19 ms·

What Wikipedia did is close to a miracle. Others used web technology to create vast noise chambers of nothingness, deceit and paranoia. Wikipedia shows that h

What Wikipedia did is close to a miracle. Others used web technology to create vast noise chambers of nothingness, deceit and paranoia. Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good. This puts to shame and exposes the shallowness and enormous wastefulness of most all other tech efforts out there. Ofcourse with such dramatic success there are emergent challenges. Developing ground truth on divisive issues that tear humanity apart is highly non-trivial. But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains.

superchroma 3y ago
Wikipedia, ahem, the Wikimedia Foundation, is also a money fire, begging for cash whilst being incredibly well funded, with most of those funds not directed to the expenses of the encyclopedia.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
The biggest barrier to improving our civilisation in the 21st century is that narcissists and psychopaths are highly motivated to attain positions of power over others. How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top: Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time. Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder. It is a wicked problem to design systems that can resist / repel malign actors. Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.
- labster 3y ago
  How is that different from any other century? It doesn’t seem unique to the 21st century. Bad leaders who value power above virtue is part of the human condition. Back in the 90s we all thought the internet would be the killer app to solve this problem once and for all, but look how that turned out.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Scale. A 15th century king might have been nominally in charge, but he couldn't exercise much authority without his various ranks of human minions, whose individual power weakened down the chain, and individual pushback increased. Now a modern "king" has immense power and resources to affect everyone with very few easily replaceable lieutenants to dilute it, and AI is bound to be a magnifier of that power. They also have more insight into the population than a 15th century King could ever do -- they didn't know you existed, but a modern king knows everything from your movements to your shopping habits. From face recognition to tracking your browser's fingerprints that information is stored and logged permanently, to be mined and used whenever the kings want.
    - arp242 3y ago
      You're seriously underestimating what it means to have absolute power and spectacularly overestimating the influence of a bit of browser tracking. To equate the two is ridiculous – it's just not the same thing at all.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    Other centuries didn't have realtime worldwide psychopathic narcissist amplifiers like Twitter.
- slushh 3y ago
  It's the other way round. We abuse narcissists' and psychopaths' desire for power to make them hold positions of power. It's the 50 cent thing, most people are not willing to pay the price to be the boss. If regular people were willing to lead, everybody else could follow them and narcissists and psychopaths had time to heal their souls.
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
It might not be a miracle†, just the natural evolution of a system which does not run ads and refuses to run ads from the get-go. Even if the ads would have been "ethical ads" (no tracking and so on), they'd still ruin the experience. We can only imagine how search would have looked without ads. Without getting too political, in the 1950s/60s there was a brief moment of naïveté when it was thought that ads could be used for the good of all, that détournement [1] was actually a possibility. (Narrator: it wasn't) Hence the miracle might be in having the courage not to run ads and not locking everything beyond a paywall, updating the phrase: build it, don't run ads/paywall it, they will come, it will be great. † Wikipedia is amazing, don't get me wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#D%C3%A9tournement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#D%C...
jruohonen 3y ago
I agree that Wikipedia is one of the great success stories of the open Internet. Therefore, it is somewhat sad that Wales is being attacked from all sides in this thread.
- mcv 3y ago
  "This thread" on HN or on Twitter? Because I don't see him being attacked much here, but Twitter is turning into an Elon Musk echo chamber, so it's only to be expected there.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  [flagged]
- bjackman 3y ago
  Bear in mind that Twitter reply threads are now dominated by Elon musk fans, because people who pay for Twitter have their replies shown first. People who aren't willing to do that don't really bother engaging with stuff like this any more, or if they do they get buried. So Wales being under attack on Twitter is sad but doesn't necessarily represent "public opinion". I think we are in the last days of major figures like Jimmy Wales still treating Twitter as a respectable arena for public engagement.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "because people who pay for Twitter have their replies shown first" I don't really go to Twitter, so I don't know, but am curious: Is this an established fact? A quick search did not show anything official confirming this.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue > Prioritized rankings in conversations and search: Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. Twitter Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers. The rationale was that paying $8/month is the best way to filter out bots, but...
geysersam 3y ago
The key is "nonprofit". Capitalism cannot unlock the potential of the web the way Wikipedia, project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Internet Archive, the Pirate bay and open source software has done. Humans are social and moral beings. Our motivations are not limited to profit maximization and rent seeking. Micro-economics can never explain Wikipedia.
- eterm 3y ago
  Stack Overflow isn't a non-profit though?
  - geysersam 3y ago
    Yes you're right. But I think the point still stands. There are other examples.
    - eterm 3y ago
      If your point is that capitalism can't deliver something like Stack Overflow then I'm not sure the point does still stand, because clearly it could.
      - geysersam 3y ago
        The point is rather that a notable chunk of the the worlds most valuable websites are nonprofits. Despite them receiving considerably less investment than their for profit / venture capital counterparts.
        ThunderSizzle 3y ago
        Although non-profit doesn't mean charity. Non-profits simply mean they're income needs to be balanced with their expenses, such as through wasteful (or polarizing) spending in the example of Mozilla.
        3y ago
AmericanChopper 3y ago
There’s plenty of useful information on Wikipedia, but the biggest motivator that drives contributions to its generation and maintenance is the desire to control information. It creates a system for people to promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views. Nearly everybody implicitly understands that this is the nature of the content on Wikipedia, that it is a repository for the biases (whether well informed or not) of the Wikipedia power-editors. Knowledge is incorporated into Wikipedia via a political process, not via merit or rigour (whether or not this process chooses to consider merit or rigour in any particular case). Having your edits included in Wikipedia is a way of exerting power over others, and considering that, it’s not a miracle at that it’s managed to attract an army of passionate contributors. There’s nothing miraculous about people passionately seeking power for themselves.
- themitigating 3y ago
  "promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views. " Not everything is an opinion. For example my physical height is a fact. How many versions of truths are there about it?
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    The Wikipedia article for Kevin Durant lists him as 6’10”, which is different from the height the NBA lists for him, which is also different from the height that he actually is. So if you want to find an example of a non-controversial fact, you’re going to have to try harder than a persons height. https://www.gq.com/story/nba-player-heights https://www.gq.com/story/nba-player-heights But my point isn’t that all information on Wikipedia is factually incorrect. It contains a lot of useful information. My point is that the process for revolving controversies doesn’t simply focus on facts, or merit, or anything similar to scientific or academic rigour, as it is often influenced more by the politics of the Wikipedia editors social hierarchy.
    - themitigating 3y ago
komali2 3y ago
I think it being non-profit is a powerful motivator for people to work on it for free. Unlike open-source projects by companies like Microsoft (random example), where I feel like I'm doing engineering for Microsoft for free if I commit code to one of their libraries. I say this because I'm not sure what functionally is meant by "having a bit of faith in moral principles."
- endorphine 3y ago
  I find it a pretty powerful motivator for working on it _in general_. I mean, I'd love to work for Wikipedia. It feels like I'm participating in something to make the world a better place, as opposed to most of the for profit companies that get the hype these days.
jfengel 3y ago
I believe that Wikipedia's key is that it's finite. It has a goal. Many of its pages are static, or evolve slowly. It wants to reach an end state that grows only at the edges, and only when there is new knowledge. When it fails, pages get locked. Misbehavior is corrected by going to the last good state, not by trying to move forward. Wikipedia succeeds by not being social media. It doesn't want engagement. It doesn't care if you leave. It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating". That's hard to replicate elsewhere, because it has done that thing well. It's the go-to source for that kind of interaction.
- scoofy 3y ago
  My main personal project is a golf wiki using this model, because I really admire it. I talk to people about how the site is growing, and it is slowly, but I let them know that I doubt it will "catch on" for probably a decade, because any type of fast growth involves purchasing data (with costs/limitations) instead of getting it for free from everyday golfers. >>But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains. Yup. Much of golf business seems to be pretty extractive to me, and the game is already too fucking expensive, I can currently run it very cheaply, and it's a fun hobby that's been rewarding seeing people use it more and more. If anyone is interested: https://golfcourse.wiki https://golfcourse.wiki
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Personally, I attribute this more to Wikipedia's non-commercial nature. It's goal has a clear end state because it isn't chasing endless growth that for-profit/vc-backed companies do. I believe also it's possible to have a social media network that is non-commercial and is successful because it has no need to pump engagement to chase endless growth.
  - wanttocomment 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's the case. It has an ever expanding budget and picks up new political causes often.
scarface74 3y ago
While what Wikipedia did might be considered noble, they had no investors to answer to and private equity or a billionaire couldn’t come in and do a hostile takeover.
delusional 3y ago
> Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good. I think it's more than "faith in principles". The principles of wikipedia wouldn't have mattered at all if it was taken over by trump stans in the early days. What makes Wikipedia great, in my opinion, is the same thing that made early open source great. There is no clout of fame, it's not a high octane competitive environment where people have to constantly posture to appear unmovable. It's a collection of weirdos all nerding out over collecting all the information. It's a bunch of librarians writing stuff for completely internally motivated reasons. I don't get the impression that the people who edit Wikipedia really care about the readers at all. They allow us to enter the temple they built for themselves, but we aren't guests, we're just onlookers.
- revolvingocelot 3y ago
  Agreed. The temple is built for "all of us", in as much as any public edifice is, but those who maintain it don't think of the readers' whims. The maintainers are too busy with the all-consuming, gradually-complexifying task of building the temple, improving the temple, improving those who improve the temple. This protects both the temple itself from dabblers, but also the temple's caretakers from those who could be considered to care too little. The best example of this quasi-religious calling, IMO, has got to be the Star Trek Into Darkness thing [0][1], temple-politics which has earned a place in the temple itself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Star_Trek_Into_Darkness_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Star_Trek_Into_Darkn... [1] https://xkcd.com/1167/ https://xkcd.com/1167/
yreg 3y ago
Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.
- api 3y ago
  Thanks for that phrase. I love it.
  - yreg 3y ago
    I've got it from @libraryofbabel here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710994
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    There's even a quote investigator entry for this phrase, which dates to at least 1911, though I'd assume it's been around almost as long as the original idiom it's an inversion of. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/30/practice/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/30/practice/
- pmcjones 3y ago
  That’s what David Boggs said about Ethernet at an early (contentious) standards meeting.
miki123211 3y ago
Wikipedia's success can, in my opinion, be directly attributed to its noncommercial nature, which is enabled by its "many reads, few writes" model. Websites of that sort are much cheaper to run than more interactive web applications, and are therefore better suitable for a non-profit model. For the vast majority of user requests, you just serve a static page from a cache. I suspect that most requests don't even touch Wikipedia's PHP code or database. The same is true for Hacker News (which entirely runs on one or two machines) and Stackoverflow, which runs on a dozen or so. Wikipedia is a lot bigger so the number of machines is probably somewhat bigger too, but it's still not comparable to social-media websites or even messaging apps like Signal.
tambourine_man 3y ago
It really is. One of the last reminiscent of the old ideological web. I donate every time they ask.
- oska 3y ago
  I used to donate to Wikipedia but now think I was naive to do so. I now donate to the Internet Archive instead.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Care to elaborate?

superchroma 3y ago

Wikipedia, ahem, the Wikimedia Foundation, is also a money fire, begging for cash whilst being incredibly well funded, with most of those funds not directed to the expenses of the encyclopedia.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

The biggest barrier to improving our civilisation in the 21st century is that narcissists and psychopaths are highly motivated to attain positions of power over others. How do we prevent such scumbags from rising to the top: Aptitude / personality tests in high-school? Perhaps people can become better over time. Trust our elders / benevolent dictators for life? People can also become worse over time, lose their empathy for others once they are higher up the ladder. It is a wicked problem to design systems that can resist / repel malign actors. Full credit to all involved in Wikipedia for fighting the good fight.

labster 3y ago
How is that different from any other century? It doesn’t seem unique to the 21st century. Bad leaders who value power above virtue is part of the human condition. Back in the 90s we all thought the internet would be the killer app to solve this problem once and for all, but look how that turned out.
- ta1243 3y ago
  Scale. A 15th century king might have been nominally in charge, but he couldn't exercise much authority without his various ranks of human minions, whose individual power weakened down the chain, and individual pushback increased. Now a modern "king" has immense power and resources to affect everyone with very few easily replaceable lieutenants to dilute it, and AI is bound to be a magnifier of that power. They also have more insight into the population than a 15th century King could ever do -- they didn't know you existed, but a modern king knows everything from your movements to your shopping habits. From face recognition to tracking your browser's fingerprints that information is stored and logged permanently, to be mined and used whenever the kings want.
  - arp242 3y ago
    You're seriously underestimating what it means to have absolute power and spectacularly overestimating the influence of a bit of browser tracking. To equate the two is ridiculous – it's just not the same thing at all.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Other centuries didn't have realtime worldwide psychopathic narcissist amplifiers like Twitter.
slushh 3y ago
It's the other way round. We abuse narcissists' and psychopaths' desire for power to make them hold positions of power. It's the 50 cent thing, most people are not willing to pay the price to be the boss. If regular people were willing to lead, everybody else could follow them and narcissists and psychopaths had time to heal their souls.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago

It might not be a miracle†, just the natural evolution of a system which does not run ads and refuses to run ads from the get-go. Even if the ads would have been "ethical ads" (no tracking and so on), they'd still ruin the experience. We can only imagine how search would have looked without ads. Without getting too political, in the 1950s/60s there was a brief moment of naïveté when it was thought that ads could be used for the good of all, that détournement [1] was actually a possibility. (Narrator: it wasn't) Hence the miracle might be in having the courage not to run ads and not locking everything beyond a paywall, updating the phrase: build it, don't run ads/paywall it, they will come, it will be great. † Wikipedia is amazing, don't get me wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#D%C3%A9tournement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International#D%C...

jruohonen 3y ago

I agree that Wikipedia is one of the great success stories of the open Internet. Therefore, it is somewhat sad that Wales is being attacked from all sides in this thread.

mcv 3y ago
"This thread" on HN or on Twitter? Because I don't see him being attacked much here, but Twitter is turning into an Elon Musk echo chamber, so it's only to be expected there.
bluescrn 3y ago
[flagged]
bjackman 3y ago
Bear in mind that Twitter reply threads are now dominated by Elon musk fans, because people who pay for Twitter have their replies shown first. People who aren't willing to do that don't really bother engaging with stuff like this any more, or if they do they get buried. So Wales being under attack on Twitter is sad but doesn't necessarily represent "public opinion". I think we are in the last days of major figures like Jimmy Wales still treating Twitter as a respectable arena for public engagement.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "because people who pay for Twitter have their replies shown first" I don't really go to Twitter, so I don't know, but am curious: Is this an established fact? A quick search did not show anything official confirming this.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue > Prioritized rankings in conversations and search: Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top. Twitter Blue subscribers will appear in the Verified tab within other users’ notifications tab which highlights replies, mentions, and engagement from Blue subscribers. The rationale was that paying $8/month is the best way to filter out bots, but...

geysersam 3y ago

The key is "nonprofit". Capitalism cannot unlock the potential of the web the way Wikipedia, project Gutenberg, Stack Overflow, Internet Archive, the Pirate bay and open source software has done. Humans are social and moral beings. Our motivations are not limited to profit maximization and rent seeking. Micro-economics can never explain Wikipedia.

eterm 3y ago
Stack Overflow isn't a non-profit though?
- geysersam 3y ago
  Yes you're right. But I think the point still stands. There are other examples.
  - eterm 3y ago
    If your point is that capitalism can't deliver something like Stack Overflow then I'm not sure the point does still stand, because clearly it could.
    - geysersam 3y ago
      The point is rather that a notable chunk of the the worlds most valuable websites are nonprofits. Despite them receiving considerably less investment than their for profit / venture capital counterparts.
      - ThunderSizzle 3y ago
        Although non-profit doesn't mean charity. Non-profits simply mean they're income needs to be balanced with their expenses, such as through wasteful (or polarizing) spending in the example of Mozilla.
        3y ago

AmericanChopper 3y ago

There’s plenty of useful information on Wikipedia, but the biggest motivator that drives contributions to its generation and maintenance is the desire to control information. It creates a system for people to promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views. Nearly everybody implicitly understands that this is the nature of the content on Wikipedia, that it is a repository for the biases (whether well informed or not) of the Wikipedia power-editors. Knowledge is incorporated into Wikipedia via a political process, not via merit or rigour (whether or not this process chooses to consider merit or rigour in any particular case). Having your edits included in Wikipedia is a way of exerting power over others, and considering that, it’s not a miracle at that it’s managed to attract an army of passionate contributors. There’s nothing miraculous about people passionately seeking power for themselves.

themitigating 3y ago
"promote their own views as the truth (for whatever reason they have for doing that), and suppress all opposing views. " Not everything is an opinion. For example my physical height is a fact. How many versions of truths are there about it?
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  The Wikipedia article for Kevin Durant lists him as 6’10”, which is different from the height the NBA lists for him, which is also different from the height that he actually is. So if you want to find an example of a non-controversial fact, you’re going to have to try harder than a persons height. https://www.gq.com/story/nba-player-heights https://www.gq.com/story/nba-player-heights But my point isn’t that all information on Wikipedia is factually incorrect. It contains a lot of useful information. My point is that the process for revolving controversies doesn’t simply focus on facts, or merit, or anything similar to scientific or academic rigour, as it is often influenced more by the politics of the Wikipedia editors social hierarchy.
  - themitigating 3y ago

komali2 3y ago

I think it being non-profit is a powerful motivator for people to work on it for free. Unlike open-source projects by companies like Microsoft (random example), where I feel like I'm doing engineering for Microsoft for free if I commit code to one of their libraries. I say this because I'm not sure what functionally is meant by "having a bit of faith in moral principles."

endorphine 3y ago
I find it a pretty powerful motivator for working on it _in general_. I mean, I'd love to work for Wikipedia. It feels like I'm participating in something to make the world a better place, as opposed to most of the for profit companies that get the hype these days.

jfengel 3y ago

I believe that Wikipedia's key is that it's finite. It has a goal. Many of its pages are static, or evolve slowly. It wants to reach an end state that grows only at the edges, and only when there is new knowledge. When it fails, pages get locked. Misbehavior is corrected by going to the last good state, not by trying to move forward. Wikipedia succeeds by not being social media. It doesn't want engagement. It doesn't care if you leave. It enforces ego-less-ness by not showing you names; it doesn't want your contributions, especially not on general topics that people enjoy "debating". That's hard to replicate elsewhere, because it has done that thing well. It's the go-to source for that kind of interaction.

scoofy 3y ago
My main personal project is a golf wiki using this model, because I really admire it. I talk to people about how the site is growing, and it is slowly, but I let them know that I doubt it will "catch on" for probably a decade, because any type of fast growth involves purchasing data (with costs/limitations) instead of getting it for free from everyday golfers. >>But the miracle stands and is asking from all of us to turn faith into science, find ways to replicate the essence of Wikipedia across all domains. Yup. Much of golf business seems to be pretty extractive to me, and the game is already too fucking expensive, I can currently run it very cheaply, and it's a fun hobby that's been rewarding seeing people use it more and more. If anyone is interested: https://golfcourse.wiki https://golfcourse.wiki
madeofpalk 3y ago
Personally, I attribute this more to Wikipedia's non-commercial nature. It's goal has a clear end state because it isn't chasing endless growth that for-profit/vc-backed companies do. I believe also it's possible to have a social media network that is non-commercial and is successful because it has no need to pump engagement to chase endless growth.
- wanttocomment 3y ago
  I'm not sure that's the case. It has an ever expanding budget and picks up new political causes often.

scarface74 3y ago

While what Wikipedia did might be considered noble, they had no investors to answer to and private equity or a billionaire couldn’t come in and do a hostile takeover.

delusional 3y ago

> Wikipedia shows that having a bit of faith in moral principles and affinity for the good side of humanity can readily turn technology into a force for good. I think it's more than "faith in principles". The principles of wikipedia wouldn't have mattered at all if it was taken over by trump stans in the early days. What makes Wikipedia great, in my opinion, is the same thing that made early open source great. There is no clout of fame, it's not a high octane competitive environment where people have to constantly posture to appear unmovable. It's a collection of weirdos all nerding out over collecting all the information. It's a bunch of librarians writing stuff for completely internally motivated reasons. I don't get the impression that the people who edit Wikipedia really care about the readers at all. They allow us to enter the temple they built for themselves, but we aren't guests, we're just onlookers.

revolvingocelot 3y ago
Agreed. The temple is built for "all of us", in as much as any public edifice is, but those who maintain it don't think of the readers' whims. The maintainers are too busy with the all-consuming, gradually-complexifying task of building the temple, improving the temple, improving those who improve the temple. This protects both the temple itself from dabblers, but also the temple's caretakers from those who could be considered to care too little. The best example of this quasi-religious calling, IMO, has got to be the Star Trek Into Darkness thing [0][1], temple-politics which has earned a place in the temple itself. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Star_Trek_Into_Darkness_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Star_Trek_Into_Darkn... [1] https://xkcd.com/1167/ https://xkcd.com/1167/

yreg 3y ago

Wikipedia works in practice, but not in theory.

api 3y ago
Thanks for that phrase. I love it.
- yreg 3y ago
  I've got it from @libraryofbabel here on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710994
- karaterobot 3y ago
  There's even a quote investigator entry for this phrase, which dates to at least 1911, though I'd assume it's been around almost as long as the original idiom it's an inversion of. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/30/practice/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/08/30/practice/
pmcjones 3y ago
That’s what David Boggs said about Ethernet at an early (contentious) standards meeting.

miki123211 3y ago

Wikipedia's success can, in my opinion, be directly attributed to its noncommercial nature, which is enabled by its "many reads, few writes" model. Websites of that sort are much cheaper to run than more interactive web applications, and are therefore better suitable for a non-profit model. For the vast majority of user requests, you just serve a static page from a cache. I suspect that most requests don't even touch Wikipedia's PHP code or database. The same is true for Hacker News (which entirely runs on one or two machines) and Stackoverflow, which runs on a dozen or so. Wikipedia is a lot bigger so the number of machines is probably somewhat bigger too, but it's still not comparable to social-media websites or even messaging apps like Signal.

tambourine_man 3y ago

It really is. One of the last reminiscent of the old ideological web. I donate every time they ask.

oska 3y ago
I used to donate to Wikipedia but now think I was naive to do so. I now donate to the Internet Archive instead.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Care to elaborate?