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Why are they paying 6.4% on processing fees? What is "movement support" and where is the travel to? Do they have to publicly disclose these disbursements anywhere? This seems sketchy at best.
Wikipedia is full of the kind of stuff mainstream payment processors balk at, so they might have to use a higher risk processor with higher fees.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is not dependent on web traffic for revenue, is a decline in traffic necessarily bad? I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.
They are highly dependent on web traffic for revenue. And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.
I doubt that they're getting "hugged to death" by AI scrapers.
Oh good, Jimmy can stop hounding me for money like a late night infomercial or televangelist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982 >2022 >It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site ope…
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Not for me. Wikipedia had its day, in between print encyclopedias and quick query AI. Its place in history is now set. Something else will come along soon enough.
Until LLMs gain the ability to cite their sources, they will be, at best, a search engine on top of Wikipedia, and not a replacement for it.
I'll go out on a limb and say we _need_ Wikipedia and it's okay that traffic falls. Physical print encyclopedias got replaced by Wikipedia, but AI isn't a replacement (can't ever see how either). While AI is a method of easier access for the end user, the purpose of Wikipedia stands on its own. I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. I say now is the tim…
Right up there with anime torrenting sites.
But seriously, AI trained on Wikipedia should donate to Wikipedia. Why are the AI companies not doing this, or are they?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not for me. Wikipedia had its day, in between print encyclopedias and quick query AI. Its place in history is now set. Something else will come along soon enough.
Until LLMs gain the ability to cite their sources, they will be, at best, a search engine on top of Wikipedia, and not a replacement for it.
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>I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. what are they increasing spending on? Are they still trying to branch out to other initiatives? I understand, even with static pages, that hosting one of the largest websites in the world won't be cheap, but it can't be rising that much, right?
For 2023-2024, their budget was ~$177 million. Travel & events was 7.4% of their expenses. Processing fees on donations was 6.4%. Grants & movement support was 25%. Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%. The Wikimedia Foundation is another Komen Foundation.
I'll go out on a limb and say we _need_ Wikipedia and it's okay that traffic falls. Physical print encyclopedias got replaced by Wikipedia, but AI isn't a replacement (can't ever see how either). While AI is a method of easier access for the end user, the purpose of Wikipedia stands on its own. I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. I say now is the tim…
Wikipedia is a victim of it's own success, it was excellent at avoiding bias for quite awhile and the vast majority of articles are extremely well written.
However it's massive popularity and dominance have also led to, well this guy put it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_...
traffic falling means wikipedia will be cheaper to run. since they don’t rely on ads, it’d likely not affecting their revenues either (assuming those who don’t use it anymore weren’5 those givîng to it)