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

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

#141

Post by morsch »

musicale wrote: post #140
akolbe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. You can't grow your revenue tenfold and still claim you are asking for money to ensure your bare survival. Remember: the WMF less than ten years ago themselves said they could survive quite well on "$10M+/year". https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-March... Now they ask for $160M+. At some point the message has to change. It has to become something a little more like: Look, so far we've done…

Well $10M in 2012 would be more like $13M today, so their budget has only expanded 12x in constant dollars, and they probably have more articles and users than they had in 2012.

Total page views have been pretty stable since 2016. Presumably the number and size of articles has increased, but I don't know by now much. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/reading/total...

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

#142

Post by r00fus »

user3939382 wrote: post #110

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…

Is it the case that other encyclopedias handle controversial topics well? If school textbooks are an example, we taught all sorts of historical nonsense as facts that are now completely debunked.

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

#143

Post by chess_buster »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #135
akolbe wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, Wikipedia is the loser, because you are rewarding a management mindset that thinks manipulating the public for financial gain is okay. Wikipedia is the most widely read reference source on the planet. Wouldn't you rather it was stewarded by an organisation that was honest with the public? There are other losers. This man, guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser…

> guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser: If Wikipedia didn't "guilt-trip" him into it I'm sure some Nigerian prince would have.

What a smug dismissal of a comment obviously crafted with care.

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

#144

Post by Spooky23 »

dbingham wrote: post #105
jefftk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

A nonprofit should always be held to a higher standard. Slack is a profit making concern valued by its utility, not its cost.

Nonprofits are cost centric and it’s both valid and essential to question the cost structure. $100M turnover seems like a lot of opex

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

#145

Post by fluoridation »

bawolff wrote: post #112
fluoridation wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're answering a point no one made. It has nothing to do with "being envious". Imagine you were asked to donate to "keep the animal shelter open", and went you went there you found that they were using gold water dishes for the little critters. You would be within your right to complain. You thought you were donating to keep it operating, but now you find that they're using funds on frivolous expenses. Is there som…

> You're answering a point no one made. It has nothing to do with "being envious". Then what is the relavence of saying "I guess you have to compare it to the salary of the donors who feel compelled ..."? The donors dont do work similar. The only reason i could possibly imagine bringing this up would be something to do with envy between the average person's salary vs the salary of a high skill position. If not that,…

The relevance is that some of those donors are donating the little money they have because they think there's a chance Wikipedia might cease to exist otherwise, not knowing that the WMF is actually using that money on gold water dishes rather than saving it for a rainy day.

Simply put, if Wikipedia asks for donations to continue operating, 100% of those donations should go towards server costs. That can include the hardware costs, the power, the bandwidth, and the people who maintain those servers. Using the money that was raised to keep it running for any other purpose is at least deceptive.

>Imagine you were donating to an animal shelter, but you discover that they spend more on dogfood than you do on feeding your family. You imagine the reason is that they are feeding the dogs caviar, but the real reason is it costs more to feed 150 dogs than it does to feed 4 people.

Now imagine that the shelter spends only 10% of its donations on dog food and other dog-related costs, and the rest goes to salaries for people who aren't caring for the dogs and to awareness campaigns. (I'm not implying this is the breakdown in Wikipedia's case; it's just an example.) Even if you think these are worthwhile uses for those funds, don't you think donors should know that their donations will be spent this way before they donate?

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

#146

Post by Spooky23 »

samsquire wrote: post #129
z0r wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate this kind of thinking being shared by someone who I recall from previous HN postings spends a lot of time thinking about how to give to charity effectively. I've been turned off from donating to Wikipedia for the better part of the last decade.

I think this kind of thinking is negative and an example of the free rider problem. Wikipedia provides a good service for the money it charges you. It doesn't charge you anything. The thing about free things is that they aren't really free, someone is paying for it and the people doing the work to keep Wikipedia online are the best skilled and placed and experienced to decide these kind of spending decisions, not peo…

Charitable giving is important to me personally, and I have a relatively limited budget to donate.

I get a lot of utility from Wikipedia, but is my marginal dollar helping the mission or paying for dinner at a conference? Perhaps I’d be better off donating to an open source foundation for that part of the charity portfolio, which may actually have more impact on Wikipedia!

I think this org doesn’t communicate what it does well.

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

#148

Post by themitigating »

xyzzyz wrote: post #33
woodruffw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: 25% overhead doesn’t really seem that bad? If those numbers are accurate, 75c of every dollar goes directly to hosting, development, and community support (things like grants and legal aid for editors). That’s probably on par if not better than most nonprofits.

Have you noticed any actual development on Wikipedia? Only thing that changes from the user perspective is that the donation request get more and more annoying every year.

How does the donation request get more annyoing each year?

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

#149

Post by esperent »

tuatoru wrote: post #138
zozbot234 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redesigning the article editing UI is pretty darn important when the only thing that ensures the site stays up to date is attracting new editors to work on it. Nobody wants a dead Wikipedia with hopelessly obsolete and misleading information, even though it would be incredibly cheap to host. And the Wikipedia partner projects are just as important as Wikipedia itself to the broader ecosystem of open content and open…

If they want to recruit new editors, the most urgent thing to do is fix the existing editor clique's reputation for being neophobic, vituperative, and ad hominem. That's where money should be going.

Are you feeling vituperative because your edits got rejected for using obscure words?

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

#150

Post by themitigating »

akolbe wrote: post #119
leokennis wrote: post #118

I might be too simple of a person, but I donate €10 per year to Wikipedia which is nothing. In return, I get immediate access to a veritable wealth of accurate and up to date knowledge on more or less everything. It’s such an amazingly great deal that I honestly think, who the F cares that they could have spent that money in a slightly more optimized way? Who cares that Jimmy Wales drives a BMW instead of a Volkswage…

Arguably, Wikipedia is the loser, because you are rewarding a management mindset that thinks manipulating the public for financial gain is okay. Wikipedia is the most widely read reference source on the planet. Wouldn't you rather it was stewarded by an organisation that was honest with the public? There are other losers. This man, guilt-tripped into donating to Wikipedia when all he has is $18 to his name is a loser…

What "treat" are you referring to? Employees need to be compensated for a company to be competitive.

Speaking of manipulative your augment takes a complex situation and turns it into "poor people using the last of their money to pay for US employees extra benefits"

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