141–150 of 166 posts
What's up with HN's general tone of hostility toward Wikimedia foundation? It's weird how the more free a service is the more entitled our attitudes seem to become.
What's up with HN's general tone of hostility toward Wikimedia foundation? It's weird how the more free a service is the more entitled our attitudes seem to become.
I think the hostility comes from Wikipedia constantly asking for money when most of the money goes to things that aren't Wikipedia.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/where-your-money-goe...
I'm sure what poster is referring to was "discussed" previously in the link below. I use parentheses because it descended into flames pretty quickly:
I'm reading the API docs https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/docs/ And they don't have an OpenAPI spec available to download? So they seriously expect developers to just manually write their own client code by reading and translating those example CURL commands by hand??! Seriously it's 2024! Not having a spec to download and insepct for any API is a sign of incompetence. When tools like Postman or https://github.com/Op…
I've been a monthly donor to wikimedia for a long time and it'd be quite a privilege to support them with nice API wrappers too. Email in profile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An engineer costs $500k a year. Salary, benefits, office space, equipment, hr, legal, and other overhead. The engineer will only see a fraction of that, of course. If you told me it took a hundred engineers to run Wikipedia I'd say, that's not totally unreasonable. Features, design, api, scaling, moderation, there's a ton for engineers to be doing.
An engineer doesn’t cost $500k/yr. An engineer who lives in one of the highest cost-of-living places on earth costs $500k/yr. There’s absolutely no reason Wikimedia needs to pay that much.
those places also have highest talent pool.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is a good thing. The entire corpus is CC-licensed and anyone can download it for free. If you want a real-time API, performance SLAs, machine parsable formats, support etc. then pay for it.
> machine parsable formats, Isn't the point of wikidata to offer machine-parseable formats? Also: how can those formats be locked into a paywall?
wikipedia infoboxes API is already paywalled, pricing starts from $0.01/req.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An engineer costs $500k a year. Salary, benefits, office space, equipment, hr, legal, and other overhead. The engineer will only see a fraction of that, of course. If you told me it took a hundred engineers to run Wikipedia I'd say, that's not totally unreasonable. Features, design, api, scaling, moderation, there's a ton for engineers to be doing.
An engineer doesn’t cost $500k/yr. An engineer who lives in one of the highest cost-of-living places on earth costs $500k/yr. There’s absolutely no reason Wikimedia needs to pay that much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't a question of the good work you do. People care about Wikipedia, not the Wikimedia Foundation. The criticism arises from misleading advertising. WMF fundraising conflates the two, implying that _Wikipedia_ needs money or it'll die. Meanwhile the 2023 budget shows $3.1m in hosting expenses versus $24.4m in awards and grants.
Firstly, there's less conflation these days - go see recent banner wording for yourself. Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should. (And no, I'm not saying all legal work we do is a strict necessity for Wikipedia. Some is a strict necessity, and some is…
From your phrasing (still) it seems like you might've confused me with the person you initially replied to.
I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs because most critics are going to view the former as essential and the latter as mission creep. I don't have any insight, nor do I have any inclination to criticize, your payroll.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firstly, there's less conflation these days - go see recent banner wording for yourself. Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should. (And no, I'm not saying all legal work we do is a strict necessity for Wikipedia. Some is a strict necessity, and some is…
> Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should. From your phrasing (still) it seems like you might've confused me with the person you initially replied to. I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs because most critics are going t…
No, you were comparing a small part of technical infrastructure costs to grant cost.
Is every dollar spent mission critical to running wikipedia? Obviously not. But that doesn't mean its runnable on 3 million dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Secondly, if you're still just acknowledging Wikipedia hosting costs - and thus pretending there's (for example) no legal work necessary for it - I don't think people are getting through to you as they should. From your phrasing (still) it seems like you might've confused me with the person you initially replied to. I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs because most critics are going t…
> I was comparing technical infrastructure costs to award/grant costs No, you were comparing a small part of technical infrastructure costs to grant cost. Is every dollar spent mission critical to running wikipedia? Obviously not. But that doesn't mean its runnable on 3 million dollars.
I have no control over how WMF presents its expenses.
For years WMF foundation has run "we need money or Wikipedia will die" ads while spending a quarter of the budget on making grants. No one forced them to write that ad copy. It's progress that they've toned it down, but we shouldn't pretend that this criticism is surprising or completely unwarranted.
I'm reading the API docs https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/docs/ And they don't have an OpenAPI spec available to download? So they seriously expect developers to just manually write their own client code by reading and translating those example CURL commands by hand??! Seriously it's 2024! Not having a spec to download and insepct for any API is a sign of incompetence. When tools like Postman or https://github.com/Op…
> And they don't have an OpenAPI spec available to download? So they seriously expect developers to just manually write their own client code by reading and translating those example CURL commands by hand??! This is baby work to literally every programmer I know.
Not to mention the fact that documentation is still always hand-written - which can have mistakes or typos in it, then downstream developers will have to translate that into hand-written client code, which can also have those same mistakes or bugs in it. And when the mistake is corrected, the dev needs to go back to where the correction was made in the docs, re-read and interpret the correction and then correct their client code. With API specs and code generators that entire process is automated now.
Now imagine bringing together approximately 6 different APIs into a single app, 5 have API specs while 1 doesn't. Now 80% of your time is spent on that 1 API where you have to read the docs to keep your client code up to date. Oh that 1 API vendor doesn't bother letting you know when their API is updated! So you have to F5 their website every week! This is literally my life right now.
Anyway, in this case, it was my mistake not to read until the very bottom where they had an OpenAPI yaml spec link there.