4 ms·

I decided to go for as much value they give me. I use it seldom but with pleasure. Therefore I used free national Swiss bank transactions to send them 1$/1CHF p

by faebi 5y ago

I decided to go for as much value they give me. I use it seldom but with pleasure. Therefore I used free national Swiss bank transactions to send them 1$/1CHF per Month.

akolbe 5y ago
There's the rub. Who's "they"? The unpaid volunteers who write and curate the articles, or the Wikimedia Foundation who takes the money? People by and large have very little idea of what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing with the money. The WMF is planning to take at least $150M this year ... According to https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-ties-to-big-tech https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-t... "The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget." The spending is not presented very transparently to the ordinary donor. You have to dig, and even then the info is often phrased in ways that make it difficult to understand what value the money actually brings. The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  On the other hand, worst case they're throwing 1CHF a month away. There's so many other purchases one does where the way the producer's organised is under hardly any scrutiny, yet when it's a non-profit, all of a sudden we have to closely inspect every cent.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  > The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today. Exactly. What, are they all working sales and marketing? What marketing and sales does wikipedia need to do? The engineering headcount at companies utterly baffles me sometimes. Mozilla laid off ~350 developers in the last year or two. That's probably well under half their total dev staff. What are all these developers doing? Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird, so they had hundreds of people working full time Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, there's some platform-specific stuff so you've got iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows specific people...but the number still seems wildly high. How about Twitter? What are all the engineers doing at twitter? We're talking about a company whose product hasn't significantly changed in a decade. Instagram was ~40 people when they got bought up. What do you suppose the engineering headcount is now? I recently read that Wayfair has over 2,000 programmers. Two. Thousand. Programmers. What the fluff are they doing? Maintaining an online furniture store, or developing sentient furniture?
  - akolbe 5y ago
    The comparison to the increase in the Mozilla headcount is quite commonly made. There are now (incl. Fundraising technology, only linked on that page) 50 people working in Wikimedia Fundraising alone: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising Some of the staff will now work on the Wikimedia Enterprise for-profit arm, selling API services to Big Tech companies. That's arguably honest work – they're intending to earn money like anyone is. They've hired "Disinformation" staff to look at instances of systematic disinformation on various Wikipedia projects. They're working on Abstract Wikipedia/Wikifunctions, a new project based on Wikidata: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing_discussion https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing... This is intended to produce basic Wikipedia articles written in a programming language that are designed for easy translation into many presently underserved languages. And yes, they have lots of programmers, and by and large the community always complains that they don't work on their wishlists but on other stuff they don't want. Compared to the early days, there has also been a huge increase in bureaucracy layers and management-consultant-speak ... some of the output, like the proposed "Universal Code of Conduct", is just hair-raisingly bad. See e.g. this discussion thread https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/AAGTJLSWDFKTQDUG7BHNOQ4ZYMIULYIF/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... The management culture of the place has always been iffy. People don't tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    > Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird Mozilla doesn't contribute development work to Thunderbird.
Symbiote 5y ago
Given there is a cost to each transaction (even if it's not your cost), why not send 12¤ per year?
ekianjo 5y ago
> I decided to go for as much value they give me. The value comes from unpaid content creators and Wikimedia org is just a parasite benefiting from everyone's else unpaid efforts.

by faebi 5y ago

I decided to go for as much value they give me. I use it seldom but with pleasure. Therefore I used free national Swiss bank transactions to send them 1$/1CHF per Month.

akolbe 5y ago

There's the rub. Who's "they"? The unpaid volunteers who write and curate the articles, or the Wikimedia Foundation who takes the money? People by and large have very little idea of what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing with the money. The WMF is planning to take at least $150M this year ... According to https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-ties-to-big-tech https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-t... "The vast majority of Wikimedia’s value to ordinary people – the website we know and use – costs the firm about 30 percent of their $112.5 million operating budget." The spending is not presented very transparently to the ordinary donor. You have to dig, and even then the info is often phrased in ways that make it difficult to understand what value the money actually brings. The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today.

Vinnl 5y ago
On the other hand, worst case they're throwing 1CHF a month away. There's so many other purchases one does where the way the producer's organised is under hardly any scrutiny, yet when it's a non-profit, all of a sudden we have to closely inspect every cent.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
> The one thing that is clear to see is the ever-expanding headcount: from less than a dozen paid staff in 2007 to 550 or so today. Exactly. What, are they all working sales and marketing? What marketing and sales does wikipedia need to do? The engineering headcount at companies utterly baffles me sometimes. Mozilla laid off ~350 developers in the last year or two. That's probably well under half their total dev staff. What are all these developers doing? Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird, so they had hundreds of people working full time Firefox and Thunderbird? Sure, there's some platform-specific stuff so you've got iOS, Android, MacOS, and Windows specific people...but the number still seems wildly high. How about Twitter? What are all the engineers doing at twitter? We're talking about a company whose product hasn't significantly changed in a decade. Instagram was ~40 people when they got bought up. What do you suppose the engineering headcount is now? I recently read that Wayfair has over 2,000 programmers. Two. Thousand. Programmers. What the fluff are they doing? Maintaining an online furniture store, or developing sentient furniture?
- akolbe 5y ago
  The comparison to the increase in the Mozilla headcount is quite commonly made. There are now (incl. Fundraising technology, only linked on that page) 50 people working in Wikimedia Fundraising alone: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising Some of the staff will now work on the Wikimedia Enterprise for-profit arm, selling API services to Big Tech companies. That's arguably honest work – they're intending to earn money like anyone is. They've hired "Disinformation" staff to look at instances of systematic disinformation on various Wikipedia projects. They're working on Abstract Wikipedia/Wikifunctions, a new project based on Wikidata: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing_discussion https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing... This is intended to produce basic Wikipedia articles written in a programming language that are designed for easy translation into many presently underserved languages. And yes, they have lots of programmers, and by and large the community always complains that they don't work on their wishlists but on other stuff they don't want. Compared to the early days, there has also been a huge increase in bureaucracy layers and management-consultant-speak ... some of the output, like the proposed "Universal Code of Conduct", is just hair-raisingly bad. See e.g. this discussion thread https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/AAGTJLSWDFKTQDUG7BHNOQ4ZYMIULYIF/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... The management culture of the place has always been iffy. People don't tell the truth, or at least not the whole truth.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > Mozilla is almost entirely Firefox and Thunderbird Mozilla doesn't contribute development work to Thunderbird.

Symbiote 5y ago

Given there is a cost to each transaction (even if it's not your cost), why not send 12¤ per year?

ekianjo 5y ago

> I decided to go for as much value they give me. The value comes from unpaid content creators and Wikimedia org is just a parasite benefiting from everyone's else unpaid efforts.