11 ms·

Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have alr

Let’s be clear, the article does mention the size of the org and some salaries, but it’s clear it’s main premise is the outrageous amount of money they have already amassed and still hiding it in their messaging to make more. It doesn’t matter if they have big plans, the way they ask for money doesn’t say that it says they can’t survive without my 10 bucks which is disgusting. I’d rather be shown ads than this.

zozbot234 5y ago
What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just about hosting a bunch of articles.
- neolog 5y ago
  > Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time Where can I learn about this?
  - bawolff 5y ago
    A lot of fuss has been made about this graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Update.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Upd... Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now then it was in 2007 so more distractions, community being mean/troll-filled now, everyone using mobile phones which are crap for writing long form content, all the easy to write articles are written, etc (Probably missed some).
    - gspr 5y ago
      Can't it just be that since 2007 most of the obvious topics for an encyclopedia to cover have been covered? It's probably less satisfying to change the wording in one sentence in an article about an Australian cheese than it is to write that article. So fewer people care.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        Yes, the standards for what counts as "good" Wikipedia editing have gotten a lot higher as well, at least wrt. mainstream topics.
      - watwut 5y ago
        No it is not. Some areas are perfectly describes, others basically empty. I remember dabbing into sewing a while ago and finding out wiki is basically empty.
        throwaway2037 5y ago
        Yes, I also notice the coverage dedicated to women vs men is extremely imbalanced. I know they have a separate team working on the issue and big advert banners about it... but the issue remains: Much more is written about men (living or dead) than women.
        pfranz 5y ago
        This was brought up as a major issue about 10 years ago: https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-wedding-gown-and-wikipedia-s-gender-gap.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-weddin...
        exporectomy 5y ago
        Aren't there far more prominent men than women though? Especially when you count the whole of patriarchal history.
        5y ago
- j-pb 5y ago
  Then let those projects fight and advertise for themselves. People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does. Those projects would crash and burn though, because frankly, no one cares about them. Stuff like wikidata and SPARQL endpoints are an academic curiosity with no real value. The semantic web won't happen, articles do and will. In addition to that, the whole deletion first and no primary information attitude makes sentences like "ecosystem of free knowledge" laughable.
  - kqr 5y ago
    Every long-term successful operation needs to sustain a few wild bets that look pointless today, with great probability will turn out to have been pointless tomorrow, but has just a tiny chance of becoming really important. If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow. Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides. If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival. Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.
    - j-pb 5y ago
      Wikipedia exploded over night. The semantic web is "tomorrow technology" for 20 years now. At what point does tomorrow technology become yesterdays vaporware to you?
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        Wikidata gets more edits per second right now than the English wikipedia does. If that's not "exploding overnight", I don't know what is. It's just that fewer people are aware of it, because it powers sily things like search engine infoboxes and AI assistants - in addition to fostering unprecedented cooperation among knowledge producers in the Linked Data/Semantic Web ecosystem.
        5y ago
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  I do wonder what role Wikipolitics plays in the editor bleed.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    It's a huge part of what made ME give up on the whole thing.
- onurcel 5y ago
  then why they don't beg for editors? they also have enough cash to develop a more appealing editor experience, but all they are asking is money.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > then why they don't beg for editors? They do, particularly in educational contexts - getting students interested in Wiki projects and having them write review articles with good sources as "homework" that can then be posted to Wikipedia. But supporting that takes money as well!
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Fixing student's homework projects is actually a burden on other more-experienced editors.
- xenator 5y ago
  Very solid point. I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects. There are many proofs that Russian Wikipedia have paid by government editors solving its own propaganda. I think +/- the same situation for other countries. Also, I know companies or celebrities who pay for their Wikipedia pages. You can find this service in 5 minutes by googling. "Profit-seeking and mindless consumption" can be a motto for the current WMF.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects. For the smaller ones, that is warranted - for example, the Croatian Wikipedia is infamous for its bias towards nationalist positions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia), something that's only made worse by the aftermath of the Balkan wars decades ago... as a half-Croat myself, I can only say: let's keep it at "the situation is complex and sucks all around, Wikipedia is just one symptom of a much deeper problem". For bigger projects such as English and German Wikipedia, sheer numbers make outright disinformation spreading much more difficult - there the problem is different: what you see is usually factually correct and neutral-ish, but there is a widespread consensus that Wikipedia editors skew towards white, male and somewhat privileged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_and_systemic_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_a...). Personally, I trust scientific and pop culture related articles in most if not all versions of Wikipedia - but keep a healthy skepticism for everything political, since there it is the hardest to judge completeness and accuracy of any subject.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Any article on the Middle East, in particular, is unreliable. Zionist gatekeepers are on constant patrol.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. "Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github. Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.
    - KingOfCoders 5y ago
      QED.
      - xvector 5y ago
        I do not see why it needs to be easier than making a PR. What would you propose?
        KingOfCoders 5y ago
        Because the easier it is the the more people are involved. That was the original idea of the WikiWay, to make editing simple [1] Second if this is the way to go - and I don't agree [2] - the UI should reflect this workflow and not propose a different one that mostly fails. [Edit] PRs also assume some kind of owner and committer relationship, which might be right for open source projects but is not the case of Wikipedia - even if many editors on Wikipedia consider the content "their own". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb - "Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, [...] . The usefulness of Wiki is in the freedom, simplicity, and power it offers." [2] Wrote a quite successfull wiki 20y ago called SnipSnap, the engine of which started Atlassian Confluence, and did several years of research in using Wikis back then.
- isaacremuant 5y ago
  They bleed editors because they keep censoring and shunning people for not having the same monolithical point of views with regards to politics and social issues. Money won't change that.
  - frzj 5y ago
    What bias are you talking about? I thought Jimbo was an Rand Fanboy, freedom of speech is their religion.
    - codeecan 5y ago
      In the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd article, they mention an event where he "held a pistol to a woman's stomach", but leave out that she was pregnant so it doesn't look as bad. Example 2, there was two mass shooting in March: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings In the Boulder shooting, all victims where white and the shooter was targeting white people but they don't mention any of that. In the Atlanta shootings, the article goes out of its way to mention 6 of 8 victims where asian (asian-hate narrative). In reality, many spa owners are asian. Theres is definitely a bias in their editing.
      - middleclick 5y ago
        The George Floyd thing is not mentioned because it's not true: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/15/fact-check-viral-photo-doesnt-show-george-floyd-assault-victim/5415937002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/15/fac...
        codeecan 5y ago
        yes, I was misinformed, the report says there was a young child at home, but NOT that she was pregnant. The child being there is not mentioned in the wiki, my original point was wrong, but I think the bias still stands.
bostonsre 5y ago
Short term it does kind of look like they have now money than they need and it may seem a little disingenuous, but I'm not sure that they amassing a large pool of money to ensure for their survival for the long term is all bad. They provide an invaluable tool to the world that allows anyone from anywhere to easily learn about anything. I would say that they are doing a great service to the world by ensuring their existence in perpetuity and that only focusing on securing funding for the short term would be incredibly short sighted and negligent.
- pydry 5y ago
  The budget will expand to consume the additional funds. It did before. This will make it more financially tenuous, not more. Added to which, once the insitution is addicted to money it becomes that much easier to corrupt.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    Yea, that could probably happen as well. Hopefully they are more judicious with their spending on current projects. But I guess aggressively spending in the short term to share more knowledge with a larger portion of the world could be a worthy cause as well. Hopefully those in power understand the gravity of the responsibility they have and they don't trend towards something like the leadership of the NRA (assuming reported corruption was true and not politically biased).
  - cutemonster 5y ago
    > The budget will expand to consume the additional funds And the organization will grow? (More people) How can one stop such things, generally, in an organization? (If it was large enough already)
harikb 5y ago
Your response sounds like Wikipedia is putting a paywall!
xbar 5y ago
How about you keep your 10 bucks and stop using Wikipedia rather than suggesting ads? Please.
- japanuspus 5y ago
  The main value of wikipedia has been provided not by the wikipedia foundation, but by the volunteers who write the articles on wikipedia. My work on wikipedia articles is for the benefit of my fellow humans, not to allow some organisation to start implying that everyone has a moral obligation to give them money. That was never part of the deal when I contributed my work.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Having to see ads even there was never part of the deal when I contributed mine (puny as it may be).
  - dmatech 5y ago
    After the whole Fram situation, my trust in the WMF's direction and leadership is pretty much non-existent. That told me all I need to know about their priorities and ethics.
MrDresden 5y ago
You find it disgusting that a service, which you probably use both directly and indirectly multiple times a day and costs you nothing, has the nerve to give you a suggestion of donating 10$ once? That is a very peculiar attitude to have.
- pydry 5y ago
  I find this attitude peculiar. The editors who provided all that value will get $0. It's like buying an album where $9.92 goes to the label and yet the label still complains about freeloaders depriving the poor musicians of income if they don't pay the $10.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    And who exactly gets the money? Because as I see, there is no corruption in the system at all. There are a few inefficiencies, but it’s incomparable to the bleeding out of musicians.
    - pydry 5y ago
      Jimbo's friends, i think.
  - MrDresden 5y ago
    You are comparing apples and oranges there.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      So? Why should one fruit grower get away with a practice that is almost universally condemned in another?
      - MrDresden 5y ago
        Making music is the livelyhood of musicians. Making edits on Wikipedia is for most a hobby, and they do not get paid for it and thus do not rely on it (I would know, I have made many edits on my language wiki and look at it mostly as something positive to give back). They have the option of stopping making edits and walk away without any hit to their income or professional growth. That is not to say that those who make certain amount of quality edits shouldn't receive something for it, or even be hired in to be on staff editors (potentially there are these kinds of positions within Wikimedia and I just don't know about it). Comparing the practice of asking consumers for an optional donation once in a while, without any access restriction to the content, versus being (legally) forced to buy the album (also taking into account streaming here) where the funds go mostly to the label doesn't make any sense.
dalbasal 5y ago
>> (money) amassed and still hiding it? Asking for money is disgusting? Disgusting?!! They ask for money. They don't sell your data, which is what most sites/apps you use do. They don't abuse their position, as an important information source. Disgusting compared to what? Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some of the most accessible financial information of any comparably sized organisation on the planet. This is why the get so much heat. The financials are easily understandable, which means a financially literate journalist or commentator can understand what's going on and take a cheap swipe in under a minute. You can literally understand wikimedia's finances better in 10 minutes than you could after weeks of studying any other non profit, publicly listed company, NGO or government organisation. There is no attempt to hide any controversial element... Asset accumulation, clearly and deliberately highlighted. Expense growth, ditto. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial_summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...

zozbot234 5y ago

What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just about hosting a bunch of articles.

neolog 5y ago
> Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time Where can I learn about this?
- bawolff 5y ago
  A lot of fuss has been made about this graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Update.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Upd... Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now then it was in 2007 so more distractions, community being mean/troll-filled now, everyone using mobile phones which are crap for writing long form content, all the easy to write articles are written, etc (Probably missed some).
  - gspr 5y ago
    Can't it just be that since 2007 most of the obvious topics for an encyclopedia to cover have been covered? It's probably less satisfying to change the wording in one sentence in an article about an Australian cheese than it is to write that article. So fewer people care.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Yes, the standards for what counts as "good" Wikipedia editing have gotten a lot higher as well, at least wrt. mainstream topics.
    - watwut 5y ago
      No it is not. Some areas are perfectly describes, others basically empty. I remember dabbing into sewing a while ago and finding out wiki is basically empty.
      - throwaway2037 5y ago
        Yes, I also notice the coverage dedicated to women vs men is extremely imbalanced. I know they have a separate team working on the issue and big advert banners about it... but the issue remains: Much more is written about men (living or dead) than women.
        pfranz 5y ago
        This was brought up as a major issue about 10 years ago: https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-wedding-gown-and-wikipedia-s-gender-gap.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/07/kate-middleton-s-weddin...
        exporectomy 5y ago
        Aren't there far more prominent men than women though? Especially when you count the whole of patriarchal history.
        5y ago
j-pb 5y ago
Then let those projects fight and advertise for themselves. People donating to wikipedia only want wikipedia, they are unaware of the other stuff wikimedia does. Those projects would crash and burn though, because frankly, no one cares about them. Stuff like wikidata and SPARQL endpoints are an academic curiosity with no real value. The semantic web won't happen, articles do and will. In addition to that, the whole deletion first and no primary information attitude makes sentences like "ecosystem of free knowledge" laughable.
- kqr 5y ago
  Every long-term successful operation needs to sustain a few wild bets that look pointless today, with great probability will turn out to have been pointless tomorrow, but has just a tiny chance of becoming really important. If you just optimise for today, you will die tomorrow. Gradual improvements won't get you out of a local peak when that local peak is swallowed by rising tides. If your organisation isn't doing things that look pointless today but in a principled way, I don't think it has great prospects of long-term survival. Heck, even the wiki concept itself started out as this long-shot experiment nobody at the time expected to be successful.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    Wikipedia exploded over night. The semantic web is "tomorrow technology" for 20 years now. At what point does tomorrow technology become yesterdays vaporware to you?
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Wikidata gets more edits per second right now than the English wikipedia does. If that's not "exploding overnight", I don't know what is. It's just that fewer people are aware of it, because it powers sily things like search engine infoboxes and AI assistants - in addition to fostering unprecedented cooperation among knowledge producers in the Linked Data/Semantic Web ecosystem.
      - 5y ago
EdwardDiego 5y ago
I do wonder what role Wikipolitics plays in the editor bleed.
- coldacid 5y ago
  It's a huge part of what made ME give up on the whole thing.
onurcel 5y ago
then why they don't beg for editors? they also have enough cash to develop a more appealing editor experience, but all they are asking is money.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > then why they don't beg for editors? They do, particularly in educational contexts - getting students interested in Wiki projects and having them write review articles with good sources as "homework" that can then be posted to Wikipedia. But supporting that takes money as well!
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Fixing student's homework projects is actually a burden on other more-experienced editors.
xenator 5y ago
Very solid point. I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects. There are many proofs that Russian Wikipedia have paid by government editors solving its own propaganda. I think +/- the same situation for other countries. Also, I know companies or celebrities who pay for their Wikipedia pages. You can find this service in 5 minutes by googling. "Profit-seeking and mindless consumption" can be a motto for the current WMF.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > I personally don't trust Wikipedia articles in many subjects. For the smaller ones, that is warranted - for example, the Croatian Wikipedia is infamous for its bias towards nationalist positions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Wikipedia), something that's only made worse by the aftermath of the Balkan wars decades ago... as a half-Croat myself, I can only say: let's keep it at "the situation is complex and sucks all around, Wikipedia is just one symptom of a much deeper problem". For bigger projects such as English and German Wikipedia, sheer numbers make outright disinformation spreading much more difficult - there the problem is different: what you see is usually factually correct and neutral-ish, but there is a widespread consensus that Wikipedia editors skew towards white, male and somewhat privileged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_and_systemic_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_a...). Personally, I trust scientific and pop culture related articles in most if not all versions of Wikipedia - but keep a healthy skepticism for everything political, since there it is the hardest to judge completeness and accuracy of any subject.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Any article on the Middle East, in particular, is unreliable. Zionist gatekeepers are on constant patrol.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. "Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github. Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    QED.
    - xvector 5y ago
      I do not see why it needs to be easier than making a PR. What would you propose?
      - KingOfCoders 5y ago
        Because the easier it is the the more people are involved. That was the original idea of the WikiWay, to make editing simple [1] Second if this is the way to go - and I don't agree [2] - the UI should reflect this workflow and not propose a different one that mostly fails. [Edit] PRs also assume some kind of owner and committer relationship, which might be right for open source projects but is not the case of Wikipedia - even if many editors on Wikipedia consider the content "their own". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb - "Cunningham's idea was to make WikiWikiWeb's pages quickly editable by its users, [...] . The usefulness of Wiki is in the freedom, simplicity, and power it offers." [2] Wrote a quite successfull wiki 20y ago called SnipSnap, the engine of which started Atlassian Confluence, and did several years of research in using Wikis back then.
isaacremuant 5y ago
They bleed editors because they keep censoring and shunning people for not having the same monolithical point of views with regards to politics and social issues. Money won't change that.
- frzj 5y ago
  What bias are you talking about? I thought Jimbo was an Rand Fanboy, freedom of speech is their religion.
  - codeecan 5y ago
    In the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd article, they mention an event where he "held a pistol to a woman's stomach", but leave out that she was pregnant so it doesn't look as bad. Example 2, there was two mass shooting in March: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Boulder_shooting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings In the Boulder shooting, all victims where white and the shooter was targeting white people but they don't mention any of that. In the Atlanta shootings, the article goes out of its way to mention 6 of 8 victims where asian (asian-hate narrative). In reality, many spa owners are asian. Theres is definitely a bias in their editing.
    - middleclick 5y ago
      The George Floyd thing is not mentioned because it's not true: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/15/fact-check-viral-photo-doesnt-show-george-floyd-assault-victim/5415937002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/15/fac...
      - codeecan 5y ago
        yes, I was misinformed, the report says there was a young child at home, but NOT that she was pregnant. The child being there is not mentioned in the wiki, my original point was wrong, but I think the bias still stands.

bostonsre 5y ago

Short term it does kind of look like they have now money than they need and it may seem a little disingenuous, but I'm not sure that they amassing a large pool of money to ensure for their survival for the long term is all bad. They provide an invaluable tool to the world that allows anyone from anywhere to easily learn about anything. I would say that they are doing a great service to the world by ensuring their existence in perpetuity and that only focusing on securing funding for the short term would be incredibly short sighted and negligent.

pydry 5y ago
The budget will expand to consume the additional funds. It did before. This will make it more financially tenuous, not more. Added to which, once the insitution is addicted to money it becomes that much easier to corrupt.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  Yea, that could probably happen as well. Hopefully they are more judicious with their spending on current projects. But I guess aggressively spending in the short term to share more knowledge with a larger portion of the world could be a worthy cause as well. Hopefully those in power understand the gravity of the responsibility they have and they don't trend towards something like the leadership of the NRA (assuming reported corruption was true and not politically biased).
- cutemonster 5y ago
  > The budget will expand to consume the additional funds And the organization will grow? (More people) How can one stop such things, generally, in an organization? (If it was large enough already)

harikb 5y ago

Your response sounds like Wikipedia is putting a paywall!

xbar 5y ago

How about you keep your 10 bucks and stop using Wikipedia rather than suggesting ads? Please.

japanuspus 5y ago
The main value of wikipedia has been provided not by the wikipedia foundation, but by the volunteers who write the articles on wikipedia. My work on wikipedia articles is for the benefit of my fellow humans, not to allow some organisation to start implying that everyone has a moral obligation to give them money. That was never part of the deal when I contributed my work.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Having to see ads even there was never part of the deal when I contributed mine (puny as it may be).
- dmatech 5y ago
  After the whole Fram situation, my trust in the WMF's direction and leadership is pretty much non-existent. That told me all I need to know about their priorities and ethics.

MrDresden 5y ago

You find it disgusting that a service, which you probably use both directly and indirectly multiple times a day and costs you nothing, has the nerve to give you a suggestion of donating 10$ once? That is a very peculiar attitude to have.

pydry 5y ago
I find this attitude peculiar. The editors who provided all that value will get $0. It's like buying an album where $9.92 goes to the label and yet the label still complains about freeloaders depriving the poor musicians of income if they don't pay the $10.
- kaba0 5y ago
  And who exactly gets the money? Because as I see, there is no corruption in the system at all. There are a few inefficiencies, but it’s incomparable to the bleeding out of musicians.
  - pydry 5y ago
    Jimbo's friends, i think.
- MrDresden 5y ago
  You are comparing apples and oranges there.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    So? Why should one fruit grower get away with a practice that is almost universally condemned in another?
    - MrDresden 5y ago
      Making music is the livelyhood of musicians. Making edits on Wikipedia is for most a hobby, and they do not get paid for it and thus do not rely on it (I would know, I have made many edits on my language wiki and look at it mostly as something positive to give back). They have the option of stopping making edits and walk away without any hit to their income or professional growth. That is not to say that those who make certain amount of quality edits shouldn't receive something for it, or even be hired in to be on staff editors (potentially there are these kinds of positions within Wikimedia and I just don't know about it). Comparing the practice of asking consumers for an optional donation once in a while, without any access restriction to the content, versus being (legally) forced to buy the album (also taking into account streaming here) where the funds go mostly to the label doesn't make any sense.

dalbasal 5y ago

>> (money) amassed and still hiding it? Asking for money is disgusting? Disgusting?!! They ask for money. They don't sell your data, which is what most sites/apps you use do. They don't abuse their position, as an important information source. Disgusting compared to what? Meanwhile, Wikipedia has some of the most accessible financial information of any comparably sized organisation on the planet. This is why the get so much heat. The financials are easily understandable, which means a financially literate journalist or commentator can understand what's going on and take a cheap swipe in under a minute. You can literally understand wikimedia's finances better in 10 minutes than you could after weeks of studying any other non profit, publicly listed company, NGO or government organisation. There is no attempt to hide any controversial element... Asset accumulation, clearly and deliberately highlighted. Expense growth, ditto. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial_summary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Financial...