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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

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Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#161

Post by scubadude »

jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #154

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…

While I think it's a modern wonder of the world, I am skeptical of health topics on Wikiepdia - I read a lot about the positive benefits of Ashwaghanda in scientific journals, seriously I could go and find 20 studies right now. However, Wikipedia says "there is insufficient evidence that it is safe or effective for treating any disease". That's just wrong. I'm guessing if I made a change, it would be reverted by one of those super editors who "own" that page.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#162

Post by Beldin »

tablespoon wrote: post #157
charles_f wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Between content moderation....I can easily see how Wikipedia can grow to 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.

True, but I don't think you can keep the volunteers if you're in maintenance mode. The scale of volunteers needed requires some responsiveness, some support.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#163

Post by jbuhbjlnjbn »

scubadude wrote: post #161
jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #154

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…

While I think it's a modern wonder of the world, I am skeptical of health topics on Wikiepdia - I read a lot about the positive benefits of Ashwaghanda in scientific journals, seriously I could go and find 20 studies right now. However, Wikipedia says "there is insufficient evidence that it is safe or effective for treating any disease". That's just wrong. I'm guessing if I made a change, it would be reverted by one…

That would be a good example of a controversial scientific topic. If there is still money on the line with competing ideas, different persons or groups of interest will try to manipulate the information to their favor. What is sacrificed in the process is the strive for factual information and the scientific process.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#164

Post by jbuhbjlnjbn »

tablespoon wrote: post #158
jbuhbjlnjbn wrote: post #154

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…

> The rabbit hole begins with controversial scientific topics and "edit wars", which rage since forever and no sensible solution was ever proposed... 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…

> 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.

Ok that sounds reasonable. But what if blatant falsehoods are written on a person on wikipedia? There is no way to rectify that information as far as I heard, probably only the legal way, suing for libel, with uncertain outcome facing a multimillion dollar company and the structure of semi-anonymous unpaid writers.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#165

Post by jbuhbjlnjbn »

matt_morgan wrote: post #131

The most successful nonprofit project in the history of the world and 90% of the comments here are about what they're doing wrong. Get a grip. Your idea about what they could be doing better is ... useless. That said, some of those email tactics are a little unsavory. But you can bet they test the hell out of them and they do what makes the most money.

That's exactly how the emails come across, optimized to squeeze out the absolute maximum of donations without any regard to non-profit or, say, ideals like integrity.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#166

Post by jbuhbjlnjbn »

ceejayoz wrote: post #33
inferyes wrote: post #24

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?

> I'd have imagined one the biggest website on the internet has better, more effective ways of raising money. How many of them are good for users , though? Sure, you can slap some Google AdWords on there, but there's a reputational and privacy cost. NPR-style sponsorships? Maybe, but I cringe when NPR does a story on Facebook that's bookended by "Facebook is a sponsor of NPR" a little. I'm a fan of the current model,…

It makes conflicts of interest a little less likely, but not at all unlikely. There are myriads of unsolved, ongoing conflicts of interest on any topic other than non-controversial scientific topics with broad consensus.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#167

Post by loeg »

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.

> You seem to feel that the amount of money they should have is just above what they need to get by.

Not at all. The only reason Wikimedia do not have enough money to run Wikipedia in perpetuity is because of Wikimedia's exponential spending growth in non-"Pedia" projects.

I would love for them to spin off a Wikipedia-only endowment that funds Wikipedia forever. It would (likely) not need to take any future donations. The level of money Wikimedia take in is far, far in excess of "just what [Wikipedia] need[s] to get by."

The problem I have with Wikimedia's fundraising is that it is disingenuous.

Wikimedia's gross mismanagement of the donation revenue threatens Wikipedia's long-term viability, which is something donors should probably care about.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#168

Post by loeg »

joshuaissac wrote: post #134
joshmanders wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But Wikipedia is living paycheck to paycheck despite getting a lot of donations. That is what Guy Macon's article is complaining about.

Yeah. The paycheck is rising exponentially every year, and yet they find a way to spend it all every year.

The vast majority of those expenses are not Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's cancer is the Wikimedia organization.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#169

Post by loeg »

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…

Section 230 means you eventually win the lawsuits, but you still have to pay lawyers to defend them.

Re: Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

#170

Post by loeg »

tablespoon wrote: post #156
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!

>>> As of September 2021, the Wikimedia endowment stands at >$100 million. >> 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 soft…

Between 2005 and 2015-2016, page views grew by ~11x, articles by ~12x, hosting expenses ~33x, and total WMF spending grew by 1250x.
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