18 ms·

Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up

201 points by btheshoe 6y ago

btheshoe 6y ago
I find this extremely concerning - this could be the beginning of a slide into financial dependence on Big Tech companies, not to mention the many conflict of interest issues.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I hadn't thought of it that way, but you are right.
- tchalla 6y ago
  In your opinion, how can the Wikipedia goal of separating commercial and other users be managed?
  - fny 6y ago
    Relying on its existing cash pile, focus on its core mission instead of growth, and hence not seeking/needing compensatory revenue streams from commercial users. I donated and contribute to wikipedia so it's material would be free to use for /anyone/ even corporates. If it improves other services I use or even others that I need to pay for, I'm glad. That's the point of a free, public resource.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Bear in mind the actual content will still be free, the thing these enterprises will be paying for is a customised feed and support infrastructure servicing their particular requirements. Would you be ok with your donations being used to pay for a feed service and support dedicated to, say, the particular needs of Google search results, or Apple's Siri? It also depends if you consider it's core mission is just English Wikipedia. Expanding into additional languages and keeping the content consistent between languages is a huge undertaking that won't work on a purely volunteer basis. If this dependable revenue stream can help with some of these other very capital intensive but worthy initiatives I'm for it.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        Wikipedia is already in 300+ different languages... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix
        simonh 6y ago
        The quality of most of those is absolutely appalling though, very sparse, inaccurate, out of date, and in some cases not even in the actual language.
        2038AD 6y ago
        I'm not concerned but there's at least a handful of those that aren't written by speakers. The Scots one was the notable example as it was almost entirely written by an American teenager who doesn't know the language
        mavhc 6y ago
        If there are no Scots speakers who care enough to write it, should it exist?
        RichEO 6y ago
        Of course. The person who suffers in this scenario is not the Scots speaking subject matter expert who chooses not to contribute their time for free, but the Scots speaking child who doesn’t have the resources to learn.
      - fny 6y ago
        > Would you be ok with your donations being used to pay for a feed service and support dedicated to, say, the particular needs of Google search results, or Apple's Siri? Absolutely not, and this isn't whats happening today. Third parties do not use the existing Wikipedia APIs to begin with, cache page results, and create their own machine readable versions. These "enterprise customers" entirely bear the costs and risk of maintaining a machine readable API. There are also businesses that compete and innovate in this space already. I'm also not okay with my donations financing an upstart like this targeting enterprise. This needs to exist outside of Wikimedia. It's completely out of scope. Profit incentives warp missions. Why can't Apple/Google et al start their own consortium that does this themselves. Why does Wikimedia need to do this? Think of the scale of operations required to support an entity like Google or Apple. This is going to require a /ton/ of investment and talent and it may even fail. Why is Wikimedia incurring start up risks like this to appease the needs of big tech?
- ppf 6y ago
  We are already dependent on "Big Tech", we just haven't realised it yet.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Mozilla #2
google234123 6y ago
Wikipedia already has enough money and gets more every year... And all the real work that people actually appreciate is done for free by volunteers. I always felt their donation drives were very deceitful since the money is not actually going to supporting the wiki (that's already funded) but is being used to increase the foundation's bureaucracy and endowment. The messaging they use doesn't make this at all clear.
- cjfd 6y ago
  Yes, I stopped giving them money after I learned this.
- bawolff 6y ago
  > I always felt their donation drives were very deceitful since the money is not actually going to supporting the wiki (that's already funded) The servers don't buy themselves. You could argue that WMF doesn't spend money effectively if you want, servers are a small part of the budget after all and like any org there are parts of the budget that are of questionable value, however its a bit much to claim its not going to supporting the wiki. [Disclaimer: i used to work for WMF a while ago. I dont anymore. My opinions are my own]
  - slooonz 6y ago
    Don’t they ? Don’t the interests on their endowment cover the cost of the technical infrastructure ?
  - garbagetime 6y ago
    The notices give a sense of urgency and uncertainty. They also use that insinuation, as well as the fact that proportionately few users donate, to guilt readers into donating. That's unkind, unpleasant behavior that makes me like Wikipedia less (along with increasing issues with the content of the website - at least the English articles).
    - kaba0 6y ago
      What issues do you have with content?
RicoElectrico 6y ago
Wikipedia? They have plenty funds to sustain their infra and core team to maintain it. What about all the (big) freeloaders who use OpenStreetMap Foundation's map tile server infrastructure [1] instead of self-hosting as it was intended [2](or using a SaaS)? All the corporate sponsors who fund OSMF [3] roll their own map stack, but outside of them still there occasionally appears a rogue app/website with high traffic. IIRC, most of the tile server traffic comes from outside of osm.org. [1] https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ [2] https://switch2osm.org/ https://switch2osm.org/ [3] Who still are controversial for their constant "bargaining" on how to put the copyright notice in the least visible way, even though it's required by ODbL license.
- google234123 6y ago
  This money would be going to foundation, their ever increasing staff, and the different random projects that they support.
  - krferriter 6y ago
    What's the problem? Other for-profit entities are getting material value from importing Wikipedia content at no cost. I'm not opposed to a for-profit vs nonprofit/personal distinction where for-profit clients that redistribute Wikipedia content have to pay a small license fee. If that results in Wikipedia paying their contributors something for accepted article contributions I'd be even more for it.
  - RicoElectrico 6y ago
    Well yes, but sometimes I ponder whether the funds are well spent. I checked out their research projects (supported by data from analytics stack they maintain), yet many were non-conclusive or half-finished. Hope they don't go the route of Mozilla.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  OSM should just run their tile server behind cloudflare. Then cloudflare will pay for all the traffic for common map tiles, and load on the tile infrastructure will be low enough that the running cost isn't substantial. Asking thousands of individual users to set up and host their own tile servers is just a waste of everyone's time.
DocTomoe 6y ago
I do wonder if this is related to dwindling editor engagement. With fewer people investing a lot of their free time into the project, a move away from a more open-source approach and more into a content marketing one inspires less opposition. We might be seeing a final cashout attempt by Wikipedia top brass here.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Editor engagement concerns are mostly around english wikipedia. English is just a small part of the wikimedia world. Besides people have been complaining about editor engagement on en for more than a decade now, its not like much has been changing on that front. [Disclaimer: used to work for WMF. Dont anymore]
  - joshuaissac 6y ago
    Active editor count on enwiki peaked at around 100k in 2007 and had fallen to around 50k by 2014. It has been stagnant since, but it is not like complaints about engagement are unwarranted. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/editors/normal|line|2003-05-18~2021-03-17|activity_level~5..24-edits*25..99-edits*100..-edits|monthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/...
- bad_username 6y ago
  > I do wonder if this is related to dwindling editor engagement. It increasingly becomes an uphill battle to be a Wikipedia editor - the neutral editors have to fight through the ideological gatekeeping and activism on the site. Even the co-founder of Wikipedia declared its neutrality to be dead. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
  - RichEO 6y ago
    Larry Sanger has been a severe critic of Wikipedia for nearly its entire life. Even putting aside his personal bias, the article you cite is not particularly convincing. As key examples, he compares the Wikipedia pages for Barack Obama (generally positive) and Donald Trump (generally negative) as evidence of failed neutrality. Any definition of neutrality that requires all political figures to be equally criticised and praised would result in a resource that simply has no value. Should the article about Hitler really balance for and against arguments concerning the Holocaust?
fny 6y ago
And this is how Wikimedia continues metastasizing. Wikipedia is now creating an enterprise version that will "compete" with free Wikipedia (articles words) to cater to enterprise clients. My donations and writings were intended to sustain a free, robust encyclopedia, not to create an internal division that explicitly caters to big tech. This title is misleading. The entire project is misleading. If Wikipedia Enterprise aims to succeed it will need to bow to its customer. Big tech is going to pay up, and it's going to expect exactly what it's paying for.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I thought I understood the Enterprise product to just be a faster API to the same content. Are you saying the content itself will diverge?
  - fny 6y ago
    I'm saying the tech will diverge and will cater to corporate interests. If anything, this project needs to exist as as a separate private entity, not something within Wikimedia, unless they plan to give it to everyone for free and consider public feedback as the guiding design principal.
    - krferriter 6y ago
      Your concern seems to be about purely speculative changes you think might happen in the future, not about what is actually changing now.
- tchalla 6y ago
  > Wikipedia is now creating an enterprise version that will "compete" with free Wikipedia (articles words) to cater to enterprise clients. How do you come to that conclusion? All data from Wikipedia is free for everyone as done before.
  - slightwinder 6y ago
    This is about features, not data. Though the line can be slim and moving fast. Today they add better query-abilities. Tommorow they offer generation of additional data which not of public interesst. Next year they might add a enterprise-only content-part which contains data not available to the public for legal reasons, or considered irrelevant for the public pedia. And of course this is technically ok to do that. But at some point it undermines the original mission of the project if you mix up opposite goals, because there naturally will be a clash between people who work on different goals.
Semaphor 6y ago
Related discussion "Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080
Qub3d 6y ago
More relevant discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080
- Aachen 6y ago
  That title seems more relevant as well.
londons_explore 6y ago
Are there any indications how much this new feed will cost? If the existing feed remains available, as a big enterprise I wouldn't pay much for use of the new feed. Just to have a few more data formatting options and possibly filtering of events barely seems worth it - I can get one of my own in house developers to implement the same in a few weeks, so if the cost is >$20k per year, I don't think I would be subscribing. I suspect the unsaid undertones are "this new feed has an SLA, and the old one doesn't, so we'll be deliberately breaking the old feed on a more regular basis till you are forced to pay for the new one".
Jyaif 6y ago
Reminder that Wikimedia receives north of 100 million of USD per year, with the servers themselves costing 2 millions. The immense majority of the money is (in my opinion) wasted on bureaucracy.
eric4smith 6y ago
Encyclopedia Galactica.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  I see. So this is Hari Seldon's all along.
prepend 6y ago
So I suppose big tech can pay this instead of donating funds? And individual donors should stop since there’s this new revenue stream?
secfirstmd 6y ago
Considering the costs of Wikipedia, I wonder if switching to something like IPFS or Sia would make sense in future?
hutzlibu 6y ago
"But whereas one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit" A midsize nonprofit that works. As it provides the technical foundation of Wikipedias Community - who are the ones to provide the actual value. So everything is pretty much working as is should be. Why on earth would anyone want Wikipedia to be a trillion dollar company? Companies are after profit. Going after profit - and providing information free (and adfree!) to the world are contrary things. So finding ways to generate extra money, while not changing the core - why not. But this sounds a bit too vague - and with potentially lots of money involved - dangerous, when they get dependent on it. Money buys influence. Not something I want in the worlds encyclopedy.
sqqqqrly 6y ago
I use wikipedia rarely. Look at the communism page : ”Excess deaths under communist party rule have also been discussed as part of a critical analysis of communist party rule." Excess deaths? This is dishonest. Over a hundred million human beings have died because of communism. More die every day in China.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  So update it?
  - nicky0 6y ago
    Hahaha, try it.
- Ceezy 6y ago
  How many died under capitalism? I guess you gonna tell me UK empire and such weren't "true" capitalist system? Well communists think that China is not a "true" communist society. Point is wikipedia is not dishonest you can Wikipedia every single massacre that happened communist or not.
  - sqqqqrly 6y ago
    Shouldn't that be listed on the Capitalism page?
    - Ceezy 6y ago
      Not really. Cause the role of an encyclopedia is not to create facts but to archive most of the knowledge. Wikipedia goal is not to be controversial but to be mainstream. On the USA landing page you find no mention of a genocide. But there is a page about the native american genocide.
- jussij 6y ago
  Speaking of dishonest. You are claiming more than a hundred million die every day in China. That means for a country with a population of around 1.5 billion people, they will all be dead in 15 days. Now I'm not claiming Wikipedia is correct, or the Chinese government is some sort of model to which we should all aspire, however I certainly know your claims are false. Finally you seem to have forgotten that China is in fact a communist regime.
chmod775 6y ago
Very sloppy article. Wikipedia never mentioned going explicitly after Google. Also I guess this is not the story the author wanted to tell, so it isn't mentioned, but Google is regularly donating millions to Wikipedia. This looks like a great way to formalize their symbiotic relationship, which the article got right, but - I didn't think I would ever say this - the article isn't exactly being fair on Google by singling them out and omitting any mention of their contributions.
- makomk 6y ago
  Wikimedia linked this article in their official announcement, so I guess that's their way of saying they agree with this narrative.
jokoon 6y ago
Any project to put wikipedia in some sort of blockchain hosting solution, or maybe like ipfs/zeronet/i2p? I've also already brought up that wikipedia articles are not categorized or labelled by field/domain, and it makes it very hard to build list of articles if you want to browse them offline. Kiwix is great, and "good article" are nice, but if articles are not properly labelled, then it becomes much harder to browse wikipedia, in my view. For example I would like to browse articles about natural history or physics. I cannot really do that. I guess a decent natural language algorithm would also easily be able to label articles pretty accurately, but I believe any serious author/editor of a wikipedia article should be asked to give at least 3 labels on a article. Dewey is already a simple enough type of classification. For example I'm pretty sure that Wikipedia is FILLED with articles on movies and tv shows and romance books, which are things I don't have any interest in.
thatwasunusual 6y ago
As a Wikipedia contributor and admin (in one country) since early days, I urge everyone to read the original description[0] of this product: > The goal of the project is to build services for large-scale for-profit reusers of Wikimedia content. [...] The focus is on organizations that want to repurpose Wikimedia content in other contexts, providing data services at a large scale, so that they are faster and more comprehensive, reliable, and secure. Wikimedia Enterprise aims to improve the user experience of Wikimedia's readers beyond our own websites; increase the reach and discoverability of the content; and improve awareness and ease of attribution and verifiability by the organizations that reuse Wikimedia content the most—through self-funding services. This has _nothing_ to do with diverging into a free and a commercial version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia stays the same; Enterprise is just a product built on top of it that anyone can opt to pay for. This is actually to make it easier for _everyone_ to make use of the Wikipedia data in a better way; > As this idea developed, it became clear there is a responsibility to democratize our data for organizations that do not possess the resources of these largest users, to ensure we are leveling the playing field and helping to foster a healthy internet without reinforcing monopolies. The benefits of such a service shouldn't just be for startups or alternatives to the internet giants, but also for universities and university researchers; archives and archivists; along with the wider Wikimedia movement. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise
- nindalf 6y ago
  Most of the comments is just generic slippery slope arguments about how this will ruin Wikipedia in the long run. HN has a way of surfacing such doom and gloom comments while the "seems to be positive, let's wait and watch" wallows at the bottom. If anyone disagrees and is firmly convinced that Wikipedia is going to die because they're offering a way for enterprises to avoid hammering the main site with requests, I'm willing to take a $100 long bet that says otherwise.
  - btheshoe 6y ago
    Maybe you're right, but I still think it's a large jump going from completely non-commercial to partially funded through commercial means. It's a jump that I find concerning
mrkramer 6y ago
And I'm asking Big Tech to pay me for my personal data oh wait a minute I get free access to their internet services but is that really enough?
pdimitar 6y ago
Is it just me or is Wikipedia lately sounding more and more desperate? What are the reasons? - Are the server costs ballooning? - Are the middle managers / bureaucracy increasing in numbers? - If not these, what else? They are also employing annoyance tactics and dark patterns to coerce you into donating. I suppose it's extremely easy for one to believe various yes-men that your organization needs more people -- from one point of growth and on. But the pertinent question remains: why does a non-profit need to grow?

201 points by btheshoe 6y ago

I find this extremely concerning - this could be the beginning of a slide into financial dependence on Big Tech companies, not to mention the many conflict of interest issues.

LatteLazy 6y ago
I hadn't thought of it that way, but you are right.
tchalla 6y ago
In your opinion, how can the Wikipedia goal of separating commercial and other users be managed?
- fny 6y ago
  Relying on its existing cash pile, focus on its core mission instead of growth, and hence not seeking/needing compensatory revenue streams from commercial users. I donated and contribute to wikipedia so it's material would be free to use for /anyone/ even corporates. If it improves other services I use or even others that I need to pay for, I'm glad. That's the point of a free, public resource.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Bear in mind the actual content will still be free, the thing these enterprises will be paying for is a customised feed and support infrastructure servicing their particular requirements. Would you be ok with your donations being used to pay for a feed service and support dedicated to, say, the particular needs of Google search results, or Apple's Siri? It also depends if you consider it's core mission is just English Wikipedia. Expanding into additional languages and keeping the content consistent between languages is a huge undertaking that won't work on a purely volunteer basis. If this dependable revenue stream can help with some of these other very capital intensive but worthy initiatives I'm for it.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Wikipedia is already in 300+ different languages... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:SiteMatrix
      - simonh 6y ago
        The quality of most of those is absolutely appalling though, very sparse, inaccurate, out of date, and in some cases not even in the actual language.
      - 2038AD 6y ago
        I'm not concerned but there's at least a handful of those that aren't written by speakers. The Scots one was the notable example as it was almost entirely written by an American teenager who doesn't know the language
        mavhc 6y ago
        If there are no Scots speakers who care enough to write it, should it exist?
        RichEO 6y ago
        Of course. The person who suffers in this scenario is not the Scots speaking subject matter expert who chooses not to contribute their time for free, but the Scots speaking child who doesn’t have the resources to learn.
    - fny 6y ago
      > Would you be ok with your donations being used to pay for a feed service and support dedicated to, say, the particular needs of Google search results, or Apple's Siri? Absolutely not, and this isn't whats happening today. Third parties do not use the existing Wikipedia APIs to begin with, cache page results, and create their own machine readable versions. These "enterprise customers" entirely bear the costs and risk of maintaining a machine readable API. There are also businesses that compete and innovate in this space already. I'm also not okay with my donations financing an upstart like this targeting enterprise. This needs to exist outside of Wikimedia. It's completely out of scope. Profit incentives warp missions. Why can't Apple/Google et al start their own consortium that does this themselves. Why does Wikimedia need to do this? Think of the scale of operations required to support an entity like Google or Apple. This is going to require a /ton/ of investment and talent and it may even fail. Why is Wikimedia incurring start up risks like this to appease the needs of big tech?
ppf 6y ago
We are already dependent on "Big Tech", we just haven't realised it yet.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Mozilla #2

google234123 6y ago

Wikipedia already has enough money and gets more every year... And all the real work that people actually appreciate is done for free by volunteers. I always felt their donation drives were very deceitful since the money is not actually going to supporting the wiki (that's already funded) but is being used to increase the foundation's bureaucracy and endowment. The messaging they use doesn't make this at all clear.

cjfd 6y ago
Yes, I stopped giving them money after I learned this.
bawolff 6y ago
> I always felt their donation drives were very deceitful since the money is not actually going to supporting the wiki (that's already funded) The servers don't buy themselves. You could argue that WMF doesn't spend money effectively if you want, servers are a small part of the budget after all and like any org there are parts of the budget that are of questionable value, however its a bit much to claim its not going to supporting the wiki. [Disclaimer: i used to work for WMF a while ago. I dont anymore. My opinions are my own]
- slooonz 6y ago
  Don’t they ? Don’t the interests on their endowment cover the cost of the technical infrastructure ?
- garbagetime 6y ago
  The notices give a sense of urgency and uncertainty. They also use that insinuation, as well as the fact that proportionately few users donate, to guilt readers into donating. That's unkind, unpleasant behavior that makes me like Wikipedia less (along with increasing issues with the content of the website - at least the English articles).
  - kaba0 6y ago
    What issues do you have with content?

RicoElectrico 6y ago

Wikipedia? They have plenty funds to sustain their infra and core team to maintain it. What about all the (big) freeloaders who use OpenStreetMap Foundation's map tile server infrastructure [1] instead of self-hosting as it was intended [2](or using a SaaS)? All the corporate sponsors who fund OSMF [3] roll their own map stack, but outside of them still there occasionally appears a rogue app/website with high traffic. IIRC, most of the tile server traffic comes from outside of osm.org. [1] https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ [2] https://switch2osm.org/ https://switch2osm.org/ [3] Who still are controversial for their constant "bargaining" on how to put the copyright notice in the least visible way, even though it's required by ODbL license.

google234123 6y ago
This money would be going to foundation, their ever increasing staff, and the different random projects that they support.
- krferriter 6y ago
  What's the problem? Other for-profit entities are getting material value from importing Wikipedia content at no cost. I'm not opposed to a for-profit vs nonprofit/personal distinction where for-profit clients that redistribute Wikipedia content have to pay a small license fee. If that results in Wikipedia paying their contributors something for accepted article contributions I'd be even more for it.
- RicoElectrico 6y ago
  Well yes, but sometimes I ponder whether the funds are well spent. I checked out their research projects (supported by data from analytics stack they maintain), yet many were non-conclusive or half-finished. Hope they don't go the route of Mozilla.
londons_explore 6y ago
OSM should just run their tile server behind cloudflare. Then cloudflare will pay for all the traffic for common map tiles, and load on the tile infrastructure will be low enough that the running cost isn't substantial. Asking thousands of individual users to set up and host their own tile servers is just a waste of everyone's time.

DocTomoe 6y ago

I do wonder if this is related to dwindling editor engagement. With fewer people investing a lot of their free time into the project, a move away from a more open-source approach and more into a content marketing one inspires less opposition. We might be seeing a final cashout attempt by Wikipedia top brass here.

bawolff 6y ago
Editor engagement concerns are mostly around english wikipedia. English is just a small part of the wikimedia world. Besides people have been complaining about editor engagement on en for more than a decade now, its not like much has been changing on that front. [Disclaimer: used to work for WMF. Dont anymore]
- joshuaissac 6y ago
  Active editor count on enwiki peaked at around 100k in 2007 and had fallen to around 50k by 2014. It has been stagnant since, but it is not like complaints about engagement are unwarranted. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/editors/normal|line|2003-05-18~2021-03-17|activity_level~5..24-edits*25..99-edits*100..-edits|monthly https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/...
bad_username 6y ago
> I do wonder if this is related to dwindling editor engagement. It increasingly becomes an uphill battle to be a Wikipedia editor - the neutral editors have to fight through the ideological gatekeeping and activism on the site. Even the co-founder of Wikipedia declared its neutrality to be dead. https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
- RichEO 6y ago
  Larry Sanger has been a severe critic of Wikipedia for nearly its entire life. Even putting aside his personal bias, the article you cite is not particularly convincing. As key examples, he compares the Wikipedia pages for Barack Obama (generally positive) and Donald Trump (generally negative) as evidence of failed neutrality. Any definition of neutrality that requires all political figures to be equally criticised and praised would result in a resource that simply has no value. Should the article about Hitler really balance for and against arguments concerning the Holocaust?

fny 6y ago

And this is how Wikimedia continues metastasizing. Wikipedia is now creating an enterprise version that will "compete" with free Wikipedia (articles words) to cater to enterprise clients. My donations and writings were intended to sustain a free, robust encyclopedia, not to create an internal division that explicitly caters to big tech. This title is misleading. The entire project is misleading. If Wikipedia Enterprise aims to succeed it will need to bow to its customer. Big tech is going to pay up, and it's going to expect exactly what it's paying for.

tyingq 6y ago
I thought I understood the Enterprise product to just be a faster API to the same content. Are you saying the content itself will diverge?
- fny 6y ago
  I'm saying the tech will diverge and will cater to corporate interests. If anything, this project needs to exist as as a separate private entity, not something within Wikimedia, unless they plan to give it to everyone for free and consider public feedback as the guiding design principal.
  - krferriter 6y ago
    Your concern seems to be about purely speculative changes you think might happen in the future, not about what is actually changing now.
tchalla 6y ago
> Wikipedia is now creating an enterprise version that will "compete" with free Wikipedia (articles words) to cater to enterprise clients. How do you come to that conclusion? All data from Wikipedia is free for everyone as done before.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  This is about features, not data. Though the line can be slim and moving fast. Today they add better query-abilities. Tommorow they offer generation of additional data which not of public interesst. Next year they might add a enterprise-only content-part which contains data not available to the public for legal reasons, or considered irrelevant for the public pedia. And of course this is technically ok to do that. But at some point it undermines the original mission of the project if you mix up opposite goals, because there naturally will be a clash between people who work on different goals.

Semaphor 6y ago

Related discussion "Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080

Qub3d 6y ago

More relevant discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080

Aachen 6y ago
That title seems more relevant as well.

londons_explore 6y ago

Are there any indications how much this new feed will cost? If the existing feed remains available, as a big enterprise I wouldn't pay much for use of the new feed. Just to have a few more data formatting options and possibly filtering of events barely seems worth it - I can get one of my own in house developers to implement the same in a few weeks, so if the cost is >$20k per year, I don't think I would be subscribing. I suspect the unsaid undertones are "this new feed has an SLA, and the old one doesn't, so we'll be deliberately breaking the old feed on a more regular basis till you are forced to pay for the new one".

Jyaif 6y ago

Reminder that Wikimedia receives north of 100 million of USD per year, with the servers themselves costing 2 millions. The immense majority of the money is (in my opinion) wasted on bureaucracy.

eric4smith 6y ago

Encyclopedia Galactica.

vagrantJin 6y ago
I see. So this is Hari Seldon's all along.

prepend 6y ago

So I suppose big tech can pay this instead of donating funds? And individual donors should stop since there’s this new revenue stream?

secfirstmd 6y ago

Considering the costs of Wikipedia, I wonder if switching to something like IPFS or Sia would make sense in future?

hutzlibu 6y ago

"But whereas one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit" A midsize nonprofit that works. As it provides the technical foundation of Wikipedias Community - who are the ones to provide the actual value. So everything is pretty much working as is should be. Why on earth would anyone want Wikipedia to be a trillion dollar company? Companies are after profit. Going after profit - and providing information free (and adfree!) to the world are contrary things. So finding ways to generate extra money, while not changing the core - why not. But this sounds a bit too vague - and with potentially lots of money involved - dangerous, when they get dependent on it. Money buys influence. Not something I want in the worlds encyclopedy.

sqqqqrly 6y ago

I use wikipedia rarely. Look at the communism page : ”Excess deaths under communist party rule have also been discussed as part of a critical analysis of communist party rule." Excess deaths? This is dishonest. Over a hundred million human beings have died because of communism. More die every day in China.

catmanjan 6y ago
So update it?
- nicky0 6y ago
  Hahaha, try it.
Ceezy 6y ago
How many died under capitalism? I guess you gonna tell me UK empire and such weren't "true" capitalist system? Well communists think that China is not a "true" communist society. Point is wikipedia is not dishonest you can Wikipedia every single massacre that happened communist or not.
- sqqqqrly 6y ago
  Shouldn't that be listed on the Capitalism page?
  - Ceezy 6y ago
    Not really. Cause the role of an encyclopedia is not to create facts but to archive most of the knowledge. Wikipedia goal is not to be controversial but to be mainstream. On the USA landing page you find no mention of a genocide. But there is a page about the native american genocide.
jussij 6y ago
Speaking of dishonest. You are claiming more than a hundred million die every day in China. That means for a country with a population of around 1.5 billion people, they will all be dead in 15 days. Now I'm not claiming Wikipedia is correct, or the Chinese government is some sort of model to which we should all aspire, however I certainly know your claims are false. Finally you seem to have forgotten that China is in fact a communist regime.

chmod775 6y ago

Very sloppy article. Wikipedia never mentioned going explicitly after Google. Also I guess this is not the story the author wanted to tell, so it isn't mentioned, but Google is regularly donating millions to Wikipedia. This looks like a great way to formalize their symbiotic relationship, which the article got right, but - I didn't think I would ever say this - the article isn't exactly being fair on Google by singling them out and omitting any mention of their contributions.

makomk 6y ago
Wikimedia linked this article in their official announcement, so I guess that's their way of saying they agree with this narrative.

jokoon 6y ago

Any project to put wikipedia in some sort of blockchain hosting solution, or maybe like ipfs/zeronet/i2p? I've also already brought up that wikipedia articles are not categorized or labelled by field/domain, and it makes it very hard to build list of articles if you want to browse them offline. Kiwix is great, and "good article" are nice, but if articles are not properly labelled, then it becomes much harder to browse wikipedia, in my view. For example I would like to browse articles about natural history or physics. I cannot really do that. I guess a decent natural language algorithm would also easily be able to label articles pretty accurately, but I believe any serious author/editor of a wikipedia article should be asked to give at least 3 labels on a article. Dewey is already a simple enough type of classification. For example I'm pretty sure that Wikipedia is FILLED with articles on movies and tv shows and romance books, which are things I don't have any interest in.

thatwasunusual 6y ago

As a Wikipedia contributor and admin (in one country) since early days, I urge everyone to read the original description[0] of this product: > The goal of the project is to build services for large-scale for-profit reusers of Wikimedia content. [...] The focus is on organizations that want to repurpose Wikimedia content in other contexts, providing data services at a large scale, so that they are faster and more comprehensive, reliable, and secure. Wikimedia Enterprise aims to improve the user experience of Wikimedia's readers beyond our own websites; increase the reach and discoverability of the content; and improve awareness and ease of attribution and verifiability by the organizations that reuse Wikimedia content the most—through self-funding services. This has _nothing_ to do with diverging into a free and a commercial version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia stays the same; Enterprise is just a product built on top of it that anyone can opt to pay for. This is actually to make it easier for _everyone_ to make use of the Wikipedia data in a better way; > As this idea developed, it became clear there is a responsibility to democratize our data for organizations that do not possess the resources of these largest users, to ensure we are leveling the playing field and helping to foster a healthy internet without reinforcing monopolies. The benefits of such a service shouldn't just be for startups or alternatives to the internet giants, but also for universities and university researchers; archives and archivists; along with the wider Wikimedia movement. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise

nindalf 6y ago
Most of the comments is just generic slippery slope arguments about how this will ruin Wikipedia in the long run. HN has a way of surfacing such doom and gloom comments while the "seems to be positive, let's wait and watch" wallows at the bottom. If anyone disagrees and is firmly convinced that Wikipedia is going to die because they're offering a way for enterprises to avoid hammering the main site with requests, I'm willing to take a $100 long bet that says otherwise.
- btheshoe 6y ago
  Maybe you're right, but I still think it's a large jump going from completely non-commercial to partially funded through commercial means. It's a jump that I find concerning

mrkramer 6y ago

And I'm asking Big Tech to pay me for my personal data oh wait a minute I get free access to their internet services but is that really enough?

pdimitar 6y ago

Is it just me or is Wikipedia lately sounding more and more desperate? What are the reasons? - Are the server costs ballooning? - Are the middle managers / bureaucracy increasing in numbers? - If not these, what else? They are also employing annoyance tactics and dark patterns to coerce you into donating. I suppose it's extremely easy for one to believe various yes-men that your organization needs more people -- from one point of growth and on. But the pertinent question remains: why does a non-profit need to grow?