8 ms·

Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not

Get the Wikimedia Foundation to spend money on the technical foundation of the sites, rather than spraying millions up the wall of "racial justice". That's not me making a strawman by going straight to "omg, the SJWs", it's a exact phrase from the 3rd paragraph of the 4.5 million Knowledge Equity Fund page [1]. That, and executive pay, is where donations go, not to keeping the lights on. The running cost to keeping the servers running is about the same as that fund. It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Just minor things of no importance to modern didactics like, you know, functional video support and rarely used, obscure, functions like uploading. They have more important things to do like weird elections and appointing cryptobro "disrupters" to the board. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund [2] https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers

threatofrain 5y ago
> It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Wikipedia is moving to Vue.
- snarkerson 5y ago
  That's almost just like doing something to fix things.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  They haven't even finished moving to OOUI. Actually, if they'd just bothered to document OOUI properly in the first place, would they need to move? As it is, they'll now have three concurrent systems (jQuery, OOUI and Vue). It's like GTK 2,3,4 all over again.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  They're not "moving" to Vue. They plan to build some optional JS-based components on Vue, since the alternative of purely handcrafted code is unappealing. And even then, that code can probably be refactored to use the vastly superior Svelte once the dev team's weird hostility to workflows based on ahead-of-time code generation is addressed.
laurent92 5y ago
I was ashamed when I learnt Wikipedia artificially funds the writing of pages of women, so they try to reach equal numbers to men. I wouldn’t be ashamed if the criteria for admissibility were equal, but barely being a researcher with published papers is enough, while men with entire books on the subject get rejected. Talk about rewriting history…
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- regularjack 5y ago
  > while men with entire books on the subject get rejected. Ok, I'll bite. Giving incentives to increase the number of pages about women, does not impact in any way the number of existing pages about men.
  - devwastaken 5y ago
    Lets say you have a company that requires a level of technical skill to work at, and instead of hiring for that technical skill, you hire them based on being blue. Everyone else, including those who are blue, know you are doing this because the individual is clearly not ready for that work. This creates resentment, which creates discrimination. You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create further inequality. A natural solution in this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia, and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.
    - mplanchard 5y ago
      Or you maintain the same hiring standards, but do more work to ensure your candidate pool, which historically is 99% not blue, actually contains some blue people, which naturally leads to more blue people on the team. These blue people are just as qualified as anyone else, and their presence keeps people from building idiotic ideas like “the only reason blue people can be hired is if we lower our standards,” since everyone who works with them can see that they are talented and deserve to be there. The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
This could almost be taken word for word from an article about Mozilla. People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set really high standards for the open, independant organisations they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they don't follow their priorities.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  Social justice isn't a bad thing. Social justice instead of actually fulfilling your primary goal is. If all the bugs are closed, the product is beautiful and there's still money sloshing about, then fill your boots. Also, make sure that your donors know their donation is going to go to racial education of Arab journalists (grantee #1), and not to paying developers and server bills. The begging banners on Wikimedia sites fail to mention that there's already 9 figure surplus, and yet the engineering teams will not see any of it no matter what you give, and their money isn't going to actually end up helping a wiki at all. If I wanted to donate to racial justice in media, I can send the money to the Media Foundation for West Africa (grantee #5), the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (#2) or any of the others myself.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I think it's a bad thing by itself. With the wikipedia example - anyone can edit, editors can by anonymous or psuedonomous, and there is no preference, implicit or explicit, for race and gender. Over the years wikipedia has been built up, by volunteers, into an amazing and valuable resource. Now, the organization controlling their work and this global good, decides that aggregate race and gender statistics are a problem. Wikipedia is a little too white, and a little too male, and that's a bad thing! Imagine applying this reason to any other organization and any other race and gender combination. Here's a crazy idea - if you want to reduce race and gender based prejudice, start by not having clear race and gender prejudices yourself.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    Instead of treating it as a nice-to-have when everything else is perfect, maybe consider that pursuing social justice will help you fulfill your primary goal?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thepasswordis 5y ago
From the first link: >The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide. What an interesting signaling statement. If you did not know what "racial equity" was, imagine trying to parse out what it is from that statement. Imagine reading this phrase out loud to anybody not already involved in this debate. Would this help them understand what "racial equity" was? If you read this statement to any of my family or friends, who live in the middle of the country, they would probably conclude that this was some sort of racist propaganda thing, and wouldn't want to talk to whoever brought it up anymore. I mean the fact that the foundation which is supposed to also be providing information to the world is also proudly publishing things like that should be pretty revelatory.
- oauea 5y ago
  Sure does sound like racism to me, just like Reddit's stance that you can't be racist against white people.
- thrashh 5y ago
  I think waaay too many people are unknowingly hanging around other people they like too much and it causes their circle to double down on crazy.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  I just always find it funny that 'Eurocentricity' is one of the problems, given the whole movement is AMERICA-CENTRIC as hell. We've even co-opted what being 'Eurocentric' means! Talk about arrogance!
- bavell 5y ago
  Absolutely 100%. I can't tell you how many companies I've lost respect for because they've hopped on the virtue-signalling PR bandwagon. It couldn't be more obvious they don't even believe what they're saying but it's in vouge these days so they plow forward anyways. The added bonus of some casual anti-white/anti-european hatred is the cherry on top.
devwastaken 5y ago
Yes, remember that Wikipedia, just like other big "nonprofits" abuse that meaning to make money. This isn't some org comprised of engineers and servers. It's a few engineers, some servers, and mostly warm bodies that are incentivizes to come up to contrived problems to justify their existence. It's very similar to modern U.S. academia.
jl6 5y ago
If you look at where the money is going, it seems a mix of orgs working to create new citable sources about under-covered topics (good, and surely in line with an encyclopaedia’s mission), and orgs who are going to “study” “issues” (highly questionable value).
remram 5y ago
Is that true? I have been told that money given to Wikipedia went towards wikipedia only, and those other activities were separate. I can't find a definite answer in their public reports and plans though.
PCGamer_Empath 5y ago
Since you're familiar enough with the activities of the knowledge equity fund to be confident that it's a waste, can you fill in more detail about which grants that it has issued that ended up being wasteful? I understand that you're not "going straight to OMG, the SJWs", so surely you have some knowledge of how these millions of dollars were allocated and at least some vague understanding of their particular failures. Unless of course you read "racial equity" and assumed that there could not possibly be a valuable distribution of funds based on that idea. Assuming that's not the case, could you give an example of a grant writing fund that ostensibly supports the idea and has created value?
- aliswe 5y ago
  there should be a pie chart specifying where the Wikipedia budget is going
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    Close enough[1]? That breakdown doesn't seem too unreasonable, the 'community' bucket is large, but not larger than 'direct support to websites' (which I take to mean Keeping The Lights On). The overhead for admin and fundraising looks fairly typical for a nonprofit. 1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annual-report/financials/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
- hitekker 5y ago
  That's a few too many passive aggressive questions to be asking with a sockpuppet account. If you could rewrite it to be less leading and resentful, I think the GP would be more willing to engage.
  - PCGamer_Empath 5y ago
    I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go back in time and register earlier. Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules? If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves. Namaste!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ryan_lane 5y ago
I'm not a huge fan of Wikimedia's fundraising copy, but their budget is well documented, and their spend is relatively good, in comparison to other non-profits (and especially in comparison to for-profits of similarly-sized web properties). You've conveniently left out links to the financial reports [1], which have annual plans, audited financial statements, form 990s, Q&As, etc. It also proves that your claim that keeping the servers running costs around the same as the knowledge equity fund is bullshit, unless you don't count paying engineering staff. Even the cost of the equipment, and the hosting itself is quite a bit more than the cost of this program. As a whole, this program is 2% of their budget for the year. In terms of the engineering, you can't look at a list of growing bug counts to determine project health. A growing list of bugs could simply a byproduct of growth of the overall project. Listing that without any analysis of open vs close ratios is lazy at best, and disingenuous at worst. Also, a number of the projects on that maintainers list are community maintained, or don't have a need for change (I wrote OAuthAuth, for instance, and can tell you it doesn't need active development). [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

threatofrain 5y ago

> It certainly isn't the case that engineering is "done" either, as the open bug count is growing constantly and huge swathes of the software aren't maintained and don't even have maintainers[2]. Wikipedia is moving to Vue.

snarkerson 5y ago
That's almost just like doing something to fix things.
adhesive_wombat 5y ago
They haven't even finished moving to OOUI. Actually, if they'd just bothered to document OOUI properly in the first place, would they need to move? As it is, they'll now have three concurrent systems (jQuery, OOUI and Vue). It's like GTK 2,3,4 all over again.
zozbot234 5y ago
They're not "moving" to Vue. They plan to build some optional JS-based components on Vue, since the alternative of purely handcrafted code is unappealing. And even then, that code can probably be refactored to use the vastly superior Svelte once the dev team's weird hostility to workflows based on ahead-of-time code generation is addressed.

laurent92 5y ago

I was ashamed when I learnt Wikipedia artificially funds the writing of pages of women, so they try to reach equal numbers to men. I wouldn’t be ashamed if the criteria for admissibility were equal, but barely being a researcher with published papers is enough, while men with entire books on the subject get rejected. Talk about rewriting history…

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
regularjack 5y ago
> while men with entire books on the subject get rejected. Ok, I'll bite. Giving incentives to increase the number of pages about women, does not impact in any way the number of existing pages about men.
- devwastaken 5y ago
  Lets say you have a company that requires a level of technical skill to work at, and instead of hiring for that technical skill, you hire them based on being blue. Everyone else, including those who are blue, know you are doing this because the individual is clearly not ready for that work. This creates resentment, which creates discrimination. You have to promote natural systems, not artificial ones, or you create further inequality. A natural solution in this case would be to create a policy where anyone whom is an authority on a subject can write about it on Wikipedia, and they can write even conflicting opinions. That can all be put together. If woman are paid, men are paid, etc.
  - mplanchard 5y ago
    Or you maintain the same hiring standards, but do more work to ensure your candidate pool, which historically is 99% not blue, actually contains some blue people, which naturally leads to more blue people on the team. These blue people are just as qualified as anyone else, and their presence keeps people from building idiotic ideas like “the only reason blue people can be hired is if we lower our standards,” since everyone who works with them can see that they are talented and deserve to be there. The idea that the only way to promote equity is through lowering standards is a pernicious and unrealistic strawman.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

This could almost be taken word for word from an article about Mozilla. People who think 'social justice' is a bad thing seem to set really high standards for the open, independant organisations they say they support, and they're not afraid to give them some extreme tough love and undermine them at every step if they don't follow their priorities.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
Social justice isn't a bad thing. Social justice instead of actually fulfilling your primary goal is. If all the bugs are closed, the product is beautiful and there's still money sloshing about, then fill your boots. Also, make sure that your donors know their donation is going to go to racial education of Arab journalists (grantee #1), and not to paying developers and server bills. The begging banners on Wikimedia sites fail to mention that there's already 9 figure surplus, and yet the engineering teams will not see any of it no matter what you give, and their money isn't going to actually end up helping a wiki at all. If I wanted to donate to racial justice in media, I can send the money to the Media Foundation for West Africa (grantee #5), the Borealis Racial Equity in Journalism Fund (#2) or any of the others myself.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  I think it's a bad thing by itself. With the wikipedia example - anyone can edit, editors can by anonymous or psuedonomous, and there is no preference, implicit or explicit, for race and gender. Over the years wikipedia has been built up, by volunteers, into an amazing and valuable resource. Now, the organization controlling their work and this global good, decides that aggregate race and gender statistics are a problem. Wikipedia is a little too white, and a little too male, and that's a bad thing! Imagine applying this reason to any other organization and any other race and gender combination. Here's a crazy idea - if you want to reduce race and gender based prejudice, start by not having clear race and gender prejudices yourself.
- paulcole 5y ago
  Instead of treating it as a nice-to-have when everything else is perfect, maybe consider that pursuing social justice will help you fulfill your primary goal?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

thepasswordis 5y ago

From the first link: >The Wikimedia Foundation defines racial equity as shifting away from Eurocentricity, White-male-imperialist-patriarchal supremacy, superiority, power and privilege to create an environment that is inclusive and reflects the experiences of communities of color worldwide. What an interesting signaling statement. If you did not know what "racial equity" was, imagine trying to parse out what it is from that statement. Imagine reading this phrase out loud to anybody not already involved in this debate. Would this help them understand what "racial equity" was? If you read this statement to any of my family or friends, who live in the middle of the country, they would probably conclude that this was some sort of racist propaganda thing, and wouldn't want to talk to whoever brought it up anymore. I mean the fact that the foundation which is supposed to also be providing information to the world is also proudly publishing things like that should be pretty revelatory.

oauea 5y ago
Sure does sound like racism to me, just like Reddit's stance that you can't be racist against white people.
thrashh 5y ago
I think waaay too many people are unknowingly hanging around other people they like too much and it causes their circle to double down on crazy.
Mezzie 5y ago
I just always find it funny that 'Eurocentricity' is one of the problems, given the whole movement is AMERICA-CENTRIC as hell. We've even co-opted what being 'Eurocentric' means! Talk about arrogance!
bavell 5y ago
Absolutely 100%. I can't tell you how many companies I've lost respect for because they've hopped on the virtue-signalling PR bandwagon. It couldn't be more obvious they don't even believe what they're saying but it's in vouge these days so they plow forward anyways. The added bonus of some casual anti-white/anti-european hatred is the cherry on top.

devwastaken 5y ago

Yes, remember that Wikipedia, just like other big "nonprofits" abuse that meaning to make money. This isn't some org comprised of engineers and servers. It's a few engineers, some servers, and mostly warm bodies that are incentivizes to come up to contrived problems to justify their existence. It's very similar to modern U.S. academia.

jl6 5y ago

If you look at where the money is going, it seems a mix of orgs working to create new citable sources about under-covered topics (good, and surely in line with an encyclopaedia’s mission), and orgs who are going to “study” “issues” (highly questionable value).

remram 5y ago

Is that true? I have been told that money given to Wikipedia went towards wikipedia only, and those other activities were separate. I can't find a definite answer in their public reports and plans though.

PCGamer_Empath 5y ago

Since you're familiar enough with the activities of the knowledge equity fund to be confident that it's a waste, can you fill in more detail about which grants that it has issued that ended up being wasteful? I understand that you're not "going straight to OMG, the SJWs", so surely you have some knowledge of how these millions of dollars were allocated and at least some vague understanding of their particular failures. Unless of course you read "racial equity" and assumed that there could not possibly be a valuable distribution of funds based on that idea. Assuming that's not the case, could you give an example of a grant writing fund that ostensibly supports the idea and has created value?

aliswe 5y ago
there should be a pie chart specifying where the Wikipedia budget is going
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  Close enough[1]? That breakdown doesn't seem too unreasonable, the 'community' bucket is large, but not larger than 'direct support to websites' (which I take to mean Keeping The Lights On). The overhead for admin and fundraising looks fairly typical for a nonprofit. 1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annual-report/financials/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annu...
hitekker 5y ago
That's a few too many passive aggressive questions to be asking with a sockpuppet account. If you could rewrite it to be less leading and resentful, I think the GP would be more willing to engage.
- PCGamer_Empath 5y ago
  I'm not really sure how I am supposed to retroactively go back in time and register earlier. Since you are handing out free advice, is it normally considered polite or helpful here to accuse people of using fake accounts? Is assuming that a person speaking with confidence about a topic may have some direct knowledge of that topic somehow rude or against the rules? If you're speaking confidently on behalf of the person that I was responding to, are you sure that you reflect their opinion faithfully? If the GP wanted to say "I refuse to give more details about the fund due to the phrasing of your request for details," surely they could have typed that themselves. Namaste!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ryan_lane 5y ago

I'm not a huge fan of Wikimedia's fundraising copy, but their budget is well documented, and their spend is relatively good, in comparison to other non-profits (and especially in comparison to for-profits of similarly-sized web properties). You've conveniently left out links to the financial reports [1], which have annual plans, audited financial statements, form 990s, Q&As, etc. It also proves that your claim that keeping the servers running costs around the same as the knowledge equity fund is bullshit, unless you don't count paying engineering staff. Even the cost of the equipment, and the hosting itself is quite a bit more than the cost of this program. As a whole, this program is 2% of their budget for the year. In terms of the engineering, you can't look at a list of growing bug counts to determine project health. A growing list of bugs could simply a byproduct of growth of the overall project. Listing that without any analysis of open vs close ratios is lazy at best, and disingenuous at worst. Also, a number of the projects on that maintainers list are community maintained, or don't have a need for change (I wrote OAuthAuth, for instance, and can tell you it doesn't need active development). [1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/