321–330 of 500 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The Wikimedia Foundation control Wikipedia, the subbordination is done by them. Editors are only as free as they permit - the two are inseparable, to suppose otherwise is as supposing chromium is independent from Google.
Of-course Wikipedia is a useful tool, so what? Are they exempt from criticism?
What is it you are saying? You abuse the English language; by definition a journalist is not a shill. Many mainstream shills may claim to be journalists, but that does not make them so.
Wikipedia is far too important as a dataset and knowledge base for companies such as Google. They will never let it fail, and are already funding it. Your donations can make a bigger difference elsewhere.
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).
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it can become a bit of a scam where if you’re a “paying member” of the BBB you can “respond” to complaints and they disappear.
After fighting with Ford over a recall issue for over a year, I opened a claim with the BBB. Two months later they closed it with a note that Ford explained that my car had been determined to be outside the claim (even though it experienced the recall related failure). Four months later, Ford issued be a check for the full cost of the repair, with an apology note. Even though at that point, I had given up. I have to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be wary of the cogs grinding in the background that can lead to an article like this hitting popularity. There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia - disagreements with the way certain topics are represented, and the way wikipedia has become a huge resource for information and news is not good news for everyone. I spend way more money on entertainment being piped into my TV, or deliveries happening a day…
> There are many people with axes to grind with wikipedia Check the wikipedia page for the author of the article, he has been against wikipedia for 20 years now. Got his job in the Daily Telegraph by insulting Google and wikipedia repeatedly about how woke they are.
I give money to Wikipedia occasionally and will gladly continue, thanks. Wikimedia makes the world a much better world place. They should have the funds to do whatever they want. You’re mad at them for some reason because they have 400 mil? That’s not even half a billion. I want a world where the Wikimedia foundation is a multi-billion dollar entity.
> Wikimedia makes the world a much better world place. They should have the funds to do whatever they want. No doubt the world is better off with Wikipedia and Wikimedia, but the attitude that "they can do no wrong" is extremely dangerous. Any powerful organization, especially ones bringing in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from the public, must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism. It is unhealthy not to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about usage going up. It's about the cost of usage going up v the cost of operations going down. As an example, if we are to trust this site ( https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm ), a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars in 2012. You can purchase 8TB for 130 dollars now. From this wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics ) we can see the amount of English articles has about double…
> a 2TB HDD was sold for about 160 dollars As far as I can see, the text of Wikipedia is about 10GB. I don't know how much space the images occupy, but if we assume they take up roughly the same space, then a single 2TB disk would accomodate 1,000 Wikipedias. This isn't about the cost of disk storage.
"As of 21 September 2022, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 21.23 GB without media."
(Note that's gzipped, so the actual size is much higher in-use.)
Media is, of course, vastly larger. Sadly, the last number given was from 2014, so I'd expect it to have increased massively since then:
"The size of the media files in Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias was described as well over 23 TB near the end of 2014"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get the outrage either. It's almost like people want Wikipedia to be barely scrapping by which isn't good. Having some money in your reserves is fine.
I want Wikimedia, and Wikipedia to be a Neutral historian of world data and events, to preserve facts and promote the free access of those facts to everyone in the world. They have strayed far far far far far from that goal
Wherein a lack of nuance allows a person to be obsessed with “phoniness”—any perceived moral breakdown in an idealized person or organization—
To want a neutral historical is one incredible demand. And then to really suggest that Wikipedia has strayed 5xfar from that!