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

Wikipedia is not short on cash

unherd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 500 posts

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#291

Post by throwoutway »

agumonkey wrote: post #256
akolbe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that they make it sound like they are struggling to have enough money to keep Wikipedia running when they are actually wealthier than ever before. The whole premise of Wikipedia (or aspiration, at least, and yes, not always fulfilled ...) is that people should have information so they can't be manipulated. It kind of sucks to see the very organisation hosting the site do the opposite, don't you think?

My reluctance to donating again to wikipedia lies almost entirely on the subtext of their communication. There's a dissonance between the class of the project, the alleged finances, the in-your-face popups (some years it was half the page).

It was greater than a half-page this year for me. It should be added to adblockers at This point

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#292

Post by denton-scratch »

jasec57322 wrote: post #229
eric4smith wrote: post #66

Brah… What’s the problem? Wikipedia will always be free to use. Some people will always support it, others won’t. Life will go on. This is exactly like trying to cancel someone on YouTube. Just don’t watch the channel.

What is the problem if I call you a rapist? Perhaps it's because it's deceptive, dishonest & undermines trust. Unless of-course you don't care about such things, then what's the problem? You don't have to read my comment, 'just' switch off the website. The problem is that Wikipedia goes to great effort to shill for the CIA-NATO propaganda machine - whilst deceptively claiming they're an independent factual source. Th…

> The problem is that Wikipedia goes to great effort to shill for the CIA-NATO propaganda machine

What exactly are you saying? Are you suggesting that thousands of Wikipedia editors have all been subborned by Western military agencies? Or are you just referring to the overpaid Wikimedia C-suite?

Of course some Wikipedia editors are shills. Most MSM journalists are shilling for someone; if you pay attention to current affairs, you'll bump into a shill within seconds. But Wikipedia is largely self-correcting; even if the mainspace articles are biased, (a) there's page history; (b) there's per-editor contribution history; and (c) there's talk pages. I don't know of any other information source that provides so many tools that a critical reader can use to judge the content of an article.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#293

Post by lanfeust6 »

rippercushions wrote: post #21

Eh. If you don't want to donate, don't, but I don't quite get the outrage here. The Wikimedia Foundation is still small as far as charities go and is visibly making Wikipedia better: the new UI is a breath of fresh air, and given the insane complexity of MediaWiki markup, the visual editor is a piece of unimaginable technical wizardry. Wiktionary is an unheralded gem and even Wikidata is starting to be genuinely usef…

According to a recent SA post here - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-october-397?..., :

"Wikimedia Foundation gets $100 million + dollars per year and only needs a single-digit million to keep Wikipedia up. All those ads begging you to donate to “protect their independence” actually give them a huge surplus, some of which gets redirected to leftie culture warrior causes. For example, they gave $250,000 to a group promoting an “intersectional scientific method” that argues that objectivity is “colonialist”, and another $250,000 to a group promoting police abolition. Is this claim true? The very small amount of research I’ve done suggests that it’s true that Wikimedia spends a lot of its budget on things other than hosting (estimates of how much maintaining their websites costs range from 8% to 43%, I haven’t looked deep enough to know who’s right), that some of the remainder goes to grants (this isn’t a specific line on their budget, but seems to be some part of the 32% going to “direct support to [Wikipedia-related] communities”), and that some of these grants do go to “racial justice” type charities, including the two above. Wikimedia says this is about increasing minority representation in Wikipedia/academia/knowledge/whatever, but the charities do also fund controversial work like opposing scientific objectivity or trying to defund the police. I don’t know if any Wikimedia money ends up at those causes. How would people be thinking about this if it went to right-wing culture war causes instead?"

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#294

Post by petercooper »

denton-scratch wrote: post #214
petercooper wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but with a warchest of $400m, their budget can seemingly be funded at 2.5% withdrawal per year, so there may be no need to ask anymore. (Though personally I'd rather they spent even more and had more full time editors and researchers improving the site.)

> more full time editors and researchers By "full-time" you mean paid? Researchers can't contribute to Wikipedia at all, unless the "research" consists of a literature review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research And if there were full-time paid editors, I'd stop editing immediately, and instead contribute my efforts to the fork that would inevitably result.

Yeah, I didn't mean original or scientific research, more working on missing citations, integrating information from newly discovered original sources, or maybe even attempting to discover such original sources. I guess Wikipedians prefer to call this editing!

With the foundation's resources and clout, someone working on their behalf may be able to get better access to many source materials.

And if there were full-time paid editors, I'd stop editing immediately

So, I'm guessing you know a lot about Wikipedia.. but aren't there already full-time paid editors, just not from the foundation? I struggle to believe there are not well funded interests out there investing money into improving Wikipedia (whether such improvements are objective or subjective) in the same way that some tech companies fund, say, programming language core teams.

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#295

Post by throwoutway »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #286

Ok - the next time Wikipedia asks for a donation, I'll give it twice as much. Noted. This take is so incredibly bad. It's good that they're not struggling financially - and people stopping to donate is a great way to change that. They aren't struggling, until they are. I don't want to live in a world where the foundation behind Wikipedia struggles with financing, so continuing to donate is the only sane way forward.

Donate to archive.org instead. Wikipedia doesn’t need your money; they’ll get it from pestering people. If they’re ever under-supported one year, they’ll let you know that too

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#296

Post by revolutukr »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #104
revolutukr wrote: post #9

I've never been offered a higher salary than I was offered by wikimedia. I turned it down because their corporate culture is helllla creepy. I'm a private guy, and they expect everybody in the company to be somewhat public figures, down to the recruiters and office managers.

So, the culture wasn't a good fit for you. That's fair. But "hel×4a creepy"? That feels like it's, just, you know, your opinion man.

Forgive me, I meant to say hella fucking creepy. Everything their employees do is public. It invites stalkers, harassment and phishing attempts. Terrible opsec.

I dunno bra, I write code because I like being the guy behind the guy, not the face on the window. You do you boo, whatever, but I've got my opinions and I'll express them whenever I want, however I want, and wherever I want.

I'll also add to this that they've got an incredibly incompetent recruitment department. The recruiter I dealt with really, really, really likes to use big words to show off her English lit degree.

I posted about it on twitter, 5 people responded with "Did she use the word perspicuous at least 3 times in every e-mail? Did she ghost you for 2 months, then send you angry messages that you haven't been more proactive in chasing her down? When you turned her down, did she say "I'm very disappointed, I saw something special in you?"

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#297

Post by [deleted] »

cxr wrote: post #284
shadowgovt wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of evidence, in the form of the hockey-sticking donation revenue for the organization, that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past. As I said, hacker ethos of biasing in favor of the scrappy underdog. It was fine to fundraise when they were small and their strategy was unproven, but as they grow and their strategy is demonstrated as effective, they lose our favor…

> There is plenty of evidence[...] that whatever they're doing now works better than what they were doing in the past. You just moved the goalposts. (In this case, moved them such that your "argument" is just restating the substance of the complaint.) Wikimedia is bringing in a lot more money doing this sort of thing. That's well understood—by all, i.e., those on both sides of the issue. Your job is not to defend the…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#298

Post by denton-scratch »

zzzeek wrote: post #226

"The NGO world of which the Wikimedia Foundation is now part uncannily follows Marx’s prediction that the middle class would devise an infinite number of ways of enriching themselves, while ensuring the proletariat, the volunteers at the Wiki-face, don’t share the riches. Understandably, the relationship between the unruly Wikipedia workers and their bourgeoisie betters at the Foundation is strained." is this a joke?…

> or upper class

Not sure what you mean by "upper class". The kind of people that term refers to for me, is a group of people that would never lower themselves to donating labour for nothing, and on the whole aren't sufficiently well-educated to even read a Wikipedia article.

I agree the comparison to Marxism is unhinged!

Re: Wikipedia is not short on cash

#300

Post by rswail »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #109
noduerme wrote: post #36

A paltry few hundred million $ in the war chest is nothing to keep open a site mainly devoted to coordinating established facts in an information landscape otherwise controlled by state actors. And I would, and I did, contribute to Wikipedia. Until it became clear to me that they'd allowed antisemitic, anti-Israeli politics to warp their articles about things like the Holocaust, the 6-day war or the Israeli-Palestini…

> Until it became clear to me that they'd allowed antisemitic, anti-Israeli politics to warp their articles about things like the Holocaust, the 6-day war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict This claim would really benefit from some examples.

You could almost say [citation needed] /s
Post reply on HN