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Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? (2015)

forum.effectivealtruism.org

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

#41

Post by mattnewton »

umvi wrote: post #34
mattnewton wrote: post #15

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 This argument may be out of date since they have had a huge management shakeup since it was written, but the criticism that volunteer labour produces the bulk of the value i…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 have enough to keep the server lights on and a crew of maintenance employees, and the fights are over how to expand past that and justify more donations, or which things that have expanded past that are kept and not cut.

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

#42

Post by toomuchtodo »

TheNorthman wrote: post #23
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

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…

> Is the non profit to gate people from editing if arbitrary diversity requirements aren't met? Notice how you're the one suggesting `diversity requirements' and then proceed by going on a tirade about it. There are many things to be done about diversity and not all of them requires coercion.

The comment I replied to mentioned gender about a cohort of participants ("I'm curious because my experience of editing, and that of other people I heard from at an editor meet up, was that the culture is heavily male dominated"), hence where my statement comes from. I want to see quality work regardless of who is doing it, and the folks doing this are uncompensated volunteers.

EDIT: @TheNorthman I cannot reply to your comment as I'm throttled by HN. Put bluntly, the gender of contributors does not matter and shouldn't even be considered. Let contributions stand on their own merit.

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

#43

Post by geofft »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
wombatmobile wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the work culture like inside of wmf? Gender balanced? Cooperative? I'm curious because my experience of editing, and that of other people I heard from at an editor meet up, was that the culture is heavily male dominated, and unnecessarily adversarial in a bullying way. That said, the CEO at the time (2007 - 2014), Sue Gardner, seemed enlightened, progressive, smart and highly capable.

. 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…

> 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).

This is true in the same sense that anyone can track down and fix bugs in the Linux kernel.

Now, I have certainly done so, but I've done it as an employee for a big and profitable company who had plenty of time to spend on it. Wikipedia is similar - it is superficially open to everyone, and sure, you can probably add some detail to an article about William of Normandy's first cousin once removed just fine, but if you're trying to document, say, whether or not there was a death camp in Warsaw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...), you're up against people who have more time and resources than you do.

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

#44

Post by bawolff »

wombatmobile wrote: post #3
bawolff wrote: post #2

It should be noted that WMF had a significant management shake up since then. The lila era management is basically all gone. However im glad that this is the article posted, and not the rediculous "cancer" article that compares amount spent on servers when the site was smaller, slow and constantly going down to the modern day site when its fast, stable and a bigger site. [Disclaimer: used to work for wmf. Do not anym…

What was the work culture like inside of wmf? Gender balanced? Cooperative? I'm curious because my experience of editing, and that of other people I heard from at an editor meet up, was that the culture is heavily male dominated, and unnecessarily adversarial in a bullying way. That said, the CEO at the time (2007 - 2014), Sue Gardner, seemed enlightened, progressive, smart and highly capable.

> Gender balanced?

Fwiw, when i was there, engineering teams generally had more men than woman. No tech teams and management tended to have more equal representation. However i would say the gender demographics of eng teams were fairly on-par for the industry at large. I never saw any sexism, but as a man, if it was present it probably would not be directed at me, so i may just not have noticed.

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

#45

Post by pchristensen »

eindiran wrote: post #27
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #21

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 it was another answer to the GP question "what does reward past content creators?"

The editing and organizing work is satisfying to some types of people, including some people on the autism spectrum. And that specific type of satisfying work is rewarding to them. Kind of like how a freshly mown lawn is satisfying to others. There are plenty of people who love mowing their lawn that would hate to do it as a job for others.

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

#46

Post by loeg »

Abhinav2000 wrote: post #6

Honestly I read through the article and wasn’t a fan of the authors points. Eg wiki only has four years of excess reserves - compare that to many other foundations and endowments and that number looks low. And he thinks its okay for them to get more money from larger donors vs their attempt at targetting small individual donations which allow wikipedia to maintain neutrality. Really don’t know why he made that argume…

They have approximately $165 million in assets and the total running costs for wikipedia servers are on the order of $2 million a year. They could keep the lights on for wikipedia for something like 80 years without a single dime of additional revenue.

The vast majority of their spending does not go to keeping wikipedia's lights on, and that is the only reason their excess reserves are as low as "four years."

Here's the graph of revenue and spending over time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/User%3AG...

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

#47

Post by bobbob1921 »

xscott wrote: post #17

I've donated thousands of dollars to Wikimedia over the years. Before I retired, I took frequent advantage of my company's policy for matching donations, doubling the amount I gave. After retirement, I set my "Amazon Smile" donations to go there. Maybe I'm bragging, but I just want to show I actually care about the topic. I know children's cancer and other horrible things pull on more heart strings, but Wikipedia mak…

> If there’s a better charity, I’d like to know about it...

Not saying it’s necessarily better or worse, but is worth considering– the Internet archive (ie they run the Wayback machine, among other services). I have donated to both. I feel strongly about archiving/storing all types of information- digital and non-digital.

There is a great amount of information that is lost or unable to be easily located due to 404 errors or servers going off-line (and the source of this issue is only getting worse)

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

#48

Post by dvt »

This is going to be a very unpopular opinion, but I'm curious what folks think: I don't like Wikipedia.

I think it's done more harm than good, I think the editing process is biased, skews to the political left or right (depending on the article), Wikipedia also generally skews secular and humanist (because that's the nature of most contributors). References constantly 404, but that's not even the main problem: references are not parsed properly. A lot of times, I'll look at a cited paper and its cited content will be diametrically opposed to what the Wiki page says.

Controversial topics are nightmare, and contributing to them is even more of a nightmare. The voting process, by definition, is flawed -- and Wikipedia is very much a "tyranny by majority." The only articles that are high quality tend to be very technical ones (where you generally have professionals in the field contribute to non-controversial topics). Most rules -- like NOR, NPOV, and BLP, are implemented haphazardly.

Why do I think Wikipedia has done more harm than good? Because there's a new phenomenon where one reads the Wiki page of a complex topic (say, something like Free Will) and 5 minutes later, the reader thinks they're a bonafide expert on a topic that has puzzled humanity for millennia. There's a reason Wikipedia can't be cited in college (heck, even high school) papers: it's low quality and unvetted. I make it a point to never cite Wikipedia in online discussion. I'd rather cite Wolfram Alpha, or a professor's personal webpage, or a specific paper.

Even before Wikipedia, you had knowledge being disseminated via the web: philosophy professors had their own web-pages, theologians had their own web-pages, and particle physicists had their own web-pages -- all filled with morsels of specific (and often times technical) information. I really wish Encyclopaedia Britannica put more efforts into their own knowledge base, but I get it: high-quality vetted content is hard to do. Wikipedia takes shortcuts, and we'd be foolish to ignore its shortcomings.

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

#49

Post by akrolsmir »

I'm seeing a lot of comments that say things like "so what should I do instead?" The article doesn't specify, but the forum it's posted on (effectivealtruism.org) has a lot to say about this topic. One simple recommendation would be to look at https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities instead.

A sketch of the argument: If you think donating is important, it's because on some level, you're hoping to bring about some good in the world. You donate to Wikipedia hoping to encourage Wikipedia to continue existing, and more work to go in to the effort of building Wikipedia.

But I'll bet that you care about other good things in the world as well: saving sick children, preventing climate change, fighting unjust policies. There's a lot of things you could make an impact on donating. How do you decide?

Effective Altruism states that not all donations are equally effective. One charity might take your $1000 and use it to buy a dying child an all-expenses-paid vacation to Disneyland. Another might use it buying bed nets to prevent the spread of malaria, in expectation keeping one more child alive than would have died. And given that your budget is limited and you can't afford both, you must decide which is more valuable to you.

So this article roughly says, "Wikipedia is a great and noble cause. But here's why it doesn't come close to the _very, absolute best_ way to use your money to help others."

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

#50

Post by young_unixer »

On one hand, I'm grateful because Wikipedia has been so useful to me.

On the other hand, the Spanish version of Wikipedia is rife with ideologically biased articles if you venture into anything that talks about politics or history. The English version is, for the most part, free of this, probably because there are more people reviewing it.

We shouldn't underestimate the propagandist power of Wikipedia in non-English languages, especially when some people give it more credibility than it deserves.

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