4 ms·

I don't disagree with anything you said. I also think that wikipedia should adopt a much less cringey fundraising style. However... I feel like wikipedia tend

I don't disagree with anything you said. I also think that wikipedia should adopt a much less cringey fundraising style. However... I feel like wikipedia tends to attract a highly disproportionate amount of criticism, especially about fundraising, budget inflation and editing/deletionism. In one sense, this is a good thing. Criticism and scrutiny keep organisations honest. In another sense, there's a nihilism to it. Wikipedia is perhaps 100X more resource efficient than a Facebook. It's far more respectful of its users than any bigtech. It embodies otherwise naive ideals of the early web. It has performed way better than commercial peers in the face of the decade's misinformation and political fact wars... including journalistic ones. It keeps its nose much cleaner than big nonprofits like the Red Cross. All freely available to everyone, highly accessible, supported by optional donations. Wikimedia is a beacon. FOSS has been tamed. The rivers of the WWW have been dammed. "Don't be evil" got fired. It feels like Wikipedia is subjected to a bigotry of higher expectations specifically because it doesn't suck. There's a crabs-in-a-bucket feel to it that disturbs me.

akolbe 4y ago
It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour. The people earning the most money from that volunteer labour aren't even the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Big Tech companies who use Wikipedia and Wikidata content to populate Knowledge Graph panels (Google, Microsoft Bing), have their voice assistants read Wikipedia articles in response to questions (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant), etc. The Wikimedia Foundation is a partner of all these organisations. Amazon regularly donates a million to the Wikimedia Endowment, there is a little-publicised Google partnership ... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_Wikimedia_Foundation_and_Google_Partnership https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_Wikimedia_Founda... ... the South Asian "Regional Partnerships" Manager moved to Wikimedia from Google: https://archive.ph/jf3FT https://archive.ph/jf3FT ... as did the originator of the Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia projects, and the seed money for Wikidata came from Microsoft founder Paul Allen and Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-12-02/Op-ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... etc.
- dalbasal 4y ago
  OK... this is the kind of thing I am talking about. "It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour." That's one of the reasons, and it's not a bad reason at all. In fact, I would say that wikipedia couldn't buy what it gets for free at any price. It's also for other reasons. Wikipedia serves lightweight websites. It has a lightweight management structure. It has a lightweight content moderation function. None of these are incidental. They are what efficiency is made of. In any case, what is your comment demonstrating other that everything can be criticised. By what standard, is wikimedia worthy of your scorn?
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    Ensuring your charitable donations are actually doing the good you think it is, is difficult enough that there are organizations specifically created to rate them and verify what they say. When a charitable organization does a poor job of it, they rightly earn the scorn they receive, because they are betraying a trust. I donate to a number of charities (including Wikipedia) and if any one of them were found to be operating as it appears Wikipedia is, I would move my money elsewhere, which is what I intend to do in this case.
idiotsecant 4y ago
I hold Wikipedia to the moral standards of the old idealistic internet precisely because it's one of the last bastions of the tech world that I still thought of as 'pure'. I'm not going to judge them by the standards of the rest of the scumbag internet. I'm going to judge them by the standards of an organization i respect. If they want to degrade themselves back into the class of 'organization I wouldn't trust to have my email address' so that I judge them by those standards instead they're well on their way to doing so.

akolbe 4y ago

It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour. The people earning the most money from that volunteer labour aren't even the Wikimedia Foundation, but the Big Tech companies who use Wikipedia and Wikidata content to populate Knowledge Graph panels (Google, Microsoft Bing), have their voice assistants read Wikipedia articles in response to questions (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant), etc. The Wikimedia Foundation is a partner of all these organisations. Amazon regularly donates a million to the Wikimedia Endowment, there is a little-publicised Google partnership ... https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_Wikimedia_Foundation_and_Google_Partnership https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_Wikimedia_Founda... ... the South Asian "Regional Partnerships" Manager moved to Wikimedia from Google: https://archive.ph/jf3FT https://archive.ph/jf3FT ... as did the originator of the Wikidata and Abstract Wikipedia projects, and the seed money for Wikidata came from Microsoft founder Paul Allen and Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-12-02/Op-ed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... etc.

dalbasal 4y ago
OK... this is the kind of thing I am talking about. "It's resource-efficient because it relies on volunteer labour." That's one of the reasons, and it's not a bad reason at all. In fact, I would say that wikipedia couldn't buy what it gets for free at any price. It's also for other reasons. Wikipedia serves lightweight websites. It has a lightweight management structure. It has a lightweight content moderation function. None of these are incidental. They are what efficiency is made of. In any case, what is your comment demonstrating other that everything can be criticised. By what standard, is wikimedia worthy of your scorn?
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  Ensuring your charitable donations are actually doing the good you think it is, is difficult enough that there are organizations specifically created to rate them and verify what they say. When a charitable organization does a poor job of it, they rightly earn the scorn they receive, because they are betraying a trust. I donate to a number of charities (including Wikipedia) and if any one of them were found to be operating as it appears Wikipedia is, I would move my money elsewhere, which is what I intend to do in this case.

idiotsecant 4y ago

I hold Wikipedia to the moral standards of the old idealistic internet precisely because it's one of the last bastions of the tech world that I still thought of as 'pure'. I'm not going to judge them by the standards of the rest of the scumbag internet. I'm going to judge them by the standards of an organization i respect. If they want to degrade themselves back into the class of 'organization I wouldn't trust to have my email address' so that I judge them by those standards instead they're well on their way to doing so.