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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

by 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.

by akolbe 4y ago

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.