151–160 of 217 posts
I have always found Wikipedias begging for money weird. Even if they chose to be driven by donations, I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money. Is it really that bad for non-profits on the internet?
Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
Compare the opening paragraphs of this article in 2015 vs now: https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.
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Compare the opening paragraphs of this article in 2015 vs now: https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.
It's strange to see someone use "bipartisan" as a stand un for "fair" or "factual".
The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed, instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information. It continues with the political topics and oh boy, just get to investigating and reading if you care for a look into the deep, dark depths.
The short heads up is, wikipedia is absolutely riddled with one-sided, manipulative information on political topics. Often written by ghost writers, posting stuff 14 hours a day for years without a single day off.
The finances and agressive begging for donations are also highly controversial. I have read multiple investigations accusing them of absolutely not needing any money, and staging a charade while getting huge sums by big interest groups, though I cannot estimate if this is true, or to which degree.
Wikipedia is far and away the most valuable project the world has ever seen and this guy is complaining about donation emails?
Compare the opening paragraphs of this article in 2015 vs now: https://web.archive.org/web/20151104200851/https://en.wikipe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) Anyone thinking that Wikipedia still provides a nonpartisan platform which makes an honest attempt to catalogue all the angles on a specific topic without any blatant spin is either dishonest or naive.
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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.
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!
>> It seems that this is approximately how much they spend each year and have ~500 staff.
> 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.
How much of that money and staff goes to actually running the site and maintaining the software? IIRC (and correct me if I'm wrong), a large fraction actually goes to other efforts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Between content moderation, dev, security, infrastructure and such, then the support needed, I can easily see how Wikipedia can grow to 500 people. They're offering a stable product that has a presence in almost _every country in the world_, serving an insane volume of data. This is not a random startup, I'm actually amazed they pull it out with just 500 people
IIRC, nearly 100% of all content moderation is done by Wikipedia volunteer editors, so that's not actually an operational expense of theirs.
Wikipedia on non-controversal scientific topics is great. The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed, instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information. It continues with the political topics and oh boy, just get to investigating and reading…
Yeah, table stakes for editing Wikipedia on anything even remotely controversial is an obsessive personality, limitless time, and patience for an huge amount of toxicity.
> ...instead wikimedia arbitrarily blocking and banning editors, even on the pages about themselfes, trying to rectify information.
IMHO, it's quite sensible to not allow people to edit pages about themselves, because people tend to have a strong-well understood biases on that topic.
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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/
It's not hard to be "most accurate/neutral" when comparing against every batshit blog and podcast, which is what your source does. In fact, NPR and PBS are clustered among the mainstream news sources, which only supports my "NPR is in the swamp with everyone else" claim. That said, I don't put much stock in JPGs that look like something a high schooler put together with PowerPoint 20 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Since some are complaining about the Ad Fontes methodology, here it is: "Ad Fontes administers an internal political bias test to analysts, asking them to rank their left-to-right position on about 20 policy positions. That information allows the company to attempt to create ideological balance by including one centrist, one left-leaning and one right-leaning analyst on each review panel. The panels review at least t…