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2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $145,970,915 I love Wikipedia but I don't see how this cost explosion can even

• Alupis 3y ago
  During which, Wikipedia and it's prominent editors have become increasingly biased in their reporting of events. Instead of being a neutral "just the facts", we get editorialization about all kinds of things that just further entrench our two camps. Word choice, framing, referenced articles, things left unsaid, etc.
  • xnyan 3y ago
    I’m not sure how you’d like people to evaluate this claim without some examples. Yes, some people will try to nitpick, but many readers here will engage in good faith. What’s an example of a heavily editorialized article?
    • cubefox 3y ago
      This article is quite heavily biased: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline For an exercise, try mentally replacing terms like "alt-right movement" with "woke movement", "alt-right pipeline" with "woke pipeline" etc.
      • zulban 3y ago
        Gave it a skim. What specifically is biased about it? Even ideas that are wrong need to have articles about those labels. There could also be an article about a "woke pipeline" if that's a concept label people are taking about.
        • cubefox 3y ago
          It demonizes right-wing YouTubers with the slur "alt-right". There could absolutely no such article exist about a "woke" pipeline. Anti left-wing bias is not acceptable in Wikipedia. Anti right-wing bias is not much of a problem.
          • heyoni 3y ago
            Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative. Remember how all the media outlets were “anti Trump” because they all described the voting scandal as being “without evidence”? That’s because there was none. You couldn’t report on that and simultaneously be on the side of reality without also being against the Trump campaign. Also, is alt right a slur? Cause woke isn’t.
            • cubefox 3y ago
              Of course "woke" is mostly used in a derogatory way. Again, no such article analysing a supposed "woke pipeline" would be acceptable in Wikipedia. > Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative. The same thing can be said about progressives. Nonetheless, the above example would be seen as highly biased.
              • leokennis 3y ago
                Do you have any proof for your claims? So far I'm mainly getting a https://www.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Persecutionfetish/ vibe from them.
                • cubefox 3y ago
                  Do you have any proof that vibes are relevant here?
• ilikehurdles 3y ago
  In that time it’s become increasingly challenging to contribute anything to The People’s Encyclopedia. I wanted to update a local wiki page with newer data from its original sources, but apparently I have become blacklisted because I use/used Apple’s private relay and safari’s privacy measures by default in all my browsing. Disabling them didn’t fix it. I would love to sign up as a fallback measure to be able to contribute, and verify my account by whatever means necessary, but apparently in the 2020s that’s just not something Wikipedia supports (as I’m also black listed from signing up despite never contributing to Wikipedia.) Increasingly I see out of date and opinionated articles and I wonder how many of us have meaningful contributions ready but are forced to sit on the sidelines because there’s no “way in” with this product.
  • smsm42 3y ago
    Note that WMF has very little relation to article editing. And login problems are likely because you are using some kind of VPN, which is also something the trolls like to use, so it frequently ends up in ban lists. It's a hard problem, because trolls are much more determined to (ab)use any privacy feature that is out there than legitimate newcomers, and unfortunately most Wiki admin teams lean towards solutions that ensure less trolls even if it means also more barriers to entry. These people are almost always volunteers, and handling trolls is not an activity they particularly enjoy, so that's the source of the bias.
  • hashar 3y ago
    I would guess the pool of IP addressed used by Apple has been blocked from contributing since for any good faith editor, there is a vast amount of vandals taking advantage of the feature to deface articles en masse. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay has some context and list potential problems that might arise (and do in your case). https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_Relay https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Apple_iCloud_Private_Re... is the related discussion page if you want to ask more. Back in the old days, we maintained a list of trustworthy http proxies for which we trusted the IP of their client. The community could then block the user behind the proxy. With everything behind https nowadays, that is no more possible (the intermediate proxy can not inject any header to carry the information). So the sole thing we see is the Apple relays IPs and if those are a source of vandalism for sure the community will block them from contributing. There is a more or less similar issue with TOR exit node for which the issue is described at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editing_with_Tor https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editing_with_Tor Given the relay is only enforced by Safari (as I understand it), you can use the IOS Wikipedia application for editing: https://apps.apple.com/app/wikipedia/id324715238 https://apps.apple.com/app/wikipedia/id324715238 , though that will not pass through the Apple relays and leak your IP.
• Joeboy 3y ago
  > 2016 Wikimedia Foundation Budget: $69,136,758 $200k less than Beeple's "Everyday" NFT sold for.
  • tasuki 3y ago
    This is not an unreasonable comparison at all. It puts things in perspective. I dislike what Wikimedia is becoming, yet Wikipedia is still functioning and useful!
    • capitainenemo 3y ago
      It's fairly unreasonable since NFT values are really not tied to anything, and in tokens that may or may not be valued at what they are supposedly valued due to manipulation of the small markets (similar to penny stock pump and dump). So those values can be more about money laundering or poor signaling than any indication of real worth.
      • Joeboy 3y ago
        What would be a good comparison? Meta spending $36+bn on the Metaverse[0]? What are examples of websites that provide clearly better value for money than Wikipedia? [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-metaverse-rivals-spent-far-less-2022-10?op=1&r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...
        • capitainenemo 3y ago
          That would be a better one yes. It was just a bad comparison of fake valuation to real. But I don't think anyone is disagreeing that Wikipedia is offering good value for money, just that some people might be justifying that to excessively compensate themselves for an operation that requires very little to run and depends almost entirely on unpaid volunteers. "well, our service is a boon to mankind, therefore it warrants skimming a bit off the top" And that could be a problem in the long run.
  • costco 3y ago
• bawolff 3y ago
  > What value have they added in that time? A new editor and CSS on articles? Assuming this is not rhetorical - everything is in git so you can look at the git log. Although it is spread through many repos, and not all contributors are paid by wmf. https://github.com/wikimedia https://github.com/wikimedia
• ilyt 3y ago
  And I preferred previous theme anyway... And it can't be set without being logged in ;/
  • Akronymus 3y ago
    I use redirector with the following settings: Redirect: https:\/\/(.)\.wikipedia\.org\/wiki\/([^?])(?!=\?useskin=vector) to: https://$1.wikipedia.org/wiki/$2?useskin=vector https://$1.wikipedia.org/wiki/$2?useskin=vector Applies to: Main window (address bar)
    • capitainenemo 3y ago
      Thank you for this! Just installed redirector. Actually a few of my tampermonkey scripts are to map twitter to nitter etc, and I have old reddit redirect addon which could be consolidated into this as well. BTW, to make it work I had to change: (.) to ([^.]*) and ([^?]) to ([^?]*) I think HN formatting ate some characters (I used indenting to try and preserve)
    • Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
      Are you saying if we use the URL parameter "useskin" set to "vector" we can get the old layout back? I wonder if this applies on other sites using mediawiki. [EDIT] Fuck me! It does work both on wikipedia and the Arch wiki. So long.
      • bawolff 3y ago
        And if you want the even older skin ?useskin=monobook
      • hashar 3y ago
        The `useskin` parameter should work on any MediaWiki instance as long as the targeted skin is installed on the instance. You can grab the list of skins from: Special:Version (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version#mw-version-skin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version#mw-version-ski... ) An API query: * direct: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&prop=&meta=siteinfo&continue=&formatversion=2&siprop=skins https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&... * demo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=json&prop=&meta=siteinfo&continue=&formatversion=2&siprop=skins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox#action=quer... Which yields the code name of each skins installed (eg: vector-2022, vector, monobook ...).
• t8sr 3y ago
  Their costs went up about 100%. The cumulative inflation over those 6 years was about 25%. The US averages 6% salary growth yearly, which over six years is about 42%, and would have been much higher in the tech industry. California averages a cost of living increase of about 8% annually, over six years that's 58%. So if you adjust for the rising costs of doing anything in tech, their operating budget has increased by much less than would seem - only about 20%. In those same six years, they've had to deal with a rise in misinformation campaigns, spam, infosec threats and recently ML models. Call me crazy, but dealing with all of the extra complexity 2022 has over 2016 on a 20% budget increase is pretty great.
  • ethbr0 3y ago
    It's unfortunate that aiming for 90/00s quality is that much harder nowadays.