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Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

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Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#191

Post by pfranz »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #126
watwut wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. Some areas are perfectly describes, others basically empty. I remember dabbing into sewing a while ago and finding out wiki is basically empty.

Yes, I also notice the coverage dedicated to women vs men is extremely imbalanced. I know they have a separate team working on the issue and big advert banners about it... but the issue remains: Much more is written about men (living or dead) than women.

This was brought up as a major issue about 10 years ago:

https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-weddin...

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#192

Post by croes »

colonwqbang wrote: post #163
paxys wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no doubt they could keep the website up and maintained on something of the order of $10m/year. What exactly are you basing this on?

Here's their budget for 2020 https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Mediu... They budgeted $5M for "data centre expenses". We cannot know for sure how much it would really cost if WMF only focused on running their website. But $10M doesn't sound implausible to me.

If WMF would only run the website, the content would only be advertisment and propaganda.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#193

Post by rakoo »

Clewza313 wrote: post #180
taurath wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it sad that this is a debate given how much of a public good it is. $10m is absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

I don't think anybody is begrudging them $10M/year, or even $100M/year for that matter. My concern is that the way their expenses keep spiralling upwards is a) not sustainable and b) introducing serious scope creep into their original mission. Here's the OG version by Jimmy Wales: "The sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world." Here's what it currently looks like: "Empower and engage people a…

Actually phrased like that, the second is more interesting.

The first version is about centralizing all informations so it can be consumed. It's the traditional view of knowledge dissemination, scaled to the whole world instantaneously. The second version is about giving people the tool to produce knowledge so it can be shared with the whole world. Just like the printing press spread authoring power from a select few people who bothered to write everything, to anyone with enough money to buy a machine, Wikipedia is giving the power to share knowledge from those who had the right curriculum to anyone with a bit of motivation.

This is the revolution that Internet and the Web promised (not just allow everyone to watch and listen, but give everyone a voice), and I'm glad Wikipedia is doing it. If it takes more money to fulfill that mission then it's totally worth it.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#194

Post by exporectomy »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #126
watwut wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. Some areas are perfectly describes, others basically empty. I remember dabbing into sewing a while ago and finding out wiki is basically empty.

Yes, I also notice the coverage dedicated to women vs men is extremely imbalanced. I know they have a separate team working on the issue and big advert banners about it... but the issue remains: Much more is written about men (living or dead) than women.

Aren't there far more prominent men than women though? Especially when you count the whole of patriarchal history.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#195

Post by bawolff »

j-pb wrote: post #186
bawolff wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How often is numerical (which is the only knowledge you can really automate this way) knowledge updated? Numerical knowledge is not the only knowledge that is stored there. I'm going to go with update rate of often. It has a higher edit rate than english wikipedia does. > How often is said knowledge dependent on cultural idiosyncracies? Sometimes that is true, other times it isn't. The system is used where it makes…

> I'm not sure what you're talking about. Wikipedia was never hosted in some magical peer-to-peer fashion on volunteer web servers, nor is there any situation where it is likely to be hosted that way. The goals of (near) instant update time, as well as some central quality control and user blocking, makes distributed hosting pretty impossible. Everything wrong with wikipedia summed up in one paragraph, nice!

I mean, if you want to make a website with different goals and properties than wikipedia, by all means go make one. Wikipedia is just one way of doing things. Its hardly the last word on how to make an online encyclopedia, and quite frankly, some competition in this space would probably be good for everyone.

But disagreing with wikipedia's goals as a product is very different from a claim that the solution intended to meet those product goals is over-engineered.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#196

Post by japanuspus »

xbar wrote: post #141
ramraj07 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.

How about you keep your 10 bucks and stop using Wikipedia rather than suggesting ads? Please.

The main value of wikipedia has been provided not by the wikipedia foundation, but by the volunteers who write the articles on wikipedia.

My work on wikipedia articles is for the benefit of my fellow humans, not to allow some organisation to start implying that everyone has a moral obligation to give them money. That was never part of the deal when I contributed my work.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#198

Post by zozbot234 »

NeoVeles wrote: post #165
Clewza313 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.

The thing that gets me is the Archive.org only has approximately $20 million USD of revenue and they run a system that is much more data intensive. The wayback machine alone is a data crunching monster and it is done for a small fraction of WMF.

Archive.org is a lot less people intensive than what WMF does. Even the book scanning work they support is mostly done by third parties, and they largely focus on hosting the resulting content. Wikipedia can't work like that, no matter how much some people wish it could.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#199

Post by KingOfCoders »

zozbot234 wrote: post #38
ramraj07 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.

What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just…

Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon.

This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#200

Post by nickik »

j-pb wrote: post #118
bawolff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't stored as RDF. RDF is provided as an export format. The language contents also aren't stored in wikidata, its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y. Wikidata isn't just used for interlanguage linking. Its also used to keep infoboxes synced across different languages, and a way to easily query that data (Depends a bit on the language, english wikipedia isn't fully on board…

> its just matching which title in language X matches which title in language Y Like I said, gross overengineering. "You can save cents and seconds of time updating knowledge boxes, by spending millions and hours developing federated SPARQL query capabilities!"

As somebody who has used these facilities I highly disagree. They are really awesome.

And if you have some magically technical solution that is much better and much easier, then please share it. And don't just complain that everybody else is doing everything wrong.

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