3 ms·

What do you make of the statement here? https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-wikipedias-deep-ties-to-big-tech https://braveneweurope.com/michael-olenick-

by akolbe 4y ago

What do you make of the statement here? 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 ($33.75 million) to maintain according to Lisa Seitz Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia."

bawolff 4y ago
I'm not sure what the context of the original quote is. It really all depends on what is meant by "maintain" and how you define things that affect wikipedia. To give a small example, if WMF pays for some swag for an event to promote minority groups to edit wikipedia - that's not what i would call "maintaining" wikipedia, but i also wouldn't say its money not going to wikipedia. Unfortunately, we dont really have a fine grained public breakdown so its hard to really see. Anyways, i'm mostly objecting to the idea that some other wikimedia project is getting more funding than wikipedia. By and large wikipedia is the favourite child and the other projects are ignored (except maybe wikidata, but wikipedia still way outweighs wikidata).
- akolbe 4y ago
  That is true if by project you mean the wikis online (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikiversity, Wikinews, Wikispecies and so forth, most of which the public is largely unaware of). I am less sure how much money presently goes on other projects in the conventional sense of the word "project". Guillaume Paumier, Principal Program Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, once said: ------------- And the fact is that, as a movement, we need as much money as we can get to advance our mission. Our vision is so ambitious and expansive that it is also bound to be inevitably expensive. This is something that the Board understood: shortly after endorsing the Strategic Direction in 2017, they directed the Foundation to prepare to raise more funds than usual, to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030. [2] My fellow members of the working group on Revenue Streams for movement strategy also understood the scope of the movement's ambitions: the first guiding question for our work was how to "maximize revenue for the movement". People who attended the meeting of strategy working groups in Berlin in early 2018 might remember a thought exercise led by the Revenue Streams group. In it, we estimated that coming closer to our vision would probably require an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion dollars. There is nothing intrinsically outrageous about that amount, as long as the money advances the mission efficiently and equitably. The International Committee of the Red Cross had a global budget of $1.6 billion in 2016." https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/MBLZ5R6SGOWU53CGTEKYOCHVOZ7YY74B/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... ------------- When he's talking about how we would like to have $1 billion a year, that seems to me to indicate that they envision a role for themselves that goes well beyond maintaining a few websites. And most of that money is supposed to come from Wikipedia fundraising ... yet there is not a word about this in the fundraising messages.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    Fair enough. I guess being around wikimedia for so long has made me think of project to soley mean wikidata, wiktionary, etc. And i fully agree that any talk of billions is ridiculous. However i suspect the tide is turning on that. Just look at how many of the current board election candidates are talking about stopping expansion and stabilizing current numbers.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      Maybe, and I hope so. There are eleven seats on the board (just five of those seats are "community-and-affiliate-selected"), and as you say, two seats are currently up for grabs. But even if the community manages to put someone like Kunal, Mike or Michał onto the board, it's one or two people against the inertia and groupthink of the nine incumbents, none of whom have said anything publicly to indicate their thinking has changed. The WMF board had the option to add another community-and-affiliate seat this year and chose not to, because they did not like the idea of "on-boarding" three new board members right now. You could also interpret that as being motivated by a desire to reduce the amount of change new members might bring.

by akolbe 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago

I'm not sure what the context of the original quote is. It really all depends on what is meant by "maintain" and how you define things that affect wikipedia. To give a small example, if WMF pays for some swag for an event to promote minority groups to edit wikipedia - that's not what i would call "maintaining" wikipedia, but i also wouldn't say its money not going to wikipedia. Unfortunately, we dont really have a fine grained public breakdown so its hard to really see. Anyways, i'm mostly objecting to the idea that some other wikimedia project is getting more funding than wikipedia. By and large wikipedia is the favourite child and the other projects are ignored (except maybe wikidata, but wikipedia still way outweighs wikidata).

akolbe 4y ago
That is true if by project you mean the wikis online (Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikiversity, Wikinews, Wikispecies and so forth, most of which the public is largely unaware of). I am less sure how much money presently goes on other projects in the conventional sense of the word "project". Guillaume Paumier, Principal Program Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, once said: ------------- And the fact is that, as a movement, we need as much money as we can get to advance our mission. Our vision is so ambitious and expansive that it is also bound to be inevitably expensive. This is something that the Board understood: shortly after endorsing the Strategic Direction in 2017, they directed the Foundation to prepare to raise more funds than usual, to be able to move towards our collective vision for 2030. [2] My fellow members of the working group on Revenue Streams for movement strategy also understood the scope of the movement's ambitions: the first guiding question for our work was how to "maximize revenue for the movement". People who attended the meeting of strategy working groups in Berlin in early 2018 might remember a thought exercise led by the Revenue Streams group. In it, we estimated that coming closer to our vision would probably require an annual budget for the movement in the vicinity of a billion dollars. There is nothing intrinsically outrageous about that amount, as long as the money advances the mission efficiently and equitably. The International Committee of the Red Cross had a global budget of $1.6 billion in 2016." https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/MBLZ5R6SGOWU53CGTEKYOCHVOZ7YY74B/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list... ------------- When he's talking about how we would like to have $1 billion a year, that seems to me to indicate that they envision a role for themselves that goes well beyond maintaining a few websites. And most of that money is supposed to come from Wikipedia fundraising ... yet there is not a word about this in the fundraising messages.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Fair enough. I guess being around wikimedia for so long has made me think of project to soley mean wikidata, wiktionary, etc. And i fully agree that any talk of billions is ridiculous. However i suspect the tide is turning on that. Just look at how many of the current board election candidates are talking about stopping expansion and stabilizing current numbers.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Maybe, and I hope so. There are eleven seats on the board (just five of those seats are "community-and-affiliate-selected"), and as you say, two seats are currently up for grabs. But even if the community manages to put someone like Kunal, Mike or Michał onto the board, it's one or two people against the inertia and groupthink of the nine incumbents, none of whom have said anything publicly to indicate their thinking has changed. The WMF board had the option to add another community-and-affiliate seat this year and chose not to, because they did not like the idea of "on-boarding" three new board members right now. You could also interpret that as being motivated by a desire to reduce the amount of change new members might bring.