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

Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 252 posts

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#101

Post by Akronymus »

mrguyorama wrote: post #92
cool_dude85 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's got more time and capacity to play the wiki game, me or the PR firm hired to edit a politician's wiki page?

All you have to do is find a bored wikipedia nerd "editor". They will gladly take on the bureaucratic battle to get that PR firm banned from editing wikipedia content. The people who make editing wikipedia their identity have A LOT of time on their hands, and LOVE fixing these kinds of things because it makes wikipedia better, and look better.

And A LOT of those people have ideological motivations on their own.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#102

Post by akolbe »

Hayarotle wrote: post #49
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not that I am aware of; and Wikipedia has spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade on a more user-friendly UI with nothing to show for it to date. Which is a good reason to question how well they allocate their hundred million dollar annual revenue.

They're testing out the new UI in the other language Wikipedias. It adds a nice collapsible topic structure to the sidebar and sets a text width limit, but hides the available languages for the article behind a button on the header. This makes it harder to tell whether the article is available in specific languages, and to switch the language. It's a bit unwieldy as of now, as you now have to jump to the top of the p…

That Village Pump page, incidentally, is also where the poll about the fundraising emails is, a few sections further down.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#103

Post by triceratops »

karencarits wrote: post #67
ryan_lane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's lower than total comp of senior engineers in the bay area, just to give a point of reference.

It's about twice the salary of the Nordic prime ministers (not combined though) as another point of reference

Is the PM's salary before- or after-tax? Do they get free housing as the prime minister? How's the housing market in their cities? In SF, where Wikipedia is based, it's completely whack. What else does a PM get? Household staff, personal assistants, drivers etc?

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#104

Post by yupper32 »

JohnFen wrote: post #96
yupper32 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive. Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?

It matters because "normal" people are the ones paying those extravagant salaries in the end.

Those normal people should know that $350k is a steal.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#105

Post by dbingham »

jefftk wrote: post #88
spywaregorilla wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems a bit silly to me. Working on the UI that enables expanding and maintaining wikipedia feels like a reasonable top priority of the organization responsible for maintaining wikipedia. If they just "served" it, it would collapse.

I agree it's a reasonable thing for them to work on, but not to fundraise for under the banner of "keep Wikipedia online".

I don't know. Here's where I start to break with some of the ways people are thinking about this.

When you pay a fee to a website - do you question how they spend that money to this level of detail? Do you ask, I dunno, lets go with Slack, to break down their fee by how much of it is necessary to keep Slack online "as is"?

I don't think I've ever seen someone do that. There's a level of entitlement that comes with donations that people just don't attach to services they purchase.

Wikipedia isn't a charity in the traditional sense - IE it's not taking those donations and redistributing them to those in poverty.

It's an organization building and maintaining a platform that provides pretty a vital service to society. Almost everyone who donates to it will have gotten far more value from Wikipedia than the cost of their donation. Maybe, instead of thinking of it as "donation", people should be thinking of their contributions as a "sliding scale fee".

On the other hand, I do believe Wikipedia should be open and should be accountable to its community. I just believe the community should be reasonable when exercising that accountability.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#106

Post by oh-4-fucks-sake »

yupper32 wrote: post #3

Sure but pointing out $350k executive salaries as somehow lavish is strange. That seems low for an executive at one of the most important (or at least, most viewed) websites on the planet.

100% agreed. $350k salaries for people that have basically built and maintained the modern-day Library of Alexandria is a pittance. These people deserve it.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#107

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

yupper32 wrote: post #89
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from the organisation's point of view, the expenditure is cheap But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive. The difference is who is in control and what are their priorities and influences. Since "the organization" is making the decisions - and, completely incidentally, "the CEO" is the head of "the organization" - it just so happens that "the organization" finds that "the CEO" should be paid lavishly…

> But from any normal person's perspective, it's expensive. Why does it matter what that hypothetical "normal" person thinks? Does that "normal" person have insight into how much it costs to hire a competent executive?

The normal person knows that just having big paycheck does not make an executive more competent. We have all seen people with huge paychecks fail spectacularly.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#108

Post by yupper32 »

Dma54rhs wrote: post #80
mcguire wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sundar Pichai gets ~$250M. Parag Agrawal gets something like $30M.

People working for them earn 100k+, Wikipedia has volunteers writhing the content for free.

If you want to compare it based on the people working for each company:

Parag has around 3900 employees. Wikipedia has around 550. Around 7x multiplier.

$30m / 7 = ~$4.3mil

Sundar has around 135k employees. 245x multiplier.

$250m / 245 = ~$1mil.

$350k seems like a steal no matter how you put it.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#109

Post by ryan_lane »

karencarits wrote: post #67
ryan_lane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's lower than total comp of senior engineers in the bay area, just to give a point of reference.

It's about twice the salary of the Nordic prime ministers (not combined though) as another point of reference

The executives don't live in Norway, they live in the bay area; hence my (relevant) particular point of reference.

Re: Once again so many people are led to think Wikipedia is broke and must be saved

#110

Post by user3939382 »

I’ve come to see Wikipedia as the enemy in many cases, where its editorial policies, intentionally or not, result in entrenching corrupt establishment political narratives propagated by the White House, State Dept, corporate media, etc.

I remember looking at the vote history where they decided The Greyzone (one of whose journalists was called to testify at the UN on their investigative journalism) wasn’t a “credible source”, the very first vote I checked belonged to a unique username that was used on other sites for an anti-Palestinian think tank academic.

For completely uncontroversial topics it’s fine, for everything else you have to read all the dismissed/shut out outsiders complaining on the talk page to get any real sense of the topic.

Wikipedia has little legitimacy which is the purpose of an encyclopedia, I’ll never donate $1 to it and if it shut down tomorrow I wouldn’t care.

Post reply on HN