73 ms·
Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?
by moneywoes 6y ago
Doesn't less page views also mean less donations?
- UncleMeat 6y agoThat's possible, but not the argument being made here. This is a hypothetical loss. And it doesn't change the fact that if you have open content then you have open content.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thesimon 6y agoDon't they have more than enough money already?
- dawnerd 6y agoThey surely would if they weren’t needlessly adding terrible UX “features”
- simonklitj 6y agoInterested. What UX "features" are you referring to?
- iso-8859-1 6y agoVisualEditor is not worth it. It's being touted as a massive improvement, but which editors is it really catering too? Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway! The money could have been spent on an interactive markup tutorial instead. That would be way cheaper, because it has a linear flow. It would also have been easier because it isn't as performance critical, as it doesn't need to load millions of time per day, only as part of the onboarding process. If you compare Wikimedias spending 5 years ago to what it is now, it has ballooned in such an excessive way if you put it in context. Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.
- zozbot234 6y ago> VisualEditor is not worth it. Surely it's "worth it" if you want the site to be usable by novice users. This is about optimizing for reach and intellectual diversity, not just "people who are currently adding value". > Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago. Wikimedia supports other projects besides Wikipedia itself, and the value it provides has not just doubled but plausibly grown by an order of magnitude compared to its early days. Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are hugely beneficial to the Internet community, and Wikivoyage is not far behind.
- anchpop 6y ago> Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway! Maybe this wouldn't be the case if pages were less complicated to edit?
- blululu 6y agoNot to justify wasting money, but the questionable UX features are a relatively small part of the massive cash fire that is the WMF. Also, while there have been some large and costly failures (Visual Editor), UX features are one of the few areas where I think that the WMF could realistically advance their purpose: increasing engagement with the encyclopedia. Features like Page Previews can be very helpful. There are a number of possible UX tweaks to improve reading and editing the encyclopedia, and these could all be helpful to the long term health of the encyclopedia (assuming they don't cut into the budget for servers).
- saagarjha 6y agoAs a casual Wikipedia editor, I enjoy using the visual editor :(
- blululu 6y agoI'm honestly glad to hear that. The main point of the Visual Editor was to make editing Wikipedia easier and more inclusive. The research suggests that it did not really succeed in achieving these goals. This result is a little surprising to me, but there are probably bigger barriers to editing wikipedia than a markup language. For some people the visual editor is great, and I think that as a long term investment it was a good idea (the benefit could have been large) even though it did not pan out. The problem is that the cost and time spent creating it was very high, and the WMF foundation has a lousy track record executing these projects effectively.
- marcinzm 6y agoThe Wikimedia Foundation has a mission of, in part, disseminating information. It's mission is NOT "get as much donation money as possible." If the loss in donations allows for their mission to be done more efficiently then that's a net gain.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoPossible, but Google's also donating to Wikipedia itself: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-million-to-wikipedias-parent-org/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
- freediver 6y agoThis is just a smokescreen. If we assume, very conservatively, that Wikipedia content outright satisfies 1% of Google searches (through info boxes, Wikipedia widget etc), thats would be worth 1% of $100bn+ of revenue Google generates from search = $1bn. Even if a fair thing to do would be to split that revenue, Wikipedia should still get $500mn in that arrangement. So a $2mn donation is just a smokescreen. Google is extracting extraordinary value from Wikipedia, and just because it is 'free' doesn't mean it shouldn't fairly give back.
- nxpnsv 6y agoMaybe. Maybe not.
- boogies 6y agoThe Wikimedia Foundation is not underfunded at all. What does worry me is that less page views may mean less engagement in the form of checking sources, flagging problems, and making edits.
- KorfmannArno 6y agoThere must be a bigger movement around contributing to Wikipedia, including financial rewards.
- thomasahle 6y agoI'm pretty sure financial incentives are the exact opposite of what Wikipedia needs.
- boogies 6y agoAddendum: their revenue was actually following an upward trend as of their last report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#Key_Stats https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#K... But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects
- jeffbee 6y agoServing pages to logged-in users is very costly to Wikimedia. Edits are even more costly.
- boogies 6y agoWhat I'm trying to communicate is that Wikimedia has challenges, possibly exacerbated by Google's behaviour, but the challenges are not money. Wikimedia is not a for-profit corporation, it's a non-profit with a mission to collect and distribute knowledge. Google distributes pieces of that knowledge, but does not contribute to the collection of new knowledge.¹ Wikimedia has all the money it needs, and is getting more money from more people all the time. It does not have all the contributions it needs in the form of new knowledge, and by many measures the new knowledge it gets is decreasing. tl;dr The monetary cost does not really matter 1. It does contribute money, which Wikimedia does not need.
- toohotatopic 6y agoOr worse: less active users who edit content. Up until now, an edit was one click away. Now, it's not only one more click away but wikipedia has no way to communicate that editing the result is possible at all.
- KorfmannArno 6y agoWikipedia's editing software also makes editing very difficult.