331–340 of 389 posts
> 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.
You need $140 million/yr for the rest of it?
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Internal DEI initiatives are very helpful for an organisation trying to create a comprehensive knowledge base without falling to any group's bias. That requires diverse perspectives. I don't care about internal DEI if the job is managing sewerage systems, but this is a perfect example of a context where fostering diverse engagement is both rational and improves the end product.
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Wikipedia is a threat to the technofeodalist AI mind shaping consortium. As long as it's reasonably decent, the AI can't go full biased without consequences, but once it's gone there's nowhere normal people can easily to go and get a good enough sanity check.
If I saw this comment 5 years ago, I would have thought you were some crazy conspiracy nut. Today I read it and worry that you might be right. I wonder what I will think seeing this sentiment 5 years from now. I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders…
What’s novel isn’t that powerful people are trying to shape the perception of reality, it’s that who is powerful and what makes them powerful may be rapidly changing. I think it’s something that our “big tech leaders” are primarily concerned with, over everything else. Fundamentally evil, imo.
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> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do. This is incorrect. Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors. Professionally organized shills are unable to do…
> Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense. Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration grou…
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Can you explain what you mean by social/moral status? I haven't seen a big run of non-profit workers marrying movie stars or becoming Pope.
Isn't the Pope like the canonical high-status non-profit worker?
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I don't have a strong opinion on this particular conflict, but I have thought about this in the abstract a bit (and landed on no satisfying conclusion). Basically, I've always been a strong proponent of workers demanding their fair share from a traditional company where the entire game is squeezing employees / society to maximize shareholder returns at all costs. However, I'm much less convinced that the same applies…
As others have said, there's even more at stake with a nonprofit. Charities famously milk their employees dry by emphasizing what good and important work they're doing, to justify overworking and underpaying them. If someone chooses to work for a nonprofit, that should not be interpreted as "willing to be a human doormat".
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This is not entirely fair. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources. The phenomenon you are referring to usually happens in areas where there is ideological or political friction. Sure, some articles can be biased, because staying perfectly factual in the middle of an active political debate or social change is difficult for most people. But in that…
> stated facts backed by decent sources. Like WW2-era articles backed by books wtitten in 2003 from an obscure author. And only this author.
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> Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense. Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration grou…
A shill gets a paycheck. Without one, I would call it activism or something.
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Recently, every time there's a discussion about single CEOs and/or private equity ruining good things, co-operatives seem to come up. Maybe they aren't such a bad idea. Certainly, for starting a company or org, it seems like a decent option.
The big problem from a startup pov is that there's no way of getting conventional/VC funding into a co-op that doesn't break the model. WikiMedia is different because it already has funds - you could reasonably offer donors an ownership share for their donation, and it wouldn't flood the voting. It doesn't seem to be anywhere close to where they're heading, however, which is a shame.
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I'm not sure you understood me. The people who are uninformed and ignorant and go to Wikipedia for their takes, get the right take on climate in my opinion. But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that. One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks…
So your argument is basically "since it's not perfect, it shouldn't exist" aka Nirvana fallacy. Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?
If you had wanted suggestions for gradual improvement, I'd say wikipedia would be better with a "high stakes" template to a lot of pages, with blunt language about idiots fighting over defining the objective Wikipedia position on issues.