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Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

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Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#31
post #9

I donate to Wikipedia every year because I use the product almost every day, and I consider it paying for a good product, not a donation. They happen to be set up as a foundation where I can look at their financials, but in my mind I treat them more like a private company. If they want to waste my money then so be it. I pay what I think is a fair price for the amount of value I get from the product.

I think the crux of the argument is that the money is largely not going to improving the product, which is mostly done by volunteer editors and contributors, but it is going to a management class fighting over project funding for new initiatives. This argument may be out of date since they have had a huge management shakeup since it was written, but the criticism that volunteer labour produces the bulk of the value i…

Right, the fundamental assumption of a market-based economy is that there is some nexus between paying for a product and the existence of that product. That's the way that the market can reward and therefore optimize for things people want. For your average for-profit company, that's a reasonably safe assumption.

When you decide to donate to a non-profit as if you were paying for a product, that assumption doesn't necessarily hold. In this case, you know fairly clearly it doesn't hold: the money doesn't go towards either the future development of the product, the continued existence of the service, or the motivation of people in the future to set up things like Wikipedia (no future Jimmy-Wales-in-2001 is going to be influenced by the 2015 Wikimedia financials). As a charitable donor, you cannot create such a nexus just by wanting it to exist.

(However, what you can create is a nexus between your charitable donation and the fundraising department of whoever you're giving to - all the more if you appear to donate in response to fundraising campaigns and not in response to the actual work the organization is doing.)

This is also why I'm a skeptic of large companies/conglomerates, which have the revenue to continue their existence basically regardless of any individual product. Very few companies operate internally on a market-based economy; they operate on the human judgment of whether management likes you and what you do. That means that a small new project that makes significant profit as a percentage of its expenses might still be a drop in the bucket of the company as a whole, and a politically-important project that's losing money might still continue to be funded if the company can afford its losses. The company might (entirely rationally) decide that "strategically" it should continue to invest in that product, which is to say that it should take advantage of the fact that it's not subject to the usual market pressures to drive out smaller or even differently-shaped competitors that are.

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#32
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sue was the ceo (executive director) before lila. Lila was the ceo where things went south.

Excuse my sloppy comment. Lila did a terrible job, but Sue was running Wikimedia while there was a slow decline in editors since the mid 00s. Having donated to Wikimedia previously, I no longer do, because senior leadership (across "administrations") is more concerned with issues completely disconnected from their core role ("To unlock the world's knowledge"). Those dollars go to the Internet Archive now (which store…

There is some research to suggest that (en) wikipedia's growth pattern (a peak followed by slow decline as beurocracy becomes ossified) is common in similar projects. So maybe they didn't do anything wrong they just failed to fix it. That said i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#33

> Wikipedia has helped me so much, it's important to pay back : The WMF has done a reasonable job of stewardship, but I believe that insofar as there inheres a strong moral obligation to pay back, this obligation is to content creators. Donating to the WMF does not reward past content creators. That's an interesting point, and it got me thinking: what does reward past content creators? As someone who has contributed…

I continue to find it amazing and admirable that it is a trait of humanity (or some people within humanity) to want to record/create/leave behind information about the world and explain it to others. At little to no reward to themselves aside from satisfaction and fulfillment.

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#34
post #9

I donate to Wikipedia every year because I use the product almost every day, and I consider it paying for a good product, not a donation. They happen to be set up as a foundation where I can look at their financials, but in my mind I treat them more like a private company. If they want to waste my money then so be it. I pay what I think is a fair price for the amount of value I get from the product.

I think the crux of the argument is that the money is largely not going to improving the product, which is mostly done by volunteer editors and contributors, but it is going to a management class fighting over project funding for new initiatives. This argument may be out of date since they have had a huge management shakeup since it was written, but the criticism that volunteer labour produces the bulk of the value i…

> but it is going to a management class fighting over project funding for new initiatives

Why are they fighting to fund new initiatives when Jimmy has to beg for donations just to keep the lights on? I want my money to go towards keeping current Wikipedia's lights on, not funding the next big idea some manager has.

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my sloppy comment. Lila did a terrible job, but Sue was running Wikimedia while there was a slow decline in editors since the mid 00s. Having donated to Wikimedia previously, I no longer do, because senior leadership (across "administrations") is more concerned with issues completely disconnected from their core role ("To unlock the world's knowledge"). Those dollars go to the Internet Archive now (which store…

There is some research to suggest that (en) wikipedia's growth pattern (a peak followed by slow decline as beurocracy becomes ossified) is common in similar projects. So maybe they didn't do anything wrong they just failed to fix it. That said i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

> That said i dont think anyone really knows what to do about the editor decline.

Pay them? Tens of millions of dollars in donations, what's the excuse not to?

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#36
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

. Is the non profit to gate people from editing if arbitrary diversity requirements aren't met? The best part about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, anyone can run it, and nobody can lock up its content (for whatever reason). Look no further to Mozilla to see what happens when a non profit fails to meet it's mandate and is stuck with "peacocks" (folks who prioritize status or signaling > substance) instead of pr…

Sue was the ceo (executive director) before lila. Lila was the ceo where things went south.

"Gardner was instrumental in raising Wikipedia's warchest and WMF's staffing. In 2011/12 - the last year for which figures are available - the Foundation raised $38.4m, up from $5m in 2007/08"

Wikipedia Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money Editors should get dosh, bureaucrats get too much, says outgoing fundraising chief

https://www.theregister.com/2013/10/08/wikipedia_foundation_...

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the most heavily-contributing editors to Wikipedia are on the autistic spectrum. (I don’t think this is a very controversial statement for anyone involved in the community.) They are editing because organizing information and making articles as complete as possible assuages an inner itch – essentially the work is its own reward. Paying them for their activity would not change much, and I personally would ques…

What does some editors being on the spectrum have to do with anything? OP's point was that if you are going to financially reward anyone for providing you with well-written Wikipedia articles ideally it would be the people who created the articles, and donating money to the WMF doesn't reward these people at all.

I think GP's point was that for many contributors, simply organizing the information well is its own reward. And therefore being paid for that work is a smaller deal than it might be for other populations.

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#38
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikidata already existed during the knowledge engine fiasco, so if it was the same thing im not sure what they were doing. I suspect a lot of KE's failure related to inconsistent messaging and project scope. I'm pretty sure even now, nobody knows what KE was planned to be or what its value proposition would be, or "what" it actually is beyond buzzwords

The first phase of Wikidata (the MVP so to speak) was purely as a common repository for interwiki links, not a general knowledge engine/knowledge graph. The latter is a lot more recent.

General statements were added in 2013 which is still before KE.

The query service (the SPARQL endpoint) is probably the most KE like part, and that was later, in 2015. Still before KE but much closer. I think (hard to say because nobody gave a straight answer) that KE was more going to be about federation and searching non wikimedia (Free) resources.

Re: Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

#40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the crux of the argument is that the money is largely not going to improving the product, which is mostly done by volunteer editors and contributors, but it is going to a management class fighting over project funding for new initiatives. This argument may be out of date since they have had a huge management shakeup since it was written, but the criticism that volunteer labour produces the bulk of the value i…

> but it is going to a management class fighting over project funding for new initiatives Why are they fighting to fund new initiatives when Jimmy has to beg for donations just to keep the lights on? I want my money to go towards keeping current Wikipedia's lights on, not funding the next big idea some manager has.

They don't have to beg for donations to keep the lights on. That's kind of the problem. They are vastly overfunded for running wikipedia and mostly squander any additional income they receive on non-Wikipedia projects. This is very well documented here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER

They get more and more in donations every year and continue to ramp up their spending, mostly not on Wikipedia (neither operating costs nor "R&D" type costs).

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