrewstuart wrote: post #84
loeg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite a lot of money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

I read the page. It's very angry about Wikipedia's finances. I still don't resent their asking and I still donate. Wikipedia is a truly worthwhile service and I'm happy they have much more money than they need to scrape by. You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by. I think that is a bad way to run any operation.

My thoughts too, "living paycheck to paycheck" doesn't sound like it ensures Wikimedia's survival. We'd all be shouting "Save Wikipedia!" if they have a bad year were expenses are up and donations are drastically down and they end up going offline due to not having enough reserve to help it.
Post reply on HN