151–160 of 389 posts
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> you can’t say some politician filled a country with immigrants from the third world. You can absolutely say that, if it's true. As it stands, I don't know of country " filled with immigrants", so it's possible your edits are getting revoked for being incendiary hyperbole. I'm also not aware of any politician described as racist in the first paragraph of their article. Can you indicate who you have in mind? More rea…
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On the countrary, nonprofits need unions more than for profits. They exploit their workers more. They have fewer resources and exploit their mission to get more work from their workers.
Yes, workers in non-profits are status-compensated as well as monetarily compensated. I don't think this is an argument for non-profit unionization.
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Most of you shouldn't be donating to WMF in the first place; they don't need your money. You could reasonably cancel your donation without resolving any of the mission vs. labor conflicts indicated by this post.
Just piling in to this because it needs to be stated with emphasis. Wikipedia foundation is not Wikipedia. Their donation campaigns are highly deceptive. Pennies on the dollar will go to supporting and maintaining the actual encyclopedia. WMF is as much a liability to the encyclopedia as a beneficiary.
I want to help fund Wikipedia. Is there a better way I can do that?
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How is the Trump or Obama article not neutral? You can literally correct them yourself if there is anything untrue or biased.
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people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too
Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google? edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.
You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.
You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.
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and who exactly owns shares of the 501(c)3 wikimedia foundation?
It doesn’t matter because they don’t control anything tangible - which is the point. Just like the 501(c)3 that openAI was. Read for knowledge: Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S.…
Did this person even have stints in PE at those firms? You can think someone is bad without throwing around the names of the bogeyman du jour as if you're actually making a meanigful argument.
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That's the English Wikipedia community in a nutshell. The WMF knows it's an issue but can't do anything about it. There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia. I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything contro…
It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.
To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things: - Fired one of the original developers of MediaWiki (the open source project that powers wikipedia) - Brooke. This person was at one point in contention to basically be BDFL of MediaWiki. She is somewhat less publicly prominent now compared to back in the day, but to a lot of oldhands this is shocking. - Laid off community tech team. This is…
> The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
> The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the software? I think there are things to criticize WMF budget about, but the website wouldn't exist if you only paid for the web server. Legal is important. Trust and safety is important. Having people maintain the software…
What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider, I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I agree that you need someone on call and I appreciate that they serve a massive amount of traffic. But then $5 million per year is a similarly massive estimate for a hosting budget.
IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
> Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.