7 ms·

Isn't that what kills most charities that don't starve?

Alex3917 9y ago
Wikipedia isn't a charity, it's a non profit. Their financials look fine, they have over a year's budget in reserves. Not seeing the issue at all here.
- fatbird 9y ago
  The issue is that the organization and spending have grown, but the mission hasn't, and they're not obviously doing better or more than they were a decade ago, except for a list of failed projects like Knowledge Engine that appear to be badly managed internal efforts that had little hope of succeeding. And all this is against a backdrop of continuing to present themselves as a scrappy do-gooder surviving on fundraising and volunteer efforts. The threat Macon identifies is that the bottom will drop out of the exponential growth in revenue and spending, leaving them no option but to sell out to Google, Facebook, or another party that will simply buy and monetize them, destroying the basic value that Wikipedia does still offer. I don't know how worried to be, but I was genuinely shocked to find out how much money they take in and how many staff they have, without fundamentally being much different than I remember from a decade ago.
  - nqzero 9y ago
    the project that i'd like to see is a beta area where the notability requirements are relaxed, with some sort of semi-automated process for promotion, with the ultimate goal of covering a much larger corpus wikipedia is great for mainstream stuff, but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page. and i'm sure the problem extends well past tech
    - hk__2 9y ago
      > but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page Do you mind mentioning some of them?
      - ghaff 9y ago
        Real quick search but, for example, linkerd does not have a page and fluentd is little more than a stub. There is separately a list of Linux Foundation projects and one can argue that they don't need their own page. But it does point out that there's a lot of inconsistency about the quality and depth of articles. Lots of articles are pretty good but then I'll hit some important tech topic that has a pretty bad entry. Things like biographies are also wildly uneven depending upon how currently well-known a person is.
        tonyztan 9y ago
        If the topic is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, anyone is free to go ahead and improve the article. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't write articles or decide what topics to include; the Wikipedia community does that, at no cost to the Wikimedia Foundation. Anyone who wants to contribute can join the community at any time. Also keep in mind that Wikipedia does not allow original research, so if a topic doesn't have much reliable third party coverage, then the article wouldn't be able to include a lot of details.
    - WikipediasBad 9y ago
      There's a site that tries to do that exact thing called Everipedia, but they have been frequently lambasted in the press for being wrong in their articles. I assume you can't relax notability while at the same time selecting for accuracy. Still though, they are getting pretty decent traffic, and I like their site design. Valiant effort, not that great execution.
      - Max_Mustermann 9y ago
        Everipedia is a blatant copy cat site run by a guy who doesn't let anyone correct the BS on the article on him on his site. See https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/74ba05/slug/dnxddsy https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/74ba05/slug/dnxd...
        WikipediasBad 9y ago
        What do you mean? I went to that thread and came out more confused than enlightened. And ya, I know they get stuff wrong from the news, I already said that in my original post, I wasn't trying to shill for them, I made that pretty clear.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    > The issue is that the organization and spending have grown, but the mission hasn't The same is true for Google. Are they negligent for not running the whole thing out of a Starbucks?
    - fatbird 9y ago
      Google is a for-profit entity designed to maximize revenue and returns for shareholders. It's an absurd comparison. You mention that the WMF has a year's budget in reserve. For a non-profit, this is generally considered a bad thing except in certain forms like building an endowment, because hoarding cash is just a way for a non-profit to actually profit and keep it. The previous ED of wikimedia actually called this out as a problem because they don't have the governance structure to prevent "log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices".
      - Alex3917 9y ago
        How is it any different? Increasing their spending either helps them meet their goals faster or it doesn’t. There is zero difference between for-profits and non-profits in this regard.
        fatbird 9y ago
        They were meeting their goals a decade ago with one part-time tech and a budget only 3% of what it is today. How has exponential growth in revenue and spending improved or sped up goal-meeting? It's kept a lot of wikipedians employed building features no one wants (or outright rejects), but it hasn't furthered the goal of collecting the world's knowledge, which is still almost entirely driven by the entirely voluntary editorial staff using the same tools they had a decade ago.
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    I'm curious what you mean by "the mission hasn't grown". In the last 10 years Wikipedia has become perhaps the go-to resource for ready reference, information on breaking news, Google search results on a given subject, etc. They've grown quite a bit in that time. But the mission hasn't changed? What direction would you see them take?
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      Which of those things doesn’t fall under the umbrella of making the sum of all human knowledge accessible to anyone for free?
    - fatbird 9y ago
      Those have all been true for more than a decade, since Wales was bragging on TED that they only had one employee and everything was volunteer driven. The scale of the operation has grown, with some necessity, but the mission is the same and doesn't require exponential growth in dollars.
      - stinkytaco 9y ago
        Wikimedia had expanded in that time, adding projects like wikibooks, and similar properties. It's also become a target for parties that want to manipulate it, but has been surprisingly resilient to that. I'm not sure if that all requires this level of growth, but its use and importance have grown exponentially. I can't think of many places that deserve those funds more, really.
        elect_engineer 9y ago
        I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". Re: "It's also become a target for parties that want to manipulate it, but has been surprisingly resilient to that" not a penny of the budget deals with parties that want to manipulate Wikipedia. That is dealt with by unpaid volunteers like me. --~~~~
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  > Their financials look fine, they have over a year's budget in reserves. I think the question is if they actually need a $65mil operating budget -- or one that's growing 15%+ per year. Especially since they're giving away a sixth of their budget in awards and grants! At that point, they're taking on a secondary role as a financial institution funding projects in addition to their primary one. If they cut this, they'd need only $55 million and would have almost two years of reserve. (We can also talk about if salary creeping up from a third to half the budget over the last ~5 years is appropriate. But that's a smaller issue.)

Wikipedia isn't a charity, it's a non profit. Their financials look fine, they have over a year's budget in reserves. Not seeing the issue at all here.

fatbird 9y ago
The issue is that the organization and spending have grown, but the mission hasn't, and they're not obviously doing better or more than they were a decade ago, except for a list of failed projects like Knowledge Engine that appear to be badly managed internal efforts that had little hope of succeeding. And all this is against a backdrop of continuing to present themselves as a scrappy do-gooder surviving on fundraising and volunteer efforts. The threat Macon identifies is that the bottom will drop out of the exponential growth in revenue and spending, leaving them no option but to sell out to Google, Facebook, or another party that will simply buy and monetize them, destroying the basic value that Wikipedia does still offer. I don't know how worried to be, but I was genuinely shocked to find out how much money they take in and how many staff they have, without fundamentally being much different than I remember from a decade ago.
- nqzero 9y ago
  the project that i'd like to see is a beta area where the notability requirements are relaxed, with some sort of semi-automated process for promotion, with the ultimate goal of covering a much larger corpus wikipedia is great for mainstream stuff, but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page. and i'm sure the problem extends well past tech
  - hk__2 9y ago
    > but even technologies with vibrant communities often lack a wikipedia page Do you mind mentioning some of them?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Real quick search but, for example, linkerd does not have a page and fluentd is little more than a stub. There is separately a list of Linux Foundation projects and one can argue that they don't need their own page. But it does point out that there's a lot of inconsistency about the quality and depth of articles. Lots of articles are pretty good but then I'll hit some important tech topic that has a pretty bad entry. Things like biographies are also wildly uneven depending upon how currently well-known a person is.
      - tonyztan 9y ago
        If the topic is notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, anyone is free to go ahead and improve the article. The Wikimedia Foundation doesn't write articles or decide what topics to include; the Wikipedia community does that, at no cost to the Wikimedia Foundation. Anyone who wants to contribute can join the community at any time. Also keep in mind that Wikipedia does not allow original research, so if a topic doesn't have much reliable third party coverage, then the article wouldn't be able to include a lot of details.
  - WikipediasBad 9y ago
    There's a site that tries to do that exact thing called Everipedia, but they have been frequently lambasted in the press for being wrong in their articles. I assume you can't relax notability while at the same time selecting for accuracy. Still though, they are getting pretty decent traffic, and I like their site design. Valiant effort, not that great execution.
    - Max_Mustermann 9y ago
      Everipedia is a blatant copy cat site run by a guy who doesn't let anyone correct the BS on the article on him on his site. See https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/74ba05/slug/dnxddsy https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/74ba05/slug/dnxd...
      - WikipediasBad 9y ago
        What do you mean? I went to that thread and came out more confused than enlightened. And ya, I know they get stuff wrong from the news, I already said that in my original post, I wasn't trying to shill for them, I made that pretty clear.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  > The issue is that the organization and spending have grown, but the mission hasn't The same is true for Google. Are they negligent for not running the whole thing out of a Starbucks?
  - fatbird 9y ago
    Google is a for-profit entity designed to maximize revenue and returns for shareholders. It's an absurd comparison. You mention that the WMF has a year's budget in reserve. For a non-profit, this is generally considered a bad thing except in certain forms like building an endowment, because hoarding cash is just a way for a non-profit to actually profit and keep it. The previous ED of wikimedia actually called this out as a problem because they don't have the governance structure to prevent "log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices".
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      How is it any different? Increasing their spending either helps them meet their goals faster or it doesn’t. There is zero difference between for-profits and non-profits in this regard.
      - fatbird 9y ago
        They were meeting their goals a decade ago with one part-time tech and a budget only 3% of what it is today. How has exponential growth in revenue and spending improved or sped up goal-meeting? It's kept a lot of wikipedians employed building features no one wants (or outright rejects), but it hasn't furthered the goal of collecting the world's knowledge, which is still almost entirely driven by the entirely voluntary editorial staff using the same tools they had a decade ago.
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by "the mission hasn't grown". In the last 10 years Wikipedia has become perhaps the go-to resource for ready reference, information on breaking news, Google search results on a given subject, etc. They've grown quite a bit in that time. But the mission hasn't changed? What direction would you see them take?
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    Which of those things doesn’t fall under the umbrella of making the sum of all human knowledge accessible to anyone for free?
  - fatbird 9y ago
    Those have all been true for more than a decade, since Wales was bragging on TED that they only had one employee and everything was volunteer driven. The scale of the operation has grown, with some necessity, but the mission is the same and doesn't require exponential growth in dollars.
    - stinkytaco 9y ago
      Wikimedia had expanded in that time, adding projects like wikibooks, and similar properties. It's also become a target for parties that want to manipulate it, but has been surprisingly resilient to that. I'm not sure if that all requires this level of growth, but its use and importance have grown exponentially. I can't think of many places that deserve those funds more, really.
      - elect_engineer 9y ago
        I am the author of the Wikipedia essay "Wikipedia has Cancer". Re: "It's also become a target for parties that want to manipulate it, but has been surprisingly resilient to that" not a penny of the budget deals with parties that want to manipulate Wikipedia. That is dealt with by unpaid volunteers like me. --~~~~
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
> Their financials look fine, they have over a year's budget in reserves. I think the question is if they actually need a $65mil operating budget -- or one that's growing 15%+ per year. Especially since they're giving away a sixth of their budget in awards and grants! At that point, they're taking on a secondary role as a financial institution funding projects in addition to their primary one. If they cut this, they'd need only $55 million and would have almost two years of reserve. (We can also talk about if salary creeping up from a third to half the budget over the last ~5 years is appropriate. But that's a smaller issue.)