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Amazon donates $1M to Wikimedia
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dajohnson89 8y agoNice to see good news like this.
- jimjimjim 8y agoThat's a good point. This is good news. Why don't people celebrate good news?
- gnulinux 8y agoBecause it is neutral news. Wikimedia has way more money than they can burn any time soon, and money has diminishing returns.
- jimjimjim 8y agoat this point in time in the dumpster fire, neutral should be celebrated!
- gnulinux 8y agoI don't understand this sort of pessimism. If a news is good, we should say good. If a news is bad, we should say bad. If it's neither, then we should state it's neither. What makes you think we live in an especially bad time frame?
- jimjimjim 8y agothe assault on truth, misinformation and disinformation. the rise of authoritarianism. the polarization of poltics. climate change denial. jerks getting outraged when people suggest not being a jerk. rage-baiting for clicks.
- gnulinux 8y agoHow is this random potpourri of global problems supposed to prove your point? Do we have any data we have more problems now than before? According to what basis? Even if this is true, what change does this make, why does this imply we should start praising neutral news just because it's not bad.
- jimjimjim 8y agoa potpourri it may be but it is a response to your question about why I think this is an especially bad time frame. I see no reason not to consider them relevant and I also see them as being indicators that things could be a lot better. Based on this my original comment was a desire to try to increase positivity.
- mudil 8y agoChump change for Bezos. Really.
- talltimtom 8y agoIt’s Amazon the company not Bezos the person.
- stygiansonic 8y agoAt this point, can you really separate the two? Most of Bezos’s wealth is tied up in Amazon, and he is virtually in control of the company.
- baud147258 8y agoWell it's not directly out of his pockets. It might impact this year's bottom line, but he didn't paid the 1M directly.
- the_duke 8y agoAccording to Bloomberg [1] he owns "just" 16.4 percent. Sure, he is CEO and probably has a large influence on the board too. But just based on stock, he doesn't even seem to have a blocking minority. (Unless he has a lot of preferred shares of some kind).
- astrodust 8y agoHe's the shot-caller. Nobody else has that much influence in the company.
- twblalock 8y ago> Chump change for Bezos. Really. Ok, then how much should he have given? Keep in mind that Wikipedia didn't even need the money, because they have enough already.
- tyingq 8y ago"Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google all contributed around $50,000 by matching employee gifts." That seems paltry for Google, given that their knowledge graph benefits a lot from Wikipedia content.
- cromwellian 8y agoGoogle gave $2 million in 2010 from searches, and Brin gave $500k. I'm guessing they gave more at various times, but I think you're right, Wikipedia is a vital resource used by Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon's AI agents, and they should be donating far more since it is arguably a significant value add for those products.
- gammateam 8y agoThrowing money at an organization has diminishing efficacy. What do you think $2 million or $10 million or $100 million would have done for the Wikimedia organization, you think they would hide the donation <div> next year?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fullshark 8y agoEstablish an endowment to ensure they are not fighting for survival in the future.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 8y agoThey could do that themselves and in fact they are - $5m/year goes into their endowment. Take a look at their budget: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Final/Financials https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_... Quite a lot of waste in there, e.g. $850k on "brand strategy" - kind of looks like they have more money than they know what to do with.
- akshayB 8y agoGoogle went after Freebase, did all the knowledge transfer to their graph and discontinued the project. Wikipedia now became a vitally important source of information and it is great to see big players trying to keep open knowledge base funded.
- singularity2001 8y agoWikidata is the new better Freebase: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2 'Earth' example
- julianozen 8y agoI'm sure this has been discussed before on HN, but how has wikimedia avoided the fake news problem that plagues facebook, twitter and youtube.
- mmanfrin 8y agoPeople don't need reliable citations to post on FB.
- tyingq 8y agoThere's also the visibility thing. You can put fake news on FB without making it visible to everyone.
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoWikipedia definitely is not immune to the fake news effect. I can recall both reading about and directly seeing numerous instances of propaganda-esque edits. I'm guessing it probably just seems less prevalent because readership isn't concentrated on any one Wiki article the way that news/fake news is. I'm also under the impression that most wiki articles are closely watched by their authors as well as various wiki bots that alert to certain types of changes, so many/most malicious edits are probably noticed and reverted soon after they are made.
- valarauca1 8y agoWikipedia has started to become _dare I say_ hostile to outside editors. The current glacial pace that it is updated at maintains pace with science, and journalism. But rarely the larger internet. While this is frustrating, when your trying to correct a citation or trivial spelling error in a long forgotten page. While on frequently trafficked pages this pace prevents a lot of malicious behavior.
- yorwba 8y agoMy Wikipedia account was created two months ago and has exactly two edits, one of which removed a spam link and another which fixed a transliteration error. There has been no hostile reaction. If you're just trying to correct a citation or trivial spelling error on a long forgotten page, editing doesn't seem to be particularly difficult.
- mmanfrin 8y agoConsidering all of their 'Alexa what is [x]' information comes from wiki, this seems short-changed.
- azinman2 8y agoIt’s kinda gross how little the big tech players have donated considering how much of their and academia’s AI efforts leverage wikimedia data.
- xyzzyz 8y agoUseless signaling. Wikipedia definitely doesn’t need any more money. This $1M will be burned on salaries of Wikimedia Foundation employees, majority of which do nothing useful. Look at their financial statements and see for yourself. Wikimedia has enough cash already to find operations for a decade or two, and they spend most of it on salaries of people running programs you never hear about, and which have no bearing on the way most people actually use Wikipedia and Commons.
- tyingq 8y agoWikimedia salaries: https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salaries https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salar...
- NickBusey 8y agoInteresting. Does this page show that they have had a CTO for just 3 of the past 10 years? Or only that they paid a CTO for those years?
- tyingq 8y agoNot sure. They announced Victoria Coleman as their CTO in 2016[1]. But she isn't listed in their 2017-2018 Form 990[2]. Odd, since all "company officers" are supposed to be listed, even if paid nothing[3]. [1]https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/11/02/victoria-coleman-chief-technology-officer/ https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/11/02/victoria-coleman-chief... [2]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/67/Form_990_FY_2016-2017_-_Public.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/67/Form_... [3]https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-990-part-vii-and-schedule-j-reporting-executive-compensation-individuals-included https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/form-990-part-vii-...
- xyzzyz 8y agoThese are only some of the salaries of a small fraction of the employees for which the salary number is even avaiable. WMF employs 5 or 6 times as many people, and it’s not clear to me what half of them are even doing. I was an admin on Wikipedia in 2007-2010, when WMF was tenth of its current size, and the Wikipedia community never felt the lack of manpower on the foundation side. Now they are an order of magnitude bigger, but in terms of end to end impact it hardly changed at all.
- WhompingWindows 8y agoThis is the equivalent of me announcing a $3 donation to Wikipedia. PR signaling and nothing more.
- gammateam 8y agoThrowing money at Wikimedia foundation doesn't solve a problem either. Typically the reason why wealthy individuals and organizations opt to do "matching" is because there isn't a $number that will satisfy people or even help the situation. So then you could tie your contribution directly to public interest. The world is open to better ideas, so try to contribute those.
- linuxftw 8y agoLarge companies donating large sums of money non-anonymously seems to circumvent the 'we're neutral because we don't have sponsors' credo. They'll get used to the large cash injections, that is how political power is bought.
- nolok 8y agoWikipedia already has a problem with cash injections and not being able to save extra money instead of launching more and more projects. As for the point you're making, I disagree as long as the income from one company isn't reaching too big a percentage of their total yearly income. And then again, Firefox clearly wasn't politically subservient to Google, despite most of their income coming from there. So it's not so much an automatic reaction, the internal culture plays a big role. Which is why Wikipedia pre-existing issue with incoming cash usage is a red flag.
- rajekas 8y agoAs other commentators have said, this donation will definitely invite accusations of virtue signaling. What Amazon needs to do is pay (not donate!) its employees better but that's also stating the obvious. What intrigues me more is that each era's barons find certain causes more appealing than others. Carnegie gave a lot of money to public libraries at a time when the printed word was expanding its reach. It's not surprising that Wikipedia is a favorite amongst tech tycoons along with education.
- smsm42 8y agoAmazon has 500K+ employees. $1M is what, two bucks per employee? Maybe three bucks if we exclude higher management, they get enough anyway. So you're saying "instead of donating to Wikipedia they should give each of their employees a free Starbucks coffee once a year". That would surely change things.
- rajekas 8y agoYou need to read what I wrote more carefully. I said "Amazon needs to pay its employees better" as in a living wage - not distribute the one mil it gave Wikipedia amongst its employees.
- smsm42 8y agoWhy would you mention it as a comment to Amazon donating to Wikipedia unless you see some link between this $1M and Amazon workers pay?
- devwastaken 8y agoWaste of money. Wikimedia is still trying to support the ancient and effectively deprecated Mediawiki which is only realistically useable for corporate style deployments. Individuals cannot use it well and wikimedia fails at meeting its mission statement time and time again. Donations to wikimedia are effectively donations to wikipedia, which cannot house the worlds information properly. Information craves distribution and perspectives, decentralization. I want to see proffessors and trade skill teachers create good wiki style sites, not for yet more useless projects by wikimedia designed to bolster their salaries. It'd be possible to make an absolutely free hosting site for informational wiki's (a wiki farm) for 1M that'd last a generation. But nobody really cares about that.
- xyzzyz 8y agoWhat exactly is the problem with MediaWiki? I for one don't believe that any problems Wikipedia currently has are of technical nature. Lots of people has contributed greatly to Wikipedia in 2000s, when MediaWiki was even less accessible than it is right now.
- davidy123 8y agoThe formats used to store data are an incredible mess. https://github.com/spencermountain/wtf_wikipedia https://github.com/spencermountain/wtf_wikipedia has a take on it.
- devwastaken 8y agoSetting up MediaWiki properly yourself is not a small undertaking. How wikipedia does what they do is with puppet deployments and a significant amount of automatic server management. It's incredibly inefficient given that pages should be statically served, it's very difficult to even know what to install and it may not even be future compatible. For example getting VisualEditor, MediaWiki's custom PHP-lua extension for your version of PHP, needing PHP-FPM, managing versions of PHP, correct configs. Setting up page caching, knowing what extensions to get, seeing lots of out of date ones, having to configure them properly. Ontop of all this doing it actually right with proper file and user permissions is just completely inaccessible to anyone but those who make a job of it. Even the mediawiki 'package' is out of date and works differntly, causing more problems. It should be as simple as getting a domain, getting cloudflare, pop up a $5 VPS and a couple commands to have a proper and automatically updated install. User sets up website, sets backups to GDrive or some other cloud service, allows logins from google, facebook, whatever, and can then manage everything from the UI.
- wpdev_63 8y agogood - they deserve it!