7 ms·

While i am sympathetic to wmf finding alternative funding streams, I do get nervous about these sort of things due to the inherent conflict of interest and ince

While i am sympathetic to wmf finding alternative funding streams, I do get nervous about these sort of things due to the inherent conflict of interest and incentives to canabalize the free offerings. I'm not saying that is happening now, but will it happen eventually? Additionally, originally it was promised this would all be open source, and officially they are sticking with that, but it seems like they are going with the model of throwing code over the fence like once a year, which does not really meet my expectations.

admissionsguy 2y ago
WMF goes the way of bureaucracies. It finds multiple ways to enlarge itself over the years and just cannot ever get any smaller. I suppose at some point it will overextend itself and harm Wikipedia, the only[1] thing of value, in the process. [1] Yeah there are Wikidata and some other projects. But it's like saying Google is not an ad company.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
I’d rather Wikipedia offer it versus a for profit enterprise using their dataset. Cut out the middleman and vertically integrate.
kemayo 2y ago
There's a whole statement-of-principles thing that at least implies that the intention isn't to cannibalize the existing offerings: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Principles https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Princip... Though I imagine that only works so far as you feel you can trust the Foundation to stick to those principles, so that's complicated. :D There's also a bunch of FAQs here that sort of get at how the funding streams are supposed to integrate into the existing structures and how it's supposed to avoid pushing out the free services: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/FAQ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/FAQ (As I said elsewhere, I work for the WMF but I don't work on anything related to this so I'm just commenting as someone who has more experience searching through our public info than most HN commenters would...)
- bawolff 2y ago
  > Though I imagine that only works so far as you feel you can trust the Foundation to stick to those principles, so that's complicated. :D At the end of the day, WMF is made up of people, and people follow incentives. I'm not saying they are bad people, but they aren't saints either. They are just people like anyone else. It might not happen today, but 5 or 10 years from now, i'm not so sure. Eventually there will be some situation where people involved will have to chose between something for the public good vs something that sells enterprise APIs better. If WMF becomes dependent on the enterprise money, it will be hard to chose the public good. When that day comes, the enshitification begins. After all, google once claimed not to be evil. The motto didn't last.
tw04 2y ago
> While i am sympathetic to wmf finding alternative funding streams Why are you sympathetic to it? Their fund, at this point, can make enough off interest on a basic CD to not just pay for every possible cost they could have until the end of time, but make the maintainer(s) obscenely wealthy without breaking a sweat. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3e/Wikimedia_Foundation_2022_Form_990.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3e/Wikim... $250m - they’re doing this out of greed, not need.
- ff317 2y ago
  Over the long term of many years you're /lucky/ if a stable very-low-risk investment can net ~3% when accounting for inflation. Thus $250M could maybe net you roughly $7.5M/year. Exactly how many network links, servers, and engineering staff do you think that buys? It's way under what it operates on today, which is way under what it ideally should be for site like Wikipedia. And that's /just/ the operational engineering of the sites on a technical level. You also need HR, you need Finance, you need a lot of Lawyers, you need software developers, you need a travel department, a fundraising team, PR people, community relations people, grant-making for the extended open ecosystem around the Wikimedia movement, conference planning, and the list goes on. You're off by enough to seem troll-ish at best.
  - flipbrad 2y ago
    It would be nice if we had a "lot of lawyers", given how frequently we're sued to try and get content censored, or having to fight orders to hand over user data - and more generally, how massive these new laws we need to comply with are (see, e.g., the EU Digital Services Act, which even creates an entirely new annual independent audit process). We even intervene in other court cases to try and prevent bad laws being created/interpreted in ways that would hurt the open internet (see, e.g., our amicus in the French Constitutional Court two weeks ago, our lawsuit against the US NSA, and our amicus briefs in the two US "Netchoice" US Supreme Court cases). We also operate the https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assistance_Program/en https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assis... Sadly, we're a very tight team. The downsides of being a nonprofit... Anyhow, I'm going to assume people are just ignorant as to how much WMF does, not deliberately trying to undermine it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Assume_good_faith https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Assume_good_faith , as they say. (disclosure: lawyer for WMF)
riedel 2y ago
I think commercial offerings are good to offer as an alternative to donations for institutions that want to support something and cannot easily make a donations.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

admissionsguy 2y ago

WMF goes the way of bureaucracies. It finds multiple ways to enlarge itself over the years and just cannot ever get any smaller. I suppose at some point it will overextend itself and harm Wikipedia, the only[1] thing of value, in the process. [1] Yeah there are Wikidata and some other projects. But it's like saying Google is not an ad company.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

I’d rather Wikipedia offer it versus a for profit enterprise using their dataset. Cut out the middleman and vertically integrate.

kemayo 2y ago

There's a whole statement-of-principles thing that at least implies that the intention isn't to cannibalize the existing offerings: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Principles https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Princip... Though I imagine that only works so far as you feel you can trust the Foundation to stick to those principles, so that's complicated. :D There's also a bunch of FAQs here that sort of get at how the funding streams are supposed to integrate into the existing structures and how it's supposed to avoid pushing out the free services: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/FAQ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/FAQ (As I said elsewhere, I work for the WMF but I don't work on anything related to this so I'm just commenting as someone who has more experience searching through our public info than most HN commenters would...)

bawolff 2y ago
> Though I imagine that only works so far as you feel you can trust the Foundation to stick to those principles, so that's complicated. :D At the end of the day, WMF is made up of people, and people follow incentives. I'm not saying they are bad people, but they aren't saints either. They are just people like anyone else. It might not happen today, but 5 or 10 years from now, i'm not so sure. Eventually there will be some situation where people involved will have to chose between something for the public good vs something that sells enterprise APIs better. If WMF becomes dependent on the enterprise money, it will be hard to chose the public good. When that day comes, the enshitification begins. After all, google once claimed not to be evil. The motto didn't last.

tw04 2y ago

> While i am sympathetic to wmf finding alternative funding streams Why are you sympathetic to it? Their fund, at this point, can make enough off interest on a basic CD to not just pay for every possible cost they could have until the end of time, but make the maintainer(s) obscenely wealthy without breaking a sweat. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3e/Wikimedia_Foundation_2022_Form_990.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/3e/Wikim... $250m - they’re doing this out of greed, not need.

ff317 2y ago
Over the long term of many years you're /lucky/ if a stable very-low-risk investment can net ~3% when accounting for inflation. Thus $250M could maybe net you roughly $7.5M/year. Exactly how many network links, servers, and engineering staff do you think that buys? It's way under what it operates on today, which is way under what it ideally should be for site like Wikipedia. And that's /just/ the operational engineering of the sites on a technical level. You also need HR, you need Finance, you need a lot of Lawyers, you need software developers, you need a travel department, a fundraising team, PR people, community relations people, grant-making for the extended open ecosystem around the Wikimedia movement, conference planning, and the list goes on. You're off by enough to seem troll-ish at best.
- flipbrad 2y ago
  It would be nice if we had a "lot of lawyers", given how frequently we're sued to try and get content censored, or having to fight orders to hand over user data - and more generally, how massive these new laws we need to comply with are (see, e.g., the EU Digital Services Act, which even creates an entirely new annual independent audit process). We even intervene in other court cases to try and prevent bad laws being created/interpreted in ways that would hurt the open internet (see, e.g., our amicus in the French Constitutional Court two weeks ago, our lawsuit against the US NSA, and our amicus briefs in the two US "Netchoice" US Supreme Court cases). We also operate the https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assistance_Program/en https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Legal_Fees_Assis... Sadly, we're a very tight team. The downsides of being a nonprofit... Anyhow, I'm going to assume people are just ignorant as to how much WMF does, not deliberately trying to undermine it. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Assume_good_faith https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Assume_good_faith , as they say. (disclosure: lawyer for WMF)

riedel 2y ago

I think commercial offerings are good to offer as an alternative to donations for institutions that want to support something and cannot easily make a donations.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]