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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)

#71

Post by xscott »

joshuaissac wrote: post #59
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…

Almost none of that money goes towards improving Wikipedia. A sizeable chunk will go towards unpopular software projects like Flow[1] and costly rebranding efforts against the community's wishes.[2] The article mentions an alternative, the Wikipedia Reward Board,[3] where the money (or other reward) would actually go to the person (or people) doing the editing work. Not every Wikimedia project has a reward board, but…

I would love for good contributors to be rewarded, but I'm not sure how you do that without people gaming the system and creating worse editor politics than there are now.

However, I am sure what happens if you don't pay the electricity and networking for the servers, or have a team of lawyers protecting the overall effort. Despite it's flaws, the current system is working well by my standards.

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

#72

Post by Abhinav2000 »

loeg wrote: post #46
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…

Yes but the answer would be somewhere in the middle — you need some level of overhead expenses above the bare minimum otherwise the ship will slowly start creaking and falling apart. I didn’t see that much evidence that they were overpaying staff (in contrast to Mozilla), which I apologise to the Author if I missed it.

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

#73

Post by Tomminn »

loeg wrote: post #51

I didn't see a top-level comment linking the other relatively well-known, related article, so here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER (2016, updated through 2020) You can agree or disagree with the conclusions, and agree or disagree on the value of WMF's non-wikipedia projects, but the facts are not in dispute (annual revenue, expenses, net assets are all from WMF published figures). Previously: https://n…

Yeah, this exponential increase in spending is what made me stop donating. I used to donate, but that was when I thought what they were trying to do was amass themselves enough capital so the return on investment would fund them indefinitely.

When I saw the cost inflation that came in lock-step with the increase in donations, I figured all my donation would buy was more bloat, not more security about the future of wikipedia.

If anything, donating seemed to leave the future of wikipedia less secure, because as long as costs were exploding, they would be more fragile to an economic downturn or controversy which reduced donations. It's easier to raise an extra 1 million dollars from alternate sources, then it is to raise an extra 100 million dollars from alternate sources.

Thriftiness is key to longevity, and they do not have it, and I will not contribute until they do. Once I'm convinced they have a culture of thrift, I'll contribute generously.

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

#74

Post by wombatmobile »

bawolff wrote: post #66
wombatmobile wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The how & why doesn't matter if you can't effectively lead people. On the contrary, how could any CEO lead an organisation that is dysfunctionally structured in the first place? I'm not commenting on Lila, of whom I know nothing. Rather, I'm looking at the structure of WMF and the Wikipedia product and seeing disconnects and ambiguities. Wikipedia's value comes from its content, which is provided by contributors wh…

These questions have the same answer as basically any other company. Most internet companies do not pay their content creators or if they do (e.g. youtube) they pay them a relatively small pot of the pie that is really only significant for the super popular people (whether that's ethical is totally different question). Anyways, some of the info you seek is probably at meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/…

Thanks bawolff.

I read this wikipedia article about KE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Fo...

I infer from the article that KE was, in part, a defensive initiative to stop google leaching traffic away from wikipedia.

It sounds like JW was a key strategist, and that wikipedians were left out of the loop, which lead to management turmoil within the ranks.

It sounds like a difficult situation, to fight an external threat using internal broadcast democracy, when you know the information is going to go public right away.

Can you imagine Gates, Bezos, Jobs or Google consulting 50,000 employees every time a competitor looked like gaining traction?

I can imagine the internal transparency and consultation practiced at WMF could be beneficial for many aspects of the operations. But at a strategic level, particularly when threatened, that model could have liabilities for an organisation - particularly one which commands such a significant place in what is a lucrative commercial domain.

To complicate matters, the funding for KE was coming from an external grant source, which may have had its own agenda.

Difficult.

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

#75

Post by wombatmobile »

bawolff wrote: post #32
toomuchtodo wrote: post #16

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.

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

How was this problem presented and discussed inside of WMF?

As an editor, I had an opportunity to discuss it with Sue Gardner at a meet up with other editors. The feedback from other editors was so strong, I'm baffled that WMF couldn't address it.

Although, I understood from Sue that WMF's role was only as a software company that made tools. She said quite clearly that the editor community ran itself.

But if dwindling editor participation is an existential threat, surely that's a core WMF problem? I'm curious what this looked like from inside WMF.

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

#76

Post by dlubarov »

xscott wrote: post #71
joshuaissac wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost none of that money goes towards improving Wikipedia. A sizeable chunk will go towards unpopular software projects like Flow[1] and costly rebranding efforts against the community's wishes.[2] The article mentions an alternative, the Wikipedia Reward Board,[3] where the money (or other reward) would actually go to the person (or people) doing the editing work. Not every Wikimedia project has a reward board, but…

I would love for good contributors to be rewarded, but I'm not sure how you do that without people gaming the system and creating worse editor politics than there are now. However, I am sure what happens if you don't pay the electricity and networking for the servers, or have a team of lawyers protecting the overall effort. Despite it's flaws, the current system is working well by my standards.

Not much of their budget is going toward hosting though -- in FY 18-19 it was ~$2.3M of their ~$91.4M expenses [1].

If we look back to 2005, Wikipedia was already one of the most popular websites on the internet, but their expenses were only $716k [2]. They were frugal back then!

I agree with the parent that the extra expenses are mostly superfluous. They have a ton of staff [3] and quite a few of their roles seem to be about promoting their brand or maximizing donations.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/2/28/Wikim... [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors/

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