4 ms·
> The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme. Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rand
by ardy42 8y ago
> The admin / oversight is hit or miss to the extreme.
Of course, there's no way they could formally audit every article. They're heavily reliant of some rando noticing something fishy in an obscure article and bringing it to their attention.
- Retric 8y agoWikipedia is still small enough to see every article reviewed. They don’t largely becase they funnel funding into other unrelated projects.
- circlefavshape 8y agoYou're wrong on both counts here - nobody gets funded to review articles (it's done by volunteers), and there are nearly 6 million articles in English alone
- Retric 8y agoSaying they don’t do something does not mean they can’t do something. 6 million / 30 minutes per article every 5 years at 15$ per hour ~= 9 million per year. Wikipedia pulled in 55 million in 2017 from North America making this a major but affordable expenditure.
- circlefavshape 8y agoThe Wikimedia Foundation is not wikipedia. Paying people to edit would be a fundamental change in the ethos of the whole movement
- Retric 8y agoWikipedia’s fund us banners go to Wikimedia, which then spends a small fraction of that on Wikipedia. Calling them separate is at best a shell game, but more realistically actively deceptive. Allowing public edits is different from not paying editors. They can have a small staff of super users which only revert or remove content while remaining a Wiki.
- circlefavshape 8y ago> Calling them separate is at best a shell game, but more realistically actively deceptive. It's neither. The volunteer community is wikipedia, and the foundation exists to serve it, not the other way around. If the foundation paid staff members to edit there would be uproar in the community
- Retric 8y agoYour right and left hands are not separate organisms. Also, if every volunteer quit tomorrow the website could still function, even if just by disabling edits until they employ enough people to review them. So, it’s clearly not the volunteers that are most critical.